Our place no longer

Most of us have our favorite spots to eat, drink and be merry.
If you’re lucky, there’s good food and plenty of it, and the atmosphere’s just right.
For a family, it’s a place where you can bring the kids and not feel like you’re breaking a cardinal rule.
It’s a place where you can find chicken fingers and fries and grown up food too.
It’s a place where you fit in when you walk through the door, a place where you’ll find your pants don’t fit when you walk out.
But it’s just a restaurant, right?
I used to think so.
I ate at “our place” in Jonathan’s home town almost once a week, even had my wedding reception in the back room.
A connection was made, I guess.
But when we moved back to New York, I found another place for Italian fare.
Ah, but you know I’m going somewhere with this.
It’s true.
I fell for a restaurant here in Sullivan County in the way that you don’t just fall for a place to eat.
Since Kevin McElroy (and at the time Erin Burgess) opened 27 Main Street here in Callicoon, I found out what it was like to eat at a restaurant more than twice in one week without feeling like a glutton.
I learned what it’s like to have “your table” and “your waitress,” to have “your special” made just the way it’s always done.
For the first time in my life, calls to a pizzeria for “a large pie, half ham, half mushrooms and make sure the two don’t touch” weren’t answered with “lady, are you crazy?”
Instead through the receiver I’d hear a faint voice yelling across the kitchen, “tell Sager it’ll be all ham ’cause she’s going to eat some meat!”
“Oh yeah,” I’d yell back through the phone, the poor waitress who’d answered covering her ear. “Make me McElroy!”
Opening the box later, I’d discover a neat dividing line across the pie with Jonathan’s ham kept squarely to one side – just the way I like it.
You could call it customer service, and yes, I suppose it was.
But I have yet to see a commercial on television for a place that offers to keep an obnoxious toy hamster behind the counter because the customer’s daughter likes it.
Or a place that allows that daughter to play the hamster’s ear-grinding song over and over and over and over and over . . .
Sunday afternoon, Jillian raced to the back of the restaurant to claim her small cup of cheese from Diane and a small cup with a make-shift straw/lid combination from Amy.
While I spent one last lunch at 27 Main with my friends, she threw breadcrumbs to the birds from the back porch and gathered fistfuls of flour from a tray set aside just for her to decorate both her face and the floor.
Slip-sliding in her Crocs with reckless glee, she had to know it was her last hurrah.
Sullivan County is chock full of restaurants, a few good ones, too.
There’s mouth-watering spinach pie in one corner, sinful cinnamon bread in another.
But the Sullivan County I love doesn’t just have places to eat. It’s a place that feels like it’s my community.
It wasn’t about the food – although I’m a sucker for his pizza. Kevin, you made a community in a little hole in the wall in my hometown.
Looks like the new owners will have some big shoes to fill.

A ‘deer’ moment in time

I felt a bit guilty parked in the middle of the road, leaning precariously across Jonathan’s lap, my lens pointed out his open window.
I was – technically – doing the very thing I’ve often criticized.
In my defense, it was a back road.
For that matter, it was “my” back road, the rarely traveled dead end where I learned to toddle and ride a bike, where I skinned my knees countless times and first climbed behind the wheel with my father encouraging me “just a little bit more, come on, it’s OK to push it above 5 mph.”
And this was one of those “chances of a lifetime,”
I’d slowed, at first, because the mother deer and her fawns were standing too close to the road for my bumper’s comfort.
With a definite awareness of the effect my insurance premium can have on the bottom line of my checking account, I wasn’t taking any chances.
Jonathan and I waited patiently for mama and babies to scamper across the road to the safety of the river.
But they didn’t.
After sizing me up, the doe had apparently decided my Grand Am was nothing compared to the downed apple tree branch she’d found for her flock to feed on.
She proceeded to crunch noisily at the fruit, her eyes fixed on Jonathan in the passenger’s seat.
Putting the car in park, I reached carefully for my camera bag on the backseat (a reporter has to be prepared, after all), and slowly but deliberately switched off my lenses.
Dropping my shutter speed and adjusting my aperture – I wasn’t going to chance a flash – I leaned across the gear shift and Jonathan.
Snap.
I caught Mama, flies buzzing her head as she lifted a juicy morsel from the ground, two leaves hanging from her snout.
Click. Click.
Her babies – first one, then the other.
My elbow nestled somewhere in Jonathan’s chest, my ears listening for motorists who’d expect me to move, I snapped furiously for a full minute or two before Mama stood up.
Flicking her ears furiously – back, then forward – she stared farther up the road.
Jonathan had just noticed the same thing Mama Deer was eyeing.
“There’s a dog,” he whispered gently in my ear.
Before I could swing my camera in the other direction, she was off, her white tail bouncing into the dark depths of the trees.
Her babies took a few more bites at the apple before they – too – took off into the evening.
Bounding into my parents’ home minutes later with my camera in hand, I had one of those déjà vu moments in reverse.
I was a young child again, sitting beside my brother in the rear seat of my mother’s Chevy Blazer, parked in the middle of our dead end road.
Her window down, she pointed to a family of deer mere feet from her driver’s side mirror.
“Look, guys,” she whispered. “Can you see it?”
She spoke in the awe-struck tones of a city girl turned country, to two country kids who were bored to tears, two kids who saw the four-legged creatures outside our windows as everyday as white bread.
“Uh huh,” we told her. “Let’s gooooooo.”
Disappointed, she did.
But Sunday night, she picked up my camera for a look-see just as quickly as she stopped that old blue Blazer more than a decade ago.
And to her credit, she scrolled through them all with that same glee.

Lessons Better Late than Never

It can be a bit awkward when you run into one of your former teachers.
Out of hundreds of students, you wonder, will they remember me?
Maybe, you think, I should save them the embarrassment of trying to conjure up a name to go with the face and keep on walking.
Then again you ponder, there’s the other side of the coin. Will they remember me all too well?
Much grayer and shorter than you remember, for a split second your old teacher can turn right before your eyes into a mirror of long exorcised demons.
Childhood pranks forgotten the day after detention swim into your brain.
A sense of utter shame fills your stomach to bursting.
Whether you did it on school grounds or not, you ask yourself, was that really me?
Probably.
Now I don’t mean me, of course, but people I know!
You know, the type of kid who would lock the classroom door and play dumb.
The kind of kid who would switch seats with a friend just to confuse the substitute.
The kid who practiced setting paper towels alight during science experiments with the Bunsen burner or glued… well, anything to anything.
You know the type – under 18, incorrigible.
Pretty normal, overall.
Of course now that you’re well past 18, there’s always the quick once over of one’s self brought on by a run-in with your one-time educator.
Do I measure up, you wonder.
Was I one of their success stories?
Intent on proving you’re not that same doofus who couldn’t wrap her head around an isosceles triangle, you stand up tall and put on your best manners.
You smile your most charming smile, slip the stick of chewed up bubblegum beneath your tongue, discreetly tuck your shirt into the waistband of your pants.
“Hello, ma’am.”
It doesn’t matter how old you are, your teachers will always be that much older.
And at 25 or 52, you’ll still feel compelled to address them as formally as was once required – in the days when you so longed to drop “Mr.” and “Mrs.”
The greeting doesn’t come easy either.
You have to get past that frozen deer-in-the-headlights feeling that you forgot to finish your homework last night.
You rack your brain.
What happens if I get a pop quiz on subjects long relegated to the “useless knowledge” file in my brain, squished between the combination to my high school gym locker (19-9-35) and the theme song to Friends?
Quick.
The value of “Pi” is 3.14159; Avogadro’s number has something to do with gases in chemistry, and every sentence should have a subject and a predicate.
Phewwww.
Don’t be surprised if you feel a jerking in your shoulder region – teachers are used to arms raised without thought or meaning.
Just keep your eyes facing front, say “may I” instead of “can I” and “is” not “like.”
Keep that chair on all fours, and for goodness sake, use your 2-inch voice.