My dinner with Lindsey

Eastside Road, Healdsburg, October 2, 2009—

EATING DINNER IS IN so many ways a routine, an automatic process. So much more goes into the making, in most cases, than into the consumption. Consumption: what a word. One should of course taste every mouthful, savor the food, begin its digestion in the mouth — to taste, to perceive with your senses the substance, is to initiate its destruction. But before the destruction comes the construction. I work at the computer, mix the Martinis, take a look at the e-mail; Lindsey's in the kitchen, slicing, heating, distributing.
We drink the Martinis while watching the news — think of it: we're not even really savoring the Martinis, delicious as they are. It takes a calamity — a wrong gin or vermouth, let's say, or running out of olives — to suddenly bring our tasting mechanism back into focus, back to the matter at hand. But that's not completely true: I do savor my Martini; that's one of the reasons I restrict it to Fridays and Saturdays, to protect it from routine.
Lindsey tips and tails the green beans while we watch the news; then she goes into the kitchen, returning in a few minutes with plates of sliced tomatoes and the beans, now lightly cooked. With them, sautéed chard and kale that I'd picked this afternoon. Then it's pasta, with the last of the pesto I made the other day. The pesto is holding up well; I think its walnut base, being more bourgeois, less ephemeral than pine nuts, paradoxically makes it both more ordinary and more of a survivor in that crowded dangerous refrigerator.
Later on, I think, we'll have the end of an apple crisp Lindsey made a couple of nights ago. After dinner we watched My Dinner with Andre; we'd never seen it before. It is of course a great movie. I have my dinner with Lindsey every night of my life, well, nearly; and nearly every one of those dinners is made for me by Lindsey. No one will ever realize how grateful I am, perhaps; but I certainly realize how fortunate I am.

Nero d'Avola