I apologize in advance if this post seems unusually grumpy; I’ve been in a lousy mood all week. The arrival of spring in Central Texas always has this effect on me. As the weather turns warm and moist and the redbuds and pear trees burst forth in clouds of colored blossoms, as the mountain laurels fill the air with the scent of grape Kool-Aid, as Heather and the rest of humanity get all goo-goo-eyed over the season of hope and rebirth, of pastel colors and eggs and baby chicks and bunnies, I grow ever gloomier, because I know what the sights and smells of spring really augur: the onset of another brutally hot summer. And in Texas, summer can last well into what would be considered fall, or even winter, in other places. To me, spring is the annual reminder that I’m about to spend six or seven months covered in a thin film of sweat. And did I mention the mosquitoes?

Perhaps it’s because I grew up in a cool, even chilly climate, but after almost three decades in Texas I have yet to acclimate fully to the summers here. Heather, on the other hand, loves hot weather; our personal comfort zones have only about a ten-degree overlap, as once the mercury climbs above 90° I begin to melt, and once it drops below 80° she begins to freeze. Under the circumstances, I think it’s pretty remarkable that we’ve been together for thirty years and married for twenty-five.

Of course hanging over everything else this week is the dreadful news of the earthquake and tsunami that devastated Japan, and the grim aftermath, with threats of nuclear disaster. We can’t yet know the final outcome of these events, but I worry that they may be a harbinger of even more catastrophes to come. A story on Grist.org suggested that climate change might cause more seismic and volcanic activity, as melting ice masses change pressures on the earth’s crust.

That’s scary all right. Equally scary are fears of massive radiation leaks from damaged nuclear reactors. We know that coal and oil and natural gas are all finite sources of energy, and that solar and wind power have limitations; nuclear power was supposed to be a sort of panacea, although we can wonder about the wisdom of building reactors in any place prone to major seismic activity. And then there’s that pesky problem of what to do with all that radioactive waste….

These gloomy reflections fit right in with the book I’ve been reading, Donovan Hohn’s Moby-Duck: The True Story of 28,800 Bath Toys Lost at Sea and the Beachcombers, Oceanographers, Environmentalists, and Fools, Including the Author, Who Went in Search of Them. The light-hearted title and subtitle are deceptive; the book is actually a thoughtful, and frequently depressing, contemplation of the problems of industrialization and pollution, and, most germane to the grim news from Japan, of the unintended consequences of technological advances. Reading it has not improved my mood.

It does, however, tell a fascinating tale. On January 10, 1992, south of the Aleutians and just west of the international date line, a freighter sailing across the northern Pacific from Hong Kong to Tacoma encountered rough weather. Somehow, as the ship rolled and plunged, two columns of containers stacked on the ship’s deck broke free and fell overboard, and at least one of them burst open as it fell, setting 7,200 packages of plastic bath toys—each containing a red beaver, green frog, and blue turtle, in addition to the yellow duck pictured on the book’s cover, but who’d buy a book titled, say, Moby-Turtle?—loose upon the waters. As the toys began washing up in unlikely places, they attracted attention from various news media—who could resist such a story?—and Hohn became obsessed with them.

The book ranges widely, both geographically and thematically: Hohn’s obsession takes him from his home in New York to (among other places) Alaska, Hawaii, South Korea, Greenland, and China’s Pearl River Delta, the industrial zone where the bath toys were manufactured, and he manages to work in reflections on the plastics industry (with a nice shout-out to my old UT Austin American studies honcho Jeff Meikle), the changing definition of childhood, the history of American environmentalism, and more. He writes well and often amusingly, but the overall message of his book is dire: we are almost literally drowning in waste, and we don’t really know what to do about it. Apparent solutions turn out merely to mask, or perhaps exacerbate, the problem; sincerely well-intentioned people disagree violently about what to do. And more and more garbage ends up in the oceans.

There was a time when all of this might have been ameliorated somewhat by the fact that spring signals the return of baseball. “Spring training”! I used to consider those the two most joyful words in the English language, other than “peach cobbler” and “tax rebate.” But that was before the steroid-fueled nightmare of the last fifteen years, in which unnaturally swollen sluggers rewrote the record book and permanently distorted the shape and balance of the National Pastime.

Now baseball is all but dead to me, and spring is when Tito and I fill out our NCAA tournament brackets, an annual exercise which makes manifest the depths of my almost complete ignorance of college basketball. (I usually pick the University of North Carolina Tar Heels to win it all, because I’ve always been a sucker for their baby-blue uniforms, but this year, in case you’re wondering, I boldly picked Duke to beat Kansas in the championship game.)

I don’t know what it will take to pull me out of my annual springtime slough of despond. Maybe the Blue Devils will actually go all the way (or, if not, maybe UNC will pull off an upset). Maybe the endorphins and tryptophan in a megadose of Easter chocolate will jolt me into a more agreeable frame of mind. Or maybe I just need to find more cheerful reading material.

What we’re reading
Heather: Karen Armstrong, Twelve Steps to a Compassionate Life
Martin: Donovan Hohn, Moby-Duck: The True Story of 28,800 Bath Toys Lost at Sea and the Beachcombers, Oceanographers, Environmentalists, and Fools, Including the Author, Who Went in Search of Them

The other night, inspired by a typically wonderful dinner at Texas French Bread, my Best Gal and I got to talking about our favorite meals ever, and what made them so. Eventually, we decided that it might be interesting to write about some of our most memorable meals. Since it happened to be my turn to grind out our weekly post, I got to go first, but we hope to turn this into an occasional series. Stay tuned!

For the purposes of our discussion, I arbitrarily ruled out meals that Heather, an amazing cook in her own right, had made at home, which knocked out a bunch of contenders: her pork posole, her made-from-scratch pizza baked in the wood-burning oven in the backyard, her weapons-grade ratatouille, her charcoal-grilled bison-lamb burgers with all the fixin’s, and so on.

With those delectable meals off the table, so to speak, my thoughts turned immediately to the tagine we enjoyed on the pillow-strewn rooftop of an inn in Morocco’s Atlas Mountains, and the tortelli at that trattoria (I can’t even remember its name) we blundered into by pure chance near the Duomo di San Martino in Lucca. Less exotically, I remembered wonderful meals at Higgins, in downtown Portland, Oregon; at Delfina and Swan Oyster Depot, in San Francisco; and at Savoy, in New York’s Soho.

Closer to home, I fondly recalled the burgers and Shypoke Eggs (actually a form of trompe l’oeil nachos) at the late lamented Little Hipp’s in San Antonio. And then there was that “Whole Hog” dinner prepared by Jesse Griffiths of Dai Due last year: seven incredibly delicious courses, each featuring some form of pork—even dessert, which was beignets fried in pork lard. (Oops! Please excuse me while I wipe the drool off my keyboard.)

Somewhat disconcertingly for a couple of self-styled foodies, though, we found that we could rarely remember the dishes that made up these meals in much detail. Rather, what we tended to recall was the setting, and the company, and other such trivia. Not that the food wasn’t important, of course; but we concluded that it takes more than merely wonderful food to make a truly memorable meal. When it all comes together, there is something magical about the combination of the flavor and texture and smell of the food, and the comfort of the setting in which it is served, and true ease and delight in the presence of one’s companions (and what a wonderfully evocative word companion is, deriving from the Latin “with bread”—literally, one with whom you would break bread).

Or, alternately, a truly memorable meal might just involve intense pain and suffering, like the one I’m about to describe. Almost thirty years ago, during the summer after we graduated from college, we set off on a 4,500-mile road trip from Massachusetts to San Francisco and then back to San Antonio—all in Heather’s un-air conditioned Toyota Tercel hatchback, nicknamed Pollo for reasons now lost in the mists of time.

It was an eventful journey—in New Orleans someone busted in one of Pollo’s windows and made off with everything we owned, including the all-important cooler full of cold beverages, and in San Francisco each of my parents had an, um, entertaining reaction to my newly pierced ear—but in some ways the high point occurred as we were making our way back to Texas in July.

We’d been following Interstate 40 eastward, but we had an early edition of Jane and Michael Stern’s book Roadfood in which we read about this Mexican joint in the dusty little town of Socorro, New Mexico, and even though Socorro was some seventy-five miles out of our way we decided (ah, youth!) that it would be worth the detour.

We reached Socorro at the height of the scorching mid-afternoon heat and found the restaurant, next to the railroad tracks and surrounded by chickens, without too much trouble. It was almost completely deserted, in that dead time between the lunch and dinner crowds, and as we walked to our table we caught a brief glimpse of an enormous black cast-iron stove in the kitchen, surrounded by a swarm of diminutive elderly women in black.

Heather ordered… I don’t know; enchiladas or something. I ordered the tamales with salsa verde, I can’t remember why; perhaps the book recommended them? We sipped our iced tea while the women in the kitchen got busy; when the food arrived, it looked and smelled fabulous. We both dug in enthusiastically, and almost immediately I realized I was in waaaaay over my head.

The tamales were wonderful, but that verde sauce… oh, my God. It’s still probably the spiciest thing I’ve ever eaten. My body’s alarm bells started clanging, the warning lights began flashing; my forehead, and then my scalp and neck and upper body, started pouring sweat like Albert Brooks in Broadcast News.

Soon my T-shirt was soaked; still the heat kept building. I drained several glasses of iced tea, to little effect. I noticed that all the women who worked in the kitchen had come out to watch me; they stood in the doorway, pointing and giggling, like a gaggle of highly amused crows.

Somehow I made it all the way through the tamales, then, trying to marshal my last shreds of dignity, stood up, marched out to the car, and changed my sopping wet T-shirt. Did the women applaud when I returned? I can’t remember, though they certainly should have. I’ve had many fiery meals since then, but none could compare to that one. Fortunately, my youthful constitution absorbed the dreadful punishment with no long-term ill effects, and we went on our way to Texas.

Yeah, that was a memorable meal, all right. Won’t you tell us about some of yours?

What we’re reading
Heather: Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking
Martin: Peter Carey, Parrot and Olivier in America