And Sorghum: You Don’t

My sister wanted to come up.  She’d bring her son.  They’ve been down in Brooklyn, throughout the Covid period.  For us it has been a bucolic drama which forces us to mask-up when we go to our choice of grocery stores and confront the challenging reality of not being able to go to local restaurants.  In the city, it’s been different.  Twenty-percent of the metropolis has been exposed to the virus and confinement means quarantining in a very tight space.  It is also the stigma that is involved in living there in the eye of the hurricane.  No one else is particularly interested in seeing you. 

My wife acquiesced.  So, it was a go.  And then my dad said he’d come.  My mom as well.  My little brother and his nephew got word and suggested they’d head up as well.  Fortunately, this all passed the veto committee that my wife chairs and today, around noon or so we welcomed them all. 

My wife wisely suggested that we set things up in the front yard, away from the view of the Gunks, but away too from the glare of the sun.  We pulled out the long table and moved out a few chairs and it all worked pretty swell. I’d thawed out a turkey breast, cooked a side a ham and generally overcooked a half a dozen other dishes that were all a lot of fun to make. Mac and cheese for kids.  But for the first time I made quinoa and turned it into a cold salad.  You can’t seem to buy baba ghanoush here, so I made some.  And sorghum:  you don’t see that every day.  I read on the label, which had the flag of India, and not China and a shot glass of sorghum liquor that you could make sorghum popcorn and so I did. 

I played Bessie Smith all day.  It fit; the heat, the swinging chair, the familiarity.  My nephews were both here.  They all looked a bit like I looked when I was twelve, or when I was four.   My brother’s son wanted to go running around in the house and we wound up in my closet.  I told him, we’d better get out of here, as it’s a bit of a messy walk-in closet.   Ah, but he thought it might be grand to stay in the walk-in closet.  I suggested his aunt, my wife, might "hit-me-with-a-stick" if she found us playing in here, so we’d better go.   The noble, young paladin took this at face value, an injustice certainly and he promptly searched out my wife and earnestly suggested that it wouldn’t be fair to hit me with a stick.  Awkward initiations then, into familial sarcasm.

Sunday, 06/07/20