Email and grits

The vernal is equinoxing, which means that it’s time for some spring cleaning. Don’t worry, this will be a mere dusting. We won’t move any furniture. After all, my ’70s vintage beach chair, with its frayed nylon webbing, loose pop rivets, and oxidized aluminum tube-frame, has got plenty of life left in it.

The first order of business is to tidy up an email issue. I discovered that some email was sliding down the garbage disposal before I got to take a bite of it. This was because I tried to improve my efficiency by using the power of automation. Unfortunately, my power of knowing-how-to-set-things-up-correctly was somewhat lacking.

Before you start calling me a bonehead, I’ll note that not all of my email was routed to the shredder. As I understand the situation, only email that contained vowels was destroyed.

Anyway, if you sent me an email but didn’t get a response, don’t sulk. Just resend.

And now I’ll tidy up a couple of holdovers from earlier columns, so we can close the books on winter and enjoy spring’s fresh promise.

Last week’s screed pondered using eight verbs as a starting point for grappling with a foreign language. The verbs were: to be, to have, to go, to know, to speak, to like, to want, and to understand. Here at the Tribune, somebody mentioned an essential verb that merits inclusion: the verb “to do.” That’s a worthy addition indeed. Consider it added.

And let’s offer a toast to the newcomer. “To do” is pretty much the slip-joint pliers of the verb world. Even when it’s not the ideal fit, it’s often times good enough to get the job done.

Of course, if someone ever lifts the hood on the great grammar machine, only to discover that the bolt-heads have all been rounded off, I guess they’ll know who the culprit is.

Meanwhile, I heard from someone who is going to take up Vietnamese via self-study, which, to use a highly technical linguistic term, is totally cool. I’ve also known a few people who steered for Vietnam from Saipan, but I haven’t heard from any recently.

Speaking of steering, we’ll veer toward another holdover topic, namely the great American road trip. After I offered some notes on the gig in February, I found that I had infected myself with White Line Fever. The highway beckoned.

So my wife and I flew to New York, picked up an old car that nobody wanted, and took a meandering 16-state drive that ended at the Pacific’s waters.

We dawdled in the South as much as possible. Sometimes dawdling was the only thing we could do, since a big snowstorm hit areas that weren’t accustomed to such weather. But that was fine with me, it was just more time to sit around and eat grits. And if there’s one thing I do better than sitting around, it’s eating grits.

As for describing grits, well, I’ll say it’s kinda’ sorta’ like the corn version of congee. This isn’t a good enough description to satisfy anyone, but nobody has offered me a better description, either. So let’s just leave congee out of it, since congee isn’t the point.

Grits is the point. And grits has to be prepared correctly (both in the mill and in the kitchen) in order to unlock its true potential. This topic doesn’t have a large footprint, since grits is largely, maybe even exclusively, a vestige of the American South.

A waiter in Tennessee shared his recipe with my wife. I have subsequently been generous enough to offer myself as a testing platform for the process, and, as a result, I’m locked into a darned good grits situation now. We’ll resupply via a product mailed from a mill in South Carolina.

On a more general road trip note, I noticed a few trends, all of them good.

For example, the number of comfortable, mid-tier hotels looks to be increasing. Likewise, I saw a lot of fresh new hotels under construction, even in fairly sleepy areas that you wouldn’t think could support such action.

Meanwhile, the truck stops of old have often been gentrified into several national brands that offer the vacationing car driver a family-friendly setting of food (basic, I’ll admit), convenience stores, and good coffee.

There are many ways to wander the roads, but in my dotage I’m happy sticking to the big highways for most of my miles, then branching off to selected back-road routings for areas of interest.

Overall, then, for the driver, I think it’s never been easier to get around, and cheap gas (we often paid about $2.15 a gallon) made things even better. So I enjoyed soaking up all that I can, while I can.

Well, that about wraps things up. Now that I’ve done my spring cleaning for this space, I’m ready to slump back down in my beach chair, update my photo album, and consider that I might be the only guy in the entire world having grits and bulgogi for lunch today.