TV and chowder | Worldly talk at the Mainely Eatable Diner dissects conspiracies and suspicious-looking soup
With the recent holidays and all the resulting cards and packages, it always takes them longer to sort the mail over at the post office, so over at the Mainely Eatable Diner we have more time to chew the fat and talk about the important issues of the day.
On this particular morning the hot topics were clam chowder and digital TV. There’s just no telling from one day to the next what topics will get us going.
Palmer Hart, a local woodland owner, got us onto the topic of chowder when someone asked him how his recent trip went.
First, you have to understand that Palmer is not what you’d call a world traveler. In the last 10 to 15 years, he’s only left the state a half-dozen times and, even then, it’s likely he didn’t get farther than Vermont.
Turns out Palmer went to a woodlot conference in Providence, which is about as far south as Palmer’s ever been and is ever likely to go. Palmer said he liked Providence well enough and was surprised to see that it was even bigger than Portland.
The only trouble he had was in the restaurants — what with all the funny-sounding items some restaurants are serving these days that Palmer can’t pronounce. Palmer said he always remembered the worldly advice of Tink Billings.
“What words were those?” Elmer asked.
“Tink always said, ‘Never order the soup du jour, because you never know from one day to the next what it’s going to be.’”
Despite those words of wisdom, Palmer still had problems with some fancy restaurants.
He said one day he went into the hotel restaurant and ordered a bowl of clam chowder for lunch. Simple, right? Well, a few minutes later, the server plunked down in front of him a steaming bowl of something, but it wasn’t like any clam chowder he’d ever seen.
Before Palmer could say anything, she was off like a shot. You know how fast those big city waitresses are. We all nodded.
Course, not knowing what it was, Palmer didn’t dare touch it. Finally she came back to ask if everything was all right. Palmer said, “It’s not all right from where I sit.”
“What’s the problem?” she asked.
He said, “I don’t know what’s in this bowl you brought me, but there’s definitely something in there that appears to be hemorrhaging.”
Palmer began chuckling and then told us down there in Providence, they intentionally put tomato sauce in their clam chowder instead of milk like you’re expected to. Then they call it Manhattan clam chowder just to deflect the blame, I guess.
Not wanting to start arguing over the merits of one or the other — red versus white — we all just sat there nodding, hoping someone would change the subject.
Finally, Hollis Watts broke the silence by asking if we’d bought our digital TVs, to be ready for the big changeover in February.
Harold Hupper piped up and said he thought the whole thing was a government plot to get everyone signed up with cable. He said — against his better judgment — he went online and looked into applying for one of those converter-box coupons the government’s handing out.
“How’d that go?” asked Hollis.
Harold said they wanted much more personal information than he thought the transaction deserved, so he just signed off.
A few at the table nodded, not wanting to give Harold the slightest encouragement.
Then Hollis asked, “So, what are you planning to do when the big changeover happens in February?”
Harold said he’s planning to go without his TV for a while and will be listening to a lot more radio.
At that point we all realized that Harold had brought us dangerously close to the touchy topic of radio and the battles between the AM-types and the FM-types, the talk radio gang and the public radio crowd. So, before everyone started firing indiscriminately in all directions, we decided to get up and leave, knowing we’d be hearing more from Harold about the government’s digital-converter conspiracy and how public radio is probably involved in some way.
John McDonald, an author, humorist and storyteller who performs throughout New England, can be reached at mainestoryteller@yahoo.com.
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