Hark, Fair Jamie Eats

A painting I did of Jamie, about 15 years ago, entitled “Sarge Sleeps.”

Cleveland, Tennessee. My wife and I are eating at a Chinese restaurant. We’ve been driving for a few hours. We pulled over in Cleveland to refuel and address pressing bladder issues. And we found this place.

The waitress asked what we wanted. We ordered a seaweed salad. This particular salad, however, was colored Legoland green and tasted like eating bait. I did not grow up eating seaweed salad.

My wife took a bite and said, “Remember when we first got married?”

“Vaguely,” I said.

“Remember when we used to get takeout from that Chinese place over by the Kmart?”

“Yes.”

“Remember how we’d always get the seaweed salad with the little thingies on it?”

“I do.”

She took a bite. Green earthworms hung from the corners of her mouth. “What do you CALL those thingies?”

“I don’t. Mainly, I just try to forget them.”

She smiled. She took another bite and I remembered a couple younger kids who used to eat Chinese food a lot.

Me with my long hair. Her with her bangs. We were poor. We had one window unit A/C in our apartment, which only worked on days of the week beginning with L. Our idea of a big night out was eating Chinese.

The Chinese restaurant in our hometown was cheap. Duct tape on the cushions. There weren’t many places to go for dates. So that’s where we went. Plus, this place had a dart board.

Jamie was good at darts. Very good, in fact. Although, during one Iron Bowl, a dart landed in a very sensitive location of my body. Which leads me to suspect foul play.

But the food at the old Chinese restaurant was stellar. And food has always been so important to the woman I married. Some people eat to live. Jamie lives to eat.

I met her after she graduated culinary school. She wore chef’s whites for a living. She bossed people around in a kitchen while stirring steel pots, angrily shouting strange phrases like, “This béarnaise has broken, dangit!” To call her job a high-stress job would like calling a Carnival cruise ship a “dinghy.”

Food service is one of the hardest jobs known to man. Being a female chef is even harder. You constantly have male staffers with “tiny spoon syndrome,” trying to prove how macho they are. Some guys don’t like having a female boss. Other guys, however, like to marry them.

Jamie finally got out of the food service game and, just to show you how insane she truly is, she became a math teacher.

But she never quit adoring food. Every vacation we take is based on food. Every day centers around the meals within it. Every morning, when she first wakes up she asks, “What do you want for supper?” She still makes things from scratch. And she still uses French words I don’t understand.

But sitting here in this restaurant, I realize how much this lovely woman has changed me. When I first met her, my idea of good food was Vienna sausage and a loaf of Wonderbread. Today, just look at me, I’m eating bright, green salad made of oceanic foliage. I’m using chopsticks and everything.

She leans over and pecks me on the cheek. “Do you still love me?” she says.

“Oui,” says I.