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vegan food in redneck heaven
Thursday, January 10 2008
setting: rural Augusta County near Staunton, Virginia
The weather was little cooler than yesterday and some rain had fallen during the night, but overall the unusually balmy conditions persisted. When the sun came out our cat Marie was eager to go outside yet again just to sit in the grass. This was proving to be something of a tropical vacation for her; back at home she spends 95% of her time in the bed in the upstairs bedroom.
Gretchen and I returned to Cranberry's in downtown Stauton so we could make a lunch of tempeh wraps. While we were there we stocked up on bulk spices, which proved unexpectedly inexpensive.
Later we walked around the back side of the wharf area, eventually wandering through the Jolly Rogers Haggle Shop (where a set of fireplace tools will cost you $165). I found a rusty old bow saw capable of cutting thicker trees than the $8 saw I'd bought at Sears, but was surprised to find the cowboy running Jolly Rogers had priced it at $18. It was an ugly thing with a plastic handle and a grey steel bow, hardly an antique. Evidently Jolly Rogers considers itself a high end antique store. Gretchen managed to haggle the cowboy down to $12, but I still felt like I'd been ripped off.
Walking around the town, Gretchen commented that Stauton looked like a town that had money. Everything was clean and the buildings were in good repair, with perfect paint jobs. This seemed particularly true to her as we walked past the bottom of Mary Baldwin College after making a loop around the heart of downtown.
At first Pam's Natural Way and then Kroger, Gretchen bought provisions that would allow her to make vegan lasagna. And back at Creekside she set to work while I borrowed one of my mother's old pickup trucks (for some reason she has two; I guess because you can never have too many) to help my brother Don move an old desk from Bob's old auto body garage to Don's new "office" in the trailer. Yesterday I'd been around back of that garage, where a makeshift set of rooms seemed to have collapsed into debris. It had looked like a post-peak-oil suburban ruin. In the garage itself, though, everything seemed to be largely intact. There's a concrete floor in need of heavy sweeping, but if one can stand the occasional flood it looks like a usable space. My mother, who has independently developed a hankering for welding, says she might start using the space as a sort of sculpture studio.
My entire family, including my father, showed up at Creekside to partake in the vegan lasagna. I've mentioned before that I prefer Gretchen's vegan recipe to conventional lasagna, which always seems swamped with cheese. She uses a mix of things, including lots of nutritional yeast, as a sort of cottage cheese subsitute, but truth be known I'd rather not know how she makes it so as to keep it a mystery. It was huge hit with my family and showcased Gretchen's cooking as never before.
Gretchen's reading at Kronos was scheduled for 8:30pm, and both Hoagie and my father planned to attend. I think this was the first time my father had ventured into town since his last medical emergency. He rode with Gretchen, me, and Sally, while Hoagie traveled separately in one of her pickup trucks with Chaps (who is always welcome at Kronos). But while we let Sally run around off-leash, my mother kept Chaps restrained out of concern for those "who don't like dogs." (Gretchen's attitude towards such people is as follows: "Fuck 'em!").
A good crowd showed up for tonight's reading, though a good fraction of it consisted of morbid teenage punks with faces full of piercings and a cliqueishness that kept them from interacting outside their group. Though unpleasant, this is a natural reaction for members of such a visibly-distinctive subculture on this tiny island of Stauntonian enlightenment, surrounded as it is by the wide sea of deepest Redneckistan.
There were a series of poems read by people taking advantage of an open mike (and not all of them were dreadful, though some of them certainly were). Then Gretchen did her piece, which is now so familiar to me that I even know what her inter-poem banter is going to be. Just as she was ending, my childhood friend Nathan VanHooser showed up, having driven the forty miles from Charlottesville. I'd told him about tonight's reading via email, but he's such a harried overworked babydaddy these days that he hadn't even replied.
He, Gretchen, and I walked up to Beverly Street and took a table at the Clocktower Tavern, a surprisingly large venue with a modern dance club in the back. The bouncer at the door insisted on checking our IDs and stamping our hands even though we were old enough to be his polyandrous parents.
Nathan told us all about how he and Janine came to procreate even though they'd initially been dead-set against it. It seems they'd been influenced by all their peers who were dropping babies. Somehow the exposure led to the decision, and once that happened, the mechanistic hand of hormones led them from there. Nathan says that he even feels concern for other parents when he hears about their children teetering on the edge of death, a form of empathy he'd never felt before.
At some point the conversation turned to the battiness of certain women as they age past sixty. I won't say specifically whom we talked about, but suffice it to say that three different women were mentioned, and only one of them was judged to lack a certain uncanny ability to induce cringes with every utterance.
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