We all have comfort zones, comfort foods, comfortable clothes, personal senses of style, quirky behaviors, favorite activities, beliefs, faith, and opinions. I know I have mine. Suzie says that I get grumpy when I’m forced out of my routine. Out of my routine might be defined as a circumstance in which particular ones or multiples of the things enumerated above are unavailable to me.
The most comfortable place in the world for me to be, I think, is in the study in our home. There is way too much stuff in there, especially since other than bathrooms and closets it is the smallest room in the house. That’s where we watch television and movies and diddle on our laptops. I sit at my roll-top computer desk, and Suzie sits in a blue leather recliner that has as many miles on it as an Apollo mission. I used to blog, read and comment on the blog posts of others, read fiction, write fiction, write agents and hope to persuade them to represent my fiction, and search the Web to satisfy my curiosity about a myriad of things, important and not. I still do those things. The difference is that my routine now includes an additional pastime.
In the last year and some, I have become a Facebooker to keep up with friends from past chunks of my life. Many of those folks are the people with whom I grew up. I used to bump into some of them before I moved from Baton Rouge to Fairway, Kansas, in 1992, and some of them I did not. A number of my “bumpees” had bumped into “bumpees” I had missed, which still enabled me to keep track. Rediscovering so many of them and learning what interesting people they turned out to be has been a joy.
The best thing in the study is Suzie, but she comes and goes, being mostly a nocturnal studier. She reads, journals, e-mails, shops the Web for shoes (Her weakness for footwear is the reason I sometimes refer to her as the Imelda Marcos of the Midwest.) and peruses it for recipes (I encourage this behavior.), watches the tube with me, plays Scrabble with me, tells me I snack too much, and generally lights up my life. She is a wonderful woman even though she was born in the Yankee state of Illinois. I’m trying to train her in Southern, having even taken her to Graceland once. It took forever to get her to say y’all correctly, but praise Jesus, she picked up on Louisiana cooking right quick.
The other things in there are manifestations of my likes. There are paintings and miniatures of lighthouses. There are paintings and miniatures of ducks and pelicans. There are renderings of crawfish and of fleurs-de-lis. We’re surrounded by bookshelves populated with stuff and books. There’s a putter, five golf balls, and one of those practice holes to shoot at across the adjacent dayroom, so named for the daybed that is its central content.
If I had to describe our study, a serious work of comfort zone-ness, in terms of food, it would be a bowl of tomato soup with a side of grilled cheese sandwich, a red beans and rice sandwich (stacked as bread, butter, red beans and rice, butter, bread), or meatloaf and mashed potatoes. In terms of clothes, it would definitely be one of those pairs of jeans you finally get worn down to cheesecloth softness for the maximum feel-good experience.
Our patio and backyard are, with the exception of sometimes being too hot or humid (I’m spoiled to Kansas weather so I have lower standards for the temperature and water content of my air now.), pure heaven. Suzie is a masterful gardener, and as such paints lush beauty on the canvas of my life, also known as the space outside our backdoor.
Other places that provide good feelings are Tybee Island and Savannah in Georgia, golf courses just about anywhere, and lighthouses and their surroundings. Baton Rouge will always be special to me. I like simply riding around seeing what still is, discovering what has changed, and paying homage to good things that were but are no more. Enjoying the old stomping grounds with family and friends is good. Sharing my roots with Suzie is special. The same thing holds true when she shares Alton, Illinois, her town on the Mississippi (across from St. Louis) with me. That reminds me of an additional comfort
I’ve shown my hand a bit on comfort foods, but there are still a few things to mention. I like shrimp and redfish Creole like that from the kitchen of Copeland’s of New Orleans. The red beans and rice from ZEA Rotisserie & Grill will, as they say, make you slap your mama, and it is just considered a side soup there. The split order of white and red cannelloni and the arancini from Gino’s in Baton Rouge can make you believe you just got off the boat in Sicily.
It was always difficult pole vaulting and playing basketball against Mike Anderson when I was young. (It was even harder to play football against him, but I had the wisdom to avoid that.) Ever since he turned the old Red and White College Town Grocery into an eponymous seafood eatery, I have found it quite easy to partake of the victuals that find their way out of his kitchens.
I was raised to love many things from Piccadilly Cafeteria, but in particular, they have some of the best crawfish étouffée that can be had. (They do the shrimp up here but not very often the crawfish.) Like many people from Baton Rouge, I’ve been eating with them since they had one location in the world on Red Stick’s Third Street. Many a tray was carried to my table by the congenial and venerable Percy Brown. A cafeteria with classy waiters, how elegant is that? Oh, yeah. Thank God for communitycoffee.com. You can find coffee here that is nearly as good as a red bag of Louisiana’s state coffee, but it costs half again or twice as much. I’m making converts. If only we had a CC’s Community Coffeehouse here.
When it comes to comfortable clothes, the soft jeans I mentioned earlier generally are for home, since the deteriorated condition that makes them special also presents the possibility of arrest if terminal failure occurs in public. That’s where shorts come in. They provide the legal ultimate in coolness. In my Southern opinion, they actually even work for me during most, though not all, of the cold weather here in America’s Heartland. You can add balance in the fall and winter by coupling them with long sleeves or even sweaters.
My personal style signatures are sweater vests and striped socks. The latter just make you feel better. The only socks I have that are not fully striped are the little short white ones I wear with sneakers or my golf shoes (when I’m wearing shorts). I’m converting friends and relatives one guy at a time. Many of my lady friends and relatives have become much more striped-sock prone, too. My collection is over 80 pair strong. Sadness occurs when I finally have to retire a set.
Suzie will attest that I have quirky behaviors. Starting the striped-sock religion is just one. She believes that I hum or sing all the time. I believe that music brings joy to the heart. I don’t mean to drive her crazy with it, but like breathing, I do it without even thinking. There have been occasions when I’ve been asked by passing coworkers what that tune is because they like it. She totally does not understand how I can fall asleep more readily with lights and a TV on than in bed. I wish I was one of the lucky ones who can fall asleep on a schedule by simply laying head on pillow. Most of that wishing occurs in the dark with my head on a pillow waiting for sleep to come. It also baffles her as to why I talk to inanimate objects and other drivers when they don’t behave as I think they should. These are the utterances in which I make my best use of my bad words.
My lovely wife will tell you I am not active enough, and she is right. The activities I enumerated when telling you about our study make my life interesting and relaxing. I frequently tell Suzie that eating out with her is my favorite thing. What’s not to like? There’s Suzie, food, most often coffee, and every now and then dessert, and we neither cook nor clean up behind it. The fun, relaxing, and enriching stuff we do when we go to Tybee and Savannah or Folly Beach and Charleston are top of the list things to do. A bad day on a golf course is better than any day in an office. Riding beaches, trails, and roads on bicycles with Suzie does it for me, too.
I believe I am blessed to have Suzie, our combined daughters, my mom, other kinfolk near and far, and many friends scattered along the timeline of my life. I have faith that my God will afford me some years to have and enjoy them.
If you’ve been here before, you already know I have opinions. Why, I’ll share one with you now. Obama is the dog, and we are the fire hydrant. When you convert four years into dog years does it constitute a term limit?
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