Friday, January 1, 2010. A New Start For One Of Us. Acme Oyster House. Cold Comes. Mary Ann spend the entire morning making a list of resolutions for the new year. She would not show them to me. I'm probably better off not knowing. With the day off, I got right back to work, plowing ahead at my steady, mildly evolutionary state. In a month, I'll begin my sixtieth year. It's the thirty-fourth year of the New Orleans Menu's publication, the twenty-third year of our marriage, the thirty-sixth year I've been on the radio every day, the twelfth year of the cat Twinnery's life, the twentieth year we've lived at the Cool Water Ranch, the year when Jude reaches majority and when Mary Leigh begins college. The fifth year since Katrina.
Mary Leigh spent the night at a friend's house, and came home around noon. I am prohibited from even hinting at what happened at the New Year's Eve party, but I think I can say that she found it exciting but not magical.
We had lunch at the Acme Oyster House, one of the few decent restaurants open today. The usual: grilled oysters, wedge salad, a seafood platter. (Mary Ann splurged on this, clearly in violation of her diet--but she's lost so much weight lately she felt she could fit it in.) I invented a new sandwich in a dream last night (I really did), and they agreed to make it--even sending out the kitchen manager to consult with me first. Not that big a deal: a fried oyster poor boy with a few slices of grilled ham, pickles, and remoulade sauce. They were overly generous with the ham, but otherwise it delivered the precise taste I was dreaming of.
We go to the Acme and I write and talk about it so often that it cheeses Mary Ann that they don't buy advertising either on my radio show or on our website. That doesn't bother me, because it's a good demonstration of my failure to give our advertisers special perks, as some of my critics say I surely must. A few days ago one of the ad sales guys at the radio station said that I'm sitting on a gold mine and not mining it. He can't understand why I won't eagerly embrace any restaurant that wants to spend money. But if I did that, it would all be over tomorrow. And I wouldn't be able to live with myself.
The word is that we'll have a pretty hard freeze here tomorrow, and a really cold series of nights starting Thursday and running through next weekend. Time to get the canvas skirts over the crawl space. My pipes are all wrapped well, but having had pipes break wholesale in my Mid-City house about thirty years ago, I am gun-shy. I'm sorry I never got around to building a new roof for the pump house. Now that's something else to worry about.
