Madame Dufour 

Madame Dufour

Journal # 17
Madame Dufour

In the summer of 1983, at the age of sixteen, I spent a month in Rouen, France as part of an exchange that was worked out between my parents, and a French lady that they had met while we were living in England. I was not thrilled about this trip because, at that time, my universe revolved around loud rock and roll bands, driving fast around the counties of the Piedmont Triad and trying to sneak into the Flamingo Drive-In. I was into Led Zeppelin, Rush and The Who, and I knew very little about France, and cared even less about it. My parents had a way of cajoling me into these things, and told me that I could visit my sister in England if I spent the month in France. I relented. I really had no choice.
I stayed with the Dufour family in a comfortable town house close to the city center. Rouen is the town where Joan of Arc was martyred, I believe, and the city center is dominated by a huge cathedral that was pock marked by shells during WWII. There is also a modern church dedicated to Joan of Arc. Needless to say, all of this was utterly boring to a sixteen year old, and I spent a good part of the trip pining away for the Fast Fare and the midnight movies at the Reynolda Cinema. I was spoiled.
The Dufour family tried their best to entertain this sulky, moping American teenager, but I would spend a good part of the day listening to Super Tramp and Simon and Garfunkle and doodling in a journal. I actually made a calendar that counted down the hours, not the days, until I returned to the States. It didn’t dawn on me that I could have used this time to learn French.
Madame Dufour was the matron of this family. She was a small, energetic woman with jet black hair and a way of ordering her family around that would have made Napoleon envious. Her main attribute? She could cook. I may have been home sick, but I was sixteen years old, and could eat twice my weight in one sitting. The fact that Madame Dufour could cook so well led me to conclude that she was my favorite of the Dufour clan.
Being a teenager, I usually slept late, but when I awoke, Madame Dufour would greet me with a bowl of hot, sweet coffee. This is where I acquired a taste for coffee and a great deal of other things I might add. With this cereal sized bowl of coffee, was a large flakey croissant with plenty of fresh French butter and preserves. This breakfast actually motivated me to get up earlier.
Lunch was the main meal of the day, and Mr. Dufour would return from work (I never understood what he did) at around eleven thirty. Even during the week, lunch could last over two hours, and Madame Dufour would serve course after course of salad, soup, chilled meats, breads, sweets, and cheese. She taught me how good a plain radish was with a little fresh butter smeared on it. She showed me how to make simple vinaigrette with olive oil, vinegar, garlic, salt and cracked black pepper. She didn’t speak a word of English, but she seemed to take a special interest in feeding her spoiled American guest.
The Dufours had a little country cottage in the orchard country of Normandy. They took me there on the weekends, and the living was primitive to say the least. They were in the process of fixing it up, and the cottage was without running water or electricity. The only way to cook was on a camp stove, and an ancient wood stove. Madame Dufour worked these with ease. She would spend all day at it, waking up with the dawn to get things going.
Sunday was the main event. She, her sons and I took their little car to a local farm early one morning to look over a gaggle of geese. After a long discussion in French with the farmer she pointed at one and said “Oui, C’est bon.”(pardon my bad French, it’s been a while). We left.
Soon after, the farmer pulled up with the dead, plucked goose. It was time for Madame Dufour to get to work.
The boys laid a large flat board on some sawhorses out in the yard. This was to be our table. The courses just seemed to keep coming that day, and I suppose it was about the fourth or fifth that we got to sample what had been running around in a barnyard earlier that day. I must confess, I don’t remember what it tasted like, but I don’t remember anything Madame Dufour cooking being less than delicious.
All of this was accompanied by wine and liquors, so by the end of the meal everyone was quite friendly, despite the language barrier. At one point they brought me a fat sausage and I ate it with slobbery gusto. The oldest son, Nicholas, asked me if I knew what it was. I said no. In broken English he explained that it was blood sausage, made from pigs intestines, bread and pork blood. The look on my face must have been telling because Madam Dufour laughed very hard.

Fall, my time of year. 

Me with my sisters. A tough but fair crowd. 

Me with my Mom and Dad. My Father was the same age I am now. 

About Me

Autobiography
Imitation of Raymond Mungo
I was born in Baptist Hospital on November 14th, 1966. The doctor that attended my mother while I was coming into the world was Dr. Wall. The only reason I know this is because every baby who was delivered in Winston-Salem between 1900 and 1999 was delivered by Dr. Wall. I'll be in casual conversation with a grandfatherly type and it will come out that he was birthed by Dr. Wall during the blizzard if nineteen-ought-six. Dr. Wall retired in 2000 at the age one-hundred and forty-two.
Not much is known about my birth except that I was a couple of weeks late. Perhaps that's why I wait out the entire grace period before I send in my mortgage payment. There is a picture of me in a baby seat, on the dryer with my sister staring at me. I don't know if she was admiring me or waiting for me to spit up, but she certainly seems transfixed.
I had three older sisters growing up, and to torture me they would hold my foot. For some reason this would drive me out of my mind and I would howl like the world was ending, while trying to contort my way out of their vice like grip. I really don't know what my problem was, and I must have outgrown my held-foot-phobia at some stage, because it doesn't bother me now.
There is also an old color photo of me at about the age of two, sitting in a pile of leaves and laughing hysterically. I have no idea what I could have found so funny about sitting in a pile of leaves. I vaguely remember this early photo shoot because our cat Solomon was wandering around in the leaves with me. There is also a photo of me shoving a handful of leaves into my mouth. I can't remember what they tasted like, but this could have been the first moment that I showed a love for gourmet food. Even now, on the rare occasion that I'm raking leaves, I either start to giggle uncontrollably or start to salivate.
When I was five my mother threw a birthday party for me and gave it a soldier theme. I was decked out in an American G.I. uniform and I think our German neighbor came as a Prussian infantry man complete with jackboots and handle bar mustache. She looked pretty cute. All I remember of this event is that my mother baked a cake shaped like a castle and that my German neighbor had us digging a parameter around the front yard until nap time.
At the age of twelve my parents moved the whole family to England. The reason for this is so convoluted, and covered in myth and speculation that it’s better to stay off the subject, but there we were. We arrived in mid-winter when the sun comes up at 12:15 p.m. and goes down promptly twenty minutes later. I was to be schooled at Scolfields School for boys which had no heat, no electricity, no running water and worse, no girls. Actually I made the part up about the electricity, heat and running water but there really weren't any girls. It was in an old gothic building that was modeled after the Tower of London and always seemed to be damp, cold and creepy. Whenever I read Poe the settings take place at Scolfields.
Back in the States I went to a Catholic high school for two years, until my parents were forced to take drastic measures and send me to Christ School in the mountains of North Carolina. This was a haven for all the rich snobbery on the Eastern Seaboard, and once again it was all boys. I started to see a theme.
Then I was off to college and guess what? Too many Girls! I got no studying done but it wasn't because of one romance after another. It was that I would pine away so hard for one that I couldn't eat, sleep or most importantly, study. So I dropped out and went to Africa.

Hendersonville

Autobiography
After Wright Morris
For some years during my youth, my sister and I would spend a week or two during the summer at the home of a Scottish surgeon in Hendersonville, North Carolina. He and his family lived in an old restored Victorian house with an expansive yard that included a barn where a real horse resided. The front yard was mostly cleared, from what I remember, but at one corner there was a grove of pines that would give shelter from summer heat and provide a place to make plans and invent games. Along the right side of the house, if you were looking off the porch, was a straight driveway that turned into a circular loop as it came into the backyard. The driveway was paved with tiny white stones that would embed themselves into the soles of your Ked’s© and sometimes enter your shoe all together, becoming uncomfortable as hell.
Inside the circular driveway I remember a lone tree with a tire swing. This was also a good starting point for excursions, but I don’t remember anyone actually swinging on it. If someone had been swinging on it they would be facing the back porch, which was screened in and used mainly as a place to kick off muddy shoes and shake the little white stones out of your sneakers. Through a door off the right of the back porch, one would enter the kitchen and smell the smells of British households everywhere, a mix of roasting meat and lavender or some such scent. The smell would at once make you salivate, and mind your P’s and Q’s at the same time. It was here that I would start following my sister’s lead.
Dr. McConnachie, who we were allowed to call Chris, had three daughters and one son when we first started to visit. His wife Jenny was the most kindly, generous person I had known up to that point, family members excluded of course, for how can you be objective about people you’re around all the time. Their only son at the time, Cameron, was still a toddler, but I felt a kinship to him immediately because the poor chap was going to have to suffer three older sisters, just as I had. I felt I could be of help to him once he stopped dribbling strained peas all over his bib.
When we first arrived for the visit, the three daughters and my sister and I would just sort of stand around trying to think up something to say. Then Pandy, the oldest, or Natasha the next to the oldest, would suggest a game of Musher-Man and the ice would break. Actually it would shatter. The game of Musher-Man was so fun and exciting that we would forget our shyness and be fast friends for the rest of the stay.
The front of the house contained a wrap-around porch that seemed so vast that you could house a family there. When the dog-days hit, and Musher-Man’s novelty had worn off, this is where the marathon game of Monopoly would take place. Because I was too young to really grasp capitalistic commerce (I still am in many ways) this part of the stay was extremely boring to me. The porch had other diversions though, one of which was a porch swing that you could get going pretty well. Once, when I was pushing a full capacity load of shrieking girls to the limits of this porch swing, I had the bright idea of seeing if I could slide under it as it was in mid-swing. I couldn’t. The swing came back and hit me in the forehead. It was a good thing there was a surgeon around. Chris always seemed to be bandaging one of us up.
Upstairs, I was bunked down in Cameron’s room, which smelled of diapers, or nappys as the McConnachies called them. The other rooms seemed to be filled with thousands of interesting toys, mostly educational in nature, like magnetic alphabets and felt cutouts that you could recreate Bible scenes with. Usually we would forgo the use of these toys for the more interesting challenge of a drawing contest. As the girls drew puppies and flowers, I would draw tanks and airplanes. I felt I was the hands down winner as my drawings were less generic in subject matter. Jenny was usually the judge. We would all get a “Very Good” but I always felt slighted. Looking back it was Natasha who should have won. She is now an artist living in Colorado.
Chris and Jenny live in Africa now and have since sold the Hendersonville house. I can still feel the little white stones in my Ked’s© when I dream of that house.

Bad Boss Man

A Bad Boss Man
Recently I had a bad experience with an employer. I will withhold his name, out of fairness, and because I doubt any one who reads this will ever have any dealings with him. I’ll just call him Greg for the purpose of this journal entry.
He is the proprietor of an area restaurant that I will also rename, calling it the Sidewinder Café. He has owned this establishment for a number of years when his mommy, sorry, mother, and daddy, oops, father helped him open it in the early nineties. He originally went in as a partner with his brother, but after a number of years of vicious sibling rivalry, the brother pulled out to presumably run as far away as possible form Greg. Greg was now left as the sole proprietor/autocrat/dictator of the restaurant.
The food at the Sidewinder is a little upscale from Applebees, and a little downscale from The Outback Café. Now, I have nothing against these chains; they do what they do and make money at it, which in the restaurant business is an incredible feat. But Greg would have you think that his menu is comparable to Einstein’s Theory of Relativity, as far as ingenious concepts go, and he guards his recipe book as if it were the Magna a la Carta. All of the recipes were either invented by himself, his brother, his mother, or some goon of a chef he employed for years, and who I will get to later. His ribs recipe came out so tough that I once chipped a tooth trying to gnaw one enough to force it down. All of these recipes he dotes over as if he were their grandmother, and any discrepancy by his cooks in changing them in any way is met with pursed lips and a brooding sulk.
He is ultimately a crude man, although he wears airs to impress the rich people in the neighborhood where he operates. Employees are often greeted by him holding a paper cup with a brown soaked napkin stuffed in it. This is his dip cup, which he indulges in twice daily, first when his wife takes the kids to school, and secondly after she has brought them by after school. He is very obsessive about not letting her find out about this habit, and the staff is set up to warn him if they see her arrive and he has a dip in.
The dipping is inconsequential compared to his signature crude habit, scratching himself in his crotch. I wish I could have flowered that last statement up a bit, but to do justice to the act, I have to tell it like it is. This is not the same as what men do when things get a little unorganized down below, this is a habit on the borderline of obsession. We would be having a conversation about inventory or invoices, and inevitably his hand would reach down and go for it like there was an infestation of some sort going on down there. Several times I would see this occur and quell the instinct to just run away and never come back. I never saw him wash his hands and later I would see him making chowder and think, “I ain’t eating that.”
The other cooks and I would make remarks to each other about these habits to relieve tension. This was by far the most negative environment I had ever been in. The cooks were disgruntled, the waiters were trying to undermine the kitchen constantly, the patrons complained often, and the sous chef and I were exhausted most of the time because, of course, Greg worked us like dogs, because we were on salary. He worked the hourly staff less, to save money.
Money. That was Greg’s obsession. He obsessed over money so much that he reminded me of a modern day version of a Dickens villain. All he needed was a tall desk and stool, with a quill pen, adding numbers to a colossal old ledger. That would be him. He was also paranoid of what he could lose. When I first started work he was so worried that a former employee was going to steal his recipe book, that he considered taking it home and locking it in his safe.
He once called me in the office to have a talk about how things were going. He talked about the former chef, who all of the staff had told me was a hot-headed bully (a dime a dozen in this business). The staff had told me that this guy would yell and publicly berate everyone until everyone was afraid to approach the kitchen. I’ve worked with chefs like this before, and vowed that I never would be like that because all it does is break down channels of communication. Greg said that this guy may have been a bully but, like Mussolini, the trains ran on time. I felt like reminding him that Mussolini was strung up by his own country men in the streets of Milan. I also should have asked him, “If he’s Mussolini, who does that make you, Hitler?”
This may sound like sour grapes, but sometimes in life you meet some one who you are completely incompatible with. Unfortunately, in the town where I live, there is a sequestered little group of society who puts on false airs, and likes to think of themselves as cultured. Greg is an example of some one who smells their money, and caters to them because he believes that he belongs on that narrow, shallow plateau.

My Sister Emily and Me. Age Five and Two 

First Blog Entry 6/3/04

This is my first blog entry and I am very excited about it. I have heard the term blog being used more and more over the past year or so, and I decided to look into it. I am still unsure of what blog stands for but maybe someone can help me clear that up.
I am a student at Guilford College in Greensboro, North Carolina. I live in Winston-Salem and work as a cook at an assisted living community. I previously worked at a country club as a banquet chef but the elitists started getting to me so I quit after eleven years and returned to college. I've completed one semester and am about to start the second session of summer school on June twenty-first. I tried college when I was in my late teens and early twenties but it didn't take for some reason. So now I'm back at it with more enthusiasm and focus than I had in those days.
I am thirty-seven. I am unmarried but have been enjoying a long term relationship with a woman named Margaret for thirteen years, and if this is starting to sound like a personality profile for a dating service it isn't. I think that for my first entry I should just give some autobiographical background in order to establish a base for whatever I might write in the future.
My father was a history professor at Salem College, which is small private women's college in Winston Salem. He and my mother raised four children, three daughters and one son, the son being me. I am the youngest. We lived in a farm house about ten miles from town in a little place called Clemmons. Clemmons has now become a large suburb with urban sprawl, but when we were growing up it was fairly rural and you might even say redneck. I caught a lot of crawdads in the creek.
I had sporadic success in grade school and usually brought home Cs and Ds. History interested me for obvious reasons, and I seemed to have knack for English, but the rest of the subjects usually bored me to distraction. I some how got through though and ended up at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. This really wasn't the best fit for me and I soon dropped out when the opportunity arose where I could go work in South Africa for eighteen months. This opened up a whole chapter in my life that indirectly led to where I am today. I want to get all of this down using this blog. I'll have a lot of time to do this and I want to get as much of it down as I can. I also want to reflect on daily events and whatnot. This is my goal. See you next time.