Comma Dot Comma

It’s time to face the cold hard facts, after a lifetime of denial.

I don’t like lettuce.

Not romaine, not butter, not red-leaf, not iceberg, not spring mix, not arugula nor any of its brethren.

It’s a likeable vegetable. Bright green, low-calorie, easy-to-chew crunchy texture. In high school my brother used to stuff all the leftover salad in his mouth after dinner rather than put it away. I secretly admired him for this.

And I do adore salads. I keep ordering salads at restaurants and buying bag lettuce for home. I don’t mind including a bit of lettuce with each bite of some tossed concoction. But when I get down to that layer where all the other vegetables are mostly eaten, and nothing remains but a deep well of leafy greens, a wave of dismay crashes through my very core. Must I really? I think. Really?

At home I pick cabbage, squash, broccoli, or beans over lettuce almost every time. Maybe one salad, and then the rest of the lettuce goes to slime.

The fact is, I’ve had it with lettuce.

Saturday afternoon in Baltimore. A group of kids roars by on their motorbikes, doing handstands and wheelies. An artist with a cut hand lets us into the abandoned warehouse where the unsplendid poetry reading is. He was prying a glass block out of his porch when the gas inside caused it to explode, but he still seems cheerful. The poets and grad students and poetry lovers drag chairs around while we editors set up the food and drink table. Everybody reads and eats and talks about art and politics and religion and football and baseball and commuting but we’re hungry for real food. How about the Red Square? Three of the members of our group, strangely enough, speak Russian. We head downtown to the basement restaurant where it turns out they are entirely out of borscht. It’s one of those places where the service is so uneven and the food so late in coming that you suspect it might be a front for illegal activities. We note the large fifty-something man with his back to the wall, surrounded by two apparent lieutenants and a pretty woman. What’s their story? There are lots of sequin-clad women around. Then the disco ball starts spinning and two lounge singers get up on stage to trade off Russian Karaoke tunes. The blonde is in a flowy see through shirt and the guy is young but bald with the widest lapels we’ve seen since the seventies. We are all shouting to hear one another, and I’ve pushed the vestiges of my stroganoff into an interesting shape on the plate. Betsy asks for the check. “No! No! You must stay!” says the waiter, plaintively. Much arguing among the poets about whether or not the bill and each of our portions are calculated correctly. Some of us were, perhaps, thrown by the commas in place of decimals. We exit onto the sidewalk and stand around wrapping up half-finished conversations. The most daughty of us officially breaks the group with a wave and a determined march toward her parked car. We disperse.

Well, I had a little crash-and-burn after my trip east. It was great to see folks. Thanks again for rushing back from out of town trips, ducking out of work a few hours early, driving fair distances with small children, feeding me, chauffeuring me around, and otherwise making my visit great.

One thing I didn’t do was maintain my rigorous health regimen to keep a chronic sinus infection at bay (yes, that same one from back in June that two rounds of antibiotics couldn’t subdue). It knocked me flat for a couple days, but now I’m back in the saddle with a killer-diller new antibiotic, hospital strength. I am to get my face scanned by a big machine and also avoid direct sunlight. That could be tough.

Last time I was on antibiotics like this was in the Peace Corps when I got dysentary from eating questionable street food. After you have dysentary for a day, you realize why so many people on that Oregon Trail computer game die of it. Then modern medicine swoops in like a superhero and you can’t believe your good fortune.

A few trip highlights later.