gritty musings...Bright Shiny Pennies

It took the news feed this morning to wake me.  Like most of you I have watched the primary season with all the awe of consecutive car crashes, Ridiculous reruns and Saturday night live spoofs.  I am stunned at what I hear, read and see. But finally this morning they finally woke my sleeping lion.  Smarty pants journalists, pasted fox news insignias on their mikes and ventured into a post Trump pep rally in Arizona and asked what they thought were absurd questions on entirely made up subjects that the Donald was supposed to have said.  In fairness they were really not things that he wouldn't have said, but to this point he hadn't.  One question, a query that stopped me in my tracks...that made me ask alexa, my morning muse to repeat it,,was.. " do you agree with Mr. Trump's assertion that all Puerto Ricans should be neutered"...what?? did they say that??? and then the answer, from a millennial woman,  all blonde white and smiles...festooned in red white and...

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 ...

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...

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..t...

So the experiment that was and is Isla Mujeres has moved to a new place.  The experience was fantastic, the people were inspiring and the learning curve for this fifty something chef was worth all the world.  The restaurant is built, the menu, wine list, servers and bar are in place.  The space is fantastic, seriously one of the most beautiful rooms I have had the good fortune to help birth. So now I move on.  Did I want to live on in this beautiful job. of course!  But like all things in my career of opening peoples dreams in the form of restaurants, the track is unpredictable and the path unknown.  Ilsa proved to be like many challenges I have confronted during my life's passage in kitchens.   Language, infra structure, and the staffing, were all at once difficult, befuddling and gratifying. The cuisine, something I felt really conformable with, was even more enlightening that I had hoped.  The people were far more complicated than their gentle...

thanksgiving 2014...there have been some years with more life altering change than this...  but they are difficult to imagine...there was the move from Pennsylvania, almost twenty years ago...leaving all the friends I grew up with, my family and the comfort of a place that... i knew so well... but there were new friends..a new family of people that would surround me...and I was at home in St. Pete..loved the beauty of a small town...and the state of Florida...the keys... both coasts..loving the ease with which you can travel anywhere in 8 hours..and there was the birth of a fantastic little girl that made all our lives more exciting and love filled every day... . then there was that morning four years ago to the day...a tablesaw changed my everyday life..but with the help of the people most important to me..i recovered.. a beautiful mangled paw..but everything was still attached...there were a slew of restaurants...more fantastic people...some life changing..proving the adage ..yo...