I Remember Nothing [28]
I was stunned. I knew the meat loaf was deteriorating, but a hockey puck? I wondered about our friendship. Had Alessandra not noticed my name was on the meat loaf? What if it were truly my meat loaf instead of one that my name had been frivolously attached to without even asking me? It seemed cruel and insensitive on her part.
That was on a Saturday night. On Monday I got an e-mail from my friend Sandy. It said: “Re: Monkey Bar meat loaf. Sue them.”
So I wrote an e-mail to Graydon, quite a long thing saying that while I did not mean to make trouble, I was compelled to tell him that people were talking about the meat loaf, and what they were saying wasn’t good. He e-mailed back to say that they were way ahead of me—they’d just fired the chef and replaced him with the famous Larry Forgione. They’d been unhappy for weeks. The meat loaf was only a symptom.
So Larry Forgione came in and changed the menu and the recipe for the meat loaf. It became a traditional meat loaf, tasty and moist, and while it didn’t seem to have a package of Lipton onion soup mix in it, it truly tasted like home. The mushroom sauce was still there, kind of swirling around on the plate, I don’t know why, because this meat loaf didn’t really call for it. But there it was, the food equivalent of a vestigial tail.
I was relieved. I could relax. My meat loaf had been saved, and now I could order some of the other things on the Monkey Bar menu. One of them was a perfect version of Chasen’s chili, served with a corn muffin. It was so heavenly that I decided to be faithful to it for a while. Eventually I noticed that the meat loaf had been downgraded slightly to a Tuesday night special, but I was too busy practicing monogamy with the chili to worry about the meat loaf.
I am writing this because yesterday I went to the Monkey Bar. It was a Tuesday. On the way there, I thought I might check up on my meat loaf. I opened the menu, and before I read a word I somehow knew what I was going to see—or rather, what I was not going to see.
My meat loaf was gone.
Louise’s Sunset Salad was still on the regular menu, but Nora’s Meat Loaf was gone.
It had bombed. There was no other way to look at it.
I asked if anyone had mentioned it now that it was gone. I asked if anyone had complained. I asked if anyone had even noticed. No one has. It’s as if it never even happened.
It’s been replaced as the Tuesday special by spaghetti and meatballs. I ordered it, hoping to discover that a grave injustice had been done, but the spaghetti and meatballs were excellent. I made a small suggestion about the consistency of the grated Parmesan cheese that’s served with them, and I just hope someone listens to me.
Addicted to L-U-V
A few years ago, I stumbled onto something called Scrabble Blitz. It was a four-minute version of Scrabble solitaire, on a Web site called Games.com, and I began playing it without a clue that within one day—I am not exaggerating—it would fry my brain. I’m no stranger to this sort of thing: one summer when I was young, I became so addicted to croquet that I had a series of recurrent dreams in which I was holding a croquet mallet and whacking my mother’s head through a wicket.
The same sort of thing happened with Scrabble Blitz, although my mother, who has been dead for many years, was left out of it. I began having Scrabble dreams in which people turned into letter tiles that danced madly about. I tuned out on conversations and instead thought about how many letters there were in the name of the person I wasn’t listening to. I fell asleep memorizing the two- and three-letter words that distinguish those of us who are hooked on Scrabble from those of you who aren’t. (For instance, while you were not