The Big Wave

An irritating thing that I encounter when I leave New York is the broad application of the word “different.” My family has been doing this for a while, lots of times when it comes to food that I make. When I dished up my cold kitchen sink orzo salad, my brother scowled when he tried it. “It’s different.” But when I made spiced nuts with sugared bacon at Christmas time, he nodded agreeably—“Huh! Different!” Or, for example, someone gave me Momento on DVD many years ago and my Dad finally got around to watching it recently; when I asked him what he thought, he shook his head, sort of bewildered, and said, “It’s just—different.”

I did some traveling through the Southeast last week, starting things off with a haircut. It came up that I’d just been up on a farm. “Tell me all about that,” Brittany said, snip-snipping, and I did, concluding with something along the lines of “and maybe it’s not everyone’s ideal vacation, but it really ended up being a perfect getaway for me.” “Sure,” she said neutrally. “Different.” Later, working her way from the back to the front and finally cutting off the last hunk of hair that had been hanging down over my eyes, effectively unsheathing my hew head for me finally to see, she exclaimed, “Omigosh! You look so different!”

Later in the week, while finishing up a culinary tour of Charleston over samples of pull pork, a few people got to talking about barbeque. One woman, who was from Grand Rapids, Michigan, was telling us about her favorite BBQ joint, Dinosaur (the one in Syracuse, not the one uptown). She went on and on about how good Dinosaur BBQ is (I guess I will have to go try it). Then, frowning at the little Dixie cup with a scoop of pull pork in it that we were all given to try, she said, “It’s not that this isn’t good, it’s just . . . different.”

Obviously I knew what meanings the speakers here were after. What amazes me is the breadth of applications, and how everyone seemed to exploit the word’s apparent inoffensiveness. Evidently you can call something “different” without expressly bestowing a judgment upon it—except that “different” is one half of a dangerous binary, with all these examples meaning “not normal” or “not the same” or “not what I’m used to.” And it’s not supposed to also mean “mediocre” (in the case of the pull pork) or “uncharacteristically delicious” (in the case of the sugared bacon). I realize I’m basing this solely on an amateur anecdotal survey, but is “different” just a lazy, offensive American euphemism?

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So Meghan and I first drove from Charlotte to Savannah, where one of the highlights was Savannah Pride. There was an awesome Tina Turner, an awesomer Cher, and then, headlining the show, “I Think We’re Alone Now” singer Tiffany, who I never knew I needed to see live. She’s so cute! We also saw the Mercer House, drank mint juleps and ate dinner at the Pink House, and took a lame “ghost tour”—lame except that the tour guide and one other paranormal enthusiast corroborated the existence of Charlie, a ghost who we were told by the innkeeper resides in the hotel room we were staying in (there were no incidents to report, except for an unidentifiable knocking sound on the bedside table in the morning). I left Savannah wishing I’d read Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil beforehand, as Meghan had urged me to do, and hoping to eventually make it back for a longer stay.

The next stop was Charleston, SC. Because we were driving in a convertible, a la “our honeymoon,” and because it is ungodly hot down there, we were tired. It took some coaxing and personal motivating for us to leave our walk-in refrigerator of a hotel room at the Indigo Inn. But we did, and we went to the waterfront where we drank sparkling water and watched people from the shade. I had insisted that we stop at the new Baked in Charleston—because I like the original one in Red Hook a lot, and was curious—and discovered, to no one’s surprise, that it’s pretty much the same as its NY counterpart. We went back to our hotel for cordials hour, a Southern custom we highly approve of, and then to dinner at Slightly North of Broad. (That place is great. I had shrimp and grits.) The next morning we got up for a “culinary walking tour.” The tour guide, Sarah, took us on a three-quarters mile walk where along the way we tried grits, sweet tea, pecan pralines, and other stuff that probably sounds obvious; I loved the tour, though, and noted that if I ever make it to cooking school, Charleston will be a great place to do it.

Then we drove up to the beach on Pawleys Island. I will always love the beaches on Jersey Shore and Long Island because they are the first beaches I ever got to know, but the South Carolina coast is so great because the water is warm. There wasn’t much to do but nap, read, swim, drink beers on the beach, and eventually have dinner at the hotel bar before passing out.

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The next day marked the fourth memorial of my mom’s death and I woke up early for the sunrise. I sat in an abandoned beach chair watching the waves for a while, thinking about how all the forces that make the little waves so soothing—gravity, the tilt of the earth, the moon, certain laws of physics I’ll never understand—are the same forces that will let loose more hurricanes and ultimately, probably, the Big Wave that will be the end of us all. This was a reminder, too, that the forces that enable us to go through good spells (I am seriously going through a good spell) and bad spells (☹) are largely the same: the proportions change, but the core weight stays the same. And, you know, one thing that is not “different” is death. Besides the necessity of oxygen, there’s no other fact about being alive, and no other fact that is so deeply moored in the makeup of the “life” that we largely take for granted.

I tried to prepare for this day, but it was hard because leading up to it I was having so much fun. Against my will, I recalled some of the incidents I manage to suppress throughout the rest of the year—my grandfather bursting into my room that morning saying, “Luke, you gotta get up. Your mother is leaving us” (these are two sentences that I would question the authenticity of if I read them in a book or heard them in a movie or play; funny how that works); or how the cover article in the New York Times Magazine the week before she died began with a description of the death rattle, and I hovered over Mom every time she napped, certain that I was hearing it; or how the only thing I could think to do once she had been taken away was to make breakfast for everyone. Also, every memorial puts in high relief the inevitable fact that everybody has mostly carried on with their lives.

I remember Mom once telling me about my grandmother, whose father died in a logging accident when Grandma was a baby and her mother died before she turned thirty years old; Mom found it unfathomable that Grandma had lived the bulk of her life without her mother around. I assume that this will probably be the case for me, as long as the Big Wave doesn’t come suck me up first. Must ride the little waves while we can.