Crab Louie!

I sat on a deck that overlooked a fine garden, field and trees. A vulture flew overhead. I sipped a barley wine and tasted delicious buttered toast made from my host’s homemade bread. It was a sunny Monday morning, an hour before noon. Earlier, I had planted 200 Sitka spruce trees in an attempt to heal a poisoned clearcut. I’ll long be dead before I’ll know if it did any good.

My host brought me a glass bowl of cooked crab with some cocktail sauce. Crab Louie! I’d never eaten Crab Louie before, but here I was eating it for brunch, along with the toast and barely wine. What a strange, incongruous, glorious combination! And who was Louie? And shouldn’t I be drinking a Cutty Sark on the rocks rather than a barely wine? Perhaps dragging on a Pall Mall, too? Doesn’t Crab Louie just scream 1952 and a table at a night club in Akron, waiting for Dean Martin to perform his 1:30 a.m. show, his third show of the night?

At that moment I was surely the only professional tree planter in the world feasting on Crab Louie after a job and I relished that distinction. More marvelous incongruity and cheers to the people who invite it into my life.