The Mushroom Sandwich
Luky loves the story of the Mushroom Sandwich. It's a Kiki story (remember Kiki is Luky's new "human" mom - he introduced her in the post about the Blue Heron: http://philosopherdog.blogspot.com/2005/09/great-blue-yonder-heron.html).
"Mushroom Sandwich" is a great story. It's not my story, and Luky doesn't narrate it any better than me so we might take some unintentional liberties in the telling, but it goes something like this.
Kiki was fresh out of school and looking for work in Knoxville. Like many young, single, degree-in-hand, soon-to-be career-ladder-climbers, she was doing whatever she could to pay the bills while scanning the horizon for the dream job. She lived alone but shared visions of independence with a best girlfriend from work who lived in a small, Smoky Mountain foothill cottage east of town. Luky says they must have been the "country" version of Laverne & Shirley.
Now, anyone not familiar with Tennessee must understand (at least accept) that it is a definite split personality state - and with regard to almost everything - politics, history (especially the Civil War), literacy, certainly football, cool (as in "hipness"), as well as cool, as in "weather." To be specific, Knoxville can be a very southern town, and it can also be a pretty northern town.
Mushroom Sandwich is a story of Knoxville in one of its particularly northern moods. It turns out, the story goes, that Kiki and her best girlfriend had scheduled a movie slumber party for a Friday night. They drank wine, ate popcorn and laughed and cried through sappy romance comedies into the wee hours. (Luky says they probably watched "Snow Dogs" - as brilliant as he is philosophically, he just doesn't have any sense of Hollywood chronology.)
Anyway, when the room filled with the radiance of a million rising Suns reflected off billions of ice crystals the two girls looked out the window to see there would be no Saturday sports bar hopping, no shopping . . . indeed, no excursions to anywhere . . . for the rest of the weekend. They were completely snowed in and nearly buried. And, if that weren't bad enough, they were still vexed with that youthful, post-college-dorm, total-lack-of-prep mindset where the baking of a cake usually implied running to the store three times for overlooked ingredients . . . in other words, there wasn't the first can of soup in storage!
Luky shudders at this point of the story. He never actually knows when we run out of Nutro, but the thought of our dog food cupboard going bare is enough to give him nightmares.
The only food in Kiki's friend's house was a half loaf of bread, some butter and a package of mushrooms. They must have had electricity, but the snow banks were over the roof . . . and since they were marooned outside the normal paths of commerce where plows and snow removers would defer to the Sun to make the roads passable, an overnight slumber party became a marathon weekend. At first with some concern which diminished with the warming sky and melting snow, they spent the weekend watching TV, talking and living on grilled mushroom sandwiches.
Years later, after the anxiety of the blizzard weekend's exile had softened, the predominant memory seems to be one of joy. And from what Luky and I can tell, that precise feeling is most effectively recalled with the smell of grilled mushroom sandwiches.
"Mushroom Sandwich" is a great story. It's not my story, and Luky doesn't narrate it any better than me so we might take some unintentional liberties in the telling, but it goes something like this.
Kiki was fresh out of school and looking for work in Knoxville. Like many young, single, degree-in-hand, soon-to-be career-ladder-climbers, she was doing whatever she could to pay the bills while scanning the horizon for the dream job. She lived alone but shared visions of independence with a best girlfriend from work who lived in a small, Smoky Mountain foothill cottage east of town. Luky says they must have been the "country" version of Laverne & Shirley.
Now, anyone not familiar with Tennessee must understand (at least accept) that it is a definite split personality state - and with regard to almost everything - politics, history (especially the Civil War), literacy, certainly football, cool (as in "hipness"), as well as cool, as in "weather." To be specific, Knoxville can be a very southern town, and it can also be a pretty northern town.
Mushroom Sandwich is a story of Knoxville in one of its particularly northern moods. It turns out, the story goes, that Kiki and her best girlfriend had scheduled a movie slumber party for a Friday night. They drank wine, ate popcorn and laughed and cried through sappy romance comedies into the wee hours. (Luky says they probably watched "Snow Dogs" - as brilliant as he is philosophically, he just doesn't have any sense of Hollywood chronology.)
Anyway, when the room filled with the radiance of a million rising Suns reflected off billions of ice crystals the two girls looked out the window to see there would be no Saturday sports bar hopping, no shopping . . . indeed, no excursions to anywhere . . . for the rest of the weekend. They were completely snowed in and nearly buried. And, if that weren't bad enough, they were still vexed with that youthful, post-college-dorm, total-lack-of-prep mindset where the baking of a cake usually implied running to the store three times for overlooked ingredients . . . in other words, there wasn't the first can of soup in storage!
Luky shudders at this point of the story. He never actually knows when we run out of Nutro, but the thought of our dog food cupboard going bare is enough to give him nightmares.
The only food in Kiki's friend's house was a half loaf of bread, some butter and a package of mushrooms. They must have had electricity, but the snow banks were over the roof . . . and since they were marooned outside the normal paths of commerce where plows and snow removers would defer to the Sun to make the roads passable, an overnight slumber party became a marathon weekend. At first with some concern which diminished with the warming sky and melting snow, they spent the weekend watching TV, talking and living on grilled mushroom sandwiches.
Years later, after the anxiety of the blizzard weekend's exile had softened, the predominant memory seems to be one of joy. And from what Luky and I can tell, that precise feeling is most effectively recalled with the smell of grilled mushroom sandwiches.
posted by RAM at 9:44 AM
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