Hopscotching the Flavors

I haven’t heard Duke Jordon in a while.  Brooklyn born bop pianist who played with Bird and Miles in the forties.  Sounds like he was forced to drive a cab in New York during the sixties.  Whenever you hear those stories you can’t help but imagine getting in the back of a cab with someone who sooner or later said, “yeah, I once played with Bird and Miles”  “Yeah?  Huh.” And thinking, “Sure he did.”  He wasn’t the first jazz musician to find a happier home over in Copenhagen.  I’ve got the song “No Problem” on and it’s swinging.

For lunch my older one wanted a burrito bowl.  As has been recently rendered, this is a common call.  I decided to make our own rather than give the “Avacado Tree” all the glory.  I chopped and boiled and fried and twisted off tops and laid it all out.  Vainly I asked if it was almost as good.  And warmly she insisted that it was just as good.  I’ll take that.

And as it was, I was on point for dinner as well.  Hopscotching the flavors of the world, I sold the older one on the idea of something Middle Eastern, with humus and baba ganoush.  This is a strictly modern modality: to bounce from one taste to another, each time one cooks, as if the after taste of Italian tomatoes needs to be put down with flat black beans and then lifted with cutting lemon, garlic and sesame.  This is how we think when we go out to eat and I think that gallery rendering of global choices is how I increasingly view the evening’s meal as well. It’s kids what done it.  They have things they must have and things they won’t have again.  A Chinese stir-fry every night, just won’t do.  

The little one, in sixth grade, had a dance tonight.  I can remember the drama and the let down of a sixth grade dance.  The reviews were middling.  “It was totally boring for the first half and then a lot of people showed up and it got cool.  But then the music sucked.”    I asked if the boys all stood against the walls.”  “No.  The boys were much better dancers.”  “Really?”  This was unexpected.  Go fellas.  There wouldn’t have been a single dude amongst us who knew the first thing about shaking it in 1977.