“To you, it was the most important day of your life…but for me, it was Tuesday.” 🎂
Another year, another steak and eggs. Life and death, death and rebirth. An ended cow, an unfinished chicken. The wheat, singular and narrow, grasping toward heaven. The potato, ensconced in earth, biding its time through hell. Scorched without, raw within. Blood. Yolk. Fire.
That tradition of eating steak and eggs every year is unexpectedly serving well as a yardstick for change. My annual reservation at Benchmark fell through because of “emergency renovations” (I hope they are okay) so this year I went to a posh diner in Old Brooklyn called Clark’s.
Some years, if you are tremendously lucky, you get to splurge on a magnificent, delicate, thoughtfully plated meal at a fancy white tablecloth restaurant, full of wealthy older people whose lifestyles are so alien to you they may as well be television characters. Some years it’s 3 AM at an all night greasy spoon, you’re falling over from your fifteenth twelve hour day that month, you’re ordering the one thing at the diner no one who eats there can afford and the cook is so taken aback that you get two perfectly cooked eggs on top of what is essentially shoe leather. Some years, hunkered down in an underfurnished roomshare with a plague raging outside, you’re poking at an overcooked puck in a styrofoam container covered in ruined scrambled eggs doused in ketchup, and some years you made that overcooked puck yourself. And some years there is no steak at all.