​Back in the day I had a lot of favorite restaurants in New York City. But one stands out above all the others.
        In the 1970s Tom Miller, being a movie publicist, received a number of invitations to pre-release screenings, often at a Twentieth Century Fox screening room then located far west on Fifty-Sixth Street, almost at the Hudson River. From time to time I would meet him there for a six o’clock screening after coming down from Columbia, Tom coming up either from his apartment or from wherever he might have been working at the time.
          There was a Japanese restaurant named Fuji on West 56 Street between Broadway and Eighth Avenue, and in his early days in New York Tom had lived in a top floor walkup above the restaurant, which had opened in 1956. Tom had not dined there in many years. One night we tried the restaurant. It was good. Pleasant people, pleasant surroundings. Nice place for a post-screening meal. All we knew about Japanese food was sukiyaki and teriyaki, and on our initial visits that is what we ordered. Well, that can get a bit tiresome after a while.

​Over the years I have been writing essays about my family and my life which I have now assembled into a single work.  Because of the nature of some of the content it will not be published, but my intention is to deposit in in some appropriate archive, likely at the University of Souith Alabama because it dovetails neatly with material about Sawyerville they already have. I was just revising the first chapter, an introduction of sorts, and I liked it well enough to share.

​          I moved to New York in January of 1962. I had never been outside the state of Alabama except for a few trips to Destin, Florida, when that was a sleepy not-even-a-village, the occasional foray to Meridian, Mississippi, two short visits to New York, and a short time in Nashville, Tennessee. I had taken a small studio apartment, a fifth floor walk-up a block and a half below Houston Street. SoHo before it was SoHo. I didn’t need a lot of space, just somewhere to eat breakfast and (usually) supper and take a shower and rest my head at night when it was too late to do anything else. Of course you might argue that in New York it was never too late to do anything else.
​
          But even an inexpensive walk-up needs to be paid for. I applied for work at several publishers but nothing ever came of that. But that rent, small by today’s standards, had to be paid. Finally I saw an ad in the New York Times for positions at Columbia University Libraries, no degree required, and with funds low, I decided I’d better try for that.

​In an earlier post on this site I cdescribed Sunday feasts at my grandmother’s house in Greensboro. Now I will address other childhood food adventures.
 
I was never afraid of the kitchen. A great joy of my early years was to play with pots and pans on the kitchen floor while my mother was cooking, and then I learned the pleasures of helping her, especially in grinding things up. I’ve never been afraid of cooking, although I spoke truly when once, on being asked if I loved to cook, I replied that I loved to eat and therefore I had to endure the other.

​King David and Annie Pearl Turberville's house stood on the east side of Demopolis Street, as Alabama Highway 69 is called as it heads south of Greensboro, Alabama, toward Demopolis. My best guess is that they moved there with their growing family from the Old Smith Place, a half mile or so downriver from old Lock Six. It was a small house of about four rooms on the side of a hill with a large number of steps leading down from the front porch to the front yard. The back door would have been at ground level. The house consisted of the front parlor, the front bedroom, my grandparents’ bedroom, and a wide hallway separating the front bedroom from the other two rooms and running down to what I recall as the dining room in my time but was in those earlier years the big kitchen. In addition to the front porch, there was as a side porch off the kitchen to the south with a pantry at the west end.