The Visible Woman...January 29, 2001

I really did pretty well at work. I have a Friday deadline on my presentation and I worked pretty hard on it. It isn't great yet but I have come up with some interesting ideas to consider. In my mind, anyway.

"Mom said I couldn't wear this shirt to church, but I did," Dad says. It is a polo shirt with a local News Channel logo that FFP got for a promotion and gave to him.

"Whenever I see this one fellow, I pat here," says Dad patting his open collar on his polo. "No tie," he says. "We agreed not to wear a tie this year."

Mom says the Mexican chicken soup is too spicy for her throat but she eats it with dips of guacamole and chips to cool it down.

I finished reading the first journal from my first trip to Europe. It went until the time that I booked my ticket for home. I think I read part of the next journal around here somewhere the other day. I didn't succeed in winnowing out too much from the box of scribbling. But it does close now. There is so much baggage in life. Old, bad writing you did yourself is not the worst of it. It was interesting what I was reading and how much on that trip. I was also cheering for the kid who found time to write letters, find special stamps for them, go to museums and tours. At the time, I worried that travel was a competition to see everything and I didn't like that. I did find time to watch people and describe them.

And in the present.

Sometimes you get a chance to dine at a restaurant with the people who own it or run it. Kind of a family or captain's table thing. We got such a chance at Zoot last night. There were to be six of us. The gracious owners and a local wine maven and his wife. The latter never showed which didn't stop us from having a wonderful time.

We had some 1990 Veuve Rosé to start. We eased into the meal by sharing some wonderful dumplings with foie gras and greens in them and some fried oysters. We tasted the new bread they are doing in house. Then we had a serving of two absolutely perfect scallops. (John Maxwell later came out and told how you can find the absolute best ingredients and receive them the next day by Fed Ex. He is getting lamb this way, too.)

A paté of rabbit and a nice Burgundy was served.

Ah, the lamb. I had it again. It was a rack this time. But still accompanied by some goat cheese rissoto. I think the shank was better but only by a fraction. This was heavenly. The 1993 Caymus Special Select was mellow and rich and went perfectly with it.

Enough? No. A dessert of apricot sorbet and sweet toast points with a 'warm soup of vanilla infused late harvest Riesling' was served. They poured the 'soup' tableside from French presses that apparently separated the herbal infusion from the liquid. We sipped a little 'Sweet Nancy' which is a dessert wine that is like a light very dry sherry.

Well, it was too much, of course, for a Monday. I spent a few minutes in my home office afterwards and watched the midnight showing of Ken Burns' Jazz from bed, sleeping between snippets of Clifford Brown and Miles and Coltrane.

An interesting thing about reading these old journals. I gave importance to things that would be forgotten forever in a few years. I focused on people who were just there and would not have a long-lasting influence on me. I worried about little things. I worried what other peoplel thought. It was amazing how many people I mentioned that I cannot remember at all. How many whose names I'd forgotten. I would never have been able to remember the boy I dated in Arizona when I was 19. Except I wrote it in one of these scribbles. I visited with someone who was in the service in Heidelberg in 1972. I know his name. Because I wrote it down. I had completely forgotten visiting him, his name. And, reminded, I don't know who he is or how I knew him.

This is not to say that I don't remember a lot of my life and important friends. I do. Of course. These journals may surface events and feelings I don't remember until I read about them. But they also surface completely forgotten moments. And feelings. That, even with the reading about them in my own hand, I cannot really connect to.

Journals are an interesting way to see what others are thinking. And that other may be you, almost three decades hence.