A Moment

Last week, while the husband and baby were out of town, Jack and I went to a friend’s house for a cookout.  At the cookout, the host had a dozen oysters on the half shell, and upon discovering that they are (a) delicious, and (b) omg amazingly cheap (Deepwater Horizon what?), we decided to repeat the experience.  Jackie and Steve showed up on my porch Thursday night with a salty, smelly burlap sack filled with 100 oysters (for $35 – an amazing deal).  Steve brought his shucker and Louisiana hot sauce, I got out some lemon juice and saltines, Jackie brought red wine, and we sat on the porch and shucked and ate and drank and talked and ate some more.  We invited neighbors and other friends, and by the end of the evening we had quite a gathering, there on the porch, and I thought about how much we like living on this particular block in this particular neighborhood of New Orleans, and how unlikely such an impromptu raw oyster fest would be if we lived in a suburb.  It is possible to have a tightly knit, friendly, and open-to-spontaneity group of close neighbors living in a suburb, but I think it more often happens in the denser population of the urbs.  We’re all on top of each other all of the time.  And I have to say, on a block such as ours, I absolutely love it.

But this isn’t supposed to be a reprise of the Country Mouse-City  Mouse debate.  It is simply a memory, collected – a warm clear night, citronella candles, friends and oysters and red wine and hours of good conversation.  May we have many more.