State Fair

I'm not going to the fair. We went to the County Fair, when the girls stayed summers with me, a couple of times, and ate our way through the church dinners. Creamed chicken on egg noodles on mashed potatoes, baked spaghetti with an inch of cheese on top, various things on sticks. The traffic jams were horrible. One of my rules was that you always carried something to read, a book at hand at all times, and we carried a stack of those Trivial Pursuit questions to amuse ourselves while waiting in line. Up most of the night, to work in the relative coolness, then slept until the phone rang. Another of those touching-bases phone calls. I shouldn't marvel anymore that everyone is so easy to find. My phone comes from one direction and my mail from another, so I'm harder to track than most, and it is difficult to actually find me even if you know the general area. Not so, of course, with the locals: park rangers, hunters, people related to people in my cemetery, they all know who I am and where I live. They know too that I look like a madman and shouldn't be disturbed. Joel is right, I am gregarious and enjoy good conversation, but idle chat leaves me cold. I had a dozen oysters, from the last trip to town, steamed them open on the grill and ate them with just a bit of salsa and a squirt of lime juice, remembered the many thousand of these that we roasted on Martha's Vineyard. There were times, September through Christmas, when we had all we could eat, and the driveway was paved with oyster shells. Free-range oysters is a difficult concept to wrap your head around. All you can eat. Oyster Croquettes, oyster stews, an absolutely fabulous Oysters Casino that I now make with a bit of pesto and a sprinkling of green stuff. Fried oysters and onion rings. Oysters in stuffing, raw oysters with just a squirt of hot sauce, a fish stew that featured oyster and crab. Crab is an interesting word, to move sideways. I prefer crab meat to lobster, if it came down to a choice, a cup of crab meat with a walnut (one of my favorite units of measurement) of butter, salt and pepper, on a piece of toast, is about as good as it gets, maybe a vine-ripened tomato in sherry vinegar, a few gherkins and black olives, some of that Irish cheddar. Troll, it seems, is to trundle a hoop. I was confused by this until I remembered playing at hoops (I can't find the name for the baton one uses to keep the hoop rolling) in Birmingham shortly after the hula-hoop was introduced. I suppose early hoops were fashioned from wood but I can't imagine they lasted very long. Our rental house in Birmingham was right across the street from the old deserted campus of Howard University and there were miles of paved walkways. Perfect for trolling. The whole campus was the greatest playground in the world: a medical building, a gym, the blackboards in classrooms still covered with mathematical formula. I had several deeply protected redoubts. stocked with food and water, where I figured to survive nuclear war. Tang and Neco Wafers. Now I keep rice and beans, some salted meat, some dried onion and garlic powder, instant potatoes, some dried herbs, at hand. Some pemmican, some dried fruit, still, it seems clear, I'm going to die.