People always expect me to be out doing something.
Like the friend who e-mailed me one evening not long after 10 p.m. When I responded immediately, he expressed surprise that I was home.
I can't be out dancing on bars or dating lawyers every night of the week, I reminded him.
No, some nights I'm at a friend's house watching "Napoleon Dynamite" for the first time, laughing and relating to being a nerd in high school.
I've never been to Idaho, but I do know plenty about growing up in a mid-century rancher and wishing I were more popular.
I hear several good songs I already know that were used in the film, like When in Rome's "The Promise" and Alphaville's "Forever Young."
So many adventures couldn't happen today
So many songs we forgot to play
So many dreams are swinging out of the blue
We let them come true
Between the actors' deadpan delivery, the quirky subplots and the bad costumes, I begin to see why this became a cult classic. Favorite line: I caught you a delicious sea bass.
Or I'm opening a bar of Choco-Love with sea salt and almonds, only to have the poet sitting beside me notice that a Roethke poem is included with the chocolate, something I'd never noticed despite weekly purchases of this particular chocolate.
Love is not love until love's vulnerable.
She slowed to sigh, in that long interval...
I tossed a stone and listened to its plunge.
She knew the grammar of least motion, she
Lent me one virtue, and I live thereby.
I should not have to have poetry pointed out to me. I am thrilled that it was.
Sometimes I'm invited to an afternoon fire where people sit around outside under a brilliant blue sky drinking Georges duBoeuf Beaujolais Nouveau while we still can and listen to music, talking about early New Order versus late New Order and how Helena Christianson once dated Michael Hutchence but is now married to Paul Banks.
Oh, what a tangled, incestuous musical web they weave.
Meanwhile, the fire burns on through the afternoon as the blue skies become cloudy ones and the fire's warmth becomes more useful than decorative.
Other times, I'm traveling to the hinterlands for an unlikely meal.
It's an Italian restaurant called Palermo and although we're the first people at the bar, before long there are three regulars surrounding us.
One, a deep-voiced man who retired from Reynolds and is now consulting for them, tells me that he built his house in Salisbury in 1989 after designing it himself.
I continue to be impressed with people who design their own houses and have no training to do so.
Coppola "Director's Cut" Zinfandel gets us started, but we soon pounce on $4 happy hour specials of crispy Buffalo wings and shrimp cocktail (a steal of a price for five good-sized shrimp).
Our bartender is young and gregarious and tells us he is a substitute P.E. teacher who has mistakenly kept the equipment room key in his pocket after a day subbing.
Also, he mentions that chivalry is not dead.
I hadn't thought it was.
Dinner is gnocchi verdi - spinach pasta with procuitto and more of it than I can possibly finish after all those wings.
Then there's the time I'm riding down a country road in Fluvanna county listening to Jimmy Martin on the radio singing "Drink Up and Go Home" as the sun sets.
Don't tell me your troubles, got enough of my own
Be thankful you're living, drink up and go home.
Oh, so thankful I'm living. Even when I'm not doing much of anything.
Showing posts with label fire. Show all posts
Showing posts with label fire. Show all posts
Monday, January 13, 2014
Tuesday, November 26, 2013
Tending and Stoking
I am the daughter of a master fire-maker.
Growing up in what is now reverently called "mid-century modern" and what we then referred to as a three-bedroom rancher, I remember how my parents were always adding something to the little house.
First it was more bedrooms, a necessity given six children. Then a bay window with window seat in the dining room overlooking the backyard. A pool, but not until all six of us were old enough to swim so as to assuage my mother's fear for our safety.
But the most dramatic change began with a giant hole.
I came home from elementary school to find a gaping opening where one of the living room walls had been when I'd left that morning and as we ate an after-school snack of warm-from-the-oven cookies and milk (yes, really), Mom explained that we were having a fireplace put in.
And not just a standard fireplace, but a white brick one with a raised hearth and built in seats on either side with areas for log storage underneath that would take up the entire wall.
It was about as mid-century modern groovy a fireplace as could be imagined and once completed, my father took it upon himself to school all six daughters on fire-making.
We were taught the difference between tinder and kindling, how to properly use bellows and when to add logs to an existing fire.
As we grew up, I can guarantee you that every one of used our fire skills to impress a guy at some point or another.
But mainly, Dad instilled in us an appreciation for a well-made fire and the pleasures one brings in cold weather.
This is a roundabout way of saying what an unexpectedly wonderful time I had with a date in front of a fire last night.
Our destination was far beyond the city, not usually my first choice, but a leisurely drive out River Road landed us at Portico, a place I knew of, but hadn't been.
He'd been for lunch a couple of times so dinner-wise, it was a first for us both.
Honestly, considering it seemed like we were out in the sticks, I was surprised at how busy it was for a Monday evening.
There was a large, older group with loud voices and napkins tucked under chins. Beside us was a young couple, also on a date, although she was very dressed up in a one-sleeved red cocktail dress. Near them was another couple looking at a map and discussing going to Bowling Green via Route 301. Several couples arrived after we did.
We took a table with a view of the garden patio with its big stone fireplace full of logs burning briskly beneath a candlelit mantle.
Over a bottle of Pinot Noir, we considered the all-purpose menu (burger, sandwiches, pizza, pasta, entrees) while doing the early-stage date chatter about what each of us had been up to lately.
I told him I'd been reading in the Washington Post about how so many restaurants up there keep their patios open year-round, adding fire pits and heaters and serving toddies and hot buttered rum to enhance the experience...and their bottom line.
We agreed that a heated rooftop bar with a view of the monuments and a drink sounded right up our alley. The date was going well.
But for now, food was the priority, so beginning with simple green salads, we moved on to penne bolognese and pizza rustica, more notable for its Italian sausage, pepperoni, mushrooms and pepperoncini oil flavor than for its flacid crust.
The music, when we could hear it over the noisier customers, was safe and soft, artists like Willie Nelson and James Taylor.
It was while we were sharing a creme caramel that my date suggested we finish the evening outside by the fireplace with some other sort of warming beverage and our server said he'd go throw some additional logs on the fire for us.
We wouldn't be able to see any monuments, but the tables on the slate-floored patio were twinkling with tea lights and that fire had a nice glow to it.
Carpe diem and all that.
Not surprisingly for Goochland, the tequila choices were limited, but my date encouraged me to give Cabo Wabo a try and if not Sammy Hagar tonight, if not in front of a roaring fire, if not with a date thoughtful enough to suggest such a thing, then when?
In a bonus bit of forethought, he asked for his bourbon and my tequila in snifters, the better to warm them.
We had the patio to ourselves and with snifters in hand, stood in front of the raised fireplace (shades of childhood) laughing, drinking and enjoying the kind of late-stage date banter that feels like it could go on all night.
I'll even admit things got pleasantly warm out there with him and maybe a small part of that was my occasional stoking of the fire.
There is nothing like being wooed well and making Dad proud at the same time.
Growing up in what is now reverently called "mid-century modern" and what we then referred to as a three-bedroom rancher, I remember how my parents were always adding something to the little house.
First it was more bedrooms, a necessity given six children. Then a bay window with window seat in the dining room overlooking the backyard. A pool, but not until all six of us were old enough to swim so as to assuage my mother's fear for our safety.
But the most dramatic change began with a giant hole.
I came home from elementary school to find a gaping opening where one of the living room walls had been when I'd left that morning and as we ate an after-school snack of warm-from-the-oven cookies and milk (yes, really), Mom explained that we were having a fireplace put in.
And not just a standard fireplace, but a white brick one with a raised hearth and built in seats on either side with areas for log storage underneath that would take up the entire wall.
It was about as mid-century modern groovy a fireplace as could be imagined and once completed, my father took it upon himself to school all six daughters on fire-making.
We were taught the difference between tinder and kindling, how to properly use bellows and when to add logs to an existing fire.
As we grew up, I can guarantee you that every one of used our fire skills to impress a guy at some point or another.
But mainly, Dad instilled in us an appreciation for a well-made fire and the pleasures one brings in cold weather.
This is a roundabout way of saying what an unexpectedly wonderful time I had with a date in front of a fire last night.
Our destination was far beyond the city, not usually my first choice, but a leisurely drive out River Road landed us at Portico, a place I knew of, but hadn't been.
He'd been for lunch a couple of times so dinner-wise, it was a first for us both.
Honestly, considering it seemed like we were out in the sticks, I was surprised at how busy it was for a Monday evening.
There was a large, older group with loud voices and napkins tucked under chins. Beside us was a young couple, also on a date, although she was very dressed up in a one-sleeved red cocktail dress. Near them was another couple looking at a map and discussing going to Bowling Green via Route 301. Several couples arrived after we did.
We took a table with a view of the garden patio with its big stone fireplace full of logs burning briskly beneath a candlelit mantle.
Over a bottle of Pinot Noir, we considered the all-purpose menu (burger, sandwiches, pizza, pasta, entrees) while doing the early-stage date chatter about what each of us had been up to lately.
I told him I'd been reading in the Washington Post about how so many restaurants up there keep their patios open year-round, adding fire pits and heaters and serving toddies and hot buttered rum to enhance the experience...and their bottom line.
We agreed that a heated rooftop bar with a view of the monuments and a drink sounded right up our alley. The date was going well.
But for now, food was the priority, so beginning with simple green salads, we moved on to penne bolognese and pizza rustica, more notable for its Italian sausage, pepperoni, mushrooms and pepperoncini oil flavor than for its flacid crust.
The music, when we could hear it over the noisier customers, was safe and soft, artists like Willie Nelson and James Taylor.
It was while we were sharing a creme caramel that my date suggested we finish the evening outside by the fireplace with some other sort of warming beverage and our server said he'd go throw some additional logs on the fire for us.
We wouldn't be able to see any monuments, but the tables on the slate-floored patio were twinkling with tea lights and that fire had a nice glow to it.
Carpe diem and all that.
Not surprisingly for Goochland, the tequila choices were limited, but my date encouraged me to give Cabo Wabo a try and if not Sammy Hagar tonight, if not in front of a roaring fire, if not with a date thoughtful enough to suggest such a thing, then when?
In a bonus bit of forethought, he asked for his bourbon and my tequila in snifters, the better to warm them.
We had the patio to ourselves and with snifters in hand, stood in front of the raised fireplace (shades of childhood) laughing, drinking and enjoying the kind of late-stage date banter that feels like it could go on all night.
I'll even admit things got pleasantly warm out there with him and maybe a small part of that was my occasional stoking of the fire.
There is nothing like being wooed well and making Dad proud at the same time.
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