1. When Paul couldn't make it over for dinner last night, it meant that the Deke fried up an pork chop that became a leftover. We also had one chop left in the package I'd purchased. Maybe for the first time in our twenty years together, the Deke and I ate pork chops for breakfast. I fixed mine with a couple of eggs fried over medium and the Deke ate hers with a half an avocado and we felt like the luckiest people alive that we ate such a luxurious breakfast for the first time.
While eating my morning pork chop, my mind flashed back to the spring semester of 1983 at Whitworth College. I was teaching a surprisingly fun and invigorating seminar in non-Shakespearean Renaissance literature -- we read a variety of Elizabethan and Jacobean plays, including the awesome Knight of the Burning Pestle, Milton's Paradise Lost, Shakespeare's sonnets and I'm not entirely sure what else. I was very fortunate that semester that about a dozen or so open-minded students signed up for the class and happily committed themselves to reading some off the beaten path plays along with some challenging and very famous other works.
Why did eating pork chops for breakfast remind me of this seminar? At some point during the semester, I invited Bill Davie and Dave Veldhuizen to come over to my apartment on a Saturday morning. Somehow, in earlier conversation, the brilliant Australian movie, Breaker Morant came up and I told them I owned a copy of it and if they came over we'd watch it.
We all enjoyed the movie a lot, but I also remember that I fixed them breakfast. I knew they both enjoyed eating at local Spokane diners like Ferguson's on Garland Ave. and Knight's Diner, then on North Division at the bottom of the Division Street hill. So I fixed a sort of diner breakfast for us: pork chops, fried eggs, toast, potatoes, and coffee. We might have also had a beer or two with breakfast, but I'm not sure.
The movie blew us away. The breakfast was delicious. It was a great morning enjoying each other as friends, not so much as teacher and student. I hadn't thought about the Breaker Morant breakfast for a while, but eating pork chops with the Deke this morning brought that scintillating morning back again.
2. I sat much of the day in our sunny living room reading more deeply into the collection of Joseph Mitchell's work, Up in the Old Hotel. The anthology includes three stories collected under the title, Old Mr. Flood. In an author's note introducing these stories, Mitchell tells his readers that Mr. Hugh G. Flood was not an actual man. He is several actual persons Mitchell observed and conversed with in the area around the Fulton Fish Market combined into one person. Through this composite creation, Mitchell gets at the truths about this area in Lower Manhattan: the whiskey drinking, fish selling, fish eating, gossip, history, stories of life, death, and rebirth, and the spirit of Peck Slip, Hartford House, Sloppy Louie's, and other features of life on the shores of the East River.
Mr. Flood is not a factual creation but his character is grounded in facts. Through Mr. Flood's stories we dive into truths, truths revealed in a more focused, efficient, and lively way through the experience of Mr. Flood than if these many experiences had been narrated through multiple persons. I once presented a public lecture over fifteen years ago about how I read non-fiction as fiction, using my reading of John Krakauer's Into Thin Air as an example. Non-fiction tends to focus on what happened; fiction is an exploration of what happens and Joseph Mitchell explores in the Mr. Flood story what happens when people of widely varying backgrounds and walks of life congregate and sell fish, buy fish, prepare fish to eat, eat fish, drink whiskey, sing songs, tell jokes, tell their stories, and express their points of view. What happens? We see the big picture, the enduring truths of human life, the truths we live with all the time regarding loyalty, friendship, love, forgiveness, fortitude, pride, renewal, and a host of other experiences humans share in. The details of Mitchell's stories are exhilaratingly particular to the sights, smells, sounds, tastes, and other sensations of whatever part of New York City Mitchell is writing about. The truths about being human that emerge are salient. The differences in time, history, or place between me sitting in Kellogg, Idaho and Mitchell's stories in early to mid-20th century New York City make Mitchell's insights into the human qualities we share all the more scintillating.
3. I broke away from reading Joseph Mitchell long enough to fix a ground beef stroganoff gravy and the Deke steamed a head of cauliflower and we poured the gravy over the florets in a bowl. The ground beef, meaty mushrooms, beef stock I had made, and generous dollops of sour cream poured over the cauliflower made for an unexpectedly tasty dinner.
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