​On Sunday at Ruan Thai in Greensboro I had the lunch special, yellow curry with chicken and fresh vegetables. It was delicious, as is everything on their menu and every special. The chef, who seems to like my interest in trying as many new things as possible and my being adventurous with seasonings, as usual came out to check on how I liked it. I assured her that it was great. She asked if I would like to try a special cucumber relish usually served with yellow curries in Thailand. Of course! She reported that she didn’t usually serve it to our local customers because she wasn’t sure they would like it.

[Restaurant Row: West 46th Street]

​Recently I posted a piece on my favorite (so far) restaurant of all time: the old Fuji Restaurant in New York. But there are others I remember as well.

Tom’s and my favorite French restaurant, Crepes Suzette, was on Restaurant Row, West 46th Street between Eighth and Ninth Avenues. It was run by two French women of mature years, the more managerial of the two named Madeleine. We must have been predictable, for on one occasional when we entered we heard Madeleine mention to her companion, “Here come the two Rob Roy boys!” While the food was not the best French cooking you could get in New York at the time, it was good, reliable, and not too pricy and we could always count on a table if we dropped by.  I recall most fondly the boeuf Bourguignon, the beef Wellington, the broiled scallops, and most especially their Dover sole.
​
Madeleine had a nephew who waited tables and who could also tend bar and greet customers if Madeleine was away. Jean-Claude was young, slim, attractive, and full of himself. He never actually flirted (especially when Madeleine was there), but he somehow let it be known that he was not averse to being admired. Once a man sitting by himself at a table next to Tom’s and mine ordered the Dover sole. When it came out it looked beautiful. The nephew set it down across from the man and did a perfect job fileting the fish and removing the bone and reassembling the fish for presentation, and I am convinced that part of his presentation was himself to us. And then he picked up the plate to present to the customer, and as he was doing so he tipped the plate just that tiny little centimeter too far and the fish slid gradually right off the plate into the man’s lap. Talk about one crestfallen waiter and one angry Madeleine! Tom and I were graceful enough not to laugh. At least not then.

[With parents and sister, 1948]

Recently I donated to the archive at the University of South Alabama my 450+ page unpublished memoir "Story-Telling," to be made publicly available after my death. I had selected that archive because it alreay houses a major collection of invaluablel material dealing with Unbria Plantation and the Pickens family of Sawyerville and my memoir also features Umbria and that family prominently as well as a great deal of material about Sawyerville at the time and over the years. I subsequently discovered that my memoir was valuable to them for other reasons asa well. Along with the memoir I included a weatlh of photos of Umbria, including the old HABS photographs, a large number of color photos taken in the spring of 1971 before the house burned the following December, and photos I had made of the ruins in 1999. In addition I included my files of photos that illustrate Sawyerville over the years and files with photos of my paternal and maternal relatives. And then I thought: If I were reading this memoir in the future I would wish to know what the author himself looked lilke. Hence this file, which I will share withj you.

​Occasionally one takes a pen in hand to try to clarify one’s own thoughts by writing them down. Of course, the danger is that one will become so enchanted with one’s own prose that one will start to believe what one writes instead of writing what one believes.
​
I could have gotten rid of some of those “ones” in that opening paragraph simply by the judicious substitution of “he.” That choice of pronoun could be the old-fashioned “he” that referred to anyone of either (or any) sex or it could be my choice because I am male and so identify.

​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.

​I’d venture the answer is no.