Old Friends and Memories

Sometimes events spur you to pause and think back over your past. Maybe that past flashes before your eyes at some moment when a possible life altering event happens. That's happened to me a few times, generally while driving and suffering the bad habits and lack of care by other drivers more intent on texting or conversation than handling a speeding car. That flash of my past happened once on my boat in the middle of the night many miles out in the Gulf of Mexico when a lightning storm hit close enough to fry my eyebrows. 

The thing is, when my life or some portion of it passed before my eyes in those moments of fright or panic, it was more of a feeling of my life when I grew up in Tennessee. It was a disjointed scrap of memories that was the smell of fried chicken and steaming cornbread, the blazing sound of katydids in the stifling heat of August when you just begged for some rain to cool off the day, the twinkling of lightning bugs as evening turned to night, bullfrog croaks on a summer night, the sound of car tires crunching on a gravel road (no gravel in Florida where I've lived most of my adult life), the delicate sound of snow falling that you could only hear if you closed your eyes and strained to listen as pine trees turned to snow cones, our dogs rolling in fresh snow as happy and excited as young boys - all these scraps of sights and sounds in around a millisecond of time, flashing in my memory.

Or, maybe some thing or some event triggers those childhood memories. I recently met up with an old and dear friend - my best friend for a lot of my childhood - after 48 years (thanks to Facebook). My friend, Arnold, is a minister, a man of great learning on one of the most important subjects to which you can devote your life. Ministers, pastors, priests, rabbis, preachers are healers of the soul, just as physicians are healers of the body. He is pastor of a church out west, a long way from Tennessee and even farther from Orlando. He has a big congregation, his family and just reading his church's website, he is involved in just about every aspect of operations and charity work. It was easy to see that the love for southern cooking that we both grew up on in Clarksville hasn't worn off and that my friend is a big contributor to church bake sales. I commented on Facebook that I still have very fond memories of chess pie, a regional delicacy of egg and sugar custard found in Tennessee, but rarely elsewhere, and Arnold baked and mailed me a pie for Thanksgiving. I'm sure it's not the first pie he has mailed.

When Arnold left for college I drove him to the bus station. He was leaving to study religion and become a minister; a heavy burden of study, memorizing and reading rested on his shoulders and I was in awe of his bravery in choosing his path. That was the last time I saw my friend until last week when he sat beside me at the Columbia restaurant. He was the same Arnold; oh we were both a bit shorter and somewhat heavier. His voice seemed softer and my hearing is getting bad, but we were the same two as we were when we grew up, just older and greyer; a bit wiser and a good bit slower, but still the same. Meeting him at his hotel after all those decades had the same feeling as if I were visiting him at college a few months after his bus ride. I slipped back through those many years to when we were at school together, when we would wolf down cheese burgers late at night at a small diner and solve the world's problems. 

These days I am going through chemotherapy for lung cancer. It's not something I tell many of my friends, but without thinking I mentioned it to Arnold; I wanted him to know - he would want to know,  just as I would want to know of a big problem of event in his life. I wish to hell we didn't live so far away from each other. Meeting up after so long with a old best childhood friend is much like a time machine trip, a second chance not at reliving one's youth but to move back in time to make up for some of those lost years. When I get past this small dip in my health I will mail my friend an apple pie.

Remembering Tennessee

The Cumberland winds through valleys like the water snakes that glide along her eddies. Clay red, bath warm and still save for current ripples along her banks around tree roots and the legs of Tennessee cattle seeking some relief in the baked cloudless summer. Heavy with Appalachian silt, river bottom carpeted in fat mudcats he would lure with bread balls on a cane pole and fry crisp in smoking lard. Thick stands of willows, poplar and pine line the shore, red sand strands sprinkled with smooth skipping stones, bleached timber and flood drift.  Dark water dotted with white bleach bottle trotline buoys leaning to the current. He paddled these waters in a dented flaking canoe he found half sunk after a flood.The leaks from a few casual bullet holes cooled the sun scalding metal under his feet. A Krogers coffee can for bailing, a black iron frying pan and a jar of peanut butter in a knapsack under the seat; the cane pole bowsprit pointing the way.

The flood-black loam bottom land along her banks grow rich hay, corn and tobacco fields for farmers who lived in sprawling old tin roofed farm houses retrofitted with central air conditioning and heating. Land passed down through two centuries of generations, forgotten of surveys that bespoke corner markers of trees, fence posts and rock outcrops long since vanished. The rolling lush fields and hardwood forests of old moneyed farmers that wore faded overalls, drove tattered pickups and hid cement floored horse barns and inground swimming pools behind those old houses. Narrow county roads connect the farms. Old paved roads, bordered by deep grassed ditches full of wild sunflowers, ragweed, dandelion, sowthistle, and power lines hanging low in the summer heat. The county lanes spider out from state road 12 that follows the river down to Nashville.

The Cumberland headwaters form up in old warn mountains near Corbin Kentucky and 700 miles later the river joins the mighty Ohio near Paducah. Along the way the Cumberland services a hydroelectric dam at Lake Barkley, feeds innumerable riverfolk, and sucks up an occasional bluegrass quarter note as it slips through Music City. The river cradled Clarksville in a sweeping bend that undercut echoing limestone bluffs on the far side and deposited a broad sand pebble beach at the town landing. One 4th of July he fired off bottle rockets from those cliffs that streaked across the river and rained the roof of the town’s police station. Riverside Drive followed the shore and the town streets, Main, Commerce, Washington, Jefferson and the others trudged uphill from the river. The town buildings all red brick solid structures. Old stores selling hardware, men’s and women’s clothes; a shoe store, a feed store, a stationery store. Two movie houses, the Capital and the Roxie. Downtown seemed about three blocks wide and about four blocks long. Small enough to window shop and daydream. Small enough everybody knew everybody, for better or worse. A single street housed the elementary school, junior and senior high schools and the cemetery.

In those days it was a small town surrounded by steep hills and deep forests of middle Tennessee. Mature thick forests of pine, oak, hickory, poplar, maple rarely thinned from fire. Dense clambering, toe grabbing undergrowth over a thick carpet of annual leaf and needles, rotting roots, kindling nests of small critters and dead limbfalls.  Honeysuckle, blackberry, kudzu, ferns, moss all mixed in a decaying dirt scent dark and moldy recipe of impossible off-trail human penetration. Sunlight slanting through the overhead canopy to show a sparkled rainbow of light as he climbed and descended down scrabble banks of loose scrim, crumbling dirt, rocks and mushrooms. Occasional rattlesnakes coiled in patches of warm light and a creek on his farm that bubbled down to the river reflected waterbugs backstroking and the cold shadows of crawdads scurrying from rock to rock. The flip flops and limb jumps of curious squirrels mixed with the soft cool sound of settled deep green shadows and breeze in the tree canopy.

The farm was part of the hill itself with a half mile drive up to the settlement, snaking around trees too big to fell, up steep grades of gravel impassable in winter ice, to plateaus to more grades still. At the top was the house, built in 1826, the main supports four giant old poplar trees; a green painted tin roof with a noticeable bow in the middle, the walls white siding clad, a front porch the length of the house, with symmetrical windows and a front door between, green painted shutters flank the windows, a fireplace chimney on each side wall another on the back wall, dubious electrical wiring and water from a deep cold cistern. His father added on rooms, modernized, had a deep well put down and spent each summer with his boys cutting cords of firewood. The farm had a separate garage and workshop, a horse barn, corral and pond on one side, a fire supply pond on the other side of the house, and a huge tobacco barn out back. There was a chicken coop, a smokehouse converted to a study, and a kid’s western cavalry log fort, complete with a wood flag pole and watch tower.

About 30 acres were in fields back then, fenced-in thick high wild grass. The summer scorch would shimmer across the fields driving human and animal alike into the cooling woods; only crows would stand the heat. But In the fall and winter small deer would ease out of the forest to nibble the grasses. There were 10 acres in pine seedlings planted in neat soldier rows, waiting for lumbering. The pine hammock floor was mattress soft with pine needles scented of sweet turps and fresh resin. Pets for the boys: horses, dogs and cats, a dimensioning flock of ducks as the dogs caught them, chickens for eggs. No one hunted the land, deer and rabbit were plentiful.

All of it gone now. Sold off for estate tracts in some artificial gated community of expensive homes. The driveway now a paved road you can find on Google Maps. The farmhouse, barns, ponds and fencing all dozed and leveled save for a small patch that still blooms tulips his father planted more than a half century ago.

Visiting India

Hyderabad is the sound of barking dogs, accelerating motorbikes and blaring horns amid swaying palms and fig trees. The hotel serves scorching hot curry for breakfast. Every office building is walled off and gated from the streets. Private security at every building checks every entering vehicle for bombs. A million people demonstrated yesterday seeking the formation of a separate province near Hyderabad. Indian banks are paying 7% interest on savings. In Hyderabad everything seems to work

________

The Westin where I’m staying is one of the nicest hotels in Hyderabad and located in the most modern part of the city, an area called hitec city. Across the street is a huge Verizon building, next door Qualcomm, Deloitte, and further down the street Microsoft, IBM, Oracle and the other giants of American technology. Yet for all the luxury of the Westin and the software fortunes across the street, stray dogs stand in front of Verizon patiently begging food, and a constant stream of people trudge up a long dirt road to the corner of the Verizon building where the pavement starts, and past the high tech centers on their way to work.  

________

This is a city of tightly compressed traffic where pedestrians, motorcycles, very small cars and auto rickshaw taxis all compete for space on the streets. Motorcycles are small and economical.  I passed one parking lot today that was a sea of motorcycles—called bikes over here—there must have been thousands. The bikes are all maybe 50cc’s with a single cylinder. I’m not sure you can buy a motorcycle that small in the states. Here, they are the only vehicles that run on gas. All the cars, trucks and minivans have diesel engines. The auto rickshaws, three-wheeled motorized versions of human powered rickshaws are everywhere, weaving in, out and around the cars and pedestrians. The cars are tiny, mostly Toyotas the size of a Yaris. A Honda civic is a big car over here. The rickshaws all have open sides and convertible tops; they are powered propane or natural gas. Indians drive like Italians only slower to conserve fuel. The vehicles use their horns liberally to squeeze about eight lanes worth of cars, bikes and walkers into the two marked lanes, and everything seems to work. The traffic flows albeit slowly in a gas-conserving way.

The Westin is nicer than any hotel I can remember and on a par with Ashford Castle in Ireland (doubtless one of the finest hotels in the world). The service here is impeccable, the food absolutely amazing; every dish, even the lowly waffle is raised to a higher plain of foodness. The kitchen turns out fresh warm croissants that are as rich and sinful as what I’ve had for breakfast in Paris. And, the wait staff serves as only the French can set and serve a table.

________

Security is very high in Hyderabad, and probably all Indian cities after the Pakistani LeT terrorist attack in Mumbai on November 26, 2008 that killed 168 people. Every building is walled off from the street, with barrier gates at entrances and exits. Private guards protect the gates. When a car pulls up to the gate, the driver must pop open the trunk, and the guards use explosive sniffing devices and under car mirrors to check under vehicles for bombs. The Westin has an airport baggage scanning conveyor for luggage, purses and computer bags, an airport metal detector that you must step through, and hand held metal wands. You go through this procedure every time you go out and return to the hotel, no exceptions.

________

At night the poor side at the edge of hitec city is dark, no street lights and only dim lights in the buildings. The dirt road leading away from Verizon and the hotel is black and scary. People are still walking home; the dogs bark and howl in the night—a few lie in the street in front of the Westin, dog and man mutually ignore each other. The city has running planned power blackouts, and the Westin, Verizon and other buildings have generators running throughout the night. At midnight a dump truck rumbles up the dirt street and dumps a load of broken concrete in a field behind one of the poor side apartments; the racket is enough to wake the dead, but neither the dogs nor the few walkers notice.

________

During breakfast it drizzles outside, yet hotel employees clean the fronds of palms on a patio overlooking lush green gardens. The hotel is constantly cleaned inside and out; the Westin employees care for it as if they owned it (what a concept). The newspaper this morning reported the city had a little over an inch of rain yesterday—there's a low pressure area over the Bay of Bengal that is forcing weather over southern India—and three souls perished from storm damage. We in Florida, or most anywhere in the US think that an inch of rain in a day is just annoying weather; roofs don’t collapse, rice paddies don't flood and adults aren't washed away down storm drains. The reality of an inch of rain actually killing people makes me wonder about the fragility of life outside our bubble. How devastating is a real tropical storm, with gale force winds and many inches of rain? Speaking of newspapers, that industry may be dying in the west, but here it reminds me of earlier decades when all the news was reported, and editors truly represented the fourth estate. It seems that India is much like America in its appreciation of its own freedoms and the nation’s right to disagree and protest, to assemble for change. The newspaper headlines remind me of the late 60’s in America with story after story of protests, civil rights issues, public pressure leveraged onto politicians and their non-answer responses.

The rain has stopped, the sun is peeking out and the stray dogs are happy and unusually loud. They are interesting dogs: all about the same size, maybe around 40 pounds, and either light brown or white, short haired, and all with tails that curl up over their backs like huskies. They don’t look or act like they are starving, but do look hungry as strays usually do. They remind me of the feral dogs on Abaco Cay in the Bahamas. The big island is filled with stray dogs and cats that the islanders can’t afford to feed. They call the cats a nuisance and the dogs are called potcakes. Potcakes all look the same as well, and are very similar to the strays down on the street here; the same size and coloring. The potcake name comes from what is stuck to the bottom of the cooking pot—that baked on stuff, the cake, is fed to the dogs. The potcakes appreciate any bit of food or attention they can find, and make very loyal pets to any family that can afford food and care.

________

It is estimated that there are 100 million people in the Hyderabad area. 

According the government reports only about 60 percent of India, or around say 700 million people, have toilets; the remaining half billion go without.

I believe I saw a dead woman, in rags, on the sidewalk driving back to the hotel. No one seemed to notice.

Department stores in Hyderabad sell you shopping bags to carry your purchases. Cost about 10 rupees per bag.

Hyderabad, a land-locked city, is considered the world capital for pearls.

Requiem for a Best Friend

Seamus is our family dog. He is a Lab and Rhodesian Ridgeback mix,  a pound puppy. The Lab part is prominent, the African lion hunter shows in just the coarse ridge of fur along his backbone. He is blonde short haired with patches of white on all paws, the tip of his tail, patches on his shoulders and a little streak on his forehead between  furrowed eye brows. He has long brown eye lashes and huge brown trusting eyes that look deep into your soul. He has a Lab's ears, completely expressive: all the way up he's excited focused, or asleep. At half mast his ears mean contemplation, curiosity, or possibly in trouble from eating the loaf of bread on the kitchen counter. And hound dog down, like now, just sadness.

 I've had a long string of dogs in my life but Seamus is by far the smartest and the most attuned to human mood and behavior. He was the runt of the litter; all his brothers used him as their pillow; and one look at him at 12 weeks and my family was hooked. We paid the pound to neuter him, chip him, give him his needed shots and brought him home. He was hungry, dehydrated, had pneumonia and needed the emergency animal hospital the first weekend, but he was instantly loved, fed, nurtured and became as ingrained into our family as another sibling.

Seamus  has liver and lung cancer at age six and will have to get the big sleep very soon. We are all  in denial; we have cried our eyes dry of tears in bouts. It doesn't change the inevitable. Seamus can hardly walk, his eyes say he doesn't understand why he is so bloated, why he can't run and play bone hockey on the slippery tile floor in the den. He is sad from sensing our sadness, just as he was sad when Sally was so sick with breast cancer.

He is a real comic: he sings when Kathleen plays her flute or blows into an empty bottle. He puts his head up and howls at the moon but is as serious about it as Kathleen is about playing: he is boldly signing a dog song and howls with great pride. He loves a giant nylon bone which he carries around wagging his tail and his whole rear half whenever we come home: a bone greeting showing off his most special possession to us. He will throw the bone into the den, pounce on it and slide across the floor: bone hockey. He is a great tease, carrying the bone or one of a variety of rubber balls over to us, just out of reach and jerking the ball away when we reach for it. It's the tease game and he trained us so we can all play it. He adopted the love seat in the living room under the picture window where he can sleep and keep an eye on the neighborhood.

Seamus has perfected a blood curdling snarl bark that scares our mailman enough that he keeps his hand on his pepper spray when he delivers the mail, but in fact Seamus would not hurt a flea unless he was protecting us. He is a gentle lamb, a real baby and at six, until his sudden decline was still as puppyish as he was at 6 months. He loves to sleep under a light blanket on Kathleen's bed at night.

Seamus is a Lab, but afraid of water (must be his African genes). He will dig in the mud at the edge of the lake, just to play in the mud, and only this year figured out he can wade out to his knees. He will sneak up to the edge of the pool and stare at his reflection, but he's not swimming; no way.

His greatest love besides ice cream is going for a walk or a car ride. As we prepare for either, he knows--he alerts on the words "walk" and "car" and "park" and starts running in circles. If we grab an empty plastic bag, he's beside himself with joy. Pure dog joy. Regardless how tired we are from a long day at work, his joy infects us. He is such a clever clown. He has given his family so many laughs, so many licks of love, and so much companionship, the accidents on the carpet and a few steaks stolen from the kitchen counter are not tallied or even remembered. He had an extra large serving of ice cream tonight. I wish he was well enough for one last walk. He will be sorely missed.

Looking for a Good Diner

I was raised on diner breakfasts back in Tennessee, where you sat at the counter over a steaming cup of coffee and watched your breakfast prepared. The cook would slice your bacon off the slab, sausage came from the Frosty Morn plant down the road and the eggs came from a nearby hen house. Back then, you got a bowl of grits with breakfast whether or not you asked for it, along with a big heap of potatoes--home fries, the signature of every breakfast cook. Potatoes were there to fill you up and sustain you till lunch, they soaked up the runny egg yoke and became an exquisite mix that you chased around the plate with the last bite of toast. For me, potatoes make the breakfast.

William Least-Heat Moon in his book Blue Highways rated diners by the number of calendars on the wall. I rate diners by their potatoes. I think it’s the most accurate measure of a diner breakfast, And by potatoes, I don’t mean those measly grated hash browns that come in a package and are merely fried in oil on the grill. I mean potatoes that started out being washed, peeled, sliced and boiled. Potatoes on a plate of fried eggs, toast and sausage are the cook’s artistic focus and should reflect an old tattered recipe perfected over the years. There is little to no artist’s touch in cooking eggs, nor to frying bacon and sausage. Home fries are the creative part of cooking breakfast.

It’s a sad fact that around Fern Park there are damned little home fries and fewer diners. I used to drop by the Athena for breakfast. It’s in the old Circuit City plaza on 436 between a post office substation and West Marine. The waitresses will pour you coffee without asking and there is counter seating if you want. Their home fries are cooked soft, almost mashed; there is garlic and paprika and they go down real good. It’s a great place to sit quietly with a novel and sip coffee. But the Athena has stopped serving breakfast during the weekdays and that sadly reduces weekday diner breakfasts in the area by about 50 percent.

The Dome Grill on Central Avenue in downtown St Petersburg cooks the very best home fries. When I kept my boat in St Pete, the Dome was my early morning choice. Their potatoes would sustain you for a whole day on the water. They were sliced thick, fried in olive oil on the grill, with chopped onions, garlic salt, black pepper and lots of fresh Italian parsley, all folded together on their big grills until the mountain of potatoes steamed and and the edges browned. The cook would slap a huge mound on your plate beside two or three fried eggs and some link sausages, and I’m telling you, it was heavenly. The cook’s name was Frank and I had bragged on his potatoes enough that he would always ask me how they were. I would leave the Dome chewing a toothpick, full as a tick, ready for a day of sailing.

Sadly, the art of making home fries has often been replaced by hash browns--those little grated bits that are neither brown nor resemble hash--no seasoning, just too much salt, and too little flavor. Denny’s and Waffle House are the main culprits. Denny’s does a very good breakfast steak, and the Waffle House pecan waffles are a delight, but the hash browns from both are disappointing. Besides, hash is chopped cooked corned beef, with diced potatoes and onions, fried on a grill--another great breakfast meat. Hash brown potatoes are a poor imitation of honest potatoes and should be relegated to the snack food isle at the grocery store.

There are certain things that should never be served with breakfast home fries, including slices of fruit, breakfast burritos and wifi hot spots. Laptops just don’t go with home fries; coffee and the newspaper go with eggs and home fries. If you want a foo foo breakfast with fruit and flavored toppings on your food and in your coffee, visit Panera further up 436 at Maitland Avenue. There you can fiddle with your laptop and Google away the hours. Leave the Internet out of my diners, please!

The second best potatoes are served at the Wooden Spoon diner in Marathon Key. The Spoon seats maybe 40 customers, serves breakfast mostly to fishermen heading out early, lunch to locals and closes mid-afternoon so the staff has time for a siesta and the daily appointment at the east end of Seven Mile Bridge to watch the sunset. Wooden spoons decorate the walls and (I’m sure) haven’t been moved in at least the 30 years we’ve been visiting the Keys. It’s the oldest diner on the island and has been there for 60 years or so. They’ve been making home fries the same way for about that long. The potatoes are sliced thick, browned in some butter on the grill, with a touch of garlic and paprika and black pepper. They come out more crunchy, not soft like the Dome’s, and mighty good. For a few dollars the Spoon will make you up a sack lunch of a sandwich and a snack to take out on the boat, but the home fries will last you all day.