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.
Top 10 things that are not as great as they used to be (at least according to the people that complain about everything)
1 Saturday Night Live
2 Music
3 Household Appliances
4 America
5 French Fries
6 The NBA
7 Customer Service
8 Southwest Air
9 Movies
10 Super Bowl Commercials
NSA marketing blows all other Christian colleges out of the water. That's what I want my kids to get out of college. I want them prepared to enter the arena.
This is testimony from Dr. Neil Frank at a Billy Graham event in the 1980s.
He's actually Forrest Frank's grandfather. He plays this before every one of his shows.
I haven't been able to stop thinking about it. This is EXACTLY what happened to me. Lift the veil 👇