Home by Another Way (14 page)

And, of course, we had a table just for two and only two. If you believe that more than two persons are
required to turn supper into an event, then you need more than just a remedial course in food-event planning.

The next spring when we were down on St. Cecilia, the children and my mother and my aunt were with us. We got tired of trying to describe St. Cecilia, so we just brought them along. We took my mother and my aunt to Hamilton Plantation to have lunch. It was not our anniversary, of course, but we considered it to be research for our next anniversary. There was some feeling that to try to repeat what had been such a splendid event the previous year might be impossible. As it turned out, we did not like it as well.

So the next fall we went to the Inn at Tower Hill to celebrate our anniversary. It was closer to Seastone and easier to find, so we drove this time, feeling adventurous.

We arrived early and went to sit on the veranda for a few moments before dinner. The veranda had been glassed in, with air conditioning, the first air conditioning we had come across in days. It was a quiet night at the inn, or so it seemed, and so the veranda was quiet
too. A man who seemed familiar headed in the direction of the little group of couches where we had collapsed into the comfort of the thick cushions and the suddenly astonishing cool air. Usually you have to go to the ATM kiosk downtown to find air conditioning.

“How are you this evening?” he said. “I am glad to see you again. Welcome back.” Which seemed an odd thing to say since we had never actually been to the Inn at Tower Hill before. We assumed he had confused us with a couple of movie stars.

“How is your mother doing? And your aunt?” he said.

This is a small town that just happens to take up an entire island in the Caribbean. It took a minute for the three of us to put it all together, but it turned out that James had been our waiter at Sugar Rock for our first anniversary dinner. He had been our waiter the day we had lunch with my mother and my aunt at Hamilton Plantation. And now here he was in front of us again, at Tower Hill. I began to wonder if I was under surveillance by the Ministry of Tourism for some reason.

These days when the food-event meeting sends us out to eat in St. Cecilia, we have begun to see people we know.

Linda from the vegetable market waves to us when we are on our way to the Heptagon, and Margaret from Windbreak is often at the Heptagon too. And so is Victor from the car-hire company. Eddie is someone we know from one of the restaurants that we like, and so we go to his restaurant to see him sometimes. We run into Andrew from the Galley when we are in the supermarket. We say hello now to Father Geoffrey from the Roman Catholic church a couple of blocks from the square, because he eats brunch where we do on Sundays.

We see the man from the water department whose name I do not know but who always greets us when we see him at the Heptagon. He is a semipermanent fixture there the way I am at Brown’s. If he is there, he always moves over so that Sara and I can sit next to each other at the counter.

We do not really know these people yet, but we are drawn to them. Sometimes we even get to break bread with them. Sometimes we just break bread beside them, and that seems to be enough. And from time to time, we have begun to feel as though we are among them.

On the day we were to catch the boat to head home for the winter the last time we were here, we ended up sitting in the restaurant at Bluewater Beach. We were waiting for Captain Christmas to pick us up. We decided we had better eat something, since one never knows these days how many hours the airlines will keep you in the air without feeding you.

One of our friends, our first friend on the island, in fact, came around the corner and plopped down beside us. We had not seen her this time; a series of telephone messages back and forth had failed to produce a rendezvous somehow, and only moments before we had been wondering if she would be hurt with us because we had not seen her.

“I found you,” she said. “I talked to David, because I knew you would go there on your last night here, and
he told me that you had used Deb’s cell phone to arrange for a boat. So I called Deb, and she told me that Captain Christmas was picking you up. So I called Captain Christmas, and he told me that he was picking you up at the Bluewater at noon, and so I closed up my office and ran down the hill to say good-bye. We will miss you while you are gone,” she said.

Sometimes a meal is just that—a meal. The point being to eat and take on fuel for the next few hours of the day. I know how to do that: fried bologna sandwiches are the midday fuel of choice when I am at the beach, any beach.

Sometimes a meal is pasta and good bread under the stars on the deck, with a book beside the plate and the one who loves you across the table with her book and her suntan and her smile. It is a meal that needs no conversation. But it is still an event.

Sometimes it is white tablecloths and silver trays,
and sometimes it is down the street a few blocks to our local, where we catch up on the news and make conversation with people who may yet come to recognize our faces. Then maybe they’ll come to grin when they see us coming and move over to make room for us and bring us our favorite thing on the menu without our having to ask.

Sometimes a meal is only a meal, but it can be something else altogether. The difference between a meal and a food event is always a personnel question. If you know how to conduct the meeting, you can start out looking for food and end up finding friends.

Seven

W
e are newspaper people at our house. A day has not really begun properly until I have traveled the few blocks through our neighborhood to a corner market to pick up the day’s papers. According to our reckoning, it takes more than one newspaper a day to keep up. We refer to it as the information round.

We have to have the
New York Times
, and we have to have our local daily. We have to pick up
USA Today
for the baseball coverage. (Our edition of the
Times
gets put to bed before the late games are finished, and our local paper covers the entire major-league day on a single page.) There is a local tabloid whose news coverage is not good but that I count on to give me good coverage of our hometown minor-league team and the local high schools, so I pick it up most days as well. We have a weekly paper in our town that we read for its irreverence and its restaurant reviews and its arts section. There is a free neighborhood weekly that we pick up
solely for its column that features anonymous letters from cranky people who complain about things in general. Humor is where you find it, and you can find it in the
Green Hills Shopper
.

Our newspaper habit has become so ingrained in us that even when we travel, one of my first moves in the morning is to head out for the papers. No matter how large or small the town is, I go hunting for papers first thing. If I can find a
Times
, I get bonus points.

The routine is altered a little bit in St. Cecilia—the delicate balance between scribbling round and sunning round and napping round has to be carefully monitored—but it is rare for us to go much more than a day or so without feeling an overwhelming need to have newsprint on our hands. Sometimes I want to know what is going on in the outside world, especially if what is going on in the outside world is the World Series. More and more I want to know what is going on in St. Cecilia.

If you want to know what matters to people, read their newspapers.

On our first trip to St. Cecilia, we were driving on the main road for the first time, going along slowly, and we saw this series of signs.

The first sign said, “Is it the truth?” Nothing else was on the sign—no logo, no Web site, no telephone number to call, no company—just the question. We just looked at each other.

About a half mile down the road, we came upon another one. “Is it beneficial to all concerned?” it read.

In a little while we rounded a curve and saw the third one. “Will it build goodwill and better friendship?”

There are three newspapers on St. Cecilia—a local weekly, a daily from one of the sister islands that covers this island as well, and the daily international edition of the
Miami Herald
. The
Herald
is about what you
would expect it to be, and it gives you the news from the world from a U.S. point of view.

The other two papers give you international news from a somewhat different perspective, to say the least, and the local news. There are daily soap-opera updates, and there are sermons from local ministers. Martha Stewart’s conviction got a couple of columns for three issues, and for some reason Jerry Rice’s trade from Oakland to Seattle got a half page as well. A nine-year-old girl won the Leewards Essay contest, and she got a full page with two four-color photos on the same day Yasser Arafat was hospitalized and got a two-paragraph sidebar. There were big stories for three or four days running when one of the major airlines announced it was increasing the number of direct flights in and out of the islands.