I mostly avoid these, but I seem to have a weakness for the questions Jonathan Carroll asks, as with at least one lengthy previous post, and these ones that got to me today.
1. Describe three meals from your past (preferably breakfast, lunch and dinner) that you would like to have again and why.
For me this has to be either about the place or the people. Don’t get me wrong, I love food, but I can always get good food. It would really need to be three experiences that I wanted to have again, where the experience centers around a meal.
So, with that in mind, let’s see…
Breakfast would be palacsinta from a street vendor while walking around Szentendre on a cool morning. Walking down a narrow stairway alley, watching Trish try to walk and eat hers without spilling powdered sugar on herself. If you don’t know palacsinta is a kind of Hungarian crepe, and Szentendre is a little town just along the Danube from Budapest. Really what I want to recapture is that feeling of wandering around Hungary with Trish, and no hard schedule. Also, the mental image of Trish sitting on the river wall doing morning shots of palinka is a fun memory.
Lunch would be the meal I had in Daliyat al-Karmel, talking to the restaurant owner and my tour guide about the Druze and the U.S. military, while packing away a lot of really lovely food–my first experiences with labneh
The dinner would definitely be the meal I had in Milan at that underground spaghetteria. It was a marvelous meal, with a sausage and polenta opener followed by seven different spaghetti courses, all coupled with a decent Chianti, but that’s not the thing. It was a meal with a good friend and a lovely woman, but that’s not the thing. I was sixteen and on my own in Europe, but that’s not the thing. The trip to Milan was the first time I had traveled alone in my European trip, grabbing a backpack and going country-to-country under my own direction. Meeting up with people I knew after I had had a couple of days to check out the city, showing them around a bit, that sense of being in charge of my own life in a very real way both in that I was the only one making decisions and in the sense that if something went wrong I had only myself to rely on to solve it. It all seems to turn around that meal: wandering the streets all day, and then leading Scott and Mary-Ellen into that restaurant like I knew what I was doing because I even my Italian stretched to understanding “spaghetteria”. Communicating with the waiter in a combination of pidgin English, dog latin, and hand gestures, but resulting in that marvelous, lengthy, and inexpensive meal. Walking through the deserted streets of Milan after the meal back to my hotel: not a hostel, not a student residence, but a hotel.
2. One or two objects from your past you wish you still had and why.
Despite what my wife would call my over-attachment to things, there aren’t actually a terribly great number of “objects” from my past that I wish I still had.
I’ve always regretted losing that Cats Laughing bumper sticker, since it really couldn’t be replaced. When I moved into my first house, I distinctly remember setting it aside to pack specially, since I really didn’t want to lose it… and it was never seen again.
And my first van, I guess. I’d love to have that vehicle back, although it would probably mortify my wife, and get my neighbours over here with pitchforks.
Oh, does “my hair” count?
3. One act you could cancel or take back.
You’d think a ton of things would jump to mind, but there aren’t actually a lot of things I’ve done that I regret enough that I would want to alter my life to erase them. There are lots of things that seemed terrible at the time, that I would have jumped at the chance to take back then, but now, with the perspective of distance, most of them seem pretty minor.
Now, if the question had been about one “lack of action” that you want to correct, I would have a lot of things to say. Most of the things in my history that I see as my failing to live up to the person I want to be are about lack of action when action was called for, not about taking the wrong action.
I guess I could just take the most embarrassing things I’ve done and start going down the list in priority order until I find one that is just embarrassing, and not also the source of a funny story. It might be that day at Shad Valley (age 16) when I had the video camera, and I spent the entire day zooming the camera in on the breasts of the various students and attractive TAs–I had thought it was a joke for the eyes of the editor of the video only, but that night there was a “viewing party” to watch the day’s footage. Man. It’s 18 years later and thinking about that still turns my face red.
4. One person you would like to see again and why.
Wow. This one is hard to narrow down. I mean what category do you chose? I’ve got lots of good friends that I don’t see enough, but I don’t think they’re candidates, since I know I will see them again in person eventually. I’ve got some people that I have lost touch with that I have no idea how to find, and that I regret, including some people who were my guardo camino in days gone by. I’d love to know how to get in touch with Jason R. Monette, Shawn A. G. Hamilton, Gregory B. Clark, Paul M. S. A. Chiappetta, and a couple of others. And of course, there’s always ex-girlfriends or women who you wanted to be girlfriends–even a married man has some “what ever happened to”s there.
But, since the question doesn’t specify that the person has to be alive, I’m going to go with the sentimental pick and say “my dad”. My father died while I was still in school, and I’d love to have a chance for him to meet Trish and Sarah, to see how my life turned out, and maybe to spend a night drinking some beers and shooting the shit. We didn’t have a lot in common when he was alive, but I suspect that we could talk quite a bit about the shared experiences that we would now have (full time work, marriage, fatherhood).
5. One experience you wish you could repeat.
Hmm… interpretation. Am I being asked for an experience I want to repeat because I might do it differently now, knowing what I know, or am I being asked which experience I want to repeat in the same way just to feel that way again?
If it’s the first one, then I’m probably back to my list of times I failed through inaction, and that’s not fun stuff to think about. So let’s go with the second one.
I’ve got a pretty long list of crazy experiences, wild adventures, and escapades, many of which would nicely serve to answer this question, but I’m not going to go with any of them. Instead, I think I have to go with “Tuesday nights at the Walper Pub”. Sitting in a dark room with some subset of my crowd, drinking Guinness expertly poured by Tracy the laconic tattooed icon, and listening to Danny do a couple of sets of some brilliant covers mixed in with his original stuff. I don’t think I’ve ever felt as “at home” in a group of people. Sitting here now, looking up at Miles, I’m pretty nostalgic.
Normally one has to tag other people to do these things to propagate the meme. I’d hate to put any pressure on anyone else, but if you find the questions as interesting as I did, and you post something using them, drop me a comment here so I can read your stuff. Or just put your thoughts in a comment here.
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