Except for the parts that aren’t, this story is almost entirely true.  I have lost touch in the ensuing years with everyone mentioned.  Except for myself.  I have not (as yet) lost touch with myself.  That will likely happen at some point.   

Unless you count Bello’s Pizza as an exotic Italian restaurant, my hometown of Mexico, Missouri back-in-the-day didn’t have much in the way of “foreign cuisine” that I remember.  Mexico people, am I wrong?

I do remember the time a few decades later when we got our first gen-u-wine Mexican restaurant on East Liberty.  A sweet older gentleman who lived nearby was among the first brave souls we knew who went there one night for dinner.  When he got home he was telling my mom and dad about it.  Mom asked him what he had eaten.  “I don’t really know. I just told the waitress to bring me whatever she thought I would like. It was something wrapped in a dishrag I think”.

So, in our family, it was pretty much the old “meat and three” at meal time, every single day.  We did on rare occasions bring home a pizza, or go to the A&W, or if we were out on the road, we might go to a truck stop (as I have written about here before), or a local restaurant in another town.  But at home it was mostly roast beef or fried pork chops or fried fish or fried chicken or fried “cube steak” or ham, etc. and always with vegetables that may have (or at least could have) come out of our garden. (Corn, green beans, potatoes, peas, tomatoes, cucumber salad, etc.)   Occasionally dad would BBQ ribs or cook steaks out on the grill.   My mom was truly a great cook, and to whatever extent I’m a decent cook today, I owe that all to her. But she didn’t venture much beyond the country cooking that she learned from her mom and sisters as a girl growing up on the farm in Callaway county.

In the late 1970’s and early 1980’s I was living in Columbia with a roommate from the exotic environs of Wentzville.  A real man-of-the-world.  He had met a girl that he was interested in named Kate.  She was a sweetie.  One night sitting around talking, the subject of our favorite foods came up.  Kate got excited, and suggested we get a group up and go out on a Friday night to a “real” restaurant.  One with menus and waitresses who came to your table, and everything.  Kate and her family from Kansas City loved to eat Chinese, and since I’d never ever even THOUGHT about eating Chinese, she insisted that was what we had to do.  So that was that.

Along with the other guy we shared a house with, and a couple of Kate’s friends we headed downtown to an upstairs place on 9th street, maybe called Kai Min?  Not sure.  In any case, it was just north of campus, on Ninth, near Booches.  Club La Booche.

Booches was (and is) the home of one of the best cheeseburgers on the planet. And a bunch of pool tables.  And a long, saloon-style bar that had been there (even then) for just shy of a hundred years. It is almost always packed with a cast of characters that ranges from silly frat-boys to blue-collar workers to accountants to University Professors, to City Fathers, journalists, lawyers, politicians …. and even wannabe hippies like me.  You get the picture. And they’ve got the coldest long-neck Budweiser bottles on the planet.  If you say you’ve found a better cheeseburger, I will not believe you.  You are mistaken.   But this has nothing to do with my story.

So, anyway ….

We climbed the dark stairs to the Chinese place on the second floor.  It also had the feel of having been there a while, and it may still be there for all I know.  It was, of course, all red and gold décor, with plants around a fountain at the entrance, full of big spotted goldfish (I’d never heard of “koi”).   There were little paper lanterns on the table, chopsticks wrapped in paper, hot tea (unsweet… ack) served in little tiny cups with no handles, and the whole nine yards.  The faint tinkling of Chinese music playing from tinny sounding speakers in the ornate ceiling.    We were shown to a big round table.

I took one look at the menu and had NO clue what to get.   Kate was sitting next to me, and was helping me with the menu and saying, “Oh, THIS is good right here, and you’d like THAT…”    A couple of the others were just as clueless.  So finally Kate did what Kate always did and just took charge, and suggested to everyone that we let her order a bunch of stuff for the table, and all share.

You know, the way God intended Chinese food be eaten.

Our exotic meal started with soup, not bad.  Pretty much like chicken noodle, but they forgot the veggies.    Then a bunch of appetizers. Something called “egg rolls”.   Hmmm.  Ok, they were a bit odd, …. but again, not bad. To me it sort of seemed like weeds rolled up in dough and fried.  Also, little flowery, crispy fried things with crab meat and cream cheese inside.  Kate said it was “fried wonton”, and told me it was the “best stuff in the whole world”.  I did not agree.  I’d never had crab, OR cream cheese.  Not a lot of crab and cream cheese recipes are learned on the farm in Callaway county.   And “pot-stickers”.   We were college students, so of course there were jokes about whether they ACTUALLY contained any real “pot”.     They did not.

Then the entrees.  Egg Foo Yung… once again with the fried weeds, but this time flattened into pancakes, and served with gravy.  ack.   Moo Goo Gai Pan.  Seemed like leftovers, all mixed together and once again, that sticky gravy.  ack.  Sweet and Sour Chicken.  Even though the world was still several years away from discovery of the McNugget, this was certainly its precursor.  Basically just fried chicken.  But with a creepy blood-red sauce. I tasted the sauce and didn’t like it much. Too sweet, too sour … and in my opinion just a weird thing with which to ruin fried chicken chunks.   “Sweet” and “Sour” are two flavors that do NOT belong with meat.  Much of the rest of it was just as strange to me.

Some of it just seemed wrong.  Some of it wasn’t bad.  A little of it I thought I would gladly eat again.

After dinner, we all went back to the house to hang out and listen to some music, and Kate sat on the couch next to me and made fun of my reactions to the food.  She laughed and put her hand on my arm. My roommate kept looking at me with a weird and somewhat perturbed look in his eyes.  I was stupid and clueless.  Still am.

A few days later, I was back in Mexico visiting my folks.  I mentioned that I’d eaten Chinese food. From their reaction, I might as well have said, “Hey folks, guess what? I just got a great deal on a hairless dog with three heads”. They weren’t exactly horrified, but they were obviously confused. You could hear a pin drop.

Neither my mom or dad said anything for an uncomfortably long moment, unsure how to react.  Then dad pretty much summed it up.  He looked at me and just asked, “Why?”

Within a few months, my roommate graduated and moved to Wisconsin for grad school, where he went on to get a PhD in Cheese Studies. (I’m not making that up).   His relationship with Kate never really got off the ground.

But mine did.

She was wicked smart, funny, and pretty much the right person at the right moment in my life, and for all the right reasons.

One night, sitting out on the deck of a bar in Westport in Kansas City, quite late and under a full moon, we began to talk about “Space, the Final Frontier.”   Not Star Trek.  Rather, just speculating on whether or not we were alone in the universe.  As you do.

We ended up arguing about whether, if aliens were to visit earth they’d be advanced so far above us in intelligence that humans would appear to them as nothing more than “cognitive plankton”.

She took the affirmative, “cognitive plankton” viewpoint.   I can remember exactly how I felt sitting in the moonlight, watching the sparkle in her eyes and the smile on her lips when she uttered the phrase, “cognitive plankton”.   It was pretty swell, and I am not making that up.

Conversely, I argued from the position that we would *at least* be as interesting to our other-worldly visitors as a Life Insurance salesman.  I felt like at a bare minimum, we would get that classic “Take Me to Your Leader” question from our interplanetary visitors.

But she was adamant about plankton, just as I was adamant about being interesting to our new alien friends. I realized right then that as much as I dug her, we really had very different ways of looking at what it means to be in the world.  It was never the same between us after that, and we eventually just lost touch.

But at least before we split, she taught me to love Chinese food.  I occasionally still think about her when I bite into an egg roll.

But she never got me to like Egg Foo Yung.

I will never like Egg Foo Yung.

Ack.

John