Knives and Forks

Catalog from the Victoria and Albert museum, 1979, an excellent exhibit of Cutlery. I love the cases, brocades and leathers, with velvet lined fitted hollows. One exceptional set was a knife, one of the first four-prong forks, and a spoon bowl, for which the fork, fitted into sleeves on the back, served as the handle. For a long time it was considered customary to carry your own silver to dinner. I had a set, fairly heavy, very plain, the years in the desert, that I kept rolled up in leather in the kitchen box in the back of the truck. I only remember a shallow wooden bowl that I ate everything out of, licked clean then wiped out with sand. A Shin Oak burl, a shinnery is underbrush you can't get through. I did get to town, got my free pint, and watched ESPN for a little while. Stopped at B's on the way home, and I hadn't seen him weeks, so we had to exchange notes on what we were reading. He's teaching three classes and doing his tutoring, which is a full schedule, and he still bakes bread and tends his garden plot; a couple of days a week, he takes the on-line tutoring over to Zoe's, gets the grand-kids off the bus, and fixes dinner. I don't know how he does it, it's all I can do to get home with a couple of corn-dogs and an order of onion rings. Down on the creek bank I found a batch of Agaricus and while collecting them got into a tick nest, I had to strip down and wipe off with alcohol, but I had a goodly sack of mushrooms. The AC was on because Black Dell had been pissing about the heat, I was gimping about, listening to Son House, and made a very good stew/soup. It wasn't a recipe as much as a process. Skinny dude, dancing around in his underwear, chopping mushrooms. I had my bar-stool, a book under my book-rock so I could read with no hands. Minced a large onion, smashed a few cloves of garlic, cooked those while I read, then added half the mushrooms (a pound) and cooked them for quite a while, added a can of chicken broth and cooked it down. Ran this through the blender and set it aside. I cook the other pound of mushrooms in a walnut of butter, fold them in, add some cream, this is so good it makes me dizzy. Ginseng season opens, so there are people in the woods. This is serious business for some folk. I harvest only two or three roots a year, for my own use (I have a single very small sip every day of grain alcohol infused with sliced root) but I like hunting them, picking the berries and planting them nearby. I go down the driveway so slowly that I sometimes spot a plant (the berries are orange) out the window. I always have to claim my territory, a time or two a year, and the poachers are always polite. I learned recently that I have a bit of a reputation as the Crazy Guy on Low-Gap Ridge. Stands to reason then, that I'd be suspect of nefarious activities. Still, I'm polite to Rangers and Cops, grease the ways, I'd never do anything to bring down attention on myself. I was reading some Dorothy Parker and she is so fucking brutal, it's a breath of fresh air, like that. Ed Sanders in All Stars, or Dahlberg in his entirety. B had loaned me a book of Chuck Close's photographs. I spent hours looking at these, detecting what his concerns were, and which were mine. The large Polaroid images are striking.