When you meet new people, be it joining a new organization,
the teachers and other parents at your kid’s new school, or maybe it’s a new boss
and coworkers at a different job, you cannot help but yearn to put your best
foot forward and make a great impression.
Often you may try and lose a little weight to gain a more youthful or
healthy appearance, you may opt to buy new clothes to freshen a haggard
wardrobe or you may try and change a negative trait or bad habit, such as biting
your nails or using poor grammar or slang terminology. In fact many people will do a combination of
all of these just to try and prove to themselves and others, they are not who
they really are.
Last year, after going to the stockyard to find an
appropriate scale that would weigh me to the nearest ton, (the number, which I
will hold privately in order to keep a team of paramedics from following me,
thinking my ultimate collapse is eminent) I decided to lose some weight. As I have lost weight, an amount equivalent
to that of the population of a small Pacific Island, I still need to lose the
combined weight of the inhabitants of the Republic of Tonga, but I feel that all
of the progress that I have made, will make a good impression; so the weight
loss issue is, by all means, handled… granted, Burger King and Popeye’s
corporate planners are having long meetings to determine how to replace this part
of their revenue stream. A few years ago
when I was building a housing development and dealing with out of town
investors who dressed like “old man” pimps with pointy shoes, I went to Jeff’s
Haberdashery in New Orleans to have their tailor, Omar the tent maker, purchase
several bales of cotton and 2 flocks of sheep to make me some custom suits, shirts
and dress pants, of which I have hardly ever worn. Therefore, I have a closet full of slightly
used garments that fit my enormous frame or in a crisis; these clothes can be
joined together to make emergency housing for over 100 people. The negative trait or bad habit concern that
I mentioned earlier, is where I seem to have the problem and seems to pose
certain obstacles for me in trying to make the best of impressions.
Being a direct descendent of my father’s parents, Ollis Ray
Saucier and Thelma Smith Saucier, I have been blessed with a few gifts and
traits, of which I can say are quite helpful when I go about my day. I can work out complex mathematical functions
in my head in mere seconds; I can lift the back end of a midsize car or truck
off of the ground, while standing flatfooted; I can even sing in a high tenor
voice, despite my largess and “ogre-ishly,” deceiving appearance. However, accompanying these few positive
attributes I possess, are several unfavorable gifts that often demonstrate my
temporal humanity. While I can give
multiple written examples and photographic proof of my shortcomings, I have
chosen to regale you with an autonomic trait I inherited from both my
grandmother and my father. As I have
grown older and settled into being the defacto patron of the family, I guess
that it was inevitable for me to escape the curse of the food-stained garment.
No matter the occasion, be it a formal Sunday meal,
Thanksgiving Dinner or a Christmas feast at my grandmother’s house on 22nd
Avenue in Hattiesburg, I can never remember a time when my grandmother did not
possess the battle scars from going 10 rounds with her plate. Being a very Southern woman with a genteel
upbringing; always in a dress and shoes with a heel, the gracious countenance
of true Southern ladies, and a case study in manners, directly from the pages
of Emily Post, one would not expect to see the remnants of red tomato gravy,
coffee with cream and two lumps, or some fragment of a home baked good adorning
the fabric of her garment, centered just about the second button from the top. But as strange as this was to imagine, the tarnishing
was going to happen every time my family got together. This was long before the moistened
stain-towelette or use of baby wipes for stain removal became in vogue. So along with a normal place setting of fine
china, silverware and a linen napkin, that was set at the head of the table for
my grandmother, was also a small plate, resting on the tablecloth to the front
and right of her place-setting; serving as a vessel to hold a damp, lightly
soaped dishcloth, that was intended to be used as a countermeasure to the
staining offensive.
My dear father, a very private person who would walk miles
out of the way to avoid calling attention to himself in any form, is another of
my family members who could not evade the opportunity for some sauce, condiment
or morsel of nourishment to leave it’s mark upon his ever carefully pressed and
tucked, shirt--- and yes, most times it was when he would be out to eat or in
the company of others. Every day of my
life, this was a man who would wake before dawn, shower and get dressed in a
pair of dress pants, a cotton button down dress shirt, and highly polished
Rockport lace-up Oxfords, or some derivative thereof, before even taking one
sip of coffee. He was tough, very masculine
and was the poster child of what a “man’s man” should be. Yet, he always carried himself as a gentleman,
with the manners and social graces reserved for English society or heads of
state. Dad was a phenomenal chef of
renown on both sides of our family and those few friends he let in close enough
to know. He would have every burner
ignited on the stove, preparing gourmet sauces or icings; both double ovens
roaring as they turned out vast amounts of pastry, breads or roasted meats; all
the while manipulating a huge Kitchen Aid commercial mixer that sits atop my
cabinets, today. The spatter of liquids
on the cooking surfaces and the clouds of flour that hung low in the kitchen,
gave testimony to the fact that we were in the midst of some serious production
taking place, but Dad, in tucked shirt and hair parted from one side to the
other in perfect order, showed no signs of battle fatigue or unwelcomed
adornment of any of the ingredients. But
let it be a red gravy, a recurring theme amongst the Saucier bloodline; any
condiment, ranging from A-1 Steak Sauce to French’s Yellow Mustard, or thousand
island salad dressing with fragments of the salad’s contents; Dad would
inexplicably find a way to decorate himself in an unwanted fashion, for all the
world to see.
With Dad’s passing and the funny remembrances of those body
shots he took at the hands of varied cuisines, I would have hoped that the
curse would have been laid to rest in a plot of ground at Roseland Park
Cemetery, off 7th Street in Hattiesburg. But not wanting to let the custom die, my
father saw fit to pass it along with me.
This takes us to my point of negative traits, ruining your opportunity
to make a good impression. As I have
been recently working in Covington, La., a wealthy suburb of the Greater New
Orleans area, just to the north of Mandeville on Highway 190; I have been
surrounded by some very well heeled and sophisticated clientele. These people are well spoken, equally well
dressed and look, for the most part, as if they only eat 4 meals per week. Not wanting to look any more out of place
than I all ready do, I have been very careful to shave closely, make sure that
the brown color of my belt matches the brown color of my polished shoes and I
have continued eating healthfully, so as to continue to shrink my handsome, yet
girlish figure. One would think that
avoiding the foods of the local Louisiana culture, rich with heavy sauces and other
juicy goodness, would also help to avert the embarrassment that is a colorful
pallet of real life depictions of the luncheon menu on one’s clothes, however
that declaration has been far from the truth.
On my ride into Covington, on I10/I12 in the mornings, I
cannot pass up the opportunity to drink very strong coffee with a little cream,
from my Tervis Notre Dame tumbler. This
tumbler comes complete with a tight fitting, “spillproof” lid that is made
secure by a sliding cover, over a perfectly sized opening from which to
sip. Children master this technique of
consuming a beverage from similarly designed “sippee” cups, at a time when
their age is measured in months, not years.
Though I have been able to consume the majority of this bean-brewed
ambrosia from the adult dispenser I have so carefully chosen to use, this week
has been a testament as to why minute drops of liquid brown dye should be wiped
from the cup immediately, as gravity and warm air, forcefully blowing from
dashboard air vents, have detrimental effects on Egyptian cotton shirts when
they encounter these caffeine laden globules of dark roast coffee. And as sausage and cheese biscuits, dripping
with hot melted butter and the love which is pork fat, have been replaced by a
medium sized, Smoothie King Lean 1 chocolate beverage, served in a 32 ounce
Styrofoam cup with a well fitting lid and long red straw, the act of preserving
an unblemished wardrobe has failed to be an accomplishment of which I can
claim. When that thick, chocolaty
richness becomes too dense to make it’s way up the straw, a bit a retraction
and circular manipulation is necessary to once again achieve a steady flow of
consumption. This maneuvering of the red
plastic implement within the scored “x” opening of the plastic lid has been
nothing more than an opportunity for this life-giving fluid to be flung as from
a spring arm, become nothing more than a sticky residue, whose sickening aroma
is preserved throughout the day between the woolen fibers of my pant legs and
the confines of the inner arm wrinkles of a long sleeved shirt. With afternoons being the time of day when I
have the most interaction with the patrons of my employer, fresh wounds from
the midday meal seem to be the problematic and visible signs of fresh foods
gone awry. While Hummus has the consistency
of a very thick paste and defies many of Sir Newton’s famous laws as it clings
to any form of cutlery in any position, when mixed when the likes a water laden
fresh cut vegetables, or topped with the golden-green drizzle of extra virgin
olive oil, it becomes an explosive mass of stain-making slurry that has an
affinity for leaving its mark for the drycleaner.
Needless to say, I persevere and do a yeomen’s job of that
which I was hired to do. I smile, greet
and complete transactions as if I were born with an innate ability to do
so. Yet with hesitation and a modicum of
humiliation, I cannot help but notice, though no matter how inconspicuous the
stares and stolen glances may seemingly be, the attention that my carefully
chosen clothing draws when they are dotted, speckled or spattered with
substances that were created to go on the inside of my body, rather than
embellishing an oversized wardrobe, encasing an equally oversized body,
belonging to the likes of me. I have
resolved myself to the fact that I am cursed with a plague that has roots from
a Biblical era. And no matter how, what or where I choose to provide my body
with the necessary sustenance that it must have to survive; short of only
consuming only ice cubes or water, I am also going to be able to non-verbally
share with all of those who can see, a varietal representation of my breakfast,
lunch and supper on a canvas of custom made clothing from a little shop just
across the river on the West Bank, in New Orleans.
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