Moby Dick and Poulet

Yep. Fish and chicken. The thing about reading Moby Dick for fun (when you’re in your forties, don’t try this at fourteen) is you realize the fun that Herman Melville had with his story. Take the moment when Ishmael and the landlord of the Spouter Inn discuss where Ishmael will sleep – there are no beds so he either sleeps with Queequeg or on a wooden bench.

Ishmael launches into the landlord when he hears about Queequeg’s shrunken head:

“And in the first place, you will be so good as to unsay that story about selling his head, which if true I take to be good evidence that this harpooner is stark mad, and I’ve no idea of sleeping with a madman; and you sir, you I mean, landlord YOU, sir, by trying to induce me to do so knowingly, would thereby render yourself liable to criminal prosecution.”

“Wall,” said the landlord, fetching a long breath, “that’s a purty long sarmon for a chap that rips a little now and then.”

I find myself snickering over my chicken salad. Like Moby Dick, Poulet has been around for a while. (30 years, which in restaurant time makes it a classic.) Like Moby Dick, it stays the same but every time I eat here, I feel this sense of gratitude that I can sit at the exact table – it sure looks like the exact table – where Brad and I came when we were college undergraduates, optimistic (him more than me), looking forward, young.

Most of the people at the other tables are solitary diners, like myself, although there are a few couples. I get what I always get: the chicken salad with homemade mayo, capers and scallions, plus a hunk of bread and a veggie salad (today, it’s fresh corn, mango, and jicama). And a glass of real lemonade which is poured for me from a blue pitcher that has condensation on the outside.

I sip my lemonade and wonder why we ever accept poor imitations. Why isn’t all lemonade made from lemons picked in a backyard, icy cold, not too sweet. Why do we settle for unhealthy, powdered lemonade with a metallic after-taste when the real thing brings solace and comfort to a hot afternoon in mid-July?

I take another bite of Marilyn’s perfect chicken salad and return to Ishmael. He’s come downstairs after sharing the bed with Queequeg and he sees the landlord:

I cherished no malice towards him, though he had been skylarking with me not a little in the matter of my bedfellow. However, a good laugh is a mighty good thing, and rather too scarce a good thing; the more’s the pity. So, if any one man, in his own proper person, afford stuff for a good joke to anybody, let him not be backward but let him cheerfully allow himself to spend and be spent in that way. And the man that has anything bountifully laughable about him, be sure there is more in that man than you perhaps think for.

Ishmael is bountifully laughable, and he sees it, poking fun of his own irate, puffed-up little speeches. I finish my chicken and sit looking out onto Shattuck Avenue, thinking about what we lose from our twenties to our fifties: the fresh outlook and infallible knees are gone but it’s not such a bad thing to have a stronger appreciation for old friends and a good laugh. I resolve to allow myself to spend and be spent in that way.

copyright 2009 Ann Krueger Spivack