I am dedicating this post today to my precious friend Denise Bennett-Garrett who passed away last week. She will always be my favorite person to cook & eat lobster with and I am confident that someday we will sit side-by-side with saints and friends ... and we will show them how to eat a lobster The Right Way. Denise - all of my best trips to the shore had you at our side..... I may not have been able to teach you how to swim, but you taught us all to be better women. Love always, Chris.
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Her sun-bronzed hand had gently caressed the faces of her
children, placed the winning card on our vacation kitchen table, flowed the
length of the flute, and rose up in joyful worship as she sang at church. But today is different. Today it is clenched in a firm, almost
death-grip. Her left hand held wrapped
tightly around her foe, her right hand simply snapped the thumb off of the
orange-red lobster claw.
This is our annual ritual meal as my friends and I leave the
shore to return to our homes. It has
been in the same place for years and yet I can’t quite recall the name of
it. We sit at a dockside restaurant’s
picnic table. Everyone at our table is
getting lobster. One friend chooses
“lazyman’s lobster” because she doesn’t want to tackle the work involved in the
steamed lobster. Another friend digs
into the fresh green salad as if it is the last salad she will ever get in her
life. Perhaps we are hungrier than we
realized. But I know that this meal is
going to linger. None of us wants to
leave the shore today.
I glance across the bay at the mini amusement park. There is a ride comprised of heavy duty
plastic hot air balloons. They are red
and yellow and the ride moves in a circle with squealing children aloft. I have not been on that ride as a child, but
I will miss it when I get back to “civilization” just the same.
The way the air smells of salt and freshness and deep fried
French fries near the pier! How could
anything that smells that inviting possibly bad for you?! Maybe it was in a moment of nostalgia like
this that I coined the phrase I want on my headstone some day: “If you’ve gotta die of something, it may as
well be happiness.” A speckled seagull
careens by the edge of our table. He,
too, is a fan of French fries. Yet he
gets to stay and I have to leave. It
seems so unfair.
A small yacht backs up and prepares to leave the
harbor. I consider what life this man
leads that affords him such a moment in time.
Also, a modest working vessel on the other side hangs its nets to dry –
it is from the work of men like these that my table will be blessed
momentarily. A “fun” boat with a couple
out for a leisurely afternoon passes by the edge of the dock. They wave at me
as if we are old friends. My next door
neighbors don’t even do that. What is
the world coming to? Is there a safer,
friendlier mentality when we all go on vacation?
I remember the trip one of our friends lost two hundred
dollars. She thought it might have been
stolen by the hotel staff that moved our baggage from one room to the suite
upgrade we asked for the next day. Four
of us searched with her for the cash.
The front desk staff was in shock and assured us that the woman in
charge of housekeeping in our room had been with them for fifteen years. I knew what they were saying and perceived
the pain in their eyes caused by this accusation – it seemed unthinkable – to
them and to me. Four of us offered to
give our friend $50 each so that we could move beyond this dilemma and just
forget it. She would not accept the
money; nor would she accept any consolation.
It made me ponder how we sometimes choose to “hold” the pains or insults
that life hands us, when we need to just let it go and move forward with a new
plan. Maybe money means too much to us
in the long run. I don’t think the
housekeeper took the money and I imagine the accusation was devastating to this
woman just trying to make ends meet in a tough economic climate. Sometimes I hate money. It divides us into the have’s, have not’s,
accused and innocent.
Ah! The lemonade and
diet Pepsi make it to the table and I am still wishing it was diet Coke. No discussion to be had there. At least the cafeteria where I work offers
both. Small children seated two tables
away spring up and run to the lobster tank to peek inside. Is this a lobster haven or a memorial for
them? How long do they get to live in
the tank before they get yanked out for the table? When we make lobster at my friend’s house for
our mid-winter feast, we steam them in beer. We joke that it is kinder for the lobsters to
send them out with a beer. Then we shake
in some Old Bay seasoning. And we use “real
butter.” That discussion will be
forthcoming when the lobster is brought to the table.
“Is this real butter?”
You can tell it’s not because it is watery-looking but we have to give
every cheapo restaurant a hard time about it every year nonetheless. I think we take turns asking the question
among the five of us. It is unthinkable
that you would serve such a great food to people and then cheap-out on the
dip. Kind of like fat-free salad
dressing. I embrace the adage, “If
you’re going to hang by one leg, you may as well hang by two.” But, I digress.
Lobsters are now on the table in red plastic baskets with a
token slice of parchment paper under them.
An empty dish is placed in the center of the acrylic-top table. Two of us go to work like brain surgeons. We will not let one piece of this gentle meat
escape our grasp. We know every nook and
cranny of this shellfish anatomy. I
crack my lobster in half and drain the hot water into the bowl. Ouch.
Hot, steamy water. Discussion
ensues about the tamale. A friend from
my childhood always insisted to eat it.
I wrinkle half my face up with the memory of it. Then I am pondering why they call a seafood
member’s guts by a Spanish title? “tamale.” I once lived in Arizona. Now THOSE are tamales! Corn meal with shredded beef with peppers
wrapped and steamed in a corn husk. This
is nothing like that!
Eight “straws” which are really the legs of the lobster are
handed from one plate to the next. The
original diner did not want to be bothered with the work of getting a bit of
flesh out of them. There are two hard
core ways to eat lobster: My way, where
you start on all the small pieces and finally work up to the two big claws and
the tail. And the other way, where you
eat all the big pieces and hope you have room for the smaller clean up details
afterwards. The advantage to my method
is only that you will genuinely be starving by the time you poke through the
little legs and get to the real meat.
My friends are poking at various other pieces of their lunch
and I am moving to the tail. I slice
from sternum to tail and am sure to extract the pieces from the four tail
flaps. Then I take that long chunk of
arguably the best part of the lobster and slice it deep down the center to
remove the “vein” - which is not so much a vein as it is a drain. Use your imagination, I’m eating and I don’t
want to get into the details.
The baked potato. A
necessary afterthought. Finally, a
restaurant that brings me enough sour cream.
There is a house near where our hotel was that had a statue of Dianna or
Venus or some Greek goddess and giant columns on the front of the house. The statues were the color of the sour cream
– pure white. Every year we drive by and
look for the house, as if someone would have moved it during the previous
eleven months and three weeks of the year.
Why do we have our rituals, our obsessive-compulsive habits? Do they make us feel more secure? “Good.
The statue is still in front of that house.” And we ask the same questions: What do the people do for a living who can
afford a house like that? (Do they own
stock in Atlantic City casinos? Do they
work on Wall Street?)
And then there is the elephant. I allow myself to be fascinated by things
other people assess as tourist traps. I
found it online when I was searching for things to see on vacation. There were three larger-than-life battleship
metal-sided elephants built around the same period of time. One was at Coney Island and sadly it burned
down. One was down near Cape May and it
was disassembled because if fell into bad disrepair. Then there was Lucy. A land developer positioned Lucy in the
beachside community of Margate to
attract potential homebuyers. Eventually
some wanted to tear her down. Then they
realized she was over a hundred years old and was an historic landmark. She was moved to a lot the size of a postage
stamp and turned to face the ocean. And
there she remains. We were able to go up
inside the spiral staircase within her back leg to the belly of the elephant
which was at one time a bar. It is
possible to go up to the chowdah canopy on top of her and look out to the
ocean. You can also walk into her head
and look out her eyeball at the ocean as well.
Now that is good fun. My friends
gave me a black and white print of Lucy the Margate Elephant which hangs in my
kitchen today.
The waitress brings our check. We order an extra lobster to-go for my
friend’s husband who waits for her at home.
I am mentally gearing myself up for the long drive home. It has been a
different sort of week: on the Tuesday
of our vacation I was browsing in a beach shop that was a block away from the
water when suddenly the whole shop shook.
I looked at the young man standing behind the register and with my poker
face on, asked rhetorically, “does the shop always shake on Tuesdays?” He looked down at his phone to see the report
that there was a mild earthquake with the epicenter in Virginia. Yet here we were in New Jersey. Go figure all those miles away and we still
felt it.
All those miles away… and I still feel it. I am not really having lobster today. I am having this lobster memory. My beach restaurant in Sea Isle City, New
Jersey, might not be there waiting for me this year. The hurricane Sandy has destroyed the
physical realities of many of my memories.
But I have my memories. And this
is something. I always thought I would
be pondering my journeys as an old woman in a nursing home – and the realities
of the beach and boardwalk would be just five hours drive away from me in my
bed or wheelchair. But in fact, a
natural disaster far more unpredictable than my own aging process has stolen
the substance of my ponderings. I am
sorry for the losses. Sorry for the
people who lost their homes and businesses, etc. I am nervous about going back – is the statue
still on the front lawn of that house? I
do not know. But I do know this: Lucy still stands in Margate gazing out to
the sea herself, unharmed.
And somewhere I will find another dockside restaurant and crack open another
lobster with my friends and ask one more time, “Is this real butter?”
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