Have you not read the newspaper or watched TV news lately? Do you not realize how utterly effed up our world — our country, rather — has become?

And this despite Peace Corps efforts. . .

Was it e.e. cummings who said “Listen there’s a helluva good universe next door, let’s go” ?

I don’t feel funny today. I felt funny a few days ago but it turned out to be only a lightweight viral attack within my Waldeyer’s Ring, which on the back of the throat is an infection bullseye.

I know this because my Primary Care Giver Assigned by Insurance, who is also an M.D., gives me cool names for stuff, like the place in your nose where nosebleeds usually start. He said that is called “Kieselbach’s Area.” How many people know this besides him, me, and now you? I know, I know, most people wouldn’t want to know, etc. But I think it’s a very cool thing to know.

And that bunion joint on your foot is the metatarsophalangeal joint. Beautiful! I discovered that on my own.

That’s the kind of day it’s been. I’ll look in on you again tomorrow. Get some rest and drink lots of liquids, preferably Belgian beer.

Tomorrow has dawned foggy and chilly. You call this a summer? I guess it’s more comfortable than the other coast (East), where it’s been hot as . . . it was last summer, with humidity.

Nope. Nothing humorous is surfacing. Later, gator . . . or as we speak in this part of the USA, “mas tarde, amigo. . .”

AND FINALLY: Still not funny, but I think I found the solution: I plan to quit writing this column. Enough’s enough. (

If you insist I continue, I will. Write a comment. If I get more than one comment (the usual guy), I’ll carry on. But you won’t write. You’re as lazy as I am.

Ciao,

mcc

Köln (Cologne — Whatever) Germany

They say the perfume biz started here; can that be right? Anyway, Köln is a fine place to visit.

–Cologne, which is Köln (or Koeln without the umlaut),

seems to be wide open.

According to Wiki: The first city in Germany to introduce an explicit prostitution tax was Cologne. The tax was initiated in 2004 by the city council led by a coalition of the conservative CDU and the leftist Greens. This tax applies to striptease, peep shows, porn cinemas, sex fairs, massage parlors, and prostitution. In the case of prostitution, the tax amounts to 150 euros per month per working prostitute, to be paid by brothel owners or by privately working prostitutes.

Evidence: First item under “Entertainment Tips” in an official City Guide, provided free in our hotel room, is “Ananda — the Art of Touch.” This and subsequent ads make it clear what’s up

(accidental pun) and uses the word “climax” in connection with “the

experienced hands of the tantra masseuse…” What really amuses me is that the

business is located in the part of town called WIENER PLATZ!!! Not kidding!!!

Coincidence? Cute blonde waitress at the museum was wearing a wrist brace. I

asked her if her injury was caused by serving too many dishes. She explained: “No, I got that

at my former job. I was a masseuse. . .” Kinda makes you wonder. . .

–Food… While I prefer the cuisine of France and Italy, Germany does offer great national food,

interesting, carefully cooked and nutritious. In my opinion. They seem to do

everything else carefully and correctly; why not cooking? There’s a trend away from ol’ Willie Brandt’s famous fat stuff and toward Asian food, but you can still enjoy a perfect grilled steak:

Rumpsteak mit Kräuterbutter (big chunk of seasoned butter, melting on top).

–Köln has a world-class modern art museum, adjacent to its

world-class cathedral and a short block from its world-class German-Roman museum. The church is a monster, either spared during WW II or restored.

The city looks fire-scorched in places. We heard that about 70 percent of Koln was ruined,

but for some reason, churches in many cities other than Dresden were spared.

Couldn’t have been on purpose, because the old Army Air Force was notoriously

inaccurate. (Read “The Story of World War II”; they had trouble hitting the right

towns, let alone the right buildings). (Lt. Al: NOT referring to you fighter pilots; referring to our B-17

fleets, which were almost suicidal, as you know — again according to first-hand accounts from

the above book.)

The German-Roman museum is logically laid out (of course), with remarkable and organized exhibits from antiquity and Roman rule.

–The Germans are really, really good at restoring things. Maybe because they’ve

had a lot of practice. I told a friend in Freiburg one time that it was

wonderful that Freiburg had been spared, like Heidelberg. He laughed, showed me

a book of Freiburg photos from the late 1940s, displaying nothing but rubble and one great big church (the church was missed, somehow, by the bombing). They replaced everything,

cobblestone by cobblestone. Beautiful in the old town.

– The Rhine looks like any other big “alter mann fluss,” (Old Man River) but

in Köln there are fine middle-aged buildings along the river, in the old town. I forget which side; follow the directions to the Hotel Ibis and take a riverside walk.

Our trek to find the hotel was amusing, for a change, instead of punishing. Hotel Ibis’s directions were excellent. (If you came in late, the Ibis chain has spread over much of Europe and is maybe the last of the good deals, dollar-wise. Rooms were usually about 60 euros. Nice places.) Laughing sardonically, I read the sign aloud: “It says go to the nearest underground stop and look for Line 2. Ha ha ha, yeah, right. . .” We approached the underground path and a sign over the door pointed down the ramp and read “Line 2.” OK. Then down at the tracks we saw a big sign, LINE 2. This was fun!

Walked to the train and a sign on the wall alongside it had a big arrow pointed forward, saying IBIS HOTEL. Good news! Then a pleasant Deutsche frau helped us work the ticket machine and warned us not to get on without a ticket. OK. Onward.

We got on and rode, gently rocking for a rather long way to the appropriate street stop, I forget the name. Got off the train and a sign on a lamppost greeted us: IBIS HOTEL. More laughter. The only glitch of this search was that the arrow pointed straight UP. Huh? Must mean “right here,” we figured. We walked once around the block without seeing the green and orange Ibis sign, and we asked directions. A friendly local pointed to “the gray building down there. . . See?”

We saw and were very happy wanderers.

The hostel in Berlin was a hoot. Shortly after we arrived, in trooped a horde of teen-agers. . . OMG, as they text. There goes the night’s sleep. I asked one where they were from and he said the Netherlands. He seemed normal enough. Turns out they were well behaved, friendly and even fun. I should have expected as much, having been a high school English teacher for nine years. Kids are fun, sometimes. And I reminded myself that such places used to be called “youth hostels.” I told Sharon I’d try to act younger. She said, “Please don’t do that. Twelve is young enough.”

The strangest guests (other than me) were older than these kids. One, a good-looking dark woman of about 30 who was dressed in sinister black, eyed me suspiciously and frowningly while I toiled on my computer at one of the side breakfast tables. She was writing a few tables away. I had barely looked at her; did I somehow look as sinister as SHE did? I thought I looked grandfatherly, or at least avuncular. Did she think I was menacing? Dangerous? Lust-driven?

As I looked at her once more, out of the corner of my much-practiced eye, she came slowly over with her computer and stopped by my elbow. I looked up, wondering what th… and she said without the slightest smile, “Would you mind watching my computer? Will you be here for a few minutes? I have to make a phone call.”

“Sure. I mean no, I don’t mind.” I smiled my warm, kind smile. Still without smiling herself, she said “Thanks,” tonelessly, and set the machine down and left.

I thought she was weird and I would write about her later, which I am now doing.

She returned, picked up the computer (a Toshiba laptop like my old one), turned away and said “Thank you,” again tonelessly, but this time into the air behind me.

“You’re welcome,” I muttered, thinking “bitch.”

The other old geezer in the place cornered me in the slow elevator down from our fourth or fifth floors and began quizzing me. It was annoying. I wasn’t interested in getting acquainted with him, an aging hippie with horrible finger and toe nails (he wore leather sandals) and a massive, grizzled beard, long hair down his neck and none on the top of his head. A big guy. Looked strong.

He said he was from Denmark, and I? “The U.S.,” I said, trying to show boredom. “Oh,” he said, not interested. So why ask? What did he expect? A few Dutch kids got in and that pushed him close to me, which I also didn’t like. Suddenly he was conspiratorial. “Lookit this!” he urged me in wheezing tones. (His English was very good.) He began showing me some flyers for the world-famous anatomy sculpture that was making the rounds in California a couple of years ago. He wouldn’t listen to me trying to tell him that I KNEW about the exhibit. It had been in L.A.

The kids got out on the ground floor and I tried to follow them away from this beast. “I’m going to visit this place,” he said. “I heard they show EVERYTHING. I mean, EVERYTHING!” Nothing more off-putting than a dirty old man. What was he thinking?

“Uh,” I grunted. I had to escape.

“How old are you,” he asked suddenly in rather rude tones.

“Seventy-four,” I said.

He grinned crookedly, proudly, the old fart, and said “I’m seventy-eight.”

“Good for you,” I said, and hurried around the corner away from the door and toward the coffee bar. When I got there I glanced back to see if he was following, but he wasn’t. He was headed our through the door, studying the flyers. Whew. NOW maybe I could have some coffee in peace and quiet.

Some of the names have been changed to protect the doofuses.

Some are anonymous.

Some of the names are real. All of the perpetrators are.

TIME OUT!

John, 70, is a nut about timing stuff right. Hungrily preparing breakfast, he gently slid two eggs into a sauce pan of heavily salted (so they won’t crack) boiling water, timed them 7 minutes (for perfectly soft-boiled) and kept an eye on the stove timer so he could microwave his leftover slice of corned beef for exactly one minute, to go with the eggs, getting both delicacies ready at the same time. Meanwhile, with three minutes to go he toasted two slices of whole wheat bread — good for the digestion.

He softened the hard butter by putting the dish in the nuker for 16 seconds and then when the egg clock said 1 minute he reset the microwave clock for one minute, to get the corned beef piping hot, and turned it on.

He buttered the toast just before scooping the eggs out of the shells, briefly cooled by putting cold water in the pan. That took just under one minute, while the microwave hummed.

Then, salivating on cue, he reached into the microwave for his corned beef and found that he had forgot to put it in. There it coldly sat, on a plate on the drainboard.

It was exactly one minute later before he could sit down to his slightly cooling eggs and toast, and he was not happy.

SWATCH BUCKLING

Q: Why was I having so much trouble buckling the leather strap on my watch?

A: Because I didn’t have my glasses on and I was trying to put it on upside-down.

SPEECHLESS

Mac writes, “I don’t know what to make of this one: Playing tennis with Maurice, a youth of 62, I was getting ready to serve when I heard him yell ‘Wait!’

“He seemed to be pointing down toward my feet. I looked down at the line and saw that I was bouncing the ball prior to serving FROM THE SERVICE LINE AT MID COURT!

“Should I see the doctor???”

THOSE PESKY KEYS

Overcome by the need for a bagel, I drove up to the supermarket this a.m., thinking as I drove about an elderly swimmer who told my wife about absent-mindedly driving past a parked school bus on her way to the pool, incurring a fine of $510 (True!)

I parked, got out of the car and realized I had left my wallet in the other car.

Cursing myself, I went back down the hill to get my money.

The wallet was there because earlier I was driving that car when a safety checkpoint cop told me that he’d “let it go this time” when I was found out — I explained that I didn’t want to take my wallet to the swimming pool for our early morning lap swim and drove without it, wearing only my sweats. No big deal, I thought, and I also used to drive to the tennis courts twice a week without the license. I whined shamelessly about my wonderful driving record and all, and it worked.

Now I have to remember to take my wallet to the pool AND tennis

courts, and remember to take it OUT of the truck when I get home. Meanwhile

remembering to leave my alternate pair of sunglasses in the truck for future use.

THIS IS NOT AS EASY AS IT SOUNDS!

To think, I once scoffed at Vermont’s law requiring 80-year-olds to

surrender their licenses. Ten more years of trying to remember all this stuff.

(Editor’s note: John was later advised that he can keep a photocopy of his license in both cars, thus easing the strain.)

THAT WALLET AGAIN

Frank, 70:

I’m glad that someone else goes through these “forgetful” moments. I had

a problem of driving to the supermarket without my wallet. I usually leave wallet and keys on my dresser, but sometimes I’ll get the keys only, to move my car out of the garage. My problem was that while driving to the store later, I realized that my wallet was still on the dresser.

Solution: Keys don’t go in my pocket without the wallet.

MIKE MAKES A SPLASH

Mike, 68, is not the only one who’s done this:

“This morning I ground the coffee beans for espresso, placed them in the

strainer, poured the necessary water into the top of the espresso machine and turned it on.

“After my shower, about 10 minutes later, the sink was covered with coffee. I Had forgotten to put the receiving container below the spout. Help! I need assisted living!”

SLIGHT OVERSIGHT

Royce, 75, writes:

Okay, I laughed at you guys until today. This morning Jane (younger than Royce and still working fulltime) baked some banana bread before heading for her teaching job. She asked me to clean up the kitchen because she had to leave. I was so diligent at cleaning up that I put the little timer she had set for baking time in a drawer where, of course, with my bad hearing I didn’t hear it go off. Guess what happened to what was in the oven.

Is there help anywhere in sight?

(Ed. Note: Not much, Royce. Sorry.)

]]> http://peacecorpsworldwide.org/mcseas-the-day/2010/06/07/senior-moments-heavy-sigh/feed/ http://peacecorpsworldwide.org/mcseas-the-day/2010/06/01/texas-ii-fort-worth-n-stuff/ http://peacecorpsworldwide.org/mcseas-the-day/2010/06/01/texas-ii-fort-worth-n-stuff/#comments Tue, 01 Jun 2010 17:41:37 +0000 John McCafferty http://peacecorpsworldwide.org/mcseas-the-day/?p=110 Dallas-Fort Worth

What a big ol’ place, this Texas. How can you not like, or at least respect a little, a state with such storied names as Fort Worth, Abilene and San Angelo? Love those names.
One change: Seemed to me that there are more immigrants in Dallas than in times past. Yes? No?
Another shuttle driver of color picked us up and I asked him if
he too was from Ethiopia, like the last one we had. He laughed and said “No, Burundi! But we all look alike! Ha ha ha.”
But a female parking garage attendant was from Ethiopia. Why so many Africans in Dallas?

More great names . . . Waco, Wichita Falls, San Anton’. . .

We had coffee in the ritziest shopping mall I’ve seen (I don’t remember seeing one like this in Beverly Hills, and Montecito’s is a little bittie area; Texas’s is BIG). While waiting for a friend to join us for lunch at an equally ritzy cafe, the famous Al Bernait’s, we got a glimpse of Dallas’s fabled wealth: the line of very expensive cars outside Starbucks — a row of Lexi with a gleaming Mercedes, the parade led by an even shinier new Mazerati.
Inside, beautifully kept women were dolled up in a manner befitting their attitude . . . Or maybe it was the reverse of that. Start with an attitude. . . Montecito East, a fine view on a morning when the weather was as nice as SoCal’s. (It was 90 and up the next week.) Classy! Or not? Fun to think about that. And to watch the parade.

Cities like Galveston, “Amarillo by mornin’” (a song) . . . Odessa. . .

Must be time to leave, I thought as a riotous barbecue my daughter put on was drawing to a close and my great-grandson was getting tired of my tickling his ribs. I was beginning to feel especially out of place, being from California but having been born in (shudder) rural Oklahoma, town of Tipton, deep southwest OK.
My daughter’s friend at work, a native of Fort Worth, asked “What’s the best thing to come out of Oklahoma?” I said I didn’t know.
“Hwy. I-35. Ha!” Got me.
I countered with the “go south till you step in it” joke.
She came back with “Why doesn’t Texas slide into the sea”?
Don’t know.
“’Cause Oklahoma sucks!”
We let it go at that, and I admitted that the cowboy stuff in her home town was really interesting. The old town, “The Stockyards” area, was full of barbecue and saloons, and the Chamber of Commerce threw in a pretty good museum. Then, during our visit, a small herd of actual longhorn steers meandered down the main tourist street, controlled by several mounted cowboys.
Black cowboys rode the range in Texas back in the day, and the lead guy on this day was a black man. That startled me in this state where some nearly violent racism had shocked and scared me in about 1947. But then that was in my Dad’s birthplace of deep eastern Texas, a hillbilly area if there ever was one. Another Texas.
Nowadays — I wouldn’t mind going back to Fort Worth and some more beef off the hoof, barbecued.
I reckon there’s no place like Texas. Maybe that’s good. Maybe not.
#  #  #

Utah and Colorado, and then you walk and trot for a mile or two through

the Denver airport, and then you are flown on down through TX and OK

panhandles (right over my birthplace of Tipton, OK), and suddenly you’re

there, in Dallas Dadgumtexas.
Or you can drive it, but you probably don’t want to do that.

Driving, you are immediately aware of how big TX is. Driving across it

east and west isn’t quite as far as driving the length of CA north and

south, but it’s almost as far, and there’s a lot less to look at.
Or you can just “go east till you smell it and south till you step

in it.”
TV’s Charles Kuralt, a good ol’ boy if there ever was one,

interviewed a West Texas rancher who said “Everthang out here sticks,

stings or stinks, but it’s home to me and Ah lak it.”
My earliest memory of the West Texas plains was my parents

stopping in Amarillo for, as Lynbdon Johnson called it, a “bowl o’ red,”

usually called chili. Chili is a staple food in much of Texas.
More important, the LBJ Library in Austin, the state capital, is

not to be missed. The Kennedy assassination material, and LBJ’s transition

into the White House, is a tear-jerker. Nor should the LBJ ranch be

missed. It’s near Johnson City, not far from Austin. I got a chicken-fried

steak as big as the average doormat in Johnson City one time. I recovered

later and went on to dine again.
A sign atop the restaurant said “More than 35 served.” A little TX

humor.

And then suddenly we were in the highly civilized environs of

Dallas (there’s an excellent art museum downtown) and its many sprawling

suburbs, the A/C is working perfectly and an Ethiopian cowboy drove our

shuttle bus and a Persian clerk made us happy to be in the over-priced

Holiday Inn Express for an auspicious beginning to our short journey.
But the A/C was not working upstairs at my daughter’s house, and

as the sun set on an 88-degree April day I was reminded that this place

would be HOT soon! (It’s at least 90 degrees in the afternoon at this

writing.) No problem — yet. How natural, how healthy to have a fan over

the bed gently turning, keeping the sweat under my chin to a minimum.
Mustn’t forget that Dallas is a splendid reminder of the Old West.

Cowboys in bronze with a magnificent sculptured herd of wild mustang

horses crash through running water in a display in Las Colinas, a

development between Fort Worth and Dallas. There are major developments in

all directions here. Splendid to look at, even if some are almost empty

due to the recent business downturn. Good times will return.
And huge longhorn steers in a small herd welcome folks to The
Stockyards in Fort Worth. Cowboy stuff and steakhousres all over the place

in old downtown Fort Worth, the beginning of many a cattle drive north.

The Chisholm Trail started here, I was told. Cowboy and cow-herding lore

abounds. Tough, colorful guys, those cowpokes.
A museum placard read,
“Grandma, do cowboys eat grass?”
“No, dear, they’re part human.”

There’s the flip-side to the gunslinging Wild West. What other

city would paint a huge black X on the spot in the road where Pres. John

F. Kennedy was slain? (The museum in the adjacent building is a good stop

too. Very interesting, and it brings back the stunning shock of that day

in 1963.)

Speaking of animals and tough guys, there are more football

players in Texas than there are people in the Dakotas. Watch “Friday Night

Lights” for an enjoyable introduction to this strange – to some of us –

western land, and perhaps the highest-level of high school football in the

country.

Surveillance is a fancy word for staring at nothing in particular, and it can really piss you off. It’s the one thing about private eye work that I hate, and I was doing a lot of it that morning. I sat on the wet, unforgiving plastic seat or whatever you call it on a small sailboat and looked at other boats, small and large. I didn’t know who owned the one I was sitting on, but it didn’t matter.
I passed the time by staring at some motor launches, fishing boats, whatever. At 4:30 a.m., everything is wet from Pacific dews and damps and it could be considered pretty in the misty lights around the harbor, except that I was feeling grumpy and the bottom half of my coffee was cold. I dumped it over the side but thoughtfully left the paper cup in the boat. I’m not a litterbug. I’m a 64-year-old private investigator and I don’t like sitting on cold, wet boats in the middle of the night.

Call me Dick McNabb, private dick with attitude.

This torture was engineered by my client, Mason Stone, who was convinced that his wayward wife, Loretta, was doing drugs and having an affair with a big-time drug smuggler who brought cocaine into California by sailing out to sea and meeting a Colombian with a fishing boat full of the stuff. I told him, politely, that he was nuts, that we have a Coast Guard for the express purpose of preventing just such crap as that, movies notwithstanding, but he was adamant, and so I agreed to spy on the rich guy who occasionally cruised all night long, out to the Channel Islands and beyond. The hours were bad, but the money was good.

Mason said his wife crewed with the guy — nice touch, I thought, leaving the S off the word like that — and he knew that they were often at sea during the night and came back to the harbor very early, just before dawn sometimes. No one was around to see them at that hour but a few fishermen, and they wouldn’t care one way or another, having no use for pleasure boaters. Mason’s idea was that if we could get the drug lord busted, he’d be able to talk some sense into his wife’s confused head and get his two sons’ mommy back home where she belonged. Then, he said, he could divorce her and get on with his life. He probably still loved her, or rather the shadow of her former self. Plenty of psychic pain involved … It was just no good to have a drugged-out mother serving as paramour for a coke pusher. What a mess.

So there I sat, with a wet ass and a bad attitude.

Well, at least I’d had some adventures since starting my new life and last career. This case looked like a dud, but as we told the team when I was a high school football coach, no one wins ‘em all. And as we also said, sometimes you don’t win any of ‘em.

I had also taught English, mostly, and could cite more poetic utterances, like “C’est la fricken vie.”

I won my last big case. Which was also my first. I didn’t exactly “solve” an open murder case, but because of my snooping around, a nice woman’s killer finally caved in and got caught and is now permanently behind bars.

Granted, it’s an odd profession, and it’s certainly not for everybody. Sometimes, as when sitting in a wet boat, it’s not for me either. But by being a private eye you have a better chance to escape boredom than most jobs offer. And I was heavy bored.

When my wife died three years ago, I had to do something to get the clock moving again. I didn’t want to lounge on cruise boats with a blanket over my knees. There’s adventure travel, but solo travel doesn’t work for me. So here I sat.

My mood was swinging back and forth, kinda bi-polar, depending on my physical comfort. At times it wasn’t so bad, here in Santa Barbara’s cute little harbor. There was a nice ocean smell to it, and halyards clinked lightly against aluminum masts as a tiny breeze wafted through. Trés pleasant. I wanted some more coffee, but didn’t dare leave my post. You never knew. . . and there came a boat! Had to be them. Who else would be out to sea in the wee hours.

I could hear the inboard motor humming softly as a big white sloop turned from the entry channel into Marina 3 to dock. I was on Marina 2, closer to the north end of the harbor and maybe 30 yards away, several fingers closer to the central channel, and I could barely make out the name. I’d have to confirm later that it was indeed the boat I was looking for: Pollo del Mar. Chicken of the Sea. Cute. Boat names are fun.

I ducked behind the raised cabin of my little borrowed sloop and rested my birder’s binoculars on the roof. Figured they’d never notice me.

Whoever it was maneuvered smartly right into his slip. Two other guys, I supposed guys, tossed lines to the dock, jumped off and tied down the boat. Soon the third guy – yeah, it was a man – wrestled three big duffel bags out of the cabin and tossed them over the side to the men on the dock. No girlfriend on board. Could it be another boat altogether? Nah. Sunday sailors don’t do this.

I got a good view of the bags as the men walked under the greenly glowing lamps over the walkway to the marina gate. The “finger,” guess it’s called. A-ha. . . They appeared to be sail bags, but they certainly didn’t contain sails. Whatever was in the bags was heavy, dense enough that less than half a bag was filled. You could tell from the shape as they hung over the men’s shoulders: the upper half of each bag was thin, while the bottom third of the bag bulged.

I’ll be damned, I thought. Mason may have been right. What could people be lugging off a boat? Surely not six-pacs of beer, or soggy tuna sandwiches, and probably not fish, or body parts. Their cargo had to be bags of valuable white powder.

They were probably carrying six-pacs, all right – full of nose candy. Cocaine has a street value of many thousands of dollars a pound, and they must have had 20 or 30 pounds in each sack. Many thousands of dollars’ worth of dope. These birds were serious crooks. I felt a little shaky. This was way out of my league.

Maybe I was the Chicken of the Sea.

Want more? Pls. vote…

mcc

]]> http://peacecorpsworldwide.org/mcseas-the-day/2010/05/17/an-old-private-dick/feed/ http://peacecorpsworldwide.org/mcseas-the-day/2010/04/08/one-more-heartburn-from-the-road/ http://peacecorpsworldwide.org/mcseas-the-day/2010/04/08/one-more-heartburn-from-the-road/#comments Thu, 08 Apr 2010 21:49:42 +0000 John McCafferty http://peacecorpsworldwide.org/mcseas-the-day/?p=97 ROAD-KILL GRILLS
(Cont. from the Previous Indigestion)

Chicken’s a better bet than beef in roadside Urgent Care facilities. Except the fried chicken in a big joint in Akron, OH. This Ohio thing is just an unfortunate coincidence, according to my daughter Susan, who used to live near Cleveland. Or maybe it’s not a coincidence. Maybe Ohio is where angry military cooks go when they retire. We had asked an Akron motel owner where we could find a good, plain dinner. She waxed enthusiastic over “the big place up on that corner? (she pointed north, toard the freeway) It’s REAL good. . . And it’s close!”
Well, she was wrong, although it WAS close and big. Or maybe she was mean-spirited and this was her little “gotcha” against folks from California, where they put avocado on everything and think their food is so damn sophisticated. The restaurant was indeed popular. Very large, very busy. This must be a good place, we thought. At last.
But no. The chicken was pathetic. Fried too hard in old oil (you can tell: the darker the finished fried product, the older the oil. My son taught me that when he worked in burger joints). The fries were brown too, but not hard like the chicken. They were limp and wet with oil.
We ate some chicken and fries out of sheer stubbornness and went back to our room. No point in arguing with the woman who recommended it. Our stomachs were OK, and we would live to drive another day. I asked SD, “If these people eat crap like that when they go out on the town, what do they eat at home?”
She (from Indiana and would know) shrugged and said “Kraft’s macaroni, from a box?”

But let’s balance these low points with some good travelers’ food: I still remember the chicken tenders (called “streeyups,” meaning strips) in a small Kentucky town. Really tasty Kentucky-fried food. My brother-in-law was driving us around southern Indiana and on into Kentucky. He had told me that Appalachian hillbillies are . . . a little strange, a little “different.” (I knew that, being an Okie, originally. We southern Scots-Irish are all related.) We stopped at a small cafe with a swinging, banging screen door, went in and felt the stares of three fat guys in bib overalls. They sat still and watched us. We sat at the counter so as not to have to stare back and forth with them. A young blonde girl behind the counter slowly approached and stood silently, staring down at me as if waiting for me to draw a gun and shoot her. I didn’t see any menus. “Hi” I smiled. “No menus, huh?”
“Huh uh.”
“Do you have hamburgers.”
“No,” she said quietly. So apparently she could speak a variant of English.
“Oh. Well, whatcha got for lunch?” My three companions sat quietly, amused.
(Imagine slow Dixie accent here) “Chicken streeyups.”
“OK!” I brightened up. Didn’t want things to get any trickier. Didn’t want to scare her any more than she already was. “I’ll have the strips. And a Coke.” I was tempted to mimic her accent,  but wisely didn’t. I didn’t want to get her or the boys angry with us. We all had the streeyups. Ate, talked quietly and got the hell out of there.The chicken was good, fried taters are fried taters and Cokes can always be counted on.
We hurried out to our car and resumed looking at green fields and gray little houses.
If you want upscale in the rural South, try Country Kitchen, Howard Johnson’s or other chain diners to see why folks down yonder are so fat. Good ol’ grub, and lots of it for a reasonable price. half-gallon jugs of Coke, Pepsi, whatever, as long as it’s got a lot of sugar in it.
Time out for an anecdote: A friend from Kentucky, a well-educated official with the Peace Corps, said his brother figured something out in a rural Kentucky Col. Sanders joint. After studying the relative costs of Coke sizes and the fact that refills were free, he whispered, pointing at the soft drink machine, “Gollee, lookie there! Yew kin git a great big ‘un for a dollar an a haif, are yew kin git a medium one fer only…”
“I get it, I get it, buy small and refill.” his brother said, shaking his head once again at the . . . what shall we say, simplicity of some country folks, including his own brother.

So there’s the good stuff: Country Kitchen is where I took my cousin and her husband in Lawton, OK, and we had a fine time.
Come to think of it, chicken strips sound pretty good right now, as I’m hungry again. Happens every few hours. For lunch or dinner it’s hard to beat that American classic, probably first perfected by slaves — Southern Fried Chicken. Saw a fried bird outlet on each corner of a North Carolina intersection, and saw the same thing in the Los Angeles ghetto, just south of USC. The four are usually Popeye’s, Kentucky Colonel and a couple of local enterprises.
My mom fried chicken regularly (in the old days, country folks didn’t have ovens, so it was boiled or fried food, period), and I do the same: dredge the bird parts in flour, salt and pepper them, and fry till crispy on the outside and then simmer for a while. I have a secret ingredient: Douse the parts with lots of powdered sage, to give them the musty flavor of the Old West. Pour off the remaining fat, leave the gritty residue, and make southern pan gravy by cooking the stuff in a cup of milk and a couple of tablespoons of “flahr.”
Just avoid Akron, Ohio, the city with a huge rubber tire statue rising up from the town center, proudly looming over all, including the place with the rubber chicken. Maybe it was soft plastic food, come to think of it.
I like the coastal Carolinas for dining out. Lots of fine seafood there. But you’re still in the South. You recognize southern humor in billboards here and there, advertising Dirty Dick’s, a popular chain of crab takeout places. (This is a true story.) Big signs show a battered old gal, weary and thin, saying solemnly, “I get crabs from Dirty Dick’s.”
Redneck humor. Too bad their secession efforts failed. Lincoln was wrong to bring them back.

#  #  #

In all fairness, I should point out that the Ohio beef debacle wasn’t as horrific as the (I just shuddered) “pot roast” I was served in the Denny’s outlet in Tucumcari, New Mexico one weary evening. Gawd. I think it was Denny’s. Chain joints are all you can find in towns like Tucumcari. They should have had a big sign on it out front: WARNING! CHAIN CAFE FOOD. it might have been safer to go hungry. Or find something salty that was sealed in plastic. And a Coke.
What got me about this piece of (expletive deleted) one warm June night was the worst pot roast of all time. A piece of animal parts floating in a slimy mass of brown, brackish liquid. It looked like the aftermath of a horrible war, with strips of quivery flubber surrounding the few small strips of actual beef. (I guess it was beef. Who knows.) I picked at it for a while and gave up. The steamed veggies with it were harmless, except that they might have been left over from the Korean War years. I always figure it’s hard to get sick on boiled stuff, especially inert vegetable matter. And as my oldest daughter used to say about MY cooking, “It will sustain human life.”
I found myself longing for a good old-fashioned diner, like one which offered a passable cheeseburger, out yonder somewhere in the cornfields of Illinois. You know the type; they’re all over the place. What you first notice when you enter is a row of fat ol’ boys in overalls and John Deere hats. These guys don’t work, evidently. They’re gentleman farmers and hire peasants to drive their tractors while they drink cup after cup of coffee and leave miserly tips. I know those guys. My daughter was a waitress.
But the food is OK. There are the other kinds, the emergency stops that Ohio seems to have a corner on.

(To be continued. It gets more palatable.)