It is a hot June day, and my good friend Mr. Tom Collins is helping me noodle on what might be worth laying out in digital ink for the few, the proud, the loyal regular readers of the Russo Low Life. On the domestic front, things are the usual pleasant shambles. I have just discovered the toddler licking ketchup out of one of those little plastic trays shaped like bottles you get at Chick-fil-A now. (Did they have these when I was a child? I remember ketchup always coming in little bags made of plastic and foil, which would tear open in sometimes surprising and explosive ways.) We have had to turn on the air conditioning, inaugurating four months of penury at the hands of the Baltimore Gas and Electric Company. The grass again, mysteriously, wants mowing.
Your humble correspondent has many and strange tidings to report. Yesterday, Eddie at the Bottom Line cajoled me and an associate into getting the special, a lamb burger, instead of my invariable bowl of chili with cheese and onions. It was fine, but perhaps didn’t quite live up to Eddie’s effusions; it summoned uneasy memories of one of the more shocking dishes I’ve eaten, the Mutton Whopper that graces the menus of India’s Burger Kings. One of the trials for a mleccha in the world’s largest democracy is the relative paucity of red meat, so I thought the Mutton Whopper would give my pining spleen the kick it needed. Maybe, but at what cost? The traditional fixings of a burger are not well attuned to mutton. I stuck to the Chicken Whopper afterwards.
Even in beefier nations, I have found the yen for American fast food inescapable. One of the reasons I have turned out to be a poor traveller is that I am prone to homesickness. When I worked in Turkey, by the end of the summer, every break day found me wandering into the nearest market town to seek a steaming mouthful of America at the local Burger King. Stateside, I eat fast food maybe four or five times a year. Abroad, regular burgers become a matter of sanity.
Happily for the lipid count, I rarely travel now; my passport expired two years ago, and, while I always vaguely mean to renew it, there has been little incentive so to do of late. Toting my delightful but empty-headed children across the world is stressful down at the lizard-brain level, and not just for the expense. Empire of the Sun is, for better or worse, my main point of reference for having kids around in foreign parts. It is not an encouraging text. And that novel’s Jim was at least old enough to make himself understood in English and use a can-opener. If separated from her doting parents, daughter number three, the toddler, would starve as soon as she ran out of already-opened ketchup packets; she is inscrutable in English, and I doubt she is much better in Marathi or Lebanese Arabic.
So we’re back to the domestic front for the foreseeable future. The toddler gave up the ketchup package and went down for her nap agreeably enough, but it is now threatening rain. The grass will have to wait. After refreshing Mr. Collins’s spirits (so to speak), and thereby my own (I’m nothing if not an empathetic fellow), I have decided to bear down on the real business of the afternoon: figuring out which horse to back at Belmont. I’m not much of a gambler; I find table games and poker tedious, and slots positively depressing. Horses, though: That’s the thing. To follow horseracing is to be a habitual optimist, to make a flat refusal to give up on antiquated pleasures just because they’re antiquated. Anyway, Journalism at 8–5 for the carnations seems like a decent bet—and, at this late date, could I make any other? We can spare five dollars for Journalism. (Please subscribe.)
No, home isn’t so bad. Horseracing, beef, Tom Collinses, a ketchupephage daughter, wet grass, reliable (if expensive) electricity coursing through my A/C unit—not so bad at all. And, on those days when I need that little touch of the exotic, a whiff of memory from my globetrotting days, I can always go to Burger King.
