Hunger and memory, Part I

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My memory of the Wayside’s pie isn’t fuzzy at all. (Photo by Flickr user Miho115.)

When I start talking about food and restaurants with people we have recently met, my wife Kathy has been known to emit a sound best described as a derisive snort. If she is in a particularly expressive mood, she might roll her eyes at the same time.

The snort is to meant for both participants in the conversation, a cross between a warning and a sigh. The warning is for the other person, compressing “You don’t know what you’re getting yourself into” into a single sound.

The sigh is for me. Through no fault of her own, she married a man who cannot be relied upon to return from the store with everything on the shopping list - even when he actually remembers to take the list with him. Yet when it comes to eating, I have a memory as immutable and unsmudged as chiseled Egyptian hieroglyphics.

Fourteen years ago, after we were married in a little church in North Tonawanda, we spent our honeymoon in Vermont and Montreal. From memory, I can tell you what exit to take off Interstate 89 in Barre, Vt. so that you can get to the Wayside Restaurant, which is an excellent place to stop on the way to Montreal, if you are hungry. (Exit 7. Turn left on Route 302, on the left, you can’t miss it.) I can tell you that sometimes the banana cream pie sells out by lunchtime, so you should ask the waitress if there’s any left as she seats you.

I can tell you that when my bride and I went out on the town in Montreal, I ordered the duck in red curry at a Thai restaurant called Chao Phraya and was struck by its subtle power. I can tell you that when we went back on the last night of our honeymoon, the pork in white pepper wasn’t as remarkable.

I can easily slide back three years before the honeymoon. I can tell you where I was the first time I had real Memphis-style barbecued pork spareribs, at Redbone’s in Somerville, Mass., how to get there from the nearest subway station, and which of their four barbecue sauces work best with the ribs.

This morning, though, I could not tell you where the charger for the cell phone was. Not without asking Kathy. Or the postage stamps in the basket, which I actually had my hand in while I quizzed her for their location.

After she has been weathered 14 years of this, I consider a derisive snort a small price to pay.

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