Most beautiful woman in the world celebrates Bloomsday

My wife, Jami, the most beautiful woman in the world, had a birthday yesterday. I had a day off so I cooked. I fried chicken, made gravy, bought one of those pre-fab salads, and baked a couple of potatoes. I had never cut up a chicken before. I had seen chefs on TV make short work of the bird with a few cleaver whacks. I don't have the cleaver control they do. I used my cleaver to saw and pry. I used a small knife to rip and peel. But when it was done, my primitive efforts were not too messy and accomplished the job. I remembered the time I was little and my nanny and pa convinced me to eat turtle. They told me that a salesman had come by the store with a chicken cut up in a new way. I did do some creative cutting along the back especially.
The kittens circled my feet: offal a thousand tongues to mew.
I may not be able to do much in the kitchen, but I can fry chicken. I am particular about soaking the pieces in buttermilk. Buttermilk keeps the flour on the bird and adds a sizzle when the oil is at its hottest. Buttermilk is the most Southern of drinks - non-alcoholic drinks. But there is a trick I learned from a Missourian, add some crushed pepper to it. It brings out the tone and undercuts the sweetness. If possible find some corn bread (not sweet) and crumble it in a glass before pouring the buttermilk on top. It is a fine dinner substitute.
I only wish that I had learned my grandmother's method of cornbread production (I only remember her advice to put a pinch of flour in the center of the pan). But that's the way cooking is: like things in art, it is being forgotten and rediscovered.
The chicken, unconventionally cut up as it was, turned out good. Jami loved it, as well as the gravy and potatoes.
Jami looks younger every day. Her smile lights up my heart.
I forgot to quote large passages from Joyce on her birthday, since her birthday is Bloomsday. Three years or so ago I was at a bar called James Joyce in Avondale Estates. I happened to be there on Bloomsday and I asked the waiter if he what day it was. He did not. I explained all about Joyce and the events of June 16th, 1904. About Eccles St and Blazes Boylen and Stephen Dadelus. But no flicker of recognition. "I guess we should know about that." "It might prove a good idea," I responded.
I may open a bar one day called the Flann O'Brien - every third policeman gets a pancake. People'll keep coming back and won't know why.

Happy Birthday Jami, Beautiful Wife

I was born on the Fourth of July, a very historical date for the US, but not so much for the rest of the world. Celebrations of the Fourth are low key in Italy, for instance, and delayed till the 14th in France. Jami was however born on an even bigger holiday, Bloomsday, the day of the month of June where all the action occurs in Joyce's Ulysses. This is a great literary holiday. People all over the world are hoisting a Guinness, ghosting a highness, and goosing a hostess. Wikipedia has a grand entry on Bloomsday. Suffice it that Joyce picked this day for the action in his book because its the day of his first date he had with his wife, Nora Barnacle. So Three Quarks for Muster Mark, as Joyce says in Finnegan's Wake, as well as The Proteiform graph itself is a polyhedron of Scripture.
And I sat [sic] about reading the Wake this morning to be sure of my quotes above, and I came upon this gem: amid all the punning and portmentauing, Joyce writes, "What has gone? How it ends?/Begin to forget it. It will remember itself from every sides, with all gestures, in each our word. Today's truth, tomorrow's trend./Forget, remember!" Something so elegiac startles after 615 pages of Burlesque. Undoubtedly a clue to the circularity of the narrative: the last sentence "a way a lone a last a loved a long the" leads right back to "Riverrun, past Eve and Adam's" and we find ourselves, with Sir Tristram, "passencore rearrived from North Amorica." This is related to what Eliot will later write in the last Quartet "to make an end is to make a beginning./ The end is where we start from." Every day an end and a beginning. The past pokes through in every new moment and tempts us with possibilities, while the future threatens us with its predeterminations and inescapable mystery. And when we arrive, in each new day, we are as we started, and know ourselves for the first time. And then we forget. Remember? St. James describes the casual hearer as one who "looking n a mirror walks away and forgets what manner of person they are." [my paraphrase] That's what Stephen Daedalus's and Leopold Bloom's and Molly Bloom's journeys are in Ulysses: odysseys, two along the streets and one in the heart, weaving and looming, discovering where to end a beginning, begin an ending. In them Joyce is trying to walk away from the mirror and remember who he is.
Marriage is an odyssey. Two people rediscover themselves and each other every day. It is a journey without timetable. Yet time and language are in the warp and woof. Delight and joy and laughter are the sound that cloaks our presence with each other. Tears, anxieties: like storms they thunder and light striking, but they spend their energies and what remains of them is a clear blue sky.
I cannot say how grateful I am for Jami. I love her bunches.