gritty musings...Bright Shiny Pennies

Sunday the fifth of July..(The beautiful girl chuckles every time I tell this story..makes her giggle.)   Its 1969 and my family is on its yearly pilgrimage to the florida keys.We are stopped in one of the nameless gas stations on a-1-a in Dillon South Carolina.  I jump outta the back of the camper truck, amazed at the green beauty that is the south.  Sweet air ... nothing like south eastern pa in the winter.   I survey everything that is a bustling, south carolina truck stop,  And then i see it...   a sign over the water fountain.   colored.   What!!!!..., I look around for any other sign that says..;"stop here for the Dillon's amazing colored water"...my 11 year old mind runs rampant with what will happen when I push the foot pedal...the south is so cool...   no snow and colored water...this is great!..and as I reach my lips to what is going  to be the most awesome water on the planet...before I get one sip of Dillon's fantastic multicolored agua...I hear.."He

So... I arrive back in the states.  I was out of country for the better part of half a year and for the mid term elections.  Here in Florida there was a medical marijuana referendum and some train stuff and oh yeah, a governor to unseat. Nationally there were seats up for grabs, with our future in the balance.  On the night of the elections I was sitting in a local cantina with a group of ex pats.  As we watched the sickening results trickle in over the bbc.  I sat stunned  So when the conversation restarted and I had washed the vomit from my big lebowski t shirt.  What really amazed me about this group, and really all groups of displaced Americans I have met in my travels, is... they are mostly conservative.  I don't know why this is a surprise.  To live outside the states takes money.  Money to get there.  Money to buy a place.  Money to live.  Money to drink.  Liberals tend to vacation, then return home to regale us with stories of eco hotels, long hikes to meet indigenous peopl

so...i'm here once again...back on the tiny island, surrounded by deep turquoise sea...people speak a language, despite Rosetta stone..,  still so very fast and foreign to me...i'm trying to teach  a core of students, so eager to learn... but the teacher is speaking martian...sometimes I am really amazed that life's path has brought me here..i'm taken back twenty some years...  standing on a corner in tsai kung, china.. looking around the sleepy village...just 35 kilometers from Hong Kong..not a sign in English, and definitely the only person who looked like me standing on that street corner I was an urbanophobic thirty something that never, ever ventured into Philly,... I never left the security of a pot smoke and hazy existence in Chester county pa. please don't get me wrong   it wasn't a bad life...life was easy, needs were met..I had a great woman to share my life with and a really sweet dog, lifelong friends were within a phone calls grasp...I played vol

so in august i was enticed..venture south..build a dream restaurant on a space that holds a dear, dear place in my heart... blue water and my food...looking out the windows of the space to the turquoise waters of the Caribbean...live in a Mexican town...challenge myself to be better  it was all so exciting... so complementary... after years of honing what I do, a chance to go somewhere far away,.. and push it.. to teach what i do to people where the language would be an issue... where the food, the intrinsic food of a region could be joined with what i do .. a .new kitchen , brand new equipment (only a chef  knows how exciting that is!!)  so a few plane rides and cocktails later i was on my way..there were promises made, but there always are...a handshake was exchanged..the only agreement that ever matters between two people committed to something as hard as birthing a restaurant... but as it has in so many instances, the situation changed and the dream drifted away..the compensatio