Home by Another Way (12 page)

Whenever I get back to Tennessee from St. Cecilia, I want to go through my house and get rid of every third thing.
Where did all of this stuff come from?
I always wonder.

The “just enough” quality to life on St. Cecilia always strikes me and always unsettles me and is even beginning to change me. It makes me uneasy about the way we live most of the time back in the States. And I do
not feel as though we live very large at our house even when we are in Tennessee.

Time passes more simply in St. Cecilia, and we are surrounded by less stuff. There are fewer clothes in the closet and on the shelves and in the drawers. There are fewer pots and pans and dishes and such. Lord knows there are fewer tables.

Sometimes when I am on St. Cecilia, I think of all my stuff back in Tennessee and wonder how it is doing and whether or not it misses me.

To be sure, I have not yet tried to celebrate Christmas without the three trees we put up each year, or tried to throw a party without a big buffet table, or attempted a dinner for twelve at a table for four while I am in the islands. I have not yet brought my computer here to write, so I have not yet faced the day-to-day hassle of hooking up the printer since there is no desk to leave it on.

I expect that I could manage living more simply in this St. Cecilian way, but I worry it would not take me
long to fill up all the available space with more stuff. Before too long I might have too many tables again and too many books and too many other things. I am worried that the walking contradiction I see when I look in the mirror in the mornings would catch up with me sooner or later.

Jim Bouton, a major-league baseball pitcher—whom I quoted in another book, back when I thought what he said had to do with baseball and not something else—once said, “You spend your life gripping a baseball, and in the end you find out it was the other way around.”

I am afraid sometimes I do not really have my stuff but rather my stuff has me.

“Your heart is where your treasure is,” or so I have heard it said, and I hate to think all my treasure is to be found on my tables and on my shelves.

Six

S
omewhere between the sunning round and the napping round comes the first major decision of the day. To make major decisions prior to the scribbling round and the feeding of the flock is simply against the rules. To go into the napping round without a clear idea of what the evening meal is going to be like is not acceptable either.

Wherever we are, we plan some portion of our day around what we will be doing for dinner in the evening and where we plan to be when we have it and whom we plan to have it with. One of the rules of our life together is to be sure that we are very thoughtful about all food events for the day. The rule is as applicable on St. Cecilia as it is anywhere else we happen to be.

Food is not such serious business to some folks, but it is to us. It could be that we do not have enough to do. It could be that we would rather do this than things we ought to be doing. Or it could be that we have caught
on somewhere that sharing a glass of wine and breaking bread together really matter.

So before we have our nap, we have to review all the possibilities. At our house this is known as the food-event planning meeting.

The meeting—it is not a formal affair, there are only the two of us on the committee, it can be held in the shower or on the porch or by the pool or in the hallway, and notes are rarely taken—begins when one of us says, “What do you want to do for dinner?” If you are too specific with the first question—“Where would you like to go to eat ribs tonight?” for example—you reveal your hand too quickly, and you cut off the sort of give-and-take that is conducive to domestic tranquillity.

Planning a food event involves meticulous attention to three particular areas—menu, location, and personnel. If you are just planning a meal, then what you eat is all that matters. If you are planning a food event, then who
and where come into play. (It occurs to me just now that a chart would be helpful, perhaps.) The order in which these things are tackled is determined, not by the person who asks the first question, thereby calling the meeting to order, but by the person who answers the first question.

“I don’t know. What do you want to do?” is not a fair answer and is easily rebuffed by experienced food-event committee people. It is like learning to return a serve in tennis, though some people are better at it than others.

A first answer like “Stay in” indicates that the primary concern is location.

“We haven’t seen so-and-so in a while” leads directly to personnel.

“Something large” means the menu questions come first.

After many years as a standing member of the food-event committee, one learns what to listen for.

Are we going out this evening or are we staying in? is the first question. Did we miss the sunset last night because we were getting ready for dinner and so we might rather stay home? Or is it going to be rainy and we really would rather not be out in the weather this evening? How long has it been since we cooked together, just the two of us, laughing and telling stories and wondering out loud about the things we have been wondering to ourselves while we work around each other in the kitchen? Is there a full moon that makes it a good night to stay home and eat by candlelight beside the pool?

If we are going out, are we feeling social or antisocial? Do we feel like liming this evening?
Liming
is an island word that means hanging out with your friends, talking about the weather or sports or geopolitics or anything else that comes up. Or do we still want to go out but really want to go to a place where there is not much chance of running into conversation? A place where we can take our books or our cards or our dominoes and be only with each other?

If we are going out tonight, then do we want to go out at lunchtime as well? If we have this kind of food or that kind of food for lunch, will that change our dinner plans?

If we are staying in, what are we cooking and do we have everything we need or do we need to go to the market? Which brings the potential for eating out at lunchtime back into play, of course, since we have to go to town anyway. Which brings location and personnel back up for discussion.

And then, of course, in case we change our minds because the weather changes or we nap for too long, do we have some food in the house that will work for a backup plan?

You will notice that all of the dinner questions keep affecting the lunch plan as well. Which is particularly key on St. Cecilia. If you can get the food-event committee meeting to go your way, then you can get yourself downtown in Princetown around noon. According to minutes of the meeting, if there had been minutes, I would have been seen to be angling for fried chicken at
the Heptagon, which is what I would be happy to do every day in St. Cecilia. What I am really angling for, I have come to realize, is a chance to be among the people in this new world of mine. And a chance to see if my place in it has changed at all.

The lunch hour in Princetown is crowded.

The schoolchildren are out for lunch, for one thing. We watch them parade up and down the streets in their uniforms. Each school has different colors, and the uniforms are neatly pressed and clean and shining in the sun. The children move in packs along the sidewalks and in the courtyards of the cafés and snackettes. They laugh and cut up the way children everywhere do. We love to watch them.

The sidewalks fill up with businesspeople and shopkeepers and government workers too. The men are in ties and polished shoes; the women are in skirts and
high heels. They stroll elegantly and languidly to lunch and back.

There are the taxi drivers and the dockworkers and the others whose work requires less formal dress. The square is full of taxis and vans, and the sounds are of music from the cafés and of people shouting greetings across the street and into shop doorways. Car horns beep cheerfully, and the policeman at the square blows his whistle to direct the traffic.

St. Cecilia is a melting pot. I expect that is true of the other island nations in this part of the world, but I do not know for sure. Any crowd of people anywhere in St. Cecilia is liable to include people of all sorts of colors and origins. The population is primarily African in origin, but everywhere you go, you will find Europeans, East Indians, Asians, and Latin Americans as well.

Nowhere is the global village more apparent than at the Heptagon.

Essentially a lime bar with a one-room kitchen, the Heptagon is a small open-air restaurant that sits along
the harbor in Princetown. Someone hung a wraparound porch along the harbor side and put three or four picnic tables in the front. There are a dozen or so stools at the counter and an open-air poolroom in a separate building a few feet away.

We go there for fried chicken and johnnycakes. They offer other things to eat, but we have not yet gotten past the fried chicken and the johnnycakes.

We order our food, and Jessica goes into the back. We then hear this wham, wham, wham sound made by a cleaver chopping our fried chicken into manageable chunks. We wait a little longer, and then when the food finally comes, we sit and eat and watch a fair portion of the world go by.