EAT HAPPY

CHAPTER ONE    HOW THIS CAME TO BE It’s a usual Wednesday roast chicken night.  Rachel, our youngest and 14-year-old has fallen asleep at 7 p.m. before dinner because she has spent half of the previous night texting her friends or visiting MySpace or Facebook or probably other sites I don’t even know about and she’s exhausted.  When I knocked on her door and asked if she wanted dinner, she grunted.  Let her sleep, I thought that way she’ll be less of a cranky monster in the morning. Her father, Lynn, came home at his usual time (7:35) after leaving the house nearly 12 hours prior (7:20 a.m.) and we proceeded to have the conversation that we’ve been having for the past two weeks.              “Where do you want to go on vacation this year,” I asked.  Again. It's already May.  Usually we’ve planned our summer vacation by February, March at the latest. This is a man who has worked for the same museum for 23 years and gets six weeks of vacation a year, except he hasn’t ever used more than two weeks of vacation in 23 years.  Ok, do the math.  Even back in the 90‘s, I could have bought a small island (perhaps only in upstate New York) if he had quit his job and they had to pay him out for all his accrued vacation time.  He looked at me and then proceeded to tell me this was a busy summer – a few blockbuster shows opening and he really had to be there.  Fine.  Except he couldn’t commit to any date.  It’s not like we had a summer house I could go to, not on his 23 year plus not-for-profit salary. And no, he didn’t have a girlfriend.    In fairness, we had traveled well the last few years, enjoying a few really great trips to Europe with and without the kids. But now the economy sucked and what was once semi-affordable was now outrageously expensive.  I felt like I was pulling teeth trying to get him to commit to some dates together. Any dates at all.  Unfortunately, because of my job, I’m tied into the academic calendar and can really only take chunks of time during the summer. That said, we had reached an impasse after 29 years. I kept asking myself why this was so important to me to vacation together.  Because it’s what we liked to do. Because it was always the best time we had together. Because it got us through jobs that were, well, boring.  So we thought we’d do a road trip - road trips like we did nearly 30 years ago staying in budget hotels but eating in good restaurants with (hopefully) lots of booze and sex thrown in.  Plus, we’d stop to see any new interesting and architecturally significant buildings that had been built along the way.   Lynn, you see, although not a practicing architect, graduated from Syracuse University with a degree in architecture.  So, yes, we travel to eat but more often we travel to see.  Consequently, on our road trips I often find myself visiting off-the-beaten-track office buildings, large scale housing projects and a church or two solely because they’ve been designed by a famous architect.  Did I mention at this writing, gas was $4.55 a gallon? Did I mention after two drinks these days I wanted to go to sleep – for 18 hours? Did I mention I thought I might have to take a second job to keep our teenager daughter supplied with all the hairspray and gel she uses on a daily basis, not to mention the amounts of cash that were flowing out of my bank account so she could “shop” and “eat out” with her friends. Did I mention we have a college-age anarchist son, Nick, who thinks it’s cool to dig in dumpsters for food (and eat it too) that major supermarket chains have thrown out because they have to make room on their shelves for new stuff?   Did I mention in the 29 years we were together Lynn and I had become “foodies”?  Even as we were planning, he kept saying to me, “You’ll have to lower your standards.” He didn’t mean hotels.  He meant restaurants.  I’m not a picky eater, but the last few years I’ve been terribly spoiled.  We’ve spent many a vacation eating at high end restaurants with chefs who have been nominated by the James Beard Foundation or those anointed by the food gods and awarded a Michelin star or two. He reminded me of my own kitchen rule. “Why go out to eat if you can make the same dish at home, for a lot less money?"  I had pretty much followed that train of thought for the past 29 years.  If we were going to spend money to eat out, it damn well better be something I can’t do at home. Regardless of how “budget minded” this vacation would be, I still wanted to eat well.  This road trip would be a challenge.