my last restaurant lunch
My
last dining experience with other people was just the past Thursday, March 12. We had
joined friends Carol Travis and Audrey Stein for a visit at the Los Angeles
County Museum of Art to the Luchita Hurtado show (more about which I will soon
write). It was raining heavily, and despite out intention of traveling a bit
further to one or another of my favorite restaurants—Mandarette or Matsumoto—we
decided on LACMA’s excellent, if somewhat pricey, Ray’s. It was the better
choice certainly given the heavy downpours, and the fact that neither Carol nor
Audrey have ever eaten there. It is one of my favorites, and the waiters, the maƮtre-des
know me well.
I’m not here, necessarily, to talk about
the food. It was as good as always, with Howard ordering up their famous
Margherita pizza, and Carol and Audrey requesting their over-sized, but
delicious salads. Feeling a bit like we were at the edge of The Decameron,
I ordered the far more expensive combination of a gin and tonic and their famed
Agnolotti, which consists of toasted pine nuts, mascarpone, fried rosemary,
brown butter, parmigiano-reggiano, and pumpkin seeds—a truly delicious pasta
that I simply couldn’t resist, particularly given what I internally predicted, that
it would soon be closed.
After a quick, laughingly elbow greeting
we all enjoyed our pleasant lunch, talking about the show we’d just seen, Carol’s
husband Case—who I was shocked to be told had died 8 years earlier, in my mind
it might have been just a couple of years ago—and sharing Audrey’s experiences
of other shows, one of which was Howard’s remarkable “Paper Show” at the Craft
Contemporary museum (formerly the Craft and Folk Museum).
To compensate for my far more expensive
and expansive meal, I determined to pay for the check. But I just couldn’t
regret ordering the more lavish lunch meal. A day or two later, the museum and restaurant
closed until the end of March—which I can only imagine will be much longer of a
time. People are nervous: when I offered my fellow diners a bite of my so very
delicious Agnolotti, they quickly refused, while Howard’s offering up of pizza slices
was easily accepted. Slices are more easily separated, surely, than a
fork-based dish into my tongue had been wandering. I comprehended it without
comment.
People in the elevators these days look
suspiciously at one another. A neighborly friend, wrapped in three bright red
scarves, told me how nervous she was about the events of the novel coronavirus:
after all we are both in our 70s. And all of us have now been told to stay
in-doors for weeks. Even the art of conversation is now perceived as dangerous,
let alone the lovely afternoon luncheon which Howard and I had experienced with
dear friends.
My close-friends Martin Nakell and his
wife Rebecca have reported that they are now teaching on-line from home—individuals
with whom, over long years, I have had so many breakfasts, luncheons, and
dinners in the US and the now plagued Italy. I expressed my feelings, given my
long years of teaching, about the difficulties of reaching out to students through
a computer. Yet, I admitted, perhaps I had been long doing that already on my
several blogs.
All restaurants and bars have now been
closed in Italy, France, and in most major US cities, including New York and
Los Angeles. Social life has come to an end just when we most need it. That
beautiful elderly friend in her three red scarves stood at the other end of the
elevator which we shared, clearly a bit afraid of any plague I might be
breeding. “We’re all terrified,” she whispered.
Yes, we all are terrified, but perhaps we
should and could be less so just by sharing with one another. I’m glad to have
ordered that Agnolotti, and truly wish the others in our small, last time party—at
least for a while—might have tasted it.
At 72, with a long history of respiratory
diseases (a childhood of Bronchitis, and two cases of Pneumonia, as well as an autoimmune
response of Psoriasis), I too am a bit scared. But no one can ever take that afternoon
luncheon joy away. The company, the food, the rain were just perfect. Howard
joked that we were going to “swim home” in the downpour to our condominium
across the street. I enjoyed the rain pounding my head like another kind of bathing
we all need to share.
Los
Angeles, March 17, 2020
Reprinted
from Green Integer Review (March 2020).