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teeny tiny rant
Dec. 19th, 2007 11:57 amDear web sites for popular local amenities: please to put your holiday hours on the web site, so I don't have to use the Evil Telephone to find out when you will be open! Guilty parties include: Guglhupf, Mama Dip's.
I don't think I ever wrote about my mother's visit to Mama Dip's when she was last here. She'd been to Crook's Corner before but was not too impressed by shrimp and grits. When she was here in November we did a marathon day of shopping, starting in Carrboro. We had worked our way up to Chapel Hill (and a hilarious store in the little mall set back from Franklin Street, where my mother bought an, I shit you not, $195 fitted sheet) and I had the brainwave to take her to Mama Dip's because she likes fried chicken. For starter's, Mama Dip herself was sitting in the entry when we came in and complemented me on my shoes (I was wearing my purple suede Dansko Roxys.) My mother went nuts over the place. She LOVED the food, went to talk to Mama Dip, and bought a cookbook. It was a side of her I don't often see, but I guess southern country cooking really touches a nostalgic place in her. She talked a lot about what her mother used to cook, especially fried chicken and succotash. Her mother (Porter) was born and raised in Annapolis, a daughter of southern parents, but I've always had an image of her as not domestic at all. My mother told me she learned to sew and bake bread, for example, from her girl scout leader. (Porter died when I was 2 and my mother only 25, so I know very little about her). I asked my mother if Porter had learned how to cook from her mother (Mary), who was one of four sisters from a lower middle class background and had been a schoolteacher before she married Bill, a PhD in philosophy from Chicago (step up!). My mother said, "oh no, she learned from Mary and Bill's cook, Sarah." Such a completely different way of life, to grow up in Annapolis in the 1930s.
In other completely different ways of life, I am reading the book Friday Night Lights, published in 1990, about the 1988 football season at Permian High School in Odessa TX. (I don't watch the show.) I was in high school myself in 1988, but it was on a completely different planet from these folks, I tell you what. I think what shocks me most is the completely open, causal, virulent racism. The school system was only desegregated in 1982, and man does it show. When people say no progress has been made in this country? I'm betting that racially things are better in Odessa now. I mean, I really really hope so.
I don't think I ever wrote about my mother's visit to Mama Dip's when she was last here. She'd been to Crook's Corner before but was not too impressed by shrimp and grits. When she was here in November we did a marathon day of shopping, starting in Carrboro. We had worked our way up to Chapel Hill (and a hilarious store in the little mall set back from Franklin Street, where my mother bought an, I shit you not, $195 fitted sheet) and I had the brainwave to take her to Mama Dip's because she likes fried chicken. For starter's, Mama Dip herself was sitting in the entry when we came in and complemented me on my shoes (I was wearing my purple suede Dansko Roxys.) My mother went nuts over the place. She LOVED the food, went to talk to Mama Dip, and bought a cookbook. It was a side of her I don't often see, but I guess southern country cooking really touches a nostalgic place in her. She talked a lot about what her mother used to cook, especially fried chicken and succotash. Her mother (Porter) was born and raised in Annapolis, a daughter of southern parents, but I've always had an image of her as not domestic at all. My mother told me she learned to sew and bake bread, for example, from her girl scout leader. (Porter died when I was 2 and my mother only 25, so I know very little about her). I asked my mother if Porter had learned how to cook from her mother (Mary), who was one of four sisters from a lower middle class background and had been a schoolteacher before she married Bill, a PhD in philosophy from Chicago (step up!). My mother said, "oh no, she learned from Mary and Bill's cook, Sarah." Such a completely different way of life, to grow up in Annapolis in the 1930s.
In other completely different ways of life, I am reading the book Friday Night Lights, published in 1990, about the 1988 football season at Permian High School in Odessa TX. (I don't watch the show.) I was in high school myself in 1988, but it was on a completely different planet from these folks, I tell you what. I think what shocks me most is the completely open, causal, virulent racism. The school system was only desegregated in 1982, and man does it show. When people say no progress has been made in this country? I'm betting that racially things are better in Odessa now. I mean, I really really hope so.