Another Sunday—is
there any other day? I'm at another bar for breakfast, one where, if
I was so inclined, I could order up a shot of Maker's Mark, and then
a Drambuie, and then an Ouzo and then a Campari and then a cheap
Tequila and then a Jameson Irish Whiskey, a Midori Melon or a
Pistachio liqueur to bring back that year in New York, and a Malibu
Coconut & Rum liqueur to bring back high school spring break.
Just for color, in clear glasses, Crème de Menthe, Crème de Banana,
Blue Curacao, and Crème de Noyaux. All neat, no ice, and why in the
world would you want to mix anything? It all gets mixed soon enough
in your stomach, anyway. If I want to bring back high school, I'll
have a Crème de Cacao. Always had it around. No one drank it, except
me.
It's a place, this
place, The Wheel of Fortune (Holman's), that reminds me of Ohio. Just
the taste of the food and the badness of the coffee. The owner, Bill
Bankule, also owns a chain of funeral homes. One restaurant and bar,
and a chain of cut-rate funeral homes. Five bucks for the breakfast
“Special Steak.” It's good, too. We're all in denial about where
this meat comes from because we just don't want to know. We're
hungry!
The waitress is
standing in front of me with a metal bowl of lemons, slicing them
into drink-size slices. For countless drinks. I'm close enough that
an invisible spray of lemon peel oil is probably floating into my
hair. You could pay $100 for this treatment at a spa.
It's almost the
first day of official autumn. Today or the next day or the next. It
feels like, and may well be, today. It's cold, and I got out my fall
jacket for the first time last night. Isn't it Rosh Hashanah or
something, soon, like today? I'll look at my calendar. Just saying
the word “Jewish” makes me want to eat rice pudding. The only
place pretending to be a Jewish deli that I've discovered (never
forget to take into account the undiscovered) is this overpriced
place in the theatre district called Cats Deli—run, no
doubt, bu someone with a Jewish grandmother, and whose claim to fame,
and this restaurant, was a small part changing the litter box on the
Broadway musical by the same name. I've sent food back at restaurants
only a couple of times in my life, and the chicken rice soup at Cats
was one of those times. I think you accidentally ladled this out of
the mop bucket. That's okay—it's a mistake anyone can make. But the
rice pudding—like a melted vanilla fast-food milkshake with barely
cooked white rice mixed in—confirmed my suspicions. Maybe these
people can sing, maybe they can dance, but they can't cook. I could
only be thankful I didn't order the gefilte fish.
I'd like to take
this dreary, gray, Sunday morning first of autumn to ask you to
please indulge me in a little indulgence—every fall I can't help
but to try to start this project which I call my Sunday Project.
It's based on a project I had some ten years ago, where on successive
Sunday mornings I would adjourn at a particular place—a family
restaurant, a particular one with a name like Country Cousins
or Chicken Kitchen—very down-home and backwoods and
fast-food and manufactured at the same time. An awful place, but
somewhere, on those particular Sunday mornings, where I found
something I an't forget, and thus keep trying to relive. I can't
relive it, but the point is in the trying, the search, the failure,
and finally the sitting, the eating, the drinking coffee, and the
writing. It should be a place I can walk to , and have a good walk to
on the way. And it should be warm and it should be tasteless. Well,
in the last few years I haven't really found the the place but I'll
keep looking, and the important thing is that I try, and go somewhere
, and write about my observations, and it's the fall—that's the
important thing—it's really just an autumn ritual. And as rituals
go, I have a lot of them. They're important to me, yes.
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