Feature Story

My  mother’s college roommate called last week. She is 80 years old and, in a wavy voice, she brightly recounted the parties that her mother and my grandmother created for the youth of their community. “Your grandmother’s house was the destination and oh, did they cook for us. We had such fun,” she says, the emotion in her voice compelling.

“Raise your hand if the best meal you’ve eaten in your life was in a Nashville restaurant.”
Ask that of any group of serious eaters, and you’re not likely to get an enthusiastic show of hands. So, if you’re a restaurant reviewer, does that mean you should temper your enthusiasm for local eateries because, overall, they don’t live up to the finest establishments in New York or San Francisco?

I’m sure I could trace my love of food back to childhood, but the challenges related to my relationship with food didn’t become obvious until after I gave birth to my first child.

When I graduated from high school, I weighed about 125 pounds. It wasn’t until I got pregnant with my son that I began to gain weight. And it wasn’t the usual 30 to 50 pounds of pregnancy weight. I gained more than 200 pounds.

If   you’ve read one story about eloping, you’ve pretty much read them all: So-and-so eloped in Hawaii — she wore a gorgeous but simple silk slip dress with flowers in her hair; he wore a linen suit. It was so romantic and spontaneous, and at a mere $7,000, way cheaper! As they exchanged their vows, pulled from the Zen Buddhist Kwan Um marriage ceremony, the setting sun bounced off the duo in a shimmer of camera-ready bliss. Back home, the happy couple dropped a measly $5,000 for a kickin’ party for friends and family.

Call me a cynic, but I’m no believer in love at first sight, or of marriage for its own sake on some predetermined life timetable.

As a little girl I imagined myself wearing a space suit, not a wedding dress. I dreamed of adventure, and I believed that becoming someone’s wife precluded the kind of far-flung escapades I envisioned for myself. I even had a visceral distaste for the word “wife;” it sounded small, like the shrunken world I’d be settling for if I sacrificed my freedom for a relationship.

I was, to a certain extent, misguided.

How often do brides think about the effort, expense, and nerves that their future husbands put into popping the question? And for the truly Southern, can you imagine being the guy and having to ask your (hopefully) future bride’s father for permission to propose? Oy! It’s enough to send you running for the Mason Dixon Line! It does happen, though ... this rite of passage, the “ask for permission” thing, which got me thinking: What is that whole exchange really like? Here we have a side-by-side comparison of how two men say it went down.

There’s something about girlfriends.

I mean the kind of girlfriends who can see you in spandex, with a half gallon of ice cream already eaten and another half on the table, spoon-in and ready. The kind who will tell you, “Yes, you really do look fat in that, but your shoes are fantastic!”

It took me a while to figure this out.

It was her day, but I knew she’d be the first to compliment my dress, my shoes, my hair ... She would hardly notice her own, though she sparkled in a gown of her own design. There she was in satin and silk, the center of attention, and yet, her eyes sought mine like a schoolgirl in search of a good grade. 

The Fates usually arrange their serendipitous witchery during those lonely expanses of time, in some dismal hotel bar or an overnight train across Eastern Europe. Suddenly, you find yourself engaged in intimate conversation with a couple of strangers a few seats down, as if you’d known them all your life. And it’s a conversation you never forget.
For me, it’s happened at a Cleveland airport bar in 1992, a cave-like kebab place in Jerusalem’s labyrinthine Arab quarter in 1989, and the bar at Rumours one quiet weekday night a couple of years ago.

Whenever I said, “Ready or not, here I come,” she was hiding. Whenever I say, “Remember when … ?” she remembers. And, whenever I’d like to forget … she still remembers.

My extraordinary (in every way!), red-headed sister and I shared a bedroom and bathroom for most of our personality-shaping, formative years. We also have a family resemblance — she looks like one side of the family, and I look like the other. Both of us sport small feet, big mouths, and zero patience.