Saturday, April 9, 2011.
Out To Breakfast. Sinatra Explained. Seafood Guide.
The Courtyard Café has been on my mind. It's where I went to breakfast every Saturday morning with the kids when they were still kids. A happy place for me. Mary Ann took me there for breakfast, even though she didn't eat anything. Good as always: nice scrambled eggs (made creamy with sour cream, I learned some time ago), spicy brabant potatoes, bacon, an English muffin, juice and coffee. I also know that it is entirely accessible to someone on wheels, as I am.
It was my fourth restaurant meal since the ankle incident. About one per week since. I'm surprised that it hasn't driven me stir-crazy. I'm eating like a different person. Yesterday I had half a small blueberry tart for breakfast, and a slice of pumpkin bread for lunch. Coffee. Juice. That was all.
I didn't do that on purpose. Mary Ann left a plate of ancient shepherd's pie (good enough the last time I had it, two weeks ago), but I didn't hear where. It proved to be in the microwave oven, which was not where I would have put a plate of meat all day. She said she told me, and that I nodded.
She also said I should have called her. But I just wasn't hungry. And I'm holding onto that feeling, using it for all it's worth. Losing weight would help other problems (snoring, reflux, hypertension, gout, and one other malady to which guys my age are prone). If I weighed forty pounds less, I might not have broken my ankle in the first place. So I'm going to worry about wasting a six-month-old shepherd's pie from the freezer?
I just finished the second book I've read during this period. It's Frank: The Voice, a 786-page half-biography of Frank Sinatra. James Kaplan wrote it like a novel. The story arc covers only the first third of Sinatra's life. He rises, improbably, to the greatest popularity ever enjoyed by a solo singer. Then he slowly declines in the late 1940s and early 1950s to become stone broke, unable to get major gigs, despised by a lot of people, and occasionally suicidal. I knew about this time in his life (I've been fascinated by the singer since my late teens), but never heard the whole story.
Kaplan leaves no stone unturned in laying open the main act of this drama. It all revolves around Sinatra's decade-long love affair with Ava Gardner. Who seems to have been the hottest woman in recorded history. From the time he began seeing her while they were both still married through their marriage to each other, they tear each other apart and then reunite, night after night, soaked in rivers of alcohol, with unlimited passion. They were at turns the best and worst possible companions for one another, feeding each other's richest and most destructive proclivities.
Now I know what reservoir Sinatra was tapping in his many songs of thwarted desire and love for unattainable women. Few men have ever experienced suck emotional peaks and canyons. (Or could handle them if they did.) The songs have always been gut-wrenching for me. Now I know why.
The book ends with Sinatra's winning the Oscar for From Here To Eternity in 1953. That's when he began his astonishing comeback, with a new voice and soul different from the one that made girls scream ten years before. I think it's a great book.
Unfortunately, I will always associate it with giving myself a hypodermic needle in the belly. That's what I did before settling down to read every night. Thank God: only five shots left to go.
In between all this non-eating and book reading, I finished a job I hadn't planned on starting. Checking over the recipes on my website, I had a few ideas to make it easier for readers to look for the kinds of recipes they wanted. One thing led to another, and by the time I quit at about ten-thirty, the thing had been beefed up considerably. I dug out a guide to local seafood I wrote as a New Orleans Menu series four years ago, updated it, added a lot of photos, and uploaded. The thirty-three new articles answer a lot of questions I'm asked often. (It's here.)
I'll bet I have a lot more articles like that in my archives. It's just a matter of finding them and the time.
Courtyard Cafe. Covington: 101 Northpark Blvd. (Marriott Courtyard Hotel). 504-871-0244.
