Gloriously Simple Times

Do you know how to say, "blåskjell"?  OK.  Can you say, "mussel"?

Mari and I have spent the evening remembering our trip up the coast of Norway, and back south, again, when we stopped in Tromsø, both there and return, and stayed overnight, in order to have mussels at a restaurant on the waterfront.  Oh, god, what lovely evenings!  Not alone for the mussels, but for the people whom we had never met before who said, "Hei!", and who toasted us with raised glasses and direct gazes, because we loved beer and blåskjell almost as much as they did, and because they lived above the Arctic Circle, especially in wintertime, and who felt sad for people who did not know what it was like to live precariously, and who knew when the light came at midnight that it was a celebration.

We live now in a desert, far from those northern lights, but tonight, with a kilo of mussels cooked in a cataplana, not because it was required but because we had one--Thank you, Portugal!--while thinking of wading into the rocks along the fjord with Audun and Jorun when we gathered blue shells, as well as those evenings in Tromsø, when we left one ship while waiting for the next, and went to the seafront restaurants.

The best meals are not always complicated meals.  Sometimes they are mussels and bread and wine and shared memories of places far away and near to our hearts.

It has come to this:  we both are growing old, but so far, we remember with keen pleasure and what it is to eat simply with complicated people and complex memories.

It is the 15th of December, on yet another year, and while the mussels in the desert are not what they are when you pick them from the rocks yourself, they are luscious with butter and wine and shallots, and they prod our old bones with memory and taste.

Let there be enough bread and blåskjell for all of us!  It does not have to be blåskjell. It can be soy or sauerkraut or black beans.  But whatever it is we need to build these old bones and young muscles, we need to do it together.  Something simple.  Something to do with wading into the edge of the sea, or deep into a cornfield or field of peppers.  Something about doing it together, or while thinking about each other.

The secret is in the sharing.

Tonight we remembered.