My time in NC is about to run out, and I am struggling to find words that would describe the best food I had here in this coastal town.
Because it’s not even about food to begin with. Over the years I developed a strong affinity for vital sparks on humble streets. Some say sparks, others say belches. It doesn’t matter. I have a hard time resisting a neighborhood takeout joint on a backstreet that emerges unexpectedly like a belch as I drive through a neglected section of the town. I pull over my car. I see an “EBT accepted” sign on the door. On the parking lot are a couple of shady characters on shady bicycles whispering shady deeds. Catcalls are being thrown across the street. I know the food is good here. I know, because I used to fetch meals for a cantankerous, snuff chewing matriarch who needed to have her weekly fried fish from a takeout place exactly like the one I’m seeing now. I once tried to help myself to the fried okras that came with her fish, and the witch slapped my hand. Anyhoo, I was young and happy back then. We helped each other. Your sorrow was my sorrow, and vice versa. That was the community, that was Americana.
I walk in. Everything reminds me of my crabby lady’s favorite takeout place. I note the flies zigzagging on the counter, their legs tracing the items on the menu typed in Microsoft plain text. A floor fan occupies one of two chairs, humming a languid tune to the very meager grocery section with sprouting potatoes and dusty canned goods. But the place is clean, it is a seafood market yet hardly smells of fish. I am enveloped by the great care and pride the workers put in to keep the place respectable.
Standing next to the crab bucket was a tall fishman with a cigarette hanging off his lips. Newport. He slowly stubbed out the cigarette. I told him he didn’t have to, I didn’t mind. He smiled as if he knew all about my aches and promised me the best flounder in the town. Okay, I say to him, don’t forget fried okras. He goes back to the kitchen to fry my fish. The magic of implicit communing is that it frees us from the constraints of time, place or even reality, faces of friends blend and shift, and I am transported to my backyard, smoking a Newport with my dead friend, to tell him everything I want to tell him, that one sunny day the matriarch uncharacteristically invited me to her annual family reunion and when I arrived at the lakefront she smiled sweetly and said “my baby I’m so happy you came,” and I knew she was only putting it on, but her grandsons were gullible and they treated me like a guest of honor, loading my plate with fried fish, okras, tater salad, the exact same way the fishman with a cigarette is loading my styrofoam takeout box right now, food overflowing then some, so I decide to spend a few more bucks to buy a 2 lb bag of grist milled grits, to use it as a weight to subdue the lid that is refusing to shut, to imitate the mannerism of the crabby matriarch, who used her heavy bible to keep the lid of a styrofoam box down, all while suppressing the overflowing memories of her husband, who one day went out for takeout fish and never came home.
