The Reader Travels

The Reader Travels is no longer just a solitary blog site feeding into my Facebook account. I’ve recently started The Reader Travels Vagabond Edition as part of the Vagabond Journey’s new blogger community. For now, it just means that I’m posting parallel blog entries each week, but I haven’t yet decided if I want to make it my new permanent home by transferring archives and merging the two paths.

I suppose that’s what adventures are all about — traveling down different paths, exploring the world beyond my living room.  The irony is that right now, I’m talking about traveling in my own home town over there. And Dallas is far from being a vagabond’s town, although I did give over five bucks in pocket change to a homeless woman who came up to me at a gas pump the other day asking for money to buy something to eat.

I just hate it when panhandlers give me some crazy story about how their car broke down and they need money for a hotel room or cab fare or whatever they say to make the story their own. But it’s almost always about their broken down car. When I lived in Houston, it was usually the guy pushing the kid in the wheelchair, a primal appeal to the heartstrings, and the guys washing windshields, working for their keep. In Dallas, it’s always the broken down car that tells the mark, this is just a one-time situation that will end as soon as I get my car fixed and go back to work.

I gave this woman money just because she said she was hungry. Granted, she was camped out beside a liquor store that hadn’t yet opened for the day, so she still could have been lying, but I don’t really care if my money went to feed her addiction or not. I may have given it to her if she had said she wanted to buy a bottle of rot-gut, just for her bold honesty.

The gas station and liquor store sits on the banks of the Trinity River, and I’ve often thought this river might be a viable place to live if I had no other. I have not walked this river, hidden by concrete, warehouses and industry, but I suspect I might find people there, forgotten by the rest of the world. The City of Dallas is revitalizing parts of the river, but I suspect there will be plenty of refuge to be had, still.

When Arthur Dent found himself in a conversation with a cow at The Restaurant at the End of the Universe, he couldn’t help becoming a vegetarian.  I mean, what would you do if a cow stood there asking you which piece of her you’d like to eat? Perhaps you’d say, “I’ll just take a little milk, if you don’t mind.”

Nobody wants to eat Babe the talking pig either. And most people in Western cultures cringe at the thought of eating horses, dogs and cats, because they’ve gotten to know the personalities of these creatures. I can assume that pigs and cows and chickens also have personalities, but they’re out of sight, out of mind, right? Let’s just eat our meat and avoid eye contact.

But then I think the real problem with the cow offering herself up for Arthur’s dinner plate is that she’s just too darned suicidal and submissive, offering herself up to the blade like that. Okay, sure, it’s the end of the universe, and they’re going to die within the hour, and she might as well put herself on a plate before the inevitable occurs. But still.

In honor of Mother’s Day, I’d like to talk a little about guilt. Since my mother instilled in us what she called “a healthy sense of guilt,” I became a minor hedonist to balance things out a bit. So I love sex and I love food, and I feel no guilt about eating eggs from caged chickens or slices from a baby cow raised in a dark box or salmon raised on a farm or meat of any kind.

But there are a lot of people who consider these things amoral, some opting never to eat any dead animals, others even opting not to eat anything that came out of an animal, no eggs, no cheese, no milk, no butter. Some even go so far as to say that eating these things brings negative energy into your body, causing you stress and strife and peacelessness.

Some eastern religions claim that garlic and onions are bad for the soul, and to lead a happy life one must strike them from their diets. I recognize that there is a great amount of peace in people who choose this lifestyle. But I refuse to feel guilt over garlic, this most wondrous creation of the gods.

So every traveler must face foods he has never eaten before. It’s part of the adventure to experience new things. These foods may seem unpalatable at first, but then we find that if we open our minds, they actually come out tasting quite delicious. As in the case of “Green Eggs and Ham,” by Dr. Seuss. Sam displays his wares to his friend who insists he doesn’t like this green food, until he realizes he has spent an entire book saying something that just wasn’t true.

Following the same path that took me through Roald Dahl’s Revolting Recipes, I also discovered Green Eggs and Ham Cookbook by Georgeanne Brennan. Georgeanne masterfully converts the poetry of Suess into simple and tasty recipes for kids and parents.

Some of the recipes are a little bit of a stretch to connect them to the Suess stanza, like “Yot in the Pot,” which is not at all like eating Yot, and she knows it. She just twisted it around and pretended like Suess meant to say “lot” and gave a monster sausage stew recipe. But honestly, no one really wants to eat a Yot. They’re rubbery, even if you cook them for a really long time, and the flavor is a bit like seawood and skunk combined. Even the most adventurous should steer away.

Regardless, I would recommend this book to parents and children alike. It’s imaginative and colorful, and there are several recipes children can make all by themselves. For instance, there’s “Gertrude’s McFuzz-y Berries” which only require some berries, sugar, tin foil and a freezer.

Not only that, but the book itself is obviously meant to be used in the kitchen. Out of the five children’s cook books I checked out at the library, this one is the only one built on a ring binder, so you can lay it flat to reference while you cook.

Oh, and Frankie Frankeny’s photos are phenomenal. Kinda creepy, though, in that live action Grinch movie kinda way.