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milk at the Indian restaurant
Wednesday, May 22 2002setting: five miles south of Staunton, VirginiaMy health and the weather were better today and I was able to go outside and enjoy the marvelously trashless woods across the street. I always bury something in the ground whenever I go there, though it needs to be stressed that I don't just bury time capsules.
In the evening the whole family went out to eat at Maharaja, the Indian restaurant on Greenville Road. Before leaving, a made a few basic hygienic demands of my brother Don. I'm a worldly, civilized person these days, having lived in the two biggest cities in the most powerful nation on Earth. I'm no longer comfortable going out to eat with people who don't care what they look and smell like. At first my demands were pretty basic: please change that stained and smelly sweatshirt and for the love of God don't wear those sweat pants. But then, when Don saw me shaving, he expressed interest in perhaps shaving himself. The only problem was that he'd never shaved before. Not willing to miss a golden opportunity, I volunteered to shave him myself, and he was agreeable. Mind you, my razor was a simple detached safety razor head (I couldn't find a matching handle to mount it on), but I did a pretty damn good job nonetheless, not nicking Don's face even once as I shaved away weeks of wiry reddish growth - everything except his sideburns. Don and my parents were most impressed with the results. For his part, Don couldn't stop running his hands over his newly-barren face.
At Maharaja, everything went well, with remarkably little embarrassment except for when Don decided to order a glass of milk to go with his barbecue chicken (the nearest thing he could find on the menu to conventional American cuisine). Don doesn't drink alcohol (he has never drunk alcohol except as an infant), though (like most American kids) he usually drinks some sort of soft drink when he eats out. I don't know what possessed him to order milk; perhaps he's on his idea of a health kick, one that doesn't consider cholesterol a vice. In any case, it was immediately clear that our Indian waiter had never been asked for milk before. At first he wanted to know if Don wanted sugar in his milk. No, he didn't. Later, returning to our table, our waiter asked if Don wanted his milk served warm. No, he wanted it cold. At about this point my mother (Hoagie) began asking questions of our waiter that seemed to reflect a certain provinciality with regard to Indian cuisine and I found myself involuntarily elbowing her. Eventually the milk came out, presented in a tall glass tumbler. There must not have been anything funny about it because Don drank it without complaint.
Hoagie made the mistake of ordering her shrimp dish at "medium" hotness, something her New England clam chowder palette should have warned her about. When it came out, she found it inedibly spicy, but there was no recourse to desert since that is most definitely not a subcontinental specialty. All was not lost, however. I told Hoagie to take the shrimp home and try it tomorrow, that the spices would mellow considerably overnight. [This is indeed what happened and she was able to greatly enjoy the shrimp the next day.]
Hoagie with one of her sandstone turtles today.
Turtles made by Hoagie from sandstone cobbles.
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