10:03 PM |
I woke up an hour later than usual (planned) to an expansive view of the Mississippi River through a window that did not have all those odd frame things in it. Since they do not have Smart Coffee at the Comfort Inn and Suites, I went to the Savory Starts place for free coffee and breakfast. Blast. Styrofoam cups again. Can't they just do the paper ones? Everybody I talk to hates styrofoam. Brilliant idea: use favorite go cup from car. Why didn't I think of this before? The Savory Start has a choice of coffee, including dark. Dark is good. I really only drink dark if I have a choice.
Packed and loaded up. Guy in overalls with green zippers comes up. I have a thing for those green zippered overalls, as Harold (Sewanee, Tennessee mechanic extraordinaire) wears them. Joe is the first guy who has ever gotten Woody's year right. Yup, Joe is the man. I asked him if he is from here (Vidalia). Nope, Oklahoma. You're a long way from home, I say. Lived here for 37 years. Joe had a '41 Ford coupe, faded red. His daddy found it for him in some field somewhere, and painted it blue for him. He looked at my dashboard. See, he said, on the gauges, these checks (he pointed to what I call tick marks) were yellow in the 40's. Red in the 41's. (I think I got that right). Woody's are champagne gold. Joe works for an oil company. He worked for Standard Oil forever, through lots of buying and selling and name changing. He has a good pension and got to keep his health insurance. He kept on working for another oil company supplier. I wish I had asked him exactly what he did. He is 73. Eureka! The money here isn't cotton and old, it is cotton and oil after all.
I told Joe that his wife must be happy to have him out of the house. They have been married 52 years. He thinks that's part of it. Joe lives right around the corner, next to the high school which used to have room about the size of the gym now. This was a two-lane road, really rural. The bridge was only built 10 years ago. Joe and his sister still have their mother's house in Oklahoma. They go there as often as they can. He also has her '88 Cutlass Brougham with the opera windows. Joe's wife knows the guy who built the Comfort Inn. And the medical clinic. And the Convention Center. And the hospital. They went to school together. He even built the real nice hair and massage place. The lady opened a restaurant there with seven types of food, for the seven continents or something like that. It didn't work. The spa did. [By the way, they have specials on Saturdays, and open at 9 a.m. Zelma at the visitors center gave me the brochure.] Most importantly to me, they will be putting a Holiday Inn Express right there. Definitely a return trip to Natchez/Vidalia, although it will be pretty tough to beat Monmouth. Maybe I'll alternate between them. Anyhow, Joe said he never would have thought this place would be anything. It used to be a mat field. What's a mat field? They bring in all these cement trucks, little ones, who put the cement in molds. Back and forth, back and forth. The mats have copper rods in them. All the mats are stuck together with the rods, and then a front-end loader rolls them on to barges. The barges go wherever the river is encroaching on something or the levee has fallen down. The mat field was very hard because all that cracked cement fell down and the cement trucks ran over it. They put a pile of topsoil over it when they built the Comfort Inn and Suites. Joe gave me his last name. It has many sylables, and the last part is land. I was later to find that a lot of people in Louisiana give their full name when asked. Anyplace else, they have always given just their first names. I liked talking to Joe, but I needed to get on the road to hit Mammy's Cupboard promptly at 11 a.m. when they opened. Back across the bridge to Mississippi.
I knew that Mammy's was just out of town, I think 16 miles. I drove for a pretty long time. Pulled over. I don't mind doing this, but it would drive my dad nuts. You'd go deaf hearing him complain about missing a turn. He probably wouldn't turn around. Anyhow, I pulled over and checked my iPad. It says just a few miles out of town. I must have been distracted by Panhandler's Treasures, a big rusty junkyard that happened to have a few really nice iron beds. I have been looking for one, but Woody is not big enough to take it home. Anyhow, how on earth could you miss a giant Aunt Jemima with a restaurant in her skirt? Decided to turn around. Checked mailbox numbers now that I know she is number 55. It is hard to check mailbox numbers going 50 miles an hour, but I did. I was in the 717 area, then going to 690. Right direction. Nearly missed her again, even though she was on my side this time. There was a bit of a paved spot just beyond her. I guess other people miss her too. Got in just on time. Here is Mammy's. I think they must have painted her skin this sort of Creole color, as the dark color could be offensive. There is an article framed inside that says Mammy's Is Stopping Progress. They have a bunch of mammy stuff in the little glass cabinet between the rooms. They all have very dark skin. The two rooms are very small, because how much can you really put in Mammy's skirt?
Billy McGee came over. I wondered how he related to the song. I looked it up. Bobby McGee. Oh. Billy McGee is a bit hard of hearing, but he had a red Ford convertible his senior year of high school. His sister got it after that. Billy is a regular. They brought him his regular meal. You can tell the locals at Mammy's because they don't eat chicken salad. Chicken salad sandwiches are Mammy's specialties. Homemade chicken salad, homemade bread. Billy sat at the table behind me and occasionally interjected questions and memories to my back. I had chicken salad without the bread. You mean chicken salad with crackers. I suppose so. I told her that I heard I need to order dessert when I sit down because you run out of it. Not at 11. Maybe at 1. I had a sweet tea and then realized my error. Tiffiany had told me to make sure I had the blueberry lemonade. The sweet tea had a straight straw, the lemonade a bendy one. I like bendy straws. The waitress came over to refill my tea. No! I'll have a blueberry lemonade. When it came time for a refill of that, I noticed that it was sweeter than the first go round. This is very good, because I've never had store bought that isn't exactly the same wherever and whenever you buy it. I'd need the refill because dessert is very rich, she said. 
The chicken salad is incredible. It's the kind you make for fancy, like for the races. It's all white meat with not too much mayonnaise (I'm not sure it even had any, but something was holding it together), with just the teensy tinsiest bit of slivered almonds. Mine came with ritz crackers and a cup of soup. I forgot how good ritz crackers are. My grandmother always loved them. They were more, well, ritzy than saltines. We usually had saltines unless my father wanted triscuits which we always had on the boat and they were always stale. The oyster crackers were always hard, too. 
Anyhow, I knew to order the hummingbird cake or the lemon ice box cake (I forgot what makes it ice box but I know it's good) or the banana carmel cake. Even though I love lemon desserts (and pineapple upside down cake), I had the banana carmel. They spell it carmel, too, the way it sounds. Caramel, damn spell checker, is not the only spelling. The cake was pie. This is also a good thing, because I love pie. The bananas were sliced the long way but still on the diagonal so that each slice was about three inches long. They weren't too green which taste icky, or too ripe which taste okay but look and feel icky. They were perfect. I wonder how they do that. My bananas are always to green or too ripe although I break the too ripe ones in half and put them in a Ziplock bag in the freezer for the smoothies that Oprah's diet guru prescribes. So. The carmel definitely wasn't from a jar, although I had kind of hoped it was so that I could make the pie at home. The crust wasn't crushed graham crackers but looked like it only lighter. Maybe Nilla wafers. There is whipped cream that is dense, not the airy kind from a can. Sublime, and not too rich for me, waitress. 
At the next table, there were four fat people, a kid and a guy with a video camera. It turns out that they are from channel 5 (an NBC affiliate by the kid's polo shirt). They do a Saturday food run segment. The kid is the reviewer. I'm not sure who the fat people are. He gave it a good review. The camera man asked if he could use me eating as background. He may. A guy in a lime green polo and that weird light hair and skin that are sort of pink grey (flesh-toned sort of like Spencer's of Speidie fame) came over. I'm not sure how on earth he steered the conversation that way, but he blurted out that he has people he never knew he had in Maryland (Woody is plated in Maryland). You know, This Hall and That River and This Famous Relative, etc., etc. I told him to read Michner's Chesapeake. His books are long, he said. I know he couldn't be that old money because his khakis had pleats in them. On my way out, I saw that he is eating with his very old, very proper mother. Sorry, you may not be my weird imaginary boyfriend. We have enough.