J'ai renvoyé à nouveau

I spent the holiday alone. But before my readers begin to pity me, I should say that this was planned as my daughters will both be in Chicago next weekend when we are to have a grand feast. We hope to outdo our meal of two years prior, a surprise visit that I wrote about at length. Ella has finished culinary school and has opened a restaurant in New Orleans, intent on being part of the redevelopment of one of the more neglected (and dangerous) areas of that city. We still have lengthy conversations about food as the soul of culture, but in truth she is now the master and I am the student. I visited her bistro over the summer and she served me a simple jambalaya and fresh corn bread that was so perfect that I wept for twenty minutes upon cleaning my bowl. When I recovered I ordered a second helping. Billie, my other daughter, is interviewing for a job in Chicago with a nonprofit. It's her backup plan depending on how she fares on the Foreign Service Exam, which she is taking for the third time. It's bad karma to controvert her dreams, but I still hope she winds up in Chicago so that we can be close. It terrifies me to think of her serving in Baghdad in the center of the mess created by Our Leader and the nincompoopery who support (and continue to apologize) for his criminal and incompetent leadership. Not that Billie wouldn't do much to make the best of a horrid situation, but I'm a grumpy old man who needs his daughter close and out of harm's way.

I should make some mention of where I've been for the past year or more. Devoted readers will recall my series of relationships with my students and ex-wives, and it all, I'm afraid, turned out badly. I had some issues, my garden variety depression spiraling temporarily out of control, heightened by my heart surgery and subsequent battery of medications. I'm in therapy now, and though I lost my job in the MFA program of a uninspiring yet pretentious middlewestern institution of higher learning, I'm on the rebound with a good job teaching at a Chicago area community college, which a former student secured for me upon hearing of my predicament.

Things are going well, and while New York exhibits indifference to my new novels and memoir despite my triumphs of old, LA has taken interest in my facility with screenwriting. At the behest of a friend I wrote a spec script while hospitalized after a storytelling drought of more than a year. Her logic was that I should begin working in a new format and she was dead on. I discovered I have latent ability in screenwriting. Several producer friends reviewed the script, immediately spying brilliance. The fact that I am honoring the strike is perhaps the only reason it is not currently in development at a major studio. I'm now working on a script about my life that is sure to have independent filmmakers queuing up once I finish, so I devoted my solo Thanksgiving time to fleshing out another pair of scenes.

Oh, I did eat well. I had some good crab and shrimp left in the freezer from a past Cajun orgy and some old baguettes that had hardened so I made a bayou stuffing and filled mixed red and green peppers for holiday flare. I made fresh hush puppies and some Cuban beans and rice. A crisp Pinot Blanc from Alpine Italy harmonized with the meal. Seafood on Thanksgiving helped me not to dwell on the fact of my solitude.

In any event, I've returned yet again. I hope to return to these online memoirs in earnest, adding my occasional recipes and advice for aspiring writerlings. I'll also add some tips on screenwriting as I'm now beginning to master that craft as well. I feel good. I get the sense that there are good things in store for the Brown Trout. Welcome back readers. J'ai renvoyé à nouveau.

Anniversary

Yesterday would have been the thirtieth anniversary of my marriage to my first wife, Lila. She was (and I trust still is) an Irish Catholic lass with freckles and a taste for mischief in her lovemaking.

We fought often. In fact we fought constantly when we weren’t in bed. She’s an artist, a perhaps that was the problem. Creative types are certainly self-absorbed, and as marriage is all about sacrifice, a writer who marries an artist is asking for trouble. Someone has to do a bulk of the giving, and neither of us were willing to compromise. Though we never grew to be close friends in the way that Ruth (my second ex) and I did, there was a definite fire--a mixture of lust and devotion--that I’ve never been able to recreate. She gave me two gorgeous daughters, my finest achievement in life being those two brief acts of pollination.

I celebrated the thirtieth anniversary of the marriage to my first wife by almost calling her. I sat next to the phone in my bathrobe, hand hovering over the receiver for the better part of an hour. Finally I gave up and fired up the grill. I had two venison round steaks marinating in a ziplock of olive oil, black pepper, garlic, sea salt and Pinot Noir. I tossed them on low heat next to a foil-wrapped, organically grown baking potato. I then sautéed a couple pounds of shitakes and some greenhouse zucchini. Since this was an entirely local meal, I paired it with a friend’s homemade Chambourcin. It’s a delightful dry red wine with green pepper and grassy qualities that make it a nice fit for wild game. It’s grown in the Midwest and Mid-Atlantic states, as well as in New York and parts of Australia, where they make a lovely sparkling wine from this varietal. Chambourcin is one of those much-maligned French-American cultivars that is either derided or ignored by the likes of those insipid writers for Wine Spectator or that nincompoop of the first order, Robert B. Parker. It’s a tricky wine for food pairing, and it’s admittedly hard to find well-made (though aren’t all wines?). My friend’s bottle was delightful, aged two years and made without oak. I’ve come to regard the use of oak (especially by California winemakers) with the same level of contempt as someone who puts ketchup on a fine porterhouse or those who pour hazelnut flavored syrup into a cup of good coffee.

In any case, after this solitary orgy that took up most of the day and evening, I retired to my back patio with a glass of tawny port so I could work on a story by lamplight. It was a balmy evening, and I smelled the thickness of coming rain. My story is about the last black cowboy in Montana, a fellow hired by a Republican rancher to illegally eliminate the endangered grizzly bear that killed his prized bird dogs. Based on a true story. I’m slipping it to a friend who is slipping it to a friend at The New Yorker. If it’s published there I’ll let my readers know…it’s almost time I revealed my identity anyway. In any case, it’s the first short story I’ve written in ages, and I think it’s pretty fucking good, if I don’t say so myself.

Around midnight I was dozing in my lawn chair and a fine mist had begun falling, dampening the draft of the story and curling the pages. I heard a soft knock at the front door, so I stumbled through the apartment and undid the chain. It was a surprise as this complex becomes something of a ghost town after the students leave.

I found Yu standing there. She was wet and crying, her cheeks purple in the streetlight. Her hair was unbraided…the first time I’d seen her this way, and it hung about her shoulders like a main of kelp. She was gorgeous. “My husband kick me out,” she said. “He find me with another man.”

“Heavens, my dear! Come in.” She rushed into my arms.

I fixed her a roasted red pepper/tomato soup with fresh produce I had on hand. I have to admit that since I was in a hurry to serve I had to use a can of tomato paste, though ordinarily I’d allow time to thicken the stock properly. I cut parsley and fresh mint from my dooryard herb garden to garnish. Dab of fresh sour cream from a local dairy.

She ate gratefully and over a bottle of Vouvray I learned that her lover was none other than Billy Clayhouse, a student who had impregnated another of my writerlings last semester. I was angry at Billy and made a note to confront him. As a marine sniper who’d done a tour in Iraq (Falluja), Clayhouse had seen hell, though that doesn’t excuse his behavior. He was also a fatherless Kiowa whelp from Oklahoma with the (tragically) common Native American mother plagued by alcoholism. He was raised by grandparents who managed to give him some respect for the old ways. Over lunch he once told me he’d been poisoned as a fetus by his mother’s drinking and he now blamed all women for his fetal alcohol syndrome, which left him with a short attention span and made writing a horrible chore. This was, he said, why he treated women so miserably. I told him that writing was a horrible chore anyway, and that I also treated women miserably, but never on purpose. I also told him to stop his fucking whining: if he couldn’t tell that women as a gender were the only hope for this world then he had no soul and might as well quit writing and go for his MBA. He left in a huff and I haven’t spoken with him since. And to think that I once considered fixing him up with my youngest daughter, Billie Trout. The miserable fuck.

The upshot of all this was that Yu had finally learned that she loved her husband. “He a computer nerd, but also he is gentle and kind. He didn’t get mad at me but just cried and blamed his self for not paying enough attention to me. I don’t know what to do, Professor Trout. He said that maybe it be best if we divorce!”

She wept.

I held her on the couch, smelling her hair and feeling her little frame like some kind of strange and delicate bird in my arms. I was a perfect gentleman, though I’d be a miserable liar if I didn’t admit that the ermine stirred in his warren somewhere down below. I managed, however, to keep the troublesome creature at bay.

We concocted a plan. What they needed was a period of separation after which they could re-evaluate their relationship. I asked her to join the summer writing session in Tuscany. She protested saying they didn’t have much money: he was only an assistant professor and not yet tenured, and her parents in China, although wealthy, had disowned her. I offered to loan her some money from my wine fund, though in truth I don’t have much to spare. Oh well, these things generally take care of themselves.

She fell asleep in the crook of my arm. I fell asleep too, and I dreamed I was a black bear and she a fawn curled up in my claws. My bear-self watched the Yu-fawn, mouth watering.

Finally, I dreamed of my lost Lila, my first lovely bride. We were married thirty years ago, when I was as young and confused as delicate little Yu. I’m still confused, but I’m now old and have recognized that this is just how life works. All we can ask for is the company of a kind stranger who might fix us a bowl of soup and listen to our troubles, resisting his urge to ravage the young fawn curled helplessly in his ragged old claws. I am in love with Yu, and Lila. I’m in love with life. And I know that this too shall pass.

Recipes for recovery

I suffered through the blackest of asses upon my return from La Paz. Your garden variety depression: what have I accomplished, who loves me, why do I exist? The intensity of the self-pity, however, reached un-troutlike level so I self-medicated. I fixed a humble peasant dish of cabbage, tripe and onions that I’d learned from an old woman in Brittany from whom I rented a seaside cottage while writing my third novel. I’d been drinking heavily at the time, and her overwhelming cuisine saved my liver. It was there that I was introduced to Alsatian and German wines that so perfectly complement peasant food and thus slowly weened myself from the dangers of calvados and brandy.

Stage two of my recovery included three young, farm-raised hens served with a three-olive sauce. The olives cost me fifty-seven dollars at the import shop, and when I fished around in my pockets and several bolivianos spilled onto the counter, I broke down and began weeping. The Turkish boy at the register stepped back, eyeing me warily.

A bottle of a light Spanish Monastrell with the meal gave me pleasant dreams for the first time in a month.

What really set me on the mend, however, was a conversation with my youngest daughter, Billie. She took the Foreign Service Exam this past Saturday. A bit of background is needed: when she was thirteen we spent six months in Marseille where I was a guest lecturer as part of a cultural exchange. Our closet friends were career diplomats at the consulate who thrilled Billie with tales of life at their African posts in the post-colonial era. It’s been her ambition ever since to work for USAID or the State Department, where she hopes to be a force for positive change. She took the exam in 2003, only a few days after the start of Mr. Bush’s subtle brilliance of the Shock and Awe(!) campaign. She was among the 6% of the applicants invited to take the orals, but she declined saying she wanted to attend graduate school, but in truth she was depressed over the neo-con foreign policy nincompoopery. But two years out she still has the desire so she’s starting the process all over again. My point is that her entire life’s ambitions are tied up with the results of a silly standardized test. She passed it once, but what if she failed this time? But rather than acting stressed or fatalistic, she was chipper with a c’est la vie indifference to her future when I talked to her on the phone. “I’ve got backup plans, Daddy, no big deal.” All this made me fell silly in my self-pity.

So she invited me to D.C. for a back-room feast with our friends at Etrusco to celebrate three months of waiting for the results of the test. “Most-Favorite Mommy Number Two will still be in town,” she said, referring to my second ex-wife, of whom she is quite fond. I sense an ulterior motive. I demurred but will likely go.

And so I am on the mend. I probably won’t be able to write for some weeks, but I’m now distracted by my MFA classes, which I’ve been neglecting. It’s a lovely day today, and I have a four-hour grad seminar on prose style this afternoon. I think we’ll have class outside in the state park where there is a babbling brook under a ceiling of glorious redbuds and dogwoods in full bloom. I’ll make up some exercise, perhaps the translation of visceral and tactile sensations into prose. We’ll go wading and I’ll ask them to immediately transcribe the sensation into their journals. It’s all nonsense, but MFA students love this sort of thing. In fact, this touchy-feely pseudo naturalism is a trait of bourgeois writers everywhere: that’s why so many conferences take place in idyllic settings that somehow recall England’s Lake District. I've been there and it's lovely, but it's no more wild than a golf course. As sophisticated as our urban writers are, they're often clueless when it comes to the natural world. A brilliant sociologist friend from Manhattan once visited me in the Midwest and remarked that it was the first time he'd "seen cows in the wild." That being said, there is something primal about rivers and streams, and it will do my students some good. My exercise today, of course, will mainly be an excuse for me to be outside, and also to sit on the bank and study the women in my class wearing shorts, watching them emerge from the brook with pink dogwood petals stuck to their glistening thighs. Perhaps I’ll fall in love again. Several times, if I’m lucky.

Next up will be my favorite French recovery dish, which despite the damage it does in cholesteral is the ideal restorative for a wounded heart. A Syrah or Shiraz with big fruit should pair nicely. And so the Trout mends.

A measure of pig fat

Kiss my big black ass, Doctor Crosby.

"You'll never improve unless you change your habits, Professor Trout," he scolded during my last visit. To compound my shame and anger, my daughter Ella stormed out of the apartment after fixing me a ridiculous concoction known as a "fruit smoothie" for my lunch.

"Christ Ella, you're supposed to be a goddamned chef!"

"I'm trying to save your life, you miserable old fuck!"

I was sure she'd return before long. We all know I can be a bastard. Maybe that explains my three divorces.

While Ella was out, I waddled across the street to the Snappy Mart and bought three packages of wretched bacon and a sack of mealy potatoes. Fortunately pommes de vendangeurs is a forgiving recipe that can be saved by imported Gruyere cheese, which I had on hand. I trimmed the fat from the bacon best I could and then clarified some butter. I buttered a round casserole and laid the bacon strips in spiral fashion, ends hanging out of the dish. I layered potato slices (gratin-thin) and then the finely grated cheese, repeated thrice and then folded the bacon over the top. I baked for forty minutes at 410 and then cooled on a rack. I ate most of it, saving one small wedge for Ella. When she returned she screamed at the amount of cholesterol I had ingested, though she devoured her slice and we then fixed a leafy spinach salad with chopped pecans and a dressing of sherry vinegar, ground pepper and XXV olive oil. Then came my one-glass ration of red wine, a Tuscan primitivo known as A Mano, which is brilliant at eight bucks a bottle. Fuck the Mondavi brothers.

Oddly, after this meal I feel better than I have at any point since the quad bypass. Perhaps I'm on the mend. I've written another ten pages on the new novel, and also revised the ending of one of my completed drafts. I'm heartened. Dare I think comeback? After all, I was once in print in thirteen different languages, though that was before some of my current students were born. Ach...I dread the thought of my return to teaching. Perhaps if I were to publish...

Poulet Demi-Deuil

Translated into English, it is roughly "chicken in partial mourning." A truly poetic dish. I don't have much strength at the moment for reasons I'll explain at length soon, but the least I could do was share this recipe, which had its desired effect. I am officially smitten with Ms. Tomasetti. I've also done an overnight stint in the county hospital. It's a long story. But for now:

-1 oz black truffles
-1 farm-raised (free range) hen...3.5.lbs
-salt/pepper as desired
-peeled carrots
-large leeks (include most of the green)
-1 red onion (substituted for yellow, which I despise)
-1 bulb garlic
-celery
-fresh, flat-leaf parsley sprigs
-fresh thyme sprigs
-unsalted butter
-heavy cream
-1 peeled turnip

Clean/rinse the truffles. Dry on paper towel. Slice.

Rinse chicken and insert your fingers between the skin and meat of the breast, careful not to tear. Slip truffle slices underneath skin in an attractive pattern. Rub chicken inside and out with salt and pepper.

Place hen in a pot with the vegetables. Cover with water and boil, then simmer 1.25 hours.

Remove chicken. Strain vegetables. Place vegetables in blender with butter/cream. Puree until smooth. Taste/adjust as needed. Serve chicken on bed of puree.
I served with fresh sauteed shitakes and a simple spinach risotto. Two bottles of Vouvray and a Merseault for good measure. I am in love, and my heart is literally broken. I'm going back to bed. Shirleen is bringing Thai this evening, and we're going to watch a rented movie. I have to return to the doctor's in the morning.

A recipe for the seduction of Ms. Tomasetti

I must ask, dear readers, for your assistance. I've drawn a blank. Although I've never suffered from "writer's block" and consider it to be a myth concocted by people who really aren't writers but like pretending that they are, I have, on occasion, suffered from "culinary impotence." You see, I'm having a young woman over for dinner and I am in need of a meal plan. I've been through dozens of volumes from my food library and nothing calls to me. Imagine...the Brown Trout at a loss for recipes. The horror!

She showed up at my office door yesterday. A trace of perfume festooned the air of the little room as she entered. I smelled, at turns, hairspray, fingernail polish, the tang of nervous sweat (pheremones!), shampoo, and crisp autumn air rolling off the black leather of her jacket. When she spoke I thought I could detect the sticky-sweet scent of a cocktail on her breath. This old trout's sniffer still functions well; I spend too much time in training in the woods with my eyes closed, inhaling wild smells, for it not to. In short, she appeared ready for a night out.

She sat down in my beanbag chair. She seemed nervous. She fiddled with her fingers and looked down at her lap. Finally she steered the conversation from small talk to what she had on her mind.

Lovely Shirleen Tomasetti: So, you've made your nomination, I assume?

Frumpy Prof. Trout: Yes. I have.

Shirleen: And...(looks away)...I guess you made your choice based solely on merit.

Prof. Trout: I did.

Shirleen: In that case, you probably didn't select me.

Trout: Why would you say that?

Shirleen: Because I know I'm not a good writer.

Trout: That's bullshit, Shirleen.

Shirleen: (surprised) You did pick me?

Trout: In truth...

Allow me to interject here. Intrepid readers will recall my recent quandry, where I had three students from whom to choose for only two slots for a full scholarship and stipend. Shirl was clearly number three, if she was that high. But she also offers obvious advantages should a lecherous old writer be intrested in lavishing favors upon a young divorcee. In truth, I did suffer an ethical lapse in choosing the two writers to nominate. Billy Clayhouse, the best writer in my classes, didn't submit an application. I also couldn't reach him. So I performed a no-no and forged his application. I submitted it along with that of the bubbly Ms. Elizabeth Puppycute. I ran Shirleen's application through the shredder, weeping as I did.

Trout (cont'd.): In truth...no. I'm only allowed two nominations, and I had applications from two better writers.

Shirleen: (eyes glistening) I see.

Trout: But if you try to say that it's because you're a bad writer, that's a fallacy.

Shirleen: (a sigh)

Trout: You've got all the tools. You're good with language. You just need to find what it is you're going to write about.

Shirleen: You've said that before, but I don't know what else I can do. You talk all the time about the "middlebrow domestic Iowa Workshop nonsense," and I know you're referring to me.

Trout: Not to you...

Shirleen: (a single tear leaking down a singular cheek) Yes...because that's what I write. I'm a "suburban" writer and you know it.

Trout: (meltyhearted) Some writers need to search to find what they want to write about...

She was openly weeping now, and my blubbering didn't help. But being a big, soft teadybear, I began crying as well. I rose from my chair and knealt by the beanbag. I took her hand and proceeded to recall, line for line, a passage from one of her stories. It's not that I'd memorized it, only that I'd been reading the piece when she knocked at the door so it was fresh in my mind. In truth, it wasn't bad. It was almost poignant, though it was a clear violation of my topic rules. Though it wasn't about the death of a grandparent, it did feature a girl standing by the edge of her aunt's hospital bed. In all, though, it was a decent scene.

She stopped weeping and watched me as I retold the scene. I'm a good reader. I'm no Garrison Keillor, who could engage an audience merely by reading the label of a soup can, but I can manage to add weight and power to a story whether it's there or not. I did my best.

I follwed by telling her again that she had the tools, which is completely true, but that she just needed to "spend some time in the trenches." She needed to travel. Cook. Wander in the woods. My native American friends understand this as well as anyone, as do, oddly, most Mormons.

Shirl: I guess you're right. I just don't know where to begin.

Trout: There's so many options. But, unfortunately, an MFA program may not be the best place to start looking.

Shirl: Maybe...maybe you could give me some ideas. Over dinner sometime (OVER DINNER SOMETIME!).

Trout: (speechless)

Shirl: (blush/smile) I mean...if that would be apporpriate...

Trout: (recovering) No, no...that's perfectly fine. Very appropriate! In fact...I'll have you over some evening. We'll discuss this matter seriously. I'll cook. It's an important conversation to have, and I haven't found a restaurant in this town yet that's reliable enough to trust for such a situation. How about...

Shirl: Tuesday?

Trout: Perfect!

And there you have it, readers. I've been racking my thoughts for the past two days. I've started a shopping list, but at the moment it contains 1) olive oil (xx) and 2) eggs and nothing else. Cookbooks are strewn about my apartment. I've spent hours on my favorite websites. I called Lucy, Most Favorite Ex-Wife Number Two, who was a glorious gourmet cook. I called my daughter Ella, a chef-in-training. I still have no idea what to prepare. I'm sick. Lovestruck over lovely Ms. Tomasetti. Please share your thoughts as to what I should prepare. My heart is twittering like a teenager's. O, the agony!

Sexfoodwords

Ella called this afternoon and commented on the bleak pronouncements on prospects for fiction writers in my previous post. For some reason she and Billie have been reading my blog closely, as if looking for clues to my mental health and wellbeing. I'm glad that they're reading it, but also annoyed.

In any case, she's my brash daughter and also the consummate pragmatist, while Billie is the idealistic dreamer. Ella's attractive. Her beauty is raw and abundant, with huge, black eyes and a wicked laugh always hovering at the edge of her lips. She's a lesbian, and it's interesting that we share similar tastes in women, physically speaking. Spiritually, emotionally and intellectually I find that most or even all women tend to be my betters.

E.Trout: So anyway, Daddy, what's the point of it all?

B.Trout: Kind of a broad question, isn't it?

Ella: I mean writing...why would anyone do it if they, as you suggest, "should give up the notion of success?"

BT: Why not?

Ella: But if there's no hope of succeeding?

BT: It's not about success.

Ella: Then what's it about?

BT: It's a very basic and essential form of communication. It's kind of like cooking.

Ella: How's that?

BT: Cooking is probably the most direct form of human communication outside of sex. Sex, of course, being the most urgent and engaging of all of the senses, is the ultimate form of interaction, but then it's only appropriate in very specific circumstances. Cooking is a close second and more ubiquitous. If you don't eat, you die. In preparing a meal...whether for family, a lover, or a stranger who shows up at your door, you're building a conversation that contains the sum total of your culture and your life's experience. From the table setting to the spices. From the way you operate the flame on the burner to how you wield the wooden spoon. From everything you've learned from your grandmother to everything you've invented on your own, or out of necessity by way of poverty, abundance, season, climate, etc. You lay out this elaborate composition on the table. It's a delicate ritual. It is direct communication. It is something that you do with passion and care even if there's no hope of financial remuneration. You don't require "success" to cook. You do it because it's a part of the human condition.

Ella: But I'm studying to be a chef, so there's a financial aspect as well...

BT: True...you will eventually get paid to cook. But if there was no hope of ever making a living through food you'd still cook anyway, wouldn't you? You'd still be passionate about the table, right?

Ella: Of course.

BT: Same thing with writing. Storytelling, behind sex and food, is the third most direct way of communicating with fellow hominids. Music, dance, visual arts all follow after. When you read something that's written well, or when you hear a story told, you are living inside the author's brain. You are swimming with their soul. You are experiencing what it is to be human and alive. And let me say that I'm not talking about Tom Clancy here, or anything that is written with any consideration for a market. So, in order to write well, you have to take the potential of success out of the equation. If there's no feasibility of financial "success" and you'd be willing to spend five hours a day writing anyway...just like you'd still cook or make love without remuneration, then you'll be a fine writer. But if the possibilities of financial reward were removed and this would cause you to quite writing...then you're not cut out for it. If there's no book release party in a Manhattan apartment near Central Park, and no book tour, and no guest writer engagements in your future, and no options on the screenplay, and no royalty checks, and you go to your grave with a stack of pages read only by those with the patience to love you, or perhaps they'll never be read at all, and if this promise of obscurity lessens your interest in prose even slightly, then give up now. Go take the LSATs. But if you're still eager, despite all of that, to plunge ahead...then write. If the process of writing is as essential to you as eating and breathing, as inherent as the procreative impulse, then by all means continue.

Ella: I see. So...have you told your students any of this? Or do you just growl at them and basically tell them to quit?

BT: Well...

Ella: Daddy...you can kind of be a bastard at times.

BT: So true, Ella Trout, so true.

Ella: I think you need to lighten up. And maybe, just to be fair, the next time you give a reading and that guy asks for advice for novice writers, maybe then you should tell him what you've just told me. It might come off better. He might actually buy some of your book after you're done speaking. That might even bring you a little more satisfaction than your usual scowling and brooding. And then everybody wins.

BT: My dear, as always, you offer sound advice.

Ella: Just thinking, Daddy. Gotta run.

BT: Peace and love, Baby Trout.

Baby Trout: Peace and love, Daddy.

Salvation

Salvation arrived on Thursday morning when my daughters appeared at the door. Despite my preparations for a grand solo feast, I was not gracefully handling the notion of Thanksgiving alone. I was in the process of pulling on my boots for a trip to the convenience store to buy a pint of whiskey...very bad for this old fish...when the doorbell rang. I wailed like an infant, kissing and slobbering over the girls until my heart quivered from palpitations and I had to sit on the sofa. Evidently they'd been planning this surprise for three months.

Ella flew in from Denver with a home-cured ham in her carry-on bag...it was a culinary school project that she'd been working on for weeks. Billie drove through the night from D.C., and before she even kicked off her shoes she proffered a bag of dried morels that she'd harvested herself in the Virginia woods last April, and as soon as I saw this I started weeping anew. We hydrated the morels and they provided the foundation for a glorious stuffing, though we logged nearly seventy miles in search of an open grocery store with decent shallots to complete the recipe. Ella had checked a cooler on the plane with a farm-raised turkey, duck and game hen and these were roasted, one stuffed within another. She also brought white asparagus, inexplicably fresh despite being out of season. She refused to name her source, which I respected. I smoked my other turkeys on a Webber grill. The girls ate more than I did, and I have no idea how they stay so thin.

The girls brought the wine as well. We had a decent Chilean Chardonnay, plus a grand California Red Zin and two bottles of Pommard. All of these were less than fifteen bucks, which is an unwritten family rule. "Some people drink wine, and some drink labels," Hemingway once wrote. Following this guideline is a snap in Europe, but somewhat more difficult in the U.S. where wealthy people and their consumption spiral have conspired to price the middle class out decent wine, and good taste in general. This bourgeois phenomenon merely confirms (as does the very existence of George W. Bush) my long-standing belief that you can be fabulously wealthy and still qualify as white trash.

As we cooked we shared the usual family stories. Billie, the sensitive girl, made me call her mother, as well as my other two ex-wives, to send Thanksgiving greetings. It went off well. I rang up Billy Clayhouse thinking that he might enjoy Billie's company, but he wasn't home. Ella's a lesbian, and tough as nails, but Billie has gotten kicked around by her two most recent boyfriends. She's curious and trusting, a dangerous combination. I'm not sure why I felt Clayhouse might make a good match.

On Friday we fished local spring creeks until our fingers froze. Ella landed a three-pound rainbow on my 2-weight midge rod. I grew tired while wading and spent half the afternoon sitting on a stump, watching the girls work the river. This worried them more than it did me. Aging is a bitch. We caught five trout altogether, keeping three...they were hatchery fish but nevertheless delicious.

They left yesterday morning, and though my heart was sad to see them go, I was left renewed and feeling frisky. I called Shirleen, my hottest student, and we went out for drinks. Today I edited three chapters on my political novel and watched football, munching on cold duck, turkey and ham and thinking how the momentary acts of pollination that I performed during the procreation of my daughters were the most worthy deeds during my tenure on this great green and blue rock.

Pork loin for Mr. Clayhouse

Had an experience today to make this entire writing school concept seem less inane.

A student, a laconic, tallish, thirtyish, square-jawed fellow, asked this lucid question after class: what should a writer eat? Like anyone who has toured the MFA reading circuit in order to whore up a few bucks for poorly bound reprints of novels long past their relevance, I hate the standard post-reading, eager-young-writer questions: when is the best time to write? is it better to write longhand or on a keyboard? do you recommend using an outline (Lord please deliver me)? do you have any advice for aspiring writers, &c, &c, &c.

Ah, but what a writer should eat...this is a question of literary merit.

Billy Clayhouse, the student in question, is an Okie with Kiowa roots. Unlike that playacting aristocrat that is Our Leader, Clayhouse has the bearing of a true cowboy. His western jeans, his crewcut and his pearl button shirts are not affectations. He hasn't said two words in class until now, except to read from his work, and then his voice is steady and clipped, like his prose. In his own way, he often tops Miss Puppycute when it comes to pure style, his only drawback being the fact that none of his work, up to this point, has featured any human beings. I'm all for dogs and cats as characters in narrative, but it's people that make fiction pulse. Clayhouse has featured an owl, a coyote, prairie chickens, a covey of quail, etc. But then, to the traditional Kiowa, animals are people and vice versa.

In any case, we spoke at length about the usual reduction sauces and the importance of restraint in a marinade. I recommended "Dad's Own Cookbook," which Harrison, the pre-eminent foodie, touts as essential for anyone starting from scratch. I've no doubt Clayhouse could do justice to a rabbit spitted over a campfire, but his skills are otherwise fairly raw. He mentioned macaroni and cheese as a staple, which caused me to shudder. I realized, then, that this was no pampered trustfunder or the recipient of suburban largess...this was a fellow working his ass off (golf course grounds crew) in order to eke his way through, of all things, an MFA program.

In any event, I shared a very simple grill recipe featuring pork loin ribs marinated in olive oil (extra, extra), fresh lime, orange peel and black pepper, then rolled in dried rosemary and seared before a gentle, slow grilling. Serve with steamed carrots (lime butter sauce) and some Ojibway rice. We strolled to my apartment where I bestowed on him a bottle of San Giminagno white, which I gave him permission to refrigerate, this being appropriate only for a novice.

For the first time in my playacting at professor, I feel as if I've made strides with a student.