good riddance to the desk potato
In case the headline didn't make it clear, this is a (somewhat meandering) book review.
It’s me! I’m here! Somehow, it’s been 11 long days since I last stormed your inboxes. I can imagine very few of you noticed my absence, but please know it’s been keeping me up at night. At least, it’s been keeping me up on the nights when my actual job hasn’t been keeping me up.
I forget sometimes that there are people here (hundreds of people here, in fact) who don’t actually know me, and some who might not have a clue what I do in my non-newsletter hours. I’m the NFL editor at the Washington Post, which means my head is swimming, if not drowning, for most of January and the first half of February. So that’s my excuse: work, and lots of it.
The only thing I’ve been making time for lately is reading, and I’ve been lucky enough to get some brief periods of calm during what I consider perfect reading weather: unexpected snow. Speaking of perfect: The book I’ve been reading lately, Dwight Garner’s “The Upstairs Delicatessen” comes pretty damn close. The book bills itself as being “on eating, reading, reading about eating, and eating while reading.” If our offline lives were governed by an algorithm, mine would have spit this book straight onto my bedside table.
Garner is the book critic at the New York Times, and he also has a voracious appetite, and those two facts collided to create “The Upstairs Delicatessen.” The book is divided into four sections — Breakfast, Lunch, Shopping, Interlude, Drinking and Dinner — and it follows a winding but coherent path through the three key meals of the day and the best words written about them. The whole thing — the books, the meals, the facts, the touching asides about Garner’s life as a critic, husband and father — has left my brain buzzing.
I learned that Hillary Clinton loves hot sauce and filled the White House cupboards with it. She snacks on jalapeños. I say this apolitically: I sure would love to live in a country with a president who looks hearty enough to withstand even one jalapeño seed.
Speaking of bites that might upset some stomachs, but not mine: I learned about what happens when you boil sweetened condensed milk in its can. Forget water to wine; this sounds like my kind of miracle.
Oh, and I learned a little bit about Joan Didion and sauerkraut. I am someone who wants to know everything there is to know about Joan Didion, so that filled a gap I didn’t know existed.
I also began to wonder about my shortcomings: Should I know how to kill a chicken? Should I aspire to know? Why can’t I bring myself to eat pickles? How will I ever read all the books Garner mentions?
The opposite of shortcoming should be longgoing. Alas, it is strength. And here’s a strength of mine: researching. So when I read that the very newspaper which pays my paychecks — and occasionally keeps me too busy to write this newsletter — once put a graphic headline about pickles in print, I began to dig into every archive I could find. The headline in question — “You can put pickles up yourself” — seemed too good to be true, and I now wonder if it might be. No archive turned up such a story, and Internet suspicion abounds that it is, in fact, an urban legend. Too bad.
Here’s what else feels like an urban legend: the boozy working lunch. I remarked on this back in November, when my brother, husband and I had two martinis each at Commanders Palace — for a total drinks bill of $1.50 — before the clock struck 1 p.m. None of us was working that day. Fifty years ago, we might have all been on the clock. (But 50 years ago, I probably wouldn’t have been invited.) “The Upstairs Delicatessen” goes on a long tangent about lunch, which is a meal I often overlook and sometimes downright scorn. At the office, it’s a protein bar and a yogurt, or a sandwich on the rare day when I wake up feeling aggressive. At home, I embody the spirit of this newsletter; I graze. A scoop of last night’s rice, a sliver of whatever I’ve baked that week, a piece of cheese, some hummus.
I was born too late for a proper lunch, maybe, and of all the regrets I have, that may be the least solvable. I’ll end, then, with an excerpt from Christopher Reid’s poem, “The Song of Lunch,” which I’d never heard of before reading Garner’s book and now will never forget:
The restaurant / is an old haunt, / though he hasn’t been there for years; / not since the publishing trade, / once the province / of swashbucklers and buccaneers, / was waylaid by suits and calculators, / and a strict afternoon / curfew imposed.
Farewell to long lunches / and other boozy pursuits! / Hail to the new age / of the desk potato, / strict hours of imprisonment / and eyesight tortured / by an impassive electronic screen!
A regret I can solve: I am too much of a desk potato. Time to close the computer and pour some wine.
🍸❤️