My wife and I are old enough to have acquired a fairly impressive assortment of medical issues. For the most part, we’re comfortable with them—they’re not exactly BFFs, but they’re familiar enough for us to be used to them.
Until one or more of them get uppity, and we have to go to a hospital. This time, my wife was the guest of honor, and I was a mere spectator. We got to meet lots of doctors, nurses, PAs, and medical technicians of various sorts. It’s a nice thing—having so many people who are concerned with one’s well-being—unless, perhaps, one would rather not be stuck in a hospital bed while they all carry on with an endless list of inscrutable and oddly impersonal things to one’s body.
Then again, I was only a spectator this time.
A couple of days into the most recent medical event, one of the doctors became concerned about my wife’s electrolyte levels. The only way to monitor the progress of her treatments was to periodically draw blood and send it downstairs to the lab. A large black man came into the room and announced that he was the guy who was to do it. He looked over at me, sitting across from my wife’s bed, and said, “How you doin’?”
I gave my usual answer, “Fair to middlin’.”
“That’s as much as any of us can expect,” he said.
“When you get to be my age, you get used to lowered expectations.”
“Ah can’t kick as high, anymo’…” he answered, “…but ah’m still kickin’ an that’s all that counts.”
I asked him what part of the South he’d come from.
“Ah’m a Georgia boy.” I told him that half of my family was from Texas.
Brian Williams is a big boy. After hearing him talk about his past playing football (“not NFL…ah didn’t have the talent—no, the drive—for the NFL”), he mentioned that he’d made good money, last weekend, at a pop-up barbecue. That led us to a discussion of various BBQ styles.
He said some things about Texas BBQ—and about chili—that led me to assume mock umbrage. “Them’s fightin’ words! This might call for a duel…”
“Ah kin settle it rat now,” his Georgian accent becoming more pronounced.
“What do mean… now?”
“You wanna’ sandwich?”
“You have a sandwich, here?”
“Ah got twenny-five of ‘em in the truck. You want it hot?”
“Absolutely!”
Ten minutes later, he walks through the door and hands me some paper towels and a large ball of aluminum foil. Inside that foil was a hamburger bun stuffed with pulled pork and “Georgia sugar sauce.” This is what BBQ is all about: good flavor, good humor, and generous goodness of heart (the man wouldn’t accept any payment but a handshake and “thanks”). You better believe that I’ll be watching for the next appearance of the Buck’s Barbecue truck.
All this talk about BBQ and Texas reminds me of something I published in Galloping Gourmand: A Culinary Collection (and a few other places):
Gatherin’ Mesquite
Once, I was fishing for crappies (pronounced “croppy”) with my father and grandfather in Texas. We were sitting in a rowboat, on the shady side of some mesquites that grew on a crumbling chunk of masonry in the middle of a tank. A tank, for those of you who are unfamiliar with Texas, is a man-made pond used for waterin’ cattle. Texans bein’—for the most part—serious about fishin’, always stock these ponds with bass an’ croppy.
This particular tank had grown some, over the years, which explains that spot of shade out in the middle. In the water, all around us, dark swimming heads—some as large as my child-sized fist—made their way toward the island.
Were they turtles?
Grandad explained that they were water moccasins. Concerned, but trying to appear nonchalant, I asked what he would do if one of the snakes decided to come into the boat. He answered, just as nonchalantly, that he’d “gittout an’ lettim’ HAVE the damn boat.”
A practical man, my grandfather—’though, in retrospect, it seems to me that there were a lot more snakes in the water than in the boat.
Did I ever tell y’all my mesquite story?
I have no recollection of having told the story—but that’s never stopped me from retelling a story before. If you’ve heard this before, feel free to wander off, an’ don’t go whinin’ about it afterwards.
Mesquite is best known as the classic Southwestern fuel for smoky-flavored barbecue. When I was a child, visiting the Texas side of the family, long before I knew there were such creatures as gourmets—and certainly before gourmets knew about mesquite—I knew ALL about mesquite. It was just common knowledge that mesquite provided the hottest, best-smelling, and tastiest firewood for outdoor, Texas-sized, feasts.
Everbody knew it.
The morning of a big barbecue would begin with lots of kids jumping in the back of my grandfather’s cream-colored pick-up. We all wore sneakers and blue jeans, rolled at the bottom, and clean white tee shirts.
We were always cautioned about rattlesnakes. Grandad’s hands and arms bore a network of X-shaped scars, so we knew that there really were rattlers out there.
Some years, there would be black and white Texas farm plates on the back of the truck, some years there wouldn’t be any plates at all—it didn’t much matter. After all, Grandad’s brother drove his entire life without once suffering the indignity of a road test. Driving, like ‘most everthing else, was entirely natural—especially driving out to someplace in the middle of nowhere (Texas, fortunately, being well-endowed with such places) to collect mesquite.
As I recall, the preferred method was to put a chain around the stump of a dead mesquite, dragging it out with the pick-up. The stumps, toughened by the hardship of Texan summers, were reluctant to give up their rocky homes. The frame of the pick-up groaned from the effort. The tall, old-fashioned tires spun, raising a very satisfying cloud of rocks and yellow dust. We screamed with delight as the twisted trees broke free of the crusty dry soil—all the time imagining volleys of rattlesnakes blasted into the air, guided as by some irresistible fate, directly at us.
It was a thoroughly festive occasion.
Sometimes, since the truck was filled with children, there would be no room for the firewood. That meant that all that mesquite, lashed together with chain, would be dragged in a great jingling clatter behind us, all the way back to the house. There it was used to cook (or cajole the essence of Texas from) the kind of meats that the cholesterol-conscious can only dream on.
Those barbecues always ended with hand-cranked ice cream, made with glowing fruit from Grandad’s peach trees. It was the only fitting conclusion to a gustatory event that mixed, without contradiction, innocence and unabashed hedonism, the purest kind of lust and unselfconscious communion.
Mere cookin’ an’ eatin’ is a poor substitute for such an experience.
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