Friends and relations

Earl, Janice, and Goddard.

They lived long and happy lives until, exhausted by the rigors of existence, they climbed gratefully into the pots on my stove. Or maybe it didn't happen quite like that. However it happened, we can be clear that on at least two occasions (she says as if reciting sins), I have done the unthinkable: cooked crustaceans that were neither shrimps nor crawdads nor crabs.

They were delicious. The first time, we ate them with just garlicky melted butter and the second time, I attempted a bearnaise sauce, which seized and turned grainy (any fool-proof tips on this will be gratefully received). In either case, you almost don't need sauces with flesh this sweet and opulent.

My interest in cooking and serving my own lobsters stems from two recent events. The first came from the knowledge, acquired in a restaurant in Maine, that I both love lobster and hate eating it when surrounded by fine diners. They are in nice clothes, and I'm in a bib. And the lobster served me in Maine was hard-shell and a complete b*st*rd to eat. By the end of the meal, I had butter in my hair. Clearly, if I was going to feast again on the succulent creatures, I was going to have to do it at home.

The second reason to eat lobster up here is the abundance of fishmongers. Back in Austin, we had Quality Seafood and that was it. On Long Island, there exists everywhere, in brick-and-mortar establishments and at farmers' markets on the seafront, places to buy fresh caught fish. Avoid the stuff sold in super-markets, I've learned, and seek out the tumble-down holes-in-the-wall. The lobsters come from the Long Island Sound (I'm told) and the chaps we've bought so far have had easily fractured soft-ish shells, the kind that make dining possible. My family refuses to look at them when they come back home in the cooler, preferring to let me function as judge, jury, executioner, and driver of the hearse. They won't even participate in the naming game! What spoil-sports!

I don't know if Jesse will ever be persuaded to try lobster, which is fine with me, given the expense. I've been waiting for her to ask me why I find it so philosophically unchallenging to toss live creatures into a hot pot, but so far, she's held the whole idea at a distance. The reason, I will be happy to tell her, if she ever asks, is that all life-forms displace other life-forms, by the very fact of their existence. Clear a field to plant wholesome grains for sprout salads, and you disrupt a food chain that had happily fed other mammals and which will now feed fewer of them. We should all eat less animal protein, for the simple reason that there isn't enough planet for all of us to party like it's 1998, but the choice to be absolutely pure about vegetarianism is an aesthetic, not a moral one. It's a fine, admirable choice, but not one that I can make.

***&&&***

After the Great Pander reported in my last entry, where Mike and I indulged Jesse's every whim, vainly seeking forgiveness for having ripped her from Texas, we've had more visitors: Dan the artist, Alison the marketer and Patrick the NYU student. The weather has been typically obstinate, affording beautiful, dry days when no one is visiting, then starting on a good round of rain for a few days the minute anyone we know touches down in JFK. We make plans to take all our friends to our favorite out-door spots, but end up going to greenhouses, again, where we can huddle out of the rain. Too much! I'm starting to see faces in the orchids. At least I'm not giving them names, not yet.

***&&&***

Aliens do exist you know and they have snatched our bodies and brought us to another planet entirely. I know this because, on a rainy morning when our darling 14-year-old couldn't possibly be asked to walk to school, I drove her, right up to the soggy parking lot a half-mile from our house. Ahead of me was a, wait for it, Maserati. It was new and it was shiny and possibly it was fast, though in the queue I was sitting in, one can't be sure of anyone's speed.

I was again gripped by the gravest doubts. The high school is said to be "great", but how can anyone know this? With such a population of kids, all beneficiaries of elite education since birth, with an education supplemented by private tutoring and having been wet-nursed by MIT post-docs, what school could possibly fail? What teacher could be so incompetent as to mess these kids up?

Jesse came home on the first day of school, all her grief fresh again, and cried. And I cried the next day. Well, I almost cried. My eyes glistened, anyway. We lobster-killers have hard hearts.