Sunday, May 9. Mother And Daughter Day. Honey Ribs. As happens now and then, Mary Leigh's birthday and Mother's Day are the same day in 2010. This is a delightful coincidence to Mary Ann's way of looking at things. I'm not so sure how Mary Leigh feels about it. In the years when we had a big party here at the Cool Water Ranch for all the mothers in Mary Ann's large family, Mary Leigh's birthday had to share that celebration. But with just the three of us here, it was a little warmer.
One perennial set-piece for Mother's Day arrived at the last minute. The enormous pricklypear cactus at the edge of the patio has always greeted this day with a lush display of its showy, brilliant yellow flowers. But not one flower bud had burst open as of yesterday. This morning, four of them were out there. The exceptionally cool spring is the culprit, but I will count this as another fine performance by the old cactus.
Also flowering all of a sudden are about a half-dozen Louisiana irises. Those purple flowers are florist-shop beauties. They grow naturally in a low spot here. This is their native habitat. We get a few more every year.
There were no gifts to buy. Mary Ann won't let me buy her any kind of gift. She pre-empts the act by going out and spending money on something she can barely allow herself permission to buy, and pushes herself over the line by calling the purchase her birthday present. Mary Leigh seems to have picked up the same weird habit. Last week, she visited the Tulane campus to get a feel for her chosen institution of higher learning. She was delighted that the shopping there was good, and came home with sweat pants and a few other items in Green Wave livery. They don't understand that men like to buy presents for women. But, pah! Of what importance are men? Mary Leigh has already given her date for the Jesuit prom last week the brush-off.
The Marys did allow me to cook dinner for them. We talked briefly about going to a restaurant, but far too late to get a reservation anywhere interesting. Mother's Day is a bad day to look for good food, anyway.
The menu at home consisted of barbecued baby back ribs and a pork tenderloin, corn on the cob and a salad. I coated the ribs with honey, then added an unusual seasoning mix I bought at Marque's Food Suppliers in Harvey about a year ago. It's almost white, with black specks. I'm not sure what's in it, but it's very good with pork. The ribs were in the Big Green Egg--which was burning a mix of charcoal and chunks of oak wood fallen from trees during Katrina--for about four hours at 250 degrees. Mary Leigh, who likes ribs but only when they're very good, said that these were very, very good. Mary Ann is a soft target for ribs, but whoever wrote the diet she's inflicted upon herself says that you should never eat pork. Which is ridiculous. I noted that the pork tenderloin (which also came out nice, pink almost all the way through from the seasoning and smoke) has less fat than skinless chicken breast.
We indulged in all these favorite foods of my girls on the old picnic table on the deck, with a blue sky above, a warm breeze making the wisteria vine wave its hundred of tendrils, the queedle-deep birds singing their question-and-answer song, and domestic tranquillity reigning over all.
This is Mary Leigh's eighteenth birthday. She says she feels different, but that the different feeling set in a few weeks ago. She says there seems to be something about her world that seems different from her world of just a little time ago. I know this feeling well. I felt it unambiguously on May 13, 1967. I've thought about that transformation ever since. But I didn't tell her all that. The last thing she wants to think is that in any way she is like me.
Then I went back to work. I didn't want to, but I had to. Tulane must be paid for. The day's honorees watched television.
