Completely Innocent

Pope whatever, the 12th, another pope in Madrid, another in Nice. The Catholic church is a joke, all of organized religion is a joke. Free Will Baptist might be an option, at least there's not much mediation. Mark Twain said that cauliflower was just cabbage with a college education. Boiled cabbage, with hot corn bread and fried salt-pork was a mainstay of our diet when I was a kid. Fried fish and hush-puppies once a week, a meat loaf, pork chops with homemade applesauce, and once in a while pot roast with potatoes and carrots. Various peas and beans. Always cornbread. Dad seemed to think that sliced white bread was the work of the devil, though we did use it to make fold-over scrambled egg sandwiches when fishing. Compromise. Relationships are always compromise. The flip-side is sleeping by yourself. Sleeping with another, for decades, I thought was the pinnacle of human endeavor, now I just place a baby blanket between my knees and roll over. Not that I wouldn't enjoy cupping my hand over a breast, just that I'm not willing to pay the price. Maria calls, three or four in the morning, and she wants to spend the day with me. She lives south of Columbus, wants to eat dinner, which means she'll probably spend the night, and my very first thought is where she'll put her gun. I think I'll cook pounded pork tenderloin medallions with a mushroom gravy, a side of fried day-lily buds; even if this is a set-up, we should go out in style. Winter spring summer or fall, artichokes should never cost more than a car. I can hear the arguments, but I don't care. She called then because she was just getting home and I had told her I didn't actually have a schedule. I've got a couple of days to think about it. Ran across this lovely ditty reading Visser's The Rituals Of Dinner, an excellent book if you're interested in food and eating history, the bibliography goes over forty pages: I eat my peas with honey---/I've done so all my life/It makes the peas taste funny/But it keeps them on the knife. Most of a day reading about knives at table. Table manners evolved as a way to control potential (or actual) violence. Especially when women and men started eating together. American frontier times, it was common to pick up a joint of meat, pull a mouthful free, and slice it off with your knife. To me, this seems fraught with danger and stupid. Invent a serving fork, to hold the meat down, and cut the meat off the bone. As time went on, and lipless people were purged from the food-chain, serving forks morphed into eating forks, an efficient way to get food to your mouth. I make a major digression into chop-sticks. An environmental disaster. The numbers here are staggering, billions, if most of the single-use chop-sticks weren't made of bamboo, an annual grass, all the trees in the world would have been turned into chop-sticks. A fork, on the other hand, could be passed on from one generation to the next. Silver doesn't tarnish with acid. The Italians were the first to notice this. Reading Emily Post from the 1930's is quite amusing. Aeneas and the crew are told, early in the story, that they won't get where they're going until they eat their table (a harpy told them, I don't remember, exactly, though I did find my college text), and when they eat their trenchers, many books later, they realize they've arrived. Interesting that trenchers survive in eating things on toast. I usually eat left-overs on toast, beans, of course, or a can of tuna, and I love eating left-over foul, with gravy, on toast, and using the edges to clean the plate, it's so efficient. The fork was slow to catch on because it was thought effeminate. One of the first forks was a knife with two tips or tines used to spear and transport a slice of cheese. Two points of contact being so much more stable. But it took a long time for forks to migrate over the channel, 1617, Lord Someone, after a stay in Italy; and America was pretty much a spoon and knife economy, even in 1837, one of those Europeans, coming over to view the great plains, complained that there were no forks. You can read about this in my not published but widely circulated text The Fork And The Folk. For years I thought this would be a simple trilogy, the knife, the spoon, and the fork, now I see it goes on forever.