[title type="h5"]Saturday, December 10, 2005. Six Hours Late; Oysters At Casamento's; Music[/title]The news from Mary Ann and Mary Leigh was not good. The train was still in North Carolina when I called this morning. It should already have arrived in Washington, and the girls were not happy. Mary Ann said that the train was currently stopped, for the who knows how many-eth time. And that nobody on the train was saying why, or when the train would reach its destination. Amtrak's website showed it as being six and a half hours late. Mary Ann was already telling me this was her last train trip, with the suggestion that it was all my fault for liking trains and infecting the rest of the family with the erroneous idea that train travel made sense. The Saturday radio show has become comfortable in the 10 a.m.-2 p.m. slot on WWL, so much so that I may be doing it even after my regular WSMB show returns next Monday. I thought about getting breakfast first, but I was still full from the steak at Keith Young's last night. And I knew that Don Dubuq--a Rummel High School classmate of mine and host of the early morning fishing and hunting show--would leave boxes of doughnuts behind. They're not very good, but I have no willpower against doughnuts. During the program, Sal Sunseri from P&J Oysters called to tell me he was helping out as a shucker behind the bar at the venerable old Casamento's. Like any iconic restaurant, no matter how low its latter-day profile may be, Casamento's reopening a couple of weeks ago was taken by many people as powerful evidence that the strings that run through the history of New Orleans have not all been severed by the hurricane. I told Sal I would be coming in after the show, but he was gone by the time I got there. But I did see a couple of people who are regulars at our Eat Club dinners, and they invited me to join them at their table. He had already eaten a platter of fried oysters, but had another one. "Instead of dessert, I like to get another appetizer or even an entree," he said. It must work; he looks healthy enough. I started with a half-dozen raw (that brings me to six dozen raw since the restoration of Louisiana oysters), then had a dozen fried, with Casamento's toasted, buttered, thick "pan bread." (It's really just plain white bread in an unsliced loaf that they cut their own distinctive way.) And fresh-cut French fries. A fine lunch. I stopped at the grocery store on the way home, and while there I called the girls again. I learned that they had finally arrived--seven and a half hours late--and that the rental car place at the station had closed for the day. Worse, Mary Leigh was standing alone in Union Station while Mary Ann tried to nail down another rental car. This did not sound good, and I kept checking with Mary Leigh to see if things were okay. At last, a car was obtained and they were off, into the wet snow and twenty-degree cold in DC. Better them than me. I was thinking about cutting down a leaning water oak in back of the house and building yet another fire to get rid of the debris, but the sunset is very early, and by the time I arrived home it was too late to begin such a project. I spent the evening reconstructing a CD of a collection of Christmas music that I've been listening to for years. I assembled the original tape in the 1970s, and I pull it out every year to make me properly nostalgic for the season. It starts with Boston Pops selections, then songs by a number of singers from the Sinatra era, and finally by Sinatra himself. The cassette, and the LP's I recorded it from, were in my downtown office on K-Day, and so were lost like everything else in there. I was able to find and buy everything (except for a forgettable version of "Happy Holidays" by Steve Lawrence and Eydie Gorme) on Napster. That's a great resource for people with far-off-mainstream musical tastes like mine.
