A Pilgrim’s Digression

Fair warning: I’m not feeling particularly consistent this afternoon, so expect no links between the paragraphs I am going to scatter here like bird feed in the snow. Pick out the seeds and overlook the empty shells.

Here in the Southeast, all weekend long we’ve been expecting a powerful winter storm that never quite materialized. Friday and yesterday, the weather forecast was for five to seven inches of snow and ice from Saturday noon through Sunday at five. In actuality, we received maybe three inches of snow with a top coat of ice.

Thus quite remarkably, yesterday we decided to get up very early and go out to breakfast and do some grocery shopping at Wal-Mart before the storm hit. “Very early” for us is seven AM, by the way.

The restuarant we ate at is one of these locally-owned “country” restaurants one can find throughout Virginia. It has a counter like a diner and lots of cigarette smoke. Virginia is a tobacco state, so the smoking laws are quite relaxed here. I remember when I first came to Virginia in 1996, I was shocked to go into a small, independent grocery store and see a sign on the checkout lane stating, “No smoking at registers.” The implication was, one could smoke throughout the rest of the store, just not at the checkout lane. And people took that implication to heart and often did smoke in the store. Used to be, when I was growing up, it was unremarkable to go into a department or grocery store and see someone smoking; they would mash the butts on the floor after finishing a smoke. Seeing such things again after all these years was a bit disorienting. Sometimes things just fade quietly out of existence without our even noticing. Sometimes for the better.

There was no smoking section in the restaurant where we ate yesterday. Smokers and non-smokers alike had to sit in the same dining area. This was only the second time we had eaten at this restaurant, the first time being a Sunday, when there were only non-smoking, post-church-attendees gobbling up eggs and bacon. Yesterday, the crowd was more varied. The first we noticed that people around us were smoking was when two older women sat down at a table very close to us and lit up.

Trying not to breathe through her nose, my wife said, “Did we sit in the smoking section?”

“I don’t think there is a smoking section,” I said.

Smoking doesn’t bother me usually, except in restaurants. I smoked. Maybe that should be “smoke” since it was just a few months ago that I bought a pack, smoked about half, and threw the rest away.

I have never smoked before, during, or after a meal, however. Smoking is a psychological habit every bit as much as a physical addiction, and as such, situation becomes important in the reinforcement of the habit. One finds that one smokes at certain times and places—while driving in the car, in the evening while drinking a beer and watching TV, or (for me) while reading, writing, and studying. I never understood the link between smoking and meals, however. These two old ladies, however, had smoked two ciggies apiece before their breakfasts had even arrived. They were those really long, thin, brown cigs, too; I think the brand name is More or something like that. Anyway, the kind that smell more like burning paper and toxins than burning tobacco. Disgusting.

The breakfast was quite good, despite the cigarette smoke, but I noticed one other thing that rather turned my stomach. A man sitting at a table nearby with seven other people blew his nose into a handkerchief and then looked at the results intently for several long seconds before going back to his meal. Eating in restaurants can be hazardous, if you look too long at the people around you. Perhaps I am simply a misanthrope. Well, I know I am a misanthrope, but still…why is it that watching other humans eat can be such a stomach-churning experience?

I have had a similar “what’s on the end of your fork” moment when eating chicken. As long as I have lived in Virginia, I have frequently seen trucks on the highway hauling hundreds of chickens in tiny cages to Virginia “processing” plants, and so knowing what chickens go through prior to slaughter makes it a little more difficult to eat a chicken sandwich. Only a little more difficult. I usually overcome my inhibitions.

I recall an episode of CSI in which one of the forensics experts commented she never ate in restaurants because by the time the meal made it to your table, it had DNA of at least two or three different people in it, including the cook and the server. I had never tought of it that way, but it’s correct. Breathing expells moisture, so the act of carrying a meal from a restaurant kitchen to a table undoubtedly results in droplets of some stranger’s expectorant finding it’s way onto your food.

I ordered my usual breakfast of eggs and bacon and hashbrowns with a side of grits. Something else I’ve noticed: in the South, grits are the normal side. In the NorthEast, scrapple is the normal side order. Go to breakfast in Washington and you will be offered scrapple. Drive twenty miles south into Virginia, and grits will be your choice of a breakfast side.

What is scrapple? I had never heard of it before moving to the Washington area. It looks rather like dry ham salad, or vomit, depending on your attitude towards ground pork. The dictionary defines it as “A mush of ground pork and cornmeal that is set in a mold and then sliced and fried.” I don’t find it particularly appetizing, but then maybe many people from the North don’t find grits particularly appetizing, either. Grits are a favorite breakfast food of mine if cooked correctly; that is, if they are not too dry and not too mushy. I sweeten grits with a spoonful of sugar.

West Virginia is a state perpetually in the throes of an identity crisis, as anyone who grew up there can tell you. West Virginia is a state that cannot decide if it is Southern or Northern, and sometimes it is both at once. Thus my High School mascot is a Revolutionary War Minuteman known as the Patriot, but at football games, students fly the Confederate flag. Although West Virginia seems to come down decidedly on the side of grits in the whole grits or scrapple debate, there are places in the eastern panhandle where one can find scrapple on the menu.

I also like to listen to people around me when I am in a restaurant or on the bus or train. It feels kind of naughty to eavesdrop, but I listen as much for how people talk as for what they are talking about. Take greetings and good-byes, for instance. Two white, Southern men greet each other in a restaurant: “Hey there, pardner, where you been keepin yourself?” And when they say good-bye, “See you later, Feller.” and “Later, Bud.” In the conversation in between, I heard one of the men ask, “What you doin, Pard?” And the other man answered, “I gotta load of law-ugs for X I gotta deliver ‘fore storm hits, and then I gonna change the awl in my car. You?” (wherein “awl” = “oil”). “We ain’t doin nothin today, ‘cept waitin’ for the snow.” “Yeah, it-a look like gonna be a big one.”

I always find it interesting how many words we elide in normal conversation, but what we say still makes sense. I had a rather eccentric, some would say “cruel,” English Grammar teacher as an undergraduate, named Dr. Dorothy “Dot” Sedley. I have many, many stories about her infamous cruelty and the difficulty of passing her class, but one thing that she taught that has always stuck with me is that grammar is nothing more than a description of the way people talk. Grammar is not a set of “rules.” Thus one could take the sentences spoken above and outline them grammatically and describe the use of “got” as a verb, a habit of spoken and written English I always find most annoying. Old Sedley would not have been perturbed by it, however. One of the things that made her classes so difficult was she overturned all the notions about grammar, especially about grammar “rules,” which our teachers had ingrained in us since Elementary school. She was not a well-loved professor, either by her students or her colleagues. Maybe in my next blog entry, I’ll write more about her. She was quite a colorful person. I use her real name in this blog because I think she is either dead or retired (same difference?). The required textbook for the class was a book she herself had written, Anatomy of English: An Introduction to the Structure of Standard American English. She claimed the socio-linguist William Labov as her mentor, and when referring to him in class, he was always “The Great Labov.” I had this image of him in my mind as a magician, The Great Labov, pulling gerunds out of his sleeve (or his ass).