The things we can't have
A special guest post this week to help knock the dust off this newsletter.
Thank you for reading Letters from Paris on the Genesee! If you have not already, please subscribe and this newsletter will appear in your inbox every Tuesday morning. You can also follow me on Twitter and Instagram for more piping hot content.
Hello! It’s been a while, how are you? I hope you’ll excuse this newsletter’s absence from your inbox for the past few weeks, but we’ve been a little busy. On November 21st, we welcomed baby Emma to our family. Mom and baby came through with flying colors, and we’ve been busy trying to settle into life as a family of four. Big sister is adjusting pretty well and is a big fan of her new sister, although she wasn’t totally thrilled to have to split time with a new baby at first.
Thank you to everyone for the kind message and gifts, it’s always a wonderful feeling to know that other people are thinking of you. I’d like to say a special thanks to my mother in law Sue, who stayed with us for a few weeks to help manage Caroline and provide an extra pair of experienced hands. The girls — and us — would be thrilled to have you anytime.
In addition to the new baby, we’ve also been dealing with several family emergencies, and I have found the time and headspace for writing this newsletter hard to come by. The holidays are a hectic time of year as it is, but with everything else going on in our lives, I needed to take a few things off my plate. Thankfully, my good friend Ryan Nagelhout has come through with a guest post. Ryan writes about sports and other assorted subjects at Uproxx, and writes and podcasts about Buffalo sports at The Gooses Roost with Corey Griswold. You can support their work on Patreon. I do, and the lads have never let me down.
You can follow Ryan on Twitter @ryannagelhout, and you can follow Corey @coreygriswold. He didn’t write anything for this, but he’s a legend of the posting game.
It’s December, which means the calendar finally matches how long this wretched year has felt. It’s as unoriginal a thought that exists these days: this year has felt like an eternity to everyone, and we’re all weary and worried and longing for it to end. It’s one of the few shared experiences left in American life: no matter how you feel about masks or Trump or the government’s role in protecting its people from a pandemic, you’re extremely ready for this period of history to be fucking over.
Back in the Before Times, when death felt less ingrained in the everyday existence of life in America, I thought the worst day of the year would be the one where Kobe Bryant died in a helicopter crash. I’m not a Lakers fan, and certainly not a Kobe fan. But Bryant was basically an everyday occurrence in my working life for years, and on a Sunday morning while I was mostly writing about Adam Driver on Saturday Night Live, that tragedy became the biggest story of the year to date.
I quickly wrote and helped edit what must have been about two dozen different angles on the horror that unfolded. It was a numbing, heartbreaking experience. But sometimes it’s part of the job. Writing about terrible things, even when you’re not on the scene of the tragedy, requires you to put distance between your thoughts and the task at hand. And at the end of it, completely wiped after sitting in front of a laptop all day, I needed to be anywhere else. So I went to a movie alone, the lackluster new Bad Boys movie. And on the walk home I decided I wasn’t ready to go home and possibly doomscroll Twitter, so I went to a bar to sit alone for an hour and quietly drink two beers.
I’ve had a lot of time to think about my relationship with food and drink these last few months. Reading Peter’s newsletter has helped, for sure, as has all the time at home I’ve had to more thoughtfully consider what I actually like to eat. I’ve started pickling onions and meal prepping and slowly making recipes I was once too intimidated to try. And, improbably, I’ve lost a lot of weight because I’m not eating at bars and restaurants as much, or settling on chaos meals after long periods of work-aided fasting.
But my reflection has been less about overall health and wellness and more about the comfort I take in the things I eat and drink. What I’ve learned more than anything, I think, is that desire is so often based on what is currently unavailable to me. The other day I walked by that bar I went to the day Kobe died. Peering in, masked, I saw a handful of people imbibing next to plexiglass screens. It was decidedly not what I needed, nor something I recognized as safe. Right now, all of that matters much more than what I currently lack.
I’m not exaggerating when I say I’d pay an absurd amount of money for some very silly culinary-adjacent things if I knew they were safe. I’d probably pay $50 to drink a slightly frozen PBR at a dive bar packed to the gills if I knew with certainty it wasn’t a superspreader event. I’d drop at least a Benjamin on a terrible matinee if I could eat some too-buttery, oversalted popcorn and drink a sixtel of Coke Zero in the dark and my only concern would be about my waistline.
These things are absurdities, though, and so my disposable income has gone toward other, perhaps equally frivolous, culinary expenses. I desperately miss pizza from Western New York, so I bought a too-expensive pan to make Detroit-style pizza thanks to a Serious Eats recipe Pete recommended. It’s relatively simple but a satisfying exercise of some new culinary muscles I’m working out, and each time I make it I grow more confident in the process and its results. It helps that the leftovers have that same spongy texture that reminds me of day-after Bills game lunches from my youth.
In November, I got downright emotional about a collaboration between Trillium Brewery in Boston and Toronto’s Bellwoods. I haven’t been home to Niagara Falls since last Christmas, and the border is closed, anyway. I had given up on getting anything from Bellwoods indefinitely, but that only made it taste that much better. Sometimes it’s the littlest things that can get you through the days and weeks.
I think about the day when Kobe died a lot. Not because I miss that specific bar more than any other, but because that night — as I often do when I find myself hungry or thirsty or craving something — I wanted something I felt was scarce. That Sunday night it was detachment, a feeling that soon became abundant in the rest of 2020. Stress tends to make you just long for the things you haven’t had lately, and now that stress is over my family and friends I’ve gone months without and the long winter that lay ahead.
In that longing, though, I’ve realized something more important. As Peter eloquently wrote in this newsletter a few months ago, it’s the people and experiences that come with that food and drink that matter more. I don’t miss dive bars, I miss the people I’d visit them with and the darts we’d throw between stories and sips. I desperately miss the family I’d eat pizza and watch football games with, and the peanut butter chocolate pie that meant celebrating another holiday in my childhood home.
In this wretched year I’ve found moments of joy and connection in new ways. I can improbably walk to a place that sells beer made by a brewery I once walked to from work back when my office was in Buffalo, not a room in my apartment in Boston’s North End. It pairs nicely with the pizza I make more often than I probably should. And though sometimes those nights contain moments where I have to fend off the emotions I feel for the things I can’t have, there are friends on video calls and someone I love in my apartment to cook with when I want something new.
There will be a time somewhere in the future where we can get back some of those things we’ve missed. I can’t wait to see my friends in bars and hug my family and try all the foods this year has been without. It probably won’t be good for my physical health, but the emotional lift will be immeasurable. Hopefully by then I have a pretty good pizza sauce recipe down pat, even if it will never quite be as good as the real thing.