|
|
|
finally in the Paris Review
Monday, September 22 2003
More than two years ago a couple of Gretchen's poems were accepted for publication in the in the Paris Review. Time passed, we got older, we moved upstate, we got married. Gretchen heard that her poems would be published in the summer issue. Summer came, now summer is ending. Gretchen checked the Paris Review's website to see if the summer issue was out yet. Finally, today, she saw that her poems had at last been finally published. Hooray! There's a huge difference between being told your poems will be published in the Paris Review and actually seeing them published. The amazing thing is that Gretchen is actually mentioned on the homepage and not tucked away unnoticed within the term "and others."
We celebrated in the evening by dining out at the Downtown Café, a gourmet restaurant situated at the primary corner in the Rondout district of Kingston. (Gretchen had a coupon she'd won in a silent auction that had benefitted homeless cats.) We showed up before 6pm and were the only diners in the place. It's a tasteful place that takes some risks with colors and succeeds. Gretchen occasionally asks me about a dining room's design mistakes, and usually their obvious, but today when she asked, I couldn't see any. She pointed out some nasty naugahyde chairs I'd overlooked. (I'd seen elegant non-naugahyde chairs at a table closer to me and had incorrectly assumed they were all the same.)
The food was excellent, starting with the delectable garlic bread which was brought to our table gratis. My black bean soup (I got the "small" which was huge.) contained entirely too much parsley, but then I wondered if perhaps my reaction was indicative of remnant provinciality. (Imagine, I said to Gretchen, somebody from Munsey, Indiana digging in at his first Indian restaurant. He'd think the food was so weird that the cooks should be arrested.)
Just before we left, somebody brought in a huge (watermelon-sized) clump of some sort of edible polypore mushroom. Evidently the restaurant features this local fungus in their continuously-morphing menu. This particular clump was so impressive that one of the cooks came out of the kitchen with a Polaroid camera to take pictures of it. I wondered if they wanted any Chicken of the Woods. There's plenty of it along the Chamomile Headwaters Trail.
For linking purposes this article's URL is:
http://asecular.com/blog.php?030922 feedback
previous | next |
