AQUAMAN, AQUAMAN, WHEREFORE ART THOU AQUAMAN?

Well, a couple of weeks ago we made the trek, with friends, to Monterey for a de rigueur visitation to the famed Monterey Aquarium to gawk at the fishes.  Circumstances rather than good planning put us there on the Sabbath, thereby avoiding that grimmest of pitfalls. . . the dreaded crush of elementary school fieldtrips.  After ransoming King Richard to gain entry we stepped into the ebb and flow and drifted on the tide of humanity into Jellyfishland.  Now these are truly one of the strangest of God’s creatures (was she stoned or just bored on that day of creation week?)  As an inkling of things to come, the jellies, as they are referred to, are floating in tanks devoid of all else; a seemingly barely big enough space narrowed front to back so they are always center stage and pleasing to the eye of the beholder.  The walls are an innocuous “blue screen” blue so as to disappear from the scene and each tank is lit from above with a blacklight so as to make the tentacles all glowy and iridescent.  Zowie! Rather like a Pixar movie. Sadly, as I progressed along the aahs and oohs and ooze of humanity, I felt like I was getting farther and farther from the smell of tideflats and deepwater symbiosis so that by the time you finally found Nemo he was a tidy, two dimensional faux-fish, manicured and Disneyfied as if a real, multicolored fish weren’t quite good enough to dazzle and amaze. 

No surprise here but I’m kinda old school about many things and one of those things, it turns out, is aquariums (aquarii?)  I’m used to, and seem to prefer, the ones where you wander through dark, cavernous hallways that smell of damp and saltwater, peering through plate glass into dim, ocean colored realms that are big enough for the fish to catch a nap when they are tired of being photographed.  Sometimes you had to stand for a passable amount of time before you saw any signs of life at all. . . but that kind of aquarium is for frittering away the better part of an afternoon avoiding some other responsibility.  It was not something you put on your bucket list to be “done” so you could move on to the zoo or the Museum of Modern Art.  One felt like a visitor to another world rather than some yabbo who had imported a gaggle of exotics for a moment’s pleasure.  It seemed dirty and gritty and, yes, even a wee bit shabby… you know… rather like the real world.

Sometimes you go out hunting or walking or poking about and see nothing of any consequence. Doesn’t mean things aren’t out there. Just means you aren’t as important as you thought you were.  And failing to see a moose the first dozen times just makes it all the more spectacular when you do. It’s what nature does. It’s how things work.

Anyway, back to Monterey… after the clownfish and the flamingo klatch and lots of interactive and zoomie graphics bits, we stopped for a bit of an in-house gnosh. Good and a bit pricey as all in-house cafes are wont to be. (no fish on the menu I noticed…)

A quick stop to watch them feed the sea otters and then we strolled through a nice exhibit about the cannery which was the building’s previous tenant.  Interesting and informative… eleventy-gazillion fish processed every 60 seconds, 24/7 and everyone was shocked and amazed when they ran out of fish to catch…

 Then it was upstairs to the tidepools and kelp beds.  Oops, gaggles of giggling Japanese girls and piles of Dads on “got the kids” weekend. Either would be tolerable but in combination I found them a tad wearing… a quick jaunt through the gift shop to admire the hellishly expensive, handblown glass doo-dads, a couple of postal cards and out the door and off to the car.

Monterey Aquarium. Check. Been there. Done that.

IN MY FAMILY IT WAS STACKWICHES AND DEAD DOG...

In those proverbial “good ol’ days” a mom or dad, constrained by lack of time or money, would clabber together a hodge-podge of what you would eat if you had time and what you had on hand and what you thought may or may not taste good together but what the hell...  I am certain that this often resulted in gustatory horrors of near biblical proportions and gave a whole generation a phobic dread of things called Chef’s Surprise or Seafood Fiesta or anything with the words layered or short-cut in their titles. This fear also generally encompasses foodstuffs with recognizable names but with the brand name of a tinned product inserted at a clever juncture, and all casseroles comically named after inedible or unappetizing objects. True, in some instances this is the wiser course, but to cast wide your umbrella to include all such dining opportunities under one turned up nose, as it were, you run a real risk of missing treats that may well already be on the culinary endangered species list. Between energy drinks and the all too invasive MacMeadowMuffin, fetched up thru the driver’s window under jaundiced yellow arches, we have lost touch with individual inventiveness. Where are those pre-ramen noodle dabblers in the kitchen arts… those who sought the philosopher’s stone using only a fridge full of leftovers and a stopwatch?  Remember the scene in Apollo 13 where the chief engineer dumps the box of stuff on the table and says to his crew, "This is what they have to work with. Let's bring 'em back safe." Before the mass marketing of breakfast-inna-bag, if you were running late for deer hunting or some other “on the go” lifestyle choice, you just scooped and ran… breakfast, lunch or dinner held together by a starch of some kind and consumed rather like a meat ice cream cone.

Sunday morning, at breakfast, I was given the opportunity to indulge in one of those classic familial treats from days gone by.  Our friends Lovely & Michelle were here from Quincy, on their way south, and Lovely stepped up to her family home plate and hit one out of the park.  Named after one child’s choice of pronunciation for the word g-r-a-n-d-p-a, it is called The Coby (cob-ee) Sandwich.  First you have to have fluffy, cheap white bread (toasted in the oven broiler so you can make a stack of them at once…) and SPAM (also broiled to perfection.) After that it’s just a question of assembling the bread and SPAM along with a fried egg, ketchup and a generous smear of, what else, grape jelly.

At this point some of you are, no doubt, casting about for a hazelnut biscotti to cleanse your taste buds and your imagination.  But then think about it for a minute… you have toast and jelly along with breakfast meat and fried eggs… how is this any different from all those other breakfasts you’ve eaten but with the measured improvement that you don’t have to wash a plate?

And yes, I am sure you could make this with 8 grain bread and smoked salmon and egg substitute layered with stone ground chipotle chutney and organic hackberry conserves.

But wouldn’t that be like giving a beautiful woman three breast implants?  Trying, unsuccessfully, to improve on perfection…

Bon apétite