USA. A breakfast counter. The waitress recommended the biscuits and gravy, and when the plate arrived, I thought something had gone wrong in the kitchen.
I say this with shame. The dish looked like a construction site after rain. Pale mounds. Gray ladle-fall. Speckles I could not identify.
In my land, the eye eats first. A meal is arranged like a garden. This meal was arranged like weather.
"Is it… finished?" I asked, carefully.
"Honey, that's what it looks like."
The man beside me was already eating his. He did not look up. "Just try it."
I am a man who has charged hillsides at dawn. I raised the fork. I tried it.
I must now formally apologize to the biscuits, the gravy, the waitress, the kitchen, and the entire breakfast tradition of the American South.
It was magnificent. Warm. Peppered. The biscuit drank the gravy the way a field drinks rain — THAT is why it is shaped like that, you fool — and every mound I had insulted was a soft fold of comfort that my homeland, in eight hundred years, never once thought to invent.
"Well?" the waitress asked.
"I judged it," I confessed. "By its appearance. I am ashamed."
"Everybody does, hon."
Everybody does. A national dish that forgives you for doubting it. It expects the doubt. It waits for you on the other side of it.
Do not judge the gravy by its face. Judge yourself, for hesitating.
I order it every Saturday now. I no longer see the construction site. I see only the garden.
It was a garden the whole time. The eye must be trained.
This dude has nailed the genre of Japanese cultural contrast writing in perfect English that conveys just enough difference in diction and idiom to feel foreign. This is skill at work. He knows exactly what he’s doing, and he’s very good at it.
“Bottomless. They have wells of salsa. The supply lines of this nation are beyond anything my ancestors imagined.”
BIG TIME NFC East Matchup
Washington in 1991 quietly had one of the best teams ever. This was also a sign Dallas was on the come up.
Cowboys vs.Redskins 1991, Week 13
Not a blame guy but my wife and daughter has us 13 minutes late to our movie start time (Hoppers)
I’m not going to say anything right now but they will get a whole-ass lecture on the way home about how we don’t miss previews and how they set the tone for the movie
Manny Chavez of Portales broke the overall New Mexico state record on Saturday in the javelin. On his final throw he went 211 feet, 10 inches. Here he is after: