Random Thoughts

Waking was late in coming to me this morning. Reasons existed, as they always do, for my missing most of the pre-noon hours of this Sunday. Primus and my wife arrived home late having been to a college hockey game. Boo, hiss the opponents vanquished our local heroes. Still I was not sleepy when they got home so I looked for some entertainment on the television. Primus headed off to be and my wife and I watched a cooking/travel program set in Spain. One hour of food pornography is the best way to describe this program.

Watching beautiful people eat food is a very guilty pleasure of mine. Part of me is repulsed by the money that had to be expended on the creation of this series. Clearly the monies spent would have been far more wisely used in delivering social welfare to the needy. Two movies stars, two TV/print personalities, a pop star, a Bentley and several Mercedes Benz vehicles all traveling for several months throughout the whole of Spain eating at top restaurants and staying in sumptuous lodgings could not have been anything other than expensive. On the other hand there was the food and the scenery. Did I mention the tapas? OMG!

Small plates have in the past decade or so be a favorite of mine. In Toronto there are several good spots for this kind of food. The nearest tapas place to where I live is an hour away in Grand Rapids. It is fine but not worth the expense of the trip for us. I may get there once this year if we have a hockey game at the right time and if there is no snow storm.

Last night one of the couples went to a tapas place in Barcelona that apparently is one of the best restaurants in Spain. The food, even the anchovies looked wonderful. While this clearly kept my attention the part of the program that really had me was the seafood portion. There came a point where the food critic writer and the young nubile actress were ferried out to a restaurant on stilts in the middle of a bay. Once disembarked in this veritable floating world the food critic chowed down on oysters. Me, I was drooling. When the critic responded to a question as to how many oysters he had ever eaten in a sitting with the number 48 I thought to myself, you wimp. I know I have probably tossed back more but on the raw oyster count/steamed oyster count I never kept track. I know I have eaten that many fried oysters at one time as my maximum of that variant of the delicacy. Lacking a gallbladder the consumption of 48 fried oysters is probably never going to be on my horizon again.

Here in the Midwest because of the obvious distance to the nearest ocean, 48-50 oysters would cost easily $150-200 dollars for good ones. Clearly I opted to move here and thus made my choice on locale vs. lunch options. Still, it doesn’t mean I cannot mourn my lack of access to oysters. Food porn, it is the stuff that memories and dreams are made of.

Well after the Spanish food interlude I headed off for bed. Between bad dreams and Francie’s restlessness quality sleep did not arrive until late. When I last looked at the clock it was about 4 a.m. Having only fallen into the dark dreamless world just before the sunrise I stayed in bed until about 11 a.m.

Due to the late hour of my rising I missed listening to the radio news programs. This was probably a good thing. When I dialed up some music I heard the announcer indicating that the fighting in Gaza was continuing. Could the news be anything else? I am fifty two years old and the earliest snippets of news I remember concerned the 67 Arab-Israeli conflict. Has anything really changed? Has anything in this battle really changed in the last half millennium?

Until there is a fundamental shift in both party’s perceptions as to their rights and entitlements in the sand that compromises the Middle East nothing will ever be resolved. It is not a question of who goes first. Both the Arabs and the Jews must realize they are people first and live in this world and do not have claims as God’s anointed to anything including land and power other than their humanity or the bodies will continue to pile up. With the weapons at play in the Middle East the body count could increase exponentially. As I said it is not a question of who must act first in good faith, they both must.

Sorry for that rant, I am tired.

Today I made the bass go first. The French horn followed. Later, much later, will come the piano practice. How do you communicate to children the value in both learning an instrument and learning the discipline to practice and instrument? My parents did not push me and I gave the clarinet up pretty early. To this day I regret I did not master any musical instrument.