ON THE ROAD AGAIN

She Who Must Be Obeyed and I are on the road again, which fact accounts for the relative paucity of posts here over the past few days. We’re in South Florida - a place that She Who Must Be Obeyed characterizes as being “a mishmash of gold and shit” - visiting Uncle Phil and Aunt Marge.

Phil has been having a rough go of it these past several weeks. Healthwise, he is what the medical community calls a “hot mess,” with two nonfunctional kidneys and a ten-year-old case of prostate cancer that has metastasized into his bones. But radiation treatments have brought relief from the pain he had been suffering when his cancer manifested itself, and lately he has been eating well enough to put on a few pounds. That’s Phil: the Energizer Bunny (keyn ayin hara).

This evening, we smuggled an apple knish into his room. His eyes lit up like those of Charlie Bucket upon seeing the innards of Willy Wonka’s Chocolate Factory for the first time, and he snarfed up that knish (the half of it we gave him, anyway) with ecstatic delight.

(An apple knish is, of course, the bastard child of a potato knish and an apple pie.)

When we’re not visiting with Phil, we’ve been trying to keep Marge entertained. Last night, SWMBO and I fixed dinner for her and a few old friends. We had raided the Whole Foods in Aventura for the necessaries, in the process running into Aria Kagan, one of the contestants on “The Next Food Network Star,” a very personable young lady in the midst of a family shopping expedition. The menu included roasted sockeye salmon with chimichurri, avocado-mango salsa, sweet potato purée with roasted garlic, braised bok choy, arugula and spinach salad with shaved Parmesan and lemon - all thrown together in a mere couple of hours, to Marge’s astonishment and delight.

This afternoon, we ran off to Pompano Beach, site of the infamous Festival indoor flea market. SWMBO and I had been there back in September; the only thing that has changed since then is a general diminution in Shopper Traffic. The place was just this side of desolate... a function of a miserable economy, a reflection of slow mid-Monday mall activity, or both. But it was the perfect encapsulation of SWMBO’s description of South Florida, and so a perfect place to spend a few hours.

We’ll be back on the road in a couple of days, headed home. Posting will be unpredictable and intermittent. Like always, eh?