Based on social and other local media reports, folks in and around Mobile had a glorious Christmas Day, with some visiting the skyscraper venues downtown for brunch and holiday beverages, basking in sunshine under mid-seventy degrees of sunshine...
I glazed a turkey breast with herbs and kumquats, and surrounded it with cornbread dressing and corn. I'm not sure why Top Chefs or any of the dozens of other culinary star-finding shows have not just showed up at my door and said "Preston, here's an apron strung in gold. Come with us now - the world need no longer be deprived of your gastronomic skills. Please honor us - the limo is waiting." That's how good my dinner was, but I send a shout out to all the rest of the chefs who posted their genius dishes on Facebook. Nice job guys, keep trying and you will get there...
I went on a Mobile area history tangent yesterday, gleaning little facts here and there on a few subjects, and discovered there is a Little Dauphin Island. Admit it - you didn't know it either. It's a small island off what I guess we can now call Big Dauphin Island, and it was accessible by land until, well, you know the story - Katrina roared in and covered up the path leading to the island. But birders think this is a good thing because bird life has flourished undeterred, undisturbed by the curious pitter-patter of humans with binoculars, pointing, quivering, whispering with excitement, "Look! A Rufous-headed Hornbill!..."
The Battle of Mobile Bay in August 1864 didn't play... There are still several of those ships sitting in Mobile River, including the Tecumseh, which the Smithsonian was going to try and recover but the project never got off the ground and there appears to be no real interest in bringing up this Federal ship that struck a torpedo on approach to conquer Mobile towards the end of the Civil War...You read that right. The unexploded torpedo was in shallow water and the Tecumseh, against orders it is said, unfortunately navigated in that direction. Over 100 men died, with only about 10 making it to safety. The commander of the ship perished when he allowed the ship's pilot to exit the sinking ship first. It is estimated there are at least 4,000 ships sitting on the floor of the Gulf of Mexico. But..in the North Atlantic Ocean in Bermuda are the most ship wrecks - at least 300 succumbed to shallow waters and abundant coral reefs, proving you don't want to mess with the Bermuda Triangle...
Unless you are a Millennial or Gen-X baby, you are familiar with the phrase "Damn the Torpedoes, full speed ahead!" This famous, likely truncated command was said to emerge from the lips of Admiral David Farragut, vis a vis some sort of megaphone as he was attached to the mast of his ship so as to view Mobile from above all the smoke they and the Confederates were creating, and so as to be heard above the lovely noise of war. He had just been told the waters were dotted with unspent torpedoes, and bent on conquering Mobile he hollered his now famous utterance. While his ships didn't take Mobile per se, they caused enough of a ruckus to halt operations on the port itself...the city itself succumbed a few months later as the war came to an end in the spring of 1865...
Enough talk of war, it's a cool, cloudy day after Christmas, a Tuesday that feels like a Sunday, a day after a day that for some reason didn't feel as Christmassy as in the past...but it's okay - there are new things to do, new places to conquer...now we wind down to the New Year, and there are no lack of venues advertising free champagne and the best entertainment in town....a moon pie will drop 34 floors down from the spires of the RSA Trustmark building, and you could or could not be there to catch it. You may have already spent all your New Year's Eve party to the crack of dawn years and now you sit in the recliner, loved ones close by, or by your lonesome with a cat purring nearby or a dog wagging his tail as if he to knows a new year is about to ring in, and sip on a glass of cold Korbel and watch the ball drop on TV in Times Square...honey, what time is it, I can't keep my eyes open much longer...it's almost midnight dear, hang in there just another thirty minutes...
It seems like yesterday when you could pull a pack of cigarettes out of a machine that read" Under age 18 prohibited," but you laughed because whoever was supposed to be guarding the cigarette machine must have taken a smoke break, and for forty cents down dropped a pack of Winston tastes good like a cigarette should...or not...the days when if you wanted to reach somebody you either wrote them a letter or called their land line phone, or stopped by...
This was not the worst year in recent history - that was the year of the pandemic...this was a pretty okay year for many, if not most...at least there will be a lot more people out taking walks, the traditional after Christmas strolls to walk off the turkey, ham, dressing, sweet potatoes, yams, pecan pie, banana pudding, divinity, pralines, green beans, carrot soufflé, corn, sweet iced tea...did I forget anything? I don't know why we get so sentimental on the last few days of the year...is it because we actually made it another year, and now we need to regroup and have a grand plan for 2024, to self-boost ourselves into a new agenda, a refreshed life with resolution and improvements that will make us shine even brighter than the year before...?
But alas, I must close now because the limo is waiting...enjoy this sort of melancholic day....
No comments:
Post a Comment