South Toward Home Read online

  Wednesdays were the days when we were bused into town for internships. In our junior year we all worked on Capitol Hill; in our senior year, we were supposed to know what we wanted to be when we grew up, so I worked at the Washington bureau of Newsweek, then owned by Katharine Graham, a Madeira alum who totally got the hang of our founder’s dictum. On those days, the style we most emulated was that of a thirty-five-year-old—the better to enable us to order martinis during our lunch breaks. So dramatically different was my own appearance that when I ran into my photography teacher in Lafayette Park, he had no idea who I was.

  Let me pause and say here that I am not necessarily proud of some aspects of my school career. And I should hasten to reassure prospective Madeira parents that I would have lasted about an hour and a half under the current school rules. It’s a miracle I lasted then—when I attended a school function a year after graduation, the dean of students, Jean Gisriel (known universally as Miss Giz), stuck her formidable face about two inches in front of mine and said, with a mixture of profound disgust and surprisingly raw frustration, “I never could get you. I never could.”

  Still, Miss Giz and the rest of our leaders (with the notable exception of Jean Harris, the murderous headmistress who arrived my senior year) managed to instill Miss Madeira’s core beliefs into us all. And the school itself is a prime example of holding it together in the direst of circumstances. After Mrs. Harris was arrested for shooting her ex-lover the Scarsdale Diet doctor, Herman Tarnower, almost every newspaper in the country identified her as the headmistress of the “posh” Madeira School. My mother was appalled, and fears were rife that applications would all but cease. But my father, as usual, got it on the money: “Every redneck in America is going to want to send their kid to that ‘posh’ place.” Sure enough, applications surged.

  The school is still all girls and still thriving, and I am forever grateful for my time there and what it taught me. Not least of which is how to hold on tight and fake it during those trying stretches when functioning—and finishing—are not necessarily assured. To that end, I will repeat the line I chose for my senior yearbook page, not from Miss Madeira, but from Andrew Jackson: “You are uneasy; you’ve never sailed with me before, I see.”

  New Year, Old Habits

  Every New Year I meet friends at my mother’s house in Seaside, Florida. On New Year’s Eve I make Lee Bailey’s Pasta with Golden Caviar and on New Year’s Day I make black-eyed peas with andouille, and on both occasions we drink lavish amounts of Veuve Clicquot provided by my great pals Joyce and Rod, who are possessed of a seemingly bottomless cache. Then, on January 2, pretty much everybody in town packs up and moves out, leaving the dog and me to get on with the real business at hand: my annual attempt at accomplishing two very important missions. The missions stay the same because I never actually accomplish them. What happens instead is that I reread all the John D. MacDonald and Robert B. Parker paperbacks in the house, sleep, walk the dog, and sleep some more. But I digress.

  Back to the missions. First I endeavor to find inner peace and learn to breathe by booking a massage every day and signing up for yoga, a practice in which I last engaged the summer before my fortieth birthday, well over a decade ago. Last year I got as far as the first massage. The masseuse rubbed some oil on her hands and then she stroked my face and told me to “let go of all that which does not serve you.” This woman is really, really nice and gives one of the best massages I’ve ever had, but in the immortal words of my friend Rick Smythe, “Naw, that ain’t gonna happen.” And it certainly is not going to happen in ninety minutes, or even in ten ninety-minute sessions. When I finally stopped laughing, I got completely freaked out by all the stuff I tote around in my head and heart that does me absolutely no good, and then I realized it wasn’t even a metaphor.

  Which leads me to the second mission: to go through the ever burgeoning amount of actual tote bags containing all the work I meant to finish, mail I meant to answer, and magazine articles I meant to read during the previous twelve months (although at this point, it’s really more like seventy-two). Last year, I took a whopping eleven bags with me and then I brought them all back home. Currently, they are stashed beneath the desk at which I am typing, ready to be reloaded into the car for the annual trip. In 2009, I left a particularly heavy bag in my Seaside bedroom with the firm intention of coming right back and dealing with it. I didn’t, of course, and now I have no idea what’s inside, but on top there’s a September 1998 New York Review of Books with a cover story on Elizabeth Hardwick by Joyce Carol Oates, which means that I’ve been carrying it around for fifteen years and three months. It would take me maybe twenty minutes to read the essay, but now it’s become a Thing, a reminder of my almost pathological procrastination and countless other inadequacies and of Oates’s own terrifying productivity. She has written seventy-eight pieces for the New York Review; I have written two. She is also the author of more than forty novels and a whole bunch of poems and short stories, none of which I have read, and she also teaches. At Princeton.

  So this year, I’m changing the plan. I’m going to read the damn Joyce Carol Oates story and then I’m going to dump out the remaining contents of the bag and all the other bags too. If I weren’t sure I’d be breaking some town ordinance, I would set fire to it all. Next I’m going to dump out the electronic tote bag that is my email inbox, in which I have 25,652 new messages. A few months ago they were down to a modest 4,000, but then my computer got hacked and the nice man in India to whom I paid five hundred dollars to retrieve my lost emails retrieved every single one I’d received since 2008. At first I was going to make them another mission—I’d go through all the missives from the past two or three years and respond. Because when I get an email, unless it’s a life-threatening one from one of my editors, including the fearless (and astonishingly patient) leader of the magazine for which I write these columns, I rarely reply. What I think is this: “Man, I need to take more than two seconds to craft an answer, so I’ll save it and jump back on it in just a little bit,” and then I never do.

  I have lost out on potentially lucrative speaking engagements and festive parties and made a whole lot of people mad or at least a little perplexed. This week, for example, I ran into a very nice man, an orthopedic surgeon from Chattanooga who gently reminded me that I’d failed to respond to the email he’d sent two years earlier asking for my grillades recipe. Naturally, I didn’t remember the email or even the brunch I’d given where he’d tasted the grillades in question. This was a screw-up of many dimensions. First of all, it’s always good to have a top-notch ortho man in your list of contacts. You never know when or where you might break a leg. Also, it would have been, at a minimum, polite of me to get back to him. Finally, since I often write about food for a living, it’s not a bad thing to have people in various cities around the country talking about the tastiness of my grillades.

  So, in this space, I’m answering his email. As for the rest of you, sorry, but I’m deleting all the others. Then I’m making two resolutions. I’m going to answer my email. When it comes in. And I’m throwing out all my tote bags. If I don’t have them, I can’t fill them up.

  Grillades

  SERVES 8

  Seasoning mix

  1 tbsp. salt

  1½ tsp. onion powder

  1½ tsp. garlic powder

  1½ tsp. cayenne

  1 tsp. white pepper

  1 tsp. sweet paprika

  1 tsp. black pepper

  ½ tsp. dry mustard

  ½ tsp. dried thyme

  ½ tsp. gumbo filé

  For the Grillades

  2 lbs. boneless veal or pork shoulder, cut into thin slices

  1 cup all-purpose flour

  7 tbsp. vegetable oil

  1 cup chopped onions

  1 cups chopped celery

  1 cup chopped green bell peppers

  2 tsp. minced garlic

  4 bay leaves

  3 cups dark chicken, veal, or beef stock


  ½ cup red wine

  1½ cups canned whole peeled tomatoes, drained and torn into pieces

  1 tbsp. Worcestershire sauce

  1 tsp. dried thyme

  Preparation

  Combine the seasoning mix ingredients in a small bowl. Sprinkle about 2 teaspoons of the mix on both sides of the meat. In a sheet pan, combine ½ half cup of the flour with another teaspoon of seasoning mix. Dredge the meat in the flour shaking off excess. Heat the oil in a large deep skillet or Dutch oven and fry the meat until golden brown about two or three minutes per side. Transfer the meat to a plate or another sheet pan and leave the oil in the skillet over high heat.

  Sprinkle in the remaining half cup of flour, whisking constantly. Continue whisking until the roux is a medium brown, about three minutes. Immediately dump in the chopped vegetables and stir with a wooden spoon until well blended. Add the bay leaves and another two teaspoons of seasoning mix. Continue cooking about five minutes, stirring constantly.

  Add stock to the vegetable mixture, stirring until well incorporated. Add the meat, wine, tomatoes, Worcestershire sauce, and thyme and bring to a boil. Reduce to a simmer and cook for about 40 minutes. Midway through, check for seasonings. You will have some seasoning mix left over, and you may add to taste. Serve hot, with cheese grits.

  Songs of Summer

  In the summer of 1969, Richard Nixon’s first one as president, my father was appointed to the American Revolution Bicentennial Commission (the Mississippi delegation had supported Nixon’s nomination at the Republican National Convention the previous summer, and Nixon was a grateful man). The first meeting was, fittingly, in July, so my mother decided to come too and take my first cousin Frances and me to see the nation’s capital. Frances was two months older than I was—which meant she was already nine and I was eight—but in terms of cool she was light-years ahead. She was taller and thinner and wore her long hair parted in the middle (my mother was forever pulling mine back with a gold barrette). Frances owned a beautiful chestnut pony named Key Biscayne; I rode a fat white mare belonging to my riding teacher, who called her Mary Poppins. On the plane from Nashville, where Frances lived, we wore matching white piqué Florence Eiseman dresses, but mine was accessorized by a lame red, white, and blue scarf in keeping with the spirit of the outing. Frances’s scarf had been designed by über-hip pop artist Peter Max and was a gift from the impossibly gorgeous and twenty-years-younger man Frances’s mother, my aunt Frances, would later marry.

  Anyway, even though we had just completed the third grade, Frances was, naturally, up on everything, including the songs on that summer’s pop charts. Her two favorites were: “Ruby, Don’t Take Your Love to Town,” the (upon grown-up reflection) antiwar song about a paralyzed vet and his philandering woman, written by the great Mel Tillis and made famous by Kenny Rogers and the First Edition; and “Spinning Wheel,” the horn-heavy and comparatively psychedelic tune by Blood, Sweat & Tears.

  It was a fun trip. We had a private tour of the White House, climbed the stairs to the top of the Washington Monument, and were allowed to assist the pretty young woman who ran the gift shop at our hotel, the newly opened Madison. But what I remember most were those two songs and every single one of their lyrics, which Frances sang pretty much nonstop. She sang them to the tourists while my mother paddled us in a boat around the Tidal Basin; she sang them from the backseat during the entire car ride to Colonial Williamsburg. I am confident that my mother still shudders at the sound of the opening chord of each, but to me they will forever be symbols of that summer and how much I adored my now departed cousin.

  I mourn Frances every day, but I also mourn those time-specific singles that would become the anthems and/or background music of each season. They were like the lead characters in Don Henley’s addictive “Boys of Summer”: You know they’re coming, you can’t wait for their arrival, they mark your experience like nothing else, and then they’re gone. Songs are still released every summer, of course, but unless they were played on one of the three channels I listen to most on SiriusXM, I couldn’t possibly tell you which ones were most popular last year. But without looking it up, I can tell you right now that Bonnie Raitt’s “Something to Talk About” was released in May 1991—it was my first, very memorable, summer in New Orleans and I was up to the same thing she was.

  The thing—and the shame—is, it could be my song again this summer, and so, for that matter, could “Ruby” (though I think I’ll pass). On any given day I can listen to either or both on my laptop, my phone, or in my new car that’s tricked out with Sirius and Pandora and God knows what else (I have yet to read the manual). But if the songs of summer can be whatever you want them to be, those three supercharged months—marked by freedom and possibility and some life-changing moment of love or lust or longing for something you might not even know yet—won’t be nearly as vividly defined or so accurately placed in time. I want (need) a song to immediately dial up what I wore and whom I loved, what I drove and what I dreamed about. A sound track lends even potentially fleeting moments an indelible quality not unlike a movie scene. The songs meant that everybody had a reel.

  Herewith I offer a handful of highlights from my own reel, which, with a notable exception, makes an excellent summer playlist:

  “Band of Gold”

  FREDA PAYNE

  It’s 1970 in Nashville. I shuttle between my grandparents’ house and that of Aunt Frances, who is not much focused on her children during that summer. Frances and I spend most nights on cots from the Army-Navy store in what was once our backyard dollhouse, smoking cadged Maryland 100s cigarettes and burning incense to mask the smell. We have a hip new digital clock radio and roll the dial back and forth between WMAK and WKDA. “Ride Captain Ride” is Frances’s favorite and I don’t dare tell her I think it might be the worst song ever recorded. Instead, I can’t get enough of the seriously great “Band of Gold,” the favorite of Ernestine Turner, my grandmother’s cook, who I adore at least as much as Frances. We run errands in Ernestine’s Chevy Nova and sing it at the top of our lungs, along with Joe Cocker’s excellent version of “The Letter” from the same summer (Ernestine, having ditched her husband, and her own band of gold, is now dating a postman). Thirty-two years later, I’m lucky enough to be a guest at Liza Minelli’s ill-fated wedding to the late producer David Gest. Since he specialized in comeback acts, the reception’s musical guests (Petula Clark, the surviving members of the Fifth Dimension, B. J. Thomas, the reunited Doobie Brothers, Billy Paul) play what is essentially a list of the songs of summers past, including “Band of Gold,” sung by Freda herself. I shed a tear for Ernestine and cannot believe my luck.

  “Mercy Me (The Ecology)”

  MARVIN GAYE

  It’s 1971 and Aunt Frances has married the man who is now my Uncle Mike. He drives a vintage forest green Mercedes (the first I’d ever seen) and his presence in our family ups Frances’s cool quotient even higher. When “Mercy Me,” which spends two weeks at the top of the August charts, comes on the radio, he explains to us what the word “ecology” means. We are enthralled.

  “Cowgirl in the Sand”/“Love the One You’re With”

  CROSBY, STILLS, NASH & YOUNG

  It’s 1974 and Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young have reunited for an epic tour. By now I have my own stereo and I’m especially in love with Stephen Stills and Neil Young. Frances is visiting us in Mississippi and we convince my mother to take us to Memphis with my best friend Jessica to see CSN&Y perform in a stadium that no longer exists. Spoiled, protected, and ridiculously bourgeois, we manage to fill a thermos with Kahlua, the only booze on my parents’ bar we knew they wouldn’t miss. We’d not yet become acquainted with the recreational drugs we saw the folks around us partaking of, but in our huaraches and gauze Indian shirts, we hoped desperately that we fit in. Jesse Colin Young and Santana opened and it remains one of the best concerts I’ve ever seen.

  “Muskrat Love”

  CAPTAIN & TENNILLE

  It’s the
summer of 1976, a month before another Republican National Convention is going to decide between President Gerald Ford and Ronald Reagan, former governor of California. Mississippi is the last uncommitted delegation and my father, its chairman, is a mighty popular man. He and my mother are invited to the White House for the State Dinner in honor of Queen Elizabeth and Prince Philip, which is not, I assure you, the reason why he ultimately cast his vote for Ford. My mother, who is wearing a diamond necklace my grandmother has sent in a box on the bus from Nashville, sits next to Bill Blass and gives Cary Grant directions to the loo. The dinner is in a tent over the Rose Garden and the menu features California wines, New England lobster, and a peach ice cream bombe. Everything is perfect except, unbelievably, Captain and Tennille have been asked to entertain. I cannot imagine what the queen made of this song, complete with the synthesizer sound effects of the muskrats mating.

  “Too Long at the Fair”

  BONNIE RAITT

  Bonnie’s second album came out in the summer of 1972, but it doesn’t have pride of place in my eight-track tape deck until the summer of 1976, my first behind the wheel of a car. Every song is perfect (including Jackson Browne’s “Under the Falling Sky”), but this one best conjures the lost love and heartbreak the aforementioned Jessica and I both thought we’d already suffered. It would be awhile before we knew the real thing, but in the meantime we could throw back the top of my navy 1967 Mustang convertible, crank up Bonnie, and drown our overblown teenage sorrows with an under-age six-pack of Miller ponies.

  “Miss You”

  THE ROLLING STONES

  This song is released in May 1978, the same month I graduate from high school and is played on an almost continual loop at the late and much lamented One Block East, one of the world’s greatest ever bars. My male running buddies and I play a happy hour drinking game that involves a pitcher of beer, a lit cigarette, and a dime, and take great pleasure in mimicking Mick’s high-pitched chorus. Eleven years later, I’m about to get married and the same gang offers to reprise the song as an all-too-fitting recessional in the church. That’s not why I end up calling off the wedding, but the cancellation coincides with my favorite song of that particular summer (1989), Mary Chapin Carpenter’s “Quitting Time.” Most people treat me like I have a brain tumor (Newsweek has just come out with a cover citing a study saying women who aren’t married by age thirty have a greater chance of being killed by a terrorist than tying the knot—and this is when there weren’t many terrorists). Meanwhile, I’m juking up and down the streets of Manhattan with “Quitting Time” on my Walkman. The one person who articulates what I felt—better, even, than Carpenter—is my father’s good friend John Alsop. When I call him with the news, he says, simply, “Relief’s a hell of an emotion, isn’t it?” Yep, it is. Every time I hear that song, I still feel a refreshing surge of it, and every time I hear “Miss You,” I crack up over the vision of that motley would-be nuptial choir. It’s great to be both seventeen and twenty-eight again. I remember exactly how it felt.