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By JEFFERSON WEAVER
Staff writer
We were standing out back having a smoke when, as he often does, Brother Johnny reached out into the blue, grabbed a thought-provoking question, and threw it my way.
“Have you ever eaten any caviar?” he asked.
In a way I was ashamed to admit I had. In my own defense, the newspaper I was working for at the time had ensured free admission to a black-tie fundraiser where the fancy fish eggs were being served, amongst high-dollar ground-up goose livers, hard, burnt toast, and something that strongly resembled liver pudding.
I earned a disdainful glance that night when I pointed out to a rather lovely and be-pearled lady that the group hosting the fete might need fewer fundraisers if they served tea and fish plates instead of champagne and fish eggs.
It’s not that I don’t appreciate the so-called finer things in life, because I do indeed like a lot of things my more down-to-earth friends find odd. By the same token, my uptown friends are aghast at many of the simpler things I hold dear.
But for the record, a cracker covered in salty black sturgeon roe does little for my perpetually growling stomach. If I am going to eat something, it will be eaten to fill the growling hole in my stomach, not to show how socially astute I may or may not be. And at $60 or more an ounce, I’m not going to eat something I don’t really like just to make folks think better of me. I would much rather sit down to a plate of hard-fried catfish- or shad-roes straight from my mother’s iron frypan. As long as there was some cornbread to go with it, of course.
It’s been a couple of years now since I’ve enjoyed a big plate of roe sacks, with a side of grits or potatoes, and either a biscuit or cornbread. It’s been even longer since I scrambled eggs from our own chickens and mixed in some chopped-up roe caught just the night before.
Mother grew up on a farm that was half-dependent on the produce of the upper reaches of the Chesapeake Bay right before and during the early part of the Depression, so she knew how to cook things like catfish, cornbread and roe.
Miss Rhonda has Mother’s frying pan now, of course. Thanks to lessons from both my mother and her own, my beloved wife can use that skillet to create masterpieces which would raise far more funds than any cracker full of fish eggs. There is a certain honesty in an ancient black pan of cornbread, an honesty any person with common sense will respect, lest their momma smite them.
A gentleman I see beside the highway almost every day makes me think of shad roe. He’s a fellow I know only in passing can be seen several times a week during the late winter and early spring, mending nets with a dexterity the most skilled embroidery fanatic would envy.
His fids flash in and out like the fins of the shad his nets pull from the river. When he’s selling garden produce, he always has a wave for passersby, but when he’s net-mending, a nod is the only greeting his busy hands can spare.
Years ago I would sit in the shade with Hugh Howard of Hampstead, hiding from my editor, enjoying a cold drink and watching as his hands and feet wove in and out, out and in, weaving net after net for the serious fishermen who pulled shad from the Cape Fear and spots from the sound.
A bright-eyed and bushy-tailed post-college kid, even one with a sound upbringing like mine, could learn a lot from folks who broke stumps, plowed fields, and hauled nets to feed their families. I rarely went away without finding out something new, and sometimes I miss old Hugh.
I’ve seen several studies of late that talk about how young people are the most narcissistic they’ve ever been, desiring money and fame above all else.
Ambition can be a good thing, since ambition and the desire for a better life help create major changes in our society, improvements in lifestyle that might never have otherwise occurred.
I just hope that some of those “I-want-it-all” kids realize that caviar is really little more than college-educated fish eggs.
Without a solid respect of things like faith, iron skillets, shad nets and hard work, all the money in the world really isn’t worth all the stale crackers covered in all the world’s caviar.
Weaver is a staff writer at The News Reporter. He may be reached via e-mail at jeffweaver@newsreporter.biz, or via telephone at 642-4104, ext 227.
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