New Beginning

The first thing I put into my Pie Hole on my first day of involuntary unemployment was a double espresso, made at 5:07 a.m. using some Double-French Roast coffee that my friend Waynette brought me from San Barbara Roasting company. It certainly worked, even at that unholy hour–at which I’d risen to go squirrel hunting. Shooting at rodents somehow seemed like an apt beginning to this first day of, as they say, the rest of my life.

Beginning a new blog also seemed apropos, especially one in which you get me instead of one of my old barbecue personas,“> Professor BBQ:

I was impressed with our forward motion. My friend Joe Montgomery and I had spent the previous night tasting no less than five wines from Grove Vineyards for my column and eating some marvelous Ossa Bucco that Anne had made from beef shanks and three huge beef ribs (hey, ossa means bones, bucco means damn good, right? Who needs veal?) As my daddy used to say to my sister Betty and I after we’d finished another marvelous meal that my momma had fixed, “Aren’t you glad we married her.”
Those words still hold. I am. Both of them.
Sitting in the woods with my trusty .22 with Lyman peep sights before light even thought about shining on the tops of the trees was nothing short of exhilarating. Anne had said to bring back no more than six squirrels and had promised to chicken-fry them — with gravy, of course. As the sun just began to touch the highest treetops, roosters and jay birds competed to see who could make the rudest sounds (Jays won, of course). A chatty hawk decided to demonstrate its most blood-curdling noises, assuring that every squirrel in the county either stayed in its nest or plastered itself to the trunk of the nearest tree for the next hour. There was plenty of action without the squirrels. Dried, wrinkled beech leaves quivered everywhere and nut hatches and woodpeckers worked non-stop to demolish a tree trunk right smack in front of me. After a while I saw what I’m almost sure were four sandhill cranes flying overhead. Who needs blood sports with entertainment like that?
Coming up six squirrels short of our quota, Joe and I settled for smoked sausage, gravy and eggs at Bob’s in Madison , although the brains and eggs were tempting.

You gotta love a place where it only costs 35 cents to add gravy to your biscuit, though I ordered a whole bowl so I could dip to my heart’s content.
The rest of the day I spent, as my cousin Reid predicted I would, filling up my time with this and that — and eating a whole lot better tthan if I’d been at work — feeling as if I’d accomplished as much as any other day, which I’m coming to realize is what self-validation is all about.