My friend Jill took me on a shopping spree to Huntsville today, largely to stock up at Costco, where she bought staples for five others as well as for her own household.As we drove from one shopping area to another, she was offering possibilities for lunch when I blurted "Dreamland!"
Happily, we stopped, and I ate an entire half slab of delectably perfect ribs.Ah, Dreamland, the Alabama gourmet restaurant for Sunbeam bread and barbeque sauce and finger-licking-good (sorry, Colonel) ribs.I first went to the original Tuscaloosa Dreamland in the early 1980s. On the edge of town in an wooden building, Dreamland invited visitors through the old screen door with the scent of hickory-fired bbq. An enormous open hearth on the left, round tables with red checked tablecloths scatted about on a concrete floor, booths, a TV screen usually tuned to sports, and plenty of happy people with faces slathered red -- oh what a lovely sight. Ribs: "ain't nothing like 'em -- nowhere."Oh, the taste -- the heavenly tart depth of the sauce and the crispy soft pig meat -- all that is unchanged by the spread of restaurants to 8 cities in Alabama and Georgia. Believe me when I say any day with these ribs is a fine one.
Sun, fire, earth, air
light in flight
on eye, tongue, skin:
summer's fiesta
from garden
to plate.
My 5- and 7-year-old neighbors came over to do a little bookbinding.Each made an accordion-fold book complete with Cap'n Crunch cover. Mary wrote and drew in hers while Sam made a new book -- one of the more complicated 16-page or 8-page folds.While her brother worked on his "puzzle" of an 8-page fold, I reminded them both that I wanted them to color and crease on top of the mat rather than the table. After all, I told them, the table is special: I designed it and my father made it from old pine salvaged from my great-grandfather's warehouse.Without losing a beat, Mary looked at the nicks on her side of the table, and said, "It's already got scratches."
I said, "Yes, it does. I don't want any new ones."She said, "Why does it have scratches?"I said, "Probably from my niece and nephew when they were little and from all my friends and family and from some of my work."She said, "You don't need to worry about them."I said, "Why?"She said, "They remind you of all the happy times."Out of the mouths of the babes, the saying goes, and the saying is right.
Years ago, I took my first art history course: a first semester survey of Western art with Barbara Rose at Barnard College. (Years later, I discovered that she was famous in art history circles.)
She taught us how to look. Required to visit the Metroplitan Museum of Art often, I remember studying the El Greco's for hours, struggling to select one about which to write a critical essay. I finally settled on The Opening of the Fifth Seal ("The Vision of St. John"). I returned many times to the museum to look and make notes, look and make notes. I loved that painting -- its energy and movement, play of light and shadow, upward-moving composition of repeated elongated shapes and bold brush strokes. I don't remember how I did on the paper, but I remember the looking and the beauty and the joy of writing about what I saw, and that, of course, was the point.
Today's New York Times offers an article titled "At Louvre, Many Stop to Snap but Few Stay to Focus" about a phenomenon I've noticed in museums since I started going to them: the streams of "viewers" who read the labels and move on or who take photographs and move on, as if collecting bits of "experience" they can tick off a mental list. Years after my El Greco experience, also at MMA, I was happily spending time with Grant Wood when a young couple breezed in the room and asked the guard, "Where's the famous painting? That's the one we came to see." The guard and I unobtrusively glanced at each other before he answered.
In his article, Michael Kimmelman says that he and his son take sketchbooks to museums, not because they are fine artists, but because the act of sketching forces them to slow down and look. I did the same thing one summer when I spent almost a month in Oxford, England. In the Ashmolean for most of an afternoon, I recorded an overheard conversation as well as an impression of a few objects.
Yesterday, I blogged about a way of looking aided by the camera, but I snap in the natural world of flux, not in a museum. The object there before me does not change, though I do in the looking. I love both ways of seeing for the same reason: the pleasures of "slow looking" (Kimmelman's phrase).
This morning, a New Orleans friend invited me to participate in an online note called the "ABC's of Me." One question asked folks to name a vegetable they detest. I finally named turnips only because I never taste anything, but plenty of other people said "okra" without hesitation and with vehemence.Why would anyone dislike this beautiful, hairy, southern (by way of Africa), summer delicacy?
At the Farmer's Market this morning, I offered my chair to an elderly lady waiting for her son to pick her up. She sat for quite a while, and we chatted like old friends. She had bought okra from one of the farmers, and we started talking about our favorite way to cook and eat it. We discovered that we share the same preference: cook fresh okra, onion, tomatoes, and corn cut right from the cob all in one pot. She told me she always adds a little sugar "because of the tomatoes," but I add only salt and pepper as I remember my mother doing. We agreed that okra stew, black eyes or field peas, pork chop, and cornbread make a fine dinner.Miss Helen and I had a fine time imagining supper, and I'll be making mine from pickings in Ronn's garden. So many people in one stew -- new friends, old ones, parents, and one of the positive legacies of the importation of Africans as slaves. That's some rich meal.
Happily, we stopped, and I ate an entire half slab of delectably perfect ribs.
