woobiquity

cxlviii. Of meat eaters in North Carolina diners

Most societies define themselves by what they are not. In North Carolina diners, what people are not is vegetarian.

The legendary chef Bill Neal observed that while Southerners may frequently make a meal out of vegetables, the meal is never vegetarian. So it’s not surprising that any breakfast order of eggs and toast here that doesn’t include a request for at least a little sausage gravy invariably gets the same deadpan, incredulous response from the waitress looking up from her pen and pad: “No meat?”

Now, at the Trackside Restaurant at the dirt racetrack near my parents’ house, the improbable option is officially on the menu, presumably to save the waitress-cum-cook the breath she’d need to muster the occasional disbelief.

You can order two eggs with:

Bacon or Sausage
Country Ham
City Ham
Country Fried Tenderloin
Fried Bologna
Fried Wieners
No Meat.

The last choice saves you up to a dollar, so perhaps at $2.35 what ‘No Meat’ really says is not so much ‘Freak’ as ‘Cheap’. After all, who wouldn’t want a little meat?

cxlvii. Of gifts that keep on 'giving'

I found some ghosts of Christmas past. They were face down in the trash.

A day earlier I’d been on the phone to my cousin in Germany talking about some of the more infamous objects that have turned up in the family gift game over the years. The ‘horny toad’ socks were a recurring, hee-hawing favorite for a decade, except to whoever unwittingly picked them from the pile of wrapped items and had to keep up with them for another year.

The most infamous object of them all was a pair of little black baby dolls. In our white, Southern family, I have to admit, redneck strands occasionally pluck a not-so-subtle twang. Which is to say that some among us seemed to find these plastic dolls, just by their existence, hilarious. Others did not, and conspired each year to capture and retire them.

The dolls mysteriously disappeared from the game a couple of years ago, but my cousin and I have kept their memory alive in our reminiscences. I’m not really sure why; perhaps partly because neither of us could precisely recall their fate.

The next evening, Christmas evening, my Mom came and went from the kitchen, tidying up various corners of the house while I prepared a few party foods. I lifted the lid on the trashcan to throw away some cutting-board scraps, and there to my amazement, lying on a heap of wrapping paper shreds and sweet potato skins, were the two dolls.

I picked one up. The chubby brown face and frizzed black hair were just as I had remembered them. But from the other side of the living room I had missed something truly grotesque about them. The little black heads were attached not to little black bodies, but to fat white ones, now barely concealed in their tattered, cave-man garments.

Among at least a dozen conflicting impulses, laughter. And sadness, firstly because someone would be so cavalier or ribald as to manufacture such an un-likeness (the folk artist from Junebug comes to mind; he painted black people with white faces because, having never known a black person, those were the limits of his imagination) and secondly, frankly, because I had solved a Christmas mystery.

But guess what. I was alone in the kitchen. So whether the poor little mutants went to an ignoble resting place, six inches under a layer of lemon peels and polenta scraps, or into an unmarked drawer, ready to haunt a future Christmas in unexpected ways, is one holiday mystery that I, having offered it, shall keep.