[title type="h5"]
Sunday, August 2, 2015.
Making New Friends. Armadillo Festival.
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The choir for the High Mass at St. Jane's in Abita Springs is unusual. Most of the singers are young women, ranging in age from single digits to their twenties. The others are their parents, who are mostly about my age. And then, not really fitting in, there I am. I have become friends with the parents, two of whom manage this unlikely musical ensemble. (I am leaving their names out because I didn't ask whether they minded being written about.)
They had a summer party for the choiristas today. Pulled pork, chili, hot dogs, potato salad. . . all good to very good. I brought the wine and beer. It was the perfect crowd for the many bottles of Barefoot bubbly I have in my wine pile. They seemed to be delighted. So was I. Even Mary Ann shows up for awhile. I bring my karaoke rig, thinking we could get some Motown, Sinatra, Beatles, and Sixties pop going. But I don't have anything that the young people would recognize. Besides, they are all in the pool outside, smartly trying to keep the heat--which hovers at about the century mark--at bay.
The adults wind up just talking about dozens of matters, all of which adds up to how wonderful life is when you can do what you want to do. Hold an armadillo festival, for example. Our hosts have actually done that numerous times, the population of armadillos in the area being great enough for the beasts to be part of the environment, which they seem happy to share with humans. They talk for awhile about putting on another party for the armored ones, but decide against.
I am there three hours. It would have been longer, but I had a devil of a time finding their house. It occurs to me only as I write this a week later that I could have rolled directly to the place if I had remembered to punch in the address in my brilliant phone, whose capabilities never cease to amaze me.
Too bad we didn't get around to the karaoke. These people are just the type who would dig all the music I have in that format. I'd forgotten how much of it I have. Trying to remember how the thing works, I did a lot of solo karaoke during the past few days, to the usual disdain of the Marys.
[title type="h5"]Monday, August 3, 2015.
A Great New Source For Red Beans. [/title]
In two weeks, I board the Sunset Limited at Union Passenger Terminal to begin a 7,500-mile rail excursion through the western two-thirds of the U.S. That prospect pleases me, but before I can go I have to figure out what to do about my daily media gigs. It's an egotistical folly to think that one cannot be replaced, but I come pretty close to that. Just getting all the commercials I would have recorded if I were not on vacation takes weeks. And what about the NOMenu Daily? While we ran around in Europe a few months ago, I had time to put out almost nothing in three weeks. My subscribers don't like this. So I have determined to put out a full Daily every day while I'm gone, by getting it all done and plugged into the system before I leave.
My hope is that I won't have to write any NOMenu stuff during the train trip. I won't be goofing off, either. I have been working on a novel in my spare (ha! ha!) for the past few years, and I have enough of a framework that I think I can actually write the whole book as America and its mountains flash by in the train's windows. All I have to do is do it. And I get a lot of it done today.
Lord knows I can't go out to take a walk. It is so hot out there that health alerts are coming from the weather service. I don't have the skin for running around in the sun.
Mary Ann is open for dinner. She tells me that she is leaving town herself later this week. Destination: Rome. No, scratch that. Seattle. I will be in Seattle myself (at the northwest corner of my box-shaped railroad route) in two and a half weeks, but our paths will not cross. She is going to guest-host the radio show in my absence. There's one thing I don't have to worry about. Not too much, anyway.
At Zea, I ask for the red bean soup du jour. I remember it as being a bean slurry with a few slivers of sausage--and not great. For that reason, I haven't ordered it in years, even though I think Zea's soups are pretty good in general. So I am surprised to get a bowl of whole, discrete, almost firm beans, with just enough sausage and a broth that is about half as thick as the sauce in a pot of plain-old-Monday red beans. They are very good. I'm glad to discover that. Now I have another excellent source for red beans on Mondays. Which, in addition to the tradition, are very good for you. Even MA, in the throes of dancing and fencing and flushing and other efforts to lose weight, says that the beans fit right into her eating program.
I like the fact that they taste great most of all.
