Food and Memory

I love the movie “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind”. It’s quirky and not for everyone (Charlie Kaufmann is the king of eccentricity in screenwriting/filmmaking), but the story line is one that I think many of us can relate to: Girl and Boy break-up, and each one then undergoes a procedure to erase the memories of each other. Who hasn’t wanted to completely erase an unfortunate or painful event from their mind?  The tagline on the movie poster has long stuck with me as something we all consciously know, but can be difficult to acknowledge: “Our memories make us who we are. We cannot change the past”.

Today is my sister-in-law and brother-in-law’s 9^th wedding anniversary. I am no longer married to my SIL’s brother, but my SIL and I grew to be great friends during the marriage, and Kat and Rob are awesome people and will always be family to me. When I looked at the calendar and saw it was their wedding anniversary, it was both a feeling of happiness, for them, but I was also surprised with a teensy twinge of...  what almost felt like sadness.  Memories of certain events remind me of periods in my life that now feel like a very, very long time ago. 

Most people remember events with triggers of dates, times, people. I remember events in terms of food-i.e. what we ate, what I cooked, if I was hung-over the next day, etc. It’s like a picture permanently imprinted in my mind. I can still tell you, down to the details, what I had for dinner at Zia’s on the Hill at my first prom in 1993 (filet-medium, broccoli, and a side of pasta, with a dinner salad). I can tell you that, five years later, when Mark McGwire hit home run #61 to tie Roger Maris’ all-time single season record, I had half a hot dog with mustard and sauerkraut in my hand, and I nearly dropped it. On 9/11/2001, after watching hours upon hours of news coverage with my jaw resting on my very large stomach, I went to the restaurant at which I worked (Norton’s in Soulard), very much like a 7 ½ months pregnant zombie, and attempted to soothe my sad soul with a giant bowl of gumbo in the odd quiet of a half-full restaurant.

I remember the happiness of Kat and Rob’s Tower Grove Park wedding, and the delicious spring rolls. Steve and I weren’t married yet, but we were happy, too. We had salad and spring rolls and hummus and pita-it was a veritable spread of small-plates deliciousness before EVERYONE was talking about what would become the small-plates trend that now en compasses half the restaurants in the country. I had Chardonnay. Steve had a red of some type. It was a beautiful day, and a fun time.

Three and a half years later, our own wedding came around, set on a beautiful 82 degree September day at a winery in Hermann, MO. Filet and chicken were on the menu that evening, with scalloped potatoes, green beans, salad, a three-tiered cheesecake, and of course, wine. I remember thinking, “It doesn’t get any better than this”, and wishing I could do the whole day over again, as the time went by way too fast. 

Last May I went to Flagstaff to stay with Kat and Rob. Steve and I had been separated for some time, and weeks before determined we were definitively getting a divorce. I needed to escape for a bit and try to pull myself from the hole I had been wallowing in, and Kat and Rob graciously hosted me over a long Memorial Weekend (that also happened to be their anniversary weekend). There was delicious Mexican food on the first night, take-out brought home by Rob after work. The second night, they hosted a little dinner party, and Rob (also an accomplished chef, and great cooking buddy) and I cooked up beef tenderloin with bacon jus, grilled veggie kabobs, and lobster risotto, washed down with, amongst other things, a 2007 Gigondas I had brought along. The next day we went wine tasting through the Verde Valley, at Page Spring Cellars near Cornville, and at Caduceus Cellars in Jerome (owned by the awesome Maynard James Keenan-yes, from Tool. Seriously. Dude is making great wine). We drank fabulous wine all day long in beautiful surroundings. We followed a day of tasting with dinner at an awesome restaurant that had been converted from an old insane asylum. Brie, and shrimp pasta and Bloody Mary’s rounded out the day.

As I walked back to my hotel that night, it occurred to me that I hadn’t cried one time that weekend, something that had been a regular occurrence for many, many months. Swaddled in great friends, good food, lovely wine, and gorgeous scenery, I was still sad-but there was light at the end of the tunnel.