Man with a Pan by John Donohue

Author:John Donohue
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Algonquin Books
Published: 2010-12-31T16:00:00+00:00

4.

The first weeks in Roanoke were unsteady. Mostly we got used to the landscape. The main commercial strip near Hollins is Williamson Road, permeated with a sense of dereliction and lost America, used-car lots, and a Hooters. On the horizon were rolling hills, a gorgeous, verdant landscape, all of it scored by the pervasive whooshing sound of the interstate, speeding people elsewhere. The most dramatic landscape was the ever-more-rolling hill of my wife’s belly, within which grew a baby.

We made explorations of the city and found some nice restaurants. Nice enough. And there was a Kroger nearby, which, for the first few weeks, I thought was going to be our only food supply. It was open twenty-four hours. I liked to visit late, after midnight, when the aisles were populated by lonely, lost characters and the whole nocturnal scene reminded me of city streets at odd hours. But the food itself was disorienting. To say I was spoiled or made lazy by New York was only part of it. There are lot of New Yorks. I had gravitated to the fey, prettified emporiums that flatter you with dazzling displays while insulting you by charging a fortune for a kumquat.

Until I moved to Roanoke, shopping for food was a lark, divorced from the day-to-day. I enjoyed the dense aisles of Balducci’s. I savored the salty possibilities of Zabar’s. (I mention Zabar’s as though it is a known quantity worldwide. It feels almost impossible to define its essence. A Jewish delicatessen? OK, that. A lot of smoked fish. Smoked meats. Smoked people. A lovely sort of crankiness pervading. Little morsels handed over. People demanding things be sliced very thin. Crowds. Chocolate. Various baskets and nebulous stuff hanging down from the ceiling. A souk. A bazaar. Rich and nonrich, Jews, non-Jews. Eighty-first and Broadway, four blocks away from where I grew up.) And then there was my favorite way to shop, to wander among the nearly grotesquely gorgeous vividness of the markets of Chinatown.

In Roanoke, I was in the world of the supermarket. Processed food. Easy food. Food for the everyday. I lectured myself that I was strolling amid abundance and only needed to be creative. I berated myself for being addicted to presentation and flair over substance. Politically, I was in enemy territory (though not entirely, as the heinous George Allen had just made his Macaca remark and would soon lose to Jim Webb), and I was aware of a hypocrisy in my tastes. I pined, mildly, for organic food, but this was a cover for the longing I had for the spectacular and the expensive.

I found a chain called Fresh Market, nestled in the more yuppified southern end of the city. Nothing that special, just a fancy supermarket. But after a few weeks of Kroger, it was a revelation. Harold Brodkey famously wrote of his character Orra Perkins, “To see her in sunlight was to see Marxism die,” and the same might be said for peppers. Some women are more beautiful than others, and some peppers, and cheeses, and lettuces, seem more beautiful than others, too.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.