LemonsAndBeans

Monday, March 10, 2008
Tip of the Straw Boater to Walker Percy

My friend Brian and I were driving around west-central Mississippi a few weeks ago when I made an off-hand but sincere comment. Dotting the roads in that rural and sparsely traveled part of the world are a profusion of historical markers. And, while passing one of the many we saw that day, I confessed my life-long love of them. I told Brian that historical markers had to be one of my 20 favorite things. The number 20 was sort of thrown in to make clear that they were not in my top five but still held a place close to my heart.

I think I like historical markers because they represent a basic hopefulness about the curiosity of man. I use the term “man” to include all of humanity. But, if we are honest with ourselves there is something about the terse, cast-iron ordinariness of historical markers that is distinctly masculine. Who but a man would think that five sentences about a long forgotten event would be enough to express the vastness of history?

For a certain sort of person, historical markers are the movie trailers of long ago. You stand in front of them, read their briefest summations and look out, more often than not, onto an open field where only the imagination can construct the events, people or places described. They let you fill in the details from a barely sketched scaffold of fact. And in this they are inherently hopeful. The impulse that leads to the erection of historical makers is the same one that included a Beatles record on the Voyager space probe before it was launched into space, racing to points unknown. It is the impulse that leaves mementos on mountaintops and plaques on rediscovered shipwrecks at the bottom of the sea. Someone might come along one day and want to know a little about what happened on that spot but until then these relics of relics stand as mute examples of our basic belief that strangers will give a damn about us.

Brian has the sort of mind that does not let shoddy logic sit on its hands. So, as I tossed out the unconsidered thought that historical markers were one of my 20 favorite things he immediately asked, “Oh yeah, what are the other 19?” I am often guilty of both half-baked commentary and silly responses to serious questions. When Brian asked me this I admitted that I did not know but was sure that girls made the list. Later in the day I tried to catalog my 20 favorite things but a review of my notebook from that trip reveals only the cryptic entry “Pecans.” I am not sure if “Pecans” was meant to be on the list or a reference to the rotten one I had picked up under a tree somewhere out side of Port Gibson, cracked open, eaten and spend the next 40 minutes trying to wash from my mouth but either way I have excluded them from the inventory to follow. So here they are, a list that would change every five minutes and inevitably excludes many of the little things that give me joy. And I submit them to you in the spirit of the builders of historical markers, with the vain hopefulness that someone might pull off to the side of the road, read a few lines and imagine something else.

20 Favorite Things, for Brian Baiamonte
Historical Markers
Girls
Lemonade
The Banjo
Black and White Movies
Winter in North Louisiana
Jelly Roll Morton
Shaving
Guinness Stout
Outdoor Markets
Cocktail Parties
Old Books
Portraits
Wooden Floors
My Mothers Secret Love of Science Fiction TV
Water Oaks
The Half Hour Before the Band Starts to Play
Waking up in a New Place
Canoes
Soup

1lb Pasta (Bowtie, Penne, Macaroni, something like that)
1 and ½ lb Cheese (Parmesan, Swiss, Cheddar and Manchego ground and mixed)
1 Sweet Onion, finely diced
1T Creole Mustard
6T Butter
6T All Purpose Flour
1t Paprika
2t Salt
½ t Freshly Ground Black Pepper
½ t Garlic Powder
½ t Smoked Paprika
2 Eggs, beaten
Pinch Freshly Ground Nutmeg
1c Heavy Cream
5c Milk

Heat the oven to 350F

Boil Pasta until slightly undercooked. Drain and set aside. In a saucepan, melt the Butter. Stir in the Flour and make a blonde roux. After about 5 minutes add the Mustard and Onions. Cook for another 3 minutes then add the Salt, Pepper, Paprika, Smoked Paprika and Garlic Powder. Whisk in the Cream and Milk and cook over low heat for about 10 minutes. The sauce should thicken. Whisk in the Eggs off of the heat. Cook for another 3 minutes or so. Fold ¾ of the Cheese mix into the modified White sauce you have made, good for you. Fold all of this together with the cooked Pasta. Pour into a baking dish of appropriate size. Top with the remaining Cheese mix. Bake for about half of an hour.

Sunday, February 10, 2008
Baton Rouge, LA
The Apostate of Saint Joseph Street

Mardi Gras starts early in Eunice. The floats begin lining up at 6AM and by the time the parade rolled, under quick moving and uncertain clouds, the line of trucks, horses and trailers stretched several miles. And by this time, the drinkers were in full flush; and everyone riding in the Eunice Mardi Gras is a drinker. It is a spectacle in the Roman sense. In order to ride, you must be in costume, usually consisting of hospital scrubs tasseled and bangled with a wild, exuberant fringe made from yards of yellow, purple and green fabric. Chicken patterns are acceptable, or LSU themes or the left over tatters of paisley bandanas, burlap and coffee sacks, camouflage and every design better suited to a whore house than a public street. It is a festival of wavering, broke-down clowns two-stepping to Cajun fiddles and Zydeco washboards. It is a parade.

We all go a little mad sometimes. What the Hatter said to Alice is doubly true for the riders in a Mardi Gras parade. What better time to do it than the day before Catholics the world over give up something dear, echoing a wandering Jesus, alone in the wilderness; forty days of privation ushered in by forty hours of pagan revels. It just makes sense. It is a glorious tradition that feels like by partaking in one is also part of some ancient human rite, adjusted and molded over the eons, but still a primal nod to the two sides of man. Feast and famine, birth and death, absolute, wild-assed drunken buffoonery and a month and a half of being judge-sober. Well, that is what it feels like if you take the time to think about it. Most of the time, riding in the Eunice Mardi Gras feels like you drank a few gallons of cheap beer.

A nine-hour parade through rural Acadiana will generate a lot of stories. But, the details are fuzzy on much of the later part of the trip and the memories of the day are more a long string of pleasant interactions and thrown plastic beads than anecdotes. The parade wandered through flooded rice fields and by remote country houses, trailer parks and clusters of children standing on farm equipment in areas otherwise unturned by human hands. Parade captains with flapping capes thundered past on horses, chickens apparently resigned to their fate tucked under the riders arm. Parish police threaded between the floats on four-wheelers and paid no mind to the chaos around them. Their role seemed to be preventing death, other than that, you could do as you pleased.

The parade would stop often in that great, flat, grand prairie of south Louisiana, crawfish ponds, hemmed by berms and levees stretch to the horizon in every direction. The stalks of long grass and flag lilies reach up, electric green, in the ditches. Silhouetted against the bright sky, figures stood on their saddles and arched perfect back flips, landing with an enormous eruption of muddy water in the carefully tended ponds. Beers flowed, whiskey bottles were passed and the music played on. All of us, lurid in our costume shambles. At midday we stopped at a warped, clapboard shack, its siding dipped from yesterdays rain, all trace of paint washed away long ago, and ate long links of boudin that steamed in the cool air.

I woke up early the next morning, head pounding like an unwatched toddler on an aluminum pot, and drove back to Baton Rouge. The day after a blow out is usually shrouded in a little bit of shame and second-guessing. I was not struck by either but needed a slow day of repair all the same. It was later that afternoon, between jazz records and reruns on the TV, that I decided to become Catholic, or act like it for a while anyway.

The phrase “In for a penny, in for a pound” is a much leaned on crutch in my vocabulary of clichés. I have used the sentiment to prolong all manner of questionable behavior and on rare occasions to stick with something worthwhile that prudence cautions against. That was the idea that came to me, lounging on my couch, that worn out Ash Wednesday. If I could dive head first into the bacchanal of a country Mardi Gras then the least I could do was give up something for Lent. If I had known the peals of laughter or looks of total horror my choice would be met with then I probably would have given up something other than alcohol. But, as they say, “In for a penny, in for a pound.”

The responses to my experiment in abstemiousness met with a range of reactions, few of them good. I was hung up on as a friend squealed with laughter on the other end of the line, I was looked at with the pitying concern people reserve for the thoroughly insane, a friend volunteered to give up the bottle with me, browbeat me about lying if I ever slipped and then promptly went out and got herself drunk that night. She missed work the next day.

Perhaps my parents showed the greatest alarm. It may be because of a few periods in which I have given up booze in the past, exercised like a fiend, slept hardly at all, read stacks of books and relished telling everyone about how wonderful I felt and how productive I was. To say the least, relationships were strained.

Their alarm, expressed in a slow and questioning “…Why?” and “Frank, you really don’t have to do that” might have come from a concern over my spiritual well being. It seems unlikely that a lapsed Methodist would endanger his immortal soul be observing Lent but when I told my mother about the recent choice you would have thought I had come home wearing a bishop’s miter. My father appeared to size me up, wondering if he could hold me down long enough to get a gin and tonic, or some other suitably WASPy drink, down my throat. My brother implored me to reconsider.

My Catholic friends were no less chagrined. There was some concern in the question, “Let me get this straight, you’re not much of a Methodist and no Catholic and you are giving up drinking for Lent?” I could hear the drawn out “…Why?” coming. “Do Methodists give up anything for Lent?” she asked. I tried to explain that I was testing myself, not making a sweeping statement. Methodists do not give up vices for Lent, but we do like tests, no matter where we may be on the liturgical calendar. Who knew temperance could provoke so many questions and expressions of concern?

It is a comfort to know so many people take an interest in your life choices. But, for a people that choose to dress up like jesters and chase chickens in the mud on a perfectly good Tuesday and in a state that gives them an official vacation during which to do this, all things are possible. I would hardly notice though, between the trips to the gym, tedious holding forth about what I am reading and getting up at 5AM I don’t have a lot of time for self reflection. I need to be drunk for that.