Carol and I just got back from a visit to her home town out on the eastern end of Long Island. We were up there for her high school reunion. The number evades me right now, but it is more than five years since she graduated from Greenport High School. There were sixty-four seniors in her graduating class and I have to hand it to them, they do a pretty good job of getting together for their reunions every five years. This year the food was catered by a (relatively recently) married couple in the class. Mary Ann Sledjeski Costello's father owned and operated Porky's Restaurant so she and her husband Tom put together an amazing array of finger foods and hors d'oevres including a fillet mignon on a slice of toasted french bread, crabmeat with dill sauce and poached salmon with cucumber. But my favorite was a dried apricot with walnut and blue cheese topping that was to die for--yummy!
The actual reunion party was held on Friday evening at Founders Landing in Southold overlooking Peconic Bay. It was a long evening as the outsider spouse whose lack of "history" was sometimes painfully obvious. I am sure that anyone who has attended a spouse's reunion can identify with me...the things we do for marital harmony. On the other hand, it is fun to allow yourself to just be the almost invisible and completely insignificant afterthought you are and observe the "process". Here are a few of my observations: Cliques that existed in high school don't go away. Sometimes there are late bloomers that no matter how hard you tried, you could not have predicted how great these people would have turned out and some of the ones who had the world by the ass in high school just haven't been able to do anything with it. And here is the big aha--life happens. Yep, profound ain't it. Good and bad events occur in life that are neither predictable nor preventable, and they make us who we are.
But wait, here is what I really wanted to address in this blog: in a couple of weeks the Cutchogue Volunteer Fire Department is having their annual barbeque chicken dinner fund raiser. According to one of Carol's classmates, they have a world famous "secret" recipe for their barbeque marinade. I understand that Martha Stewart attended the festivities last year, but was not able to get them to share their secret marinade recipe with her. This was said with an absolute straight face, more than a little bit of pride, and complete and total ignorance to the fact that there was a son of the South standing right there in their midst. This is where it gets tricky because no matter how hard I try, I cannot reconcile those two diametrically opposed terms and put them in the same sentence--Yankee and barbeque. Think about it for a minute. See what I mean? The only way I can do it is to say, "Yankees don't know nothing 'bout no barbeque." Chowder? No problem. Pasta? Ok, it works for me. But barbeque? Pllleeeaaassseeee.
The actual reunion party was held on Friday evening at Founders Landing in Southold overlooking Peconic Bay. It was a long evening as the outsider spouse whose lack of "history" was sometimes painfully obvious. I am sure that anyone who has attended a spouse's reunion can identify with me...the things we do for marital harmony. On the other hand, it is fun to allow yourself to just be the almost invisible and completely insignificant afterthought you are and observe the "process". Here are a few of my observations: Cliques that existed in high school don't go away. Sometimes there are late bloomers that no matter how hard you tried, you could not have predicted how great these people would have turned out and some of the ones who had the world by the ass in high school just haven't been able to do anything with it. And here is the big aha--life happens. Yep, profound ain't it. Good and bad events occur in life that are neither predictable nor preventable, and they make us who we are.
But wait, here is what I really wanted to address in this blog: in a couple of weeks the Cutchogue Volunteer Fire Department is having their annual barbeque chicken dinner fund raiser. According to one of Carol's classmates, they have a world famous "secret" recipe for their barbeque marinade. I understand that Martha Stewart attended the festivities last year, but was not able to get them to share their secret marinade recipe with her. This was said with an absolute straight face, more than a little bit of pride, and complete and total ignorance to the fact that there was a son of the South standing right there in their midst. This is where it gets tricky because no matter how hard I try, I cannot reconcile those two diametrically opposed terms and put them in the same sentence--Yankee and barbeque. Think about it for a minute. See what I mean? The only way I can do it is to say, "Yankees don't know nothing 'bout no barbeque." Chowder? No problem. Pasta? Ok, it works for me. But barbeque? Pllleeeaaassseeee.
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