A Good Meal and Old Shoes

Last weekend, a good meal came together. Lindz and I hit Costco like a ton of bricks, so we had lots of food in the house. We drank a very good bottle of pinot noir, Sanford Santa Rita Hills.

I skewered a bunch of scallops and seasoned them with my handy-dandy Trader Joe's lemon pepper grinder. I grilled them.

The salad you saw up there featured, in addition to roasted sweet peppers and toasted pine nuts, these marvelous little beasties of Lindz's creation:

They are balls of goat cheese, coated in panko crumbs and fried. Yep. Luxurious. Good-ass crap, as we like to say around these parts.

And now, how about a jarring transition to a different subject? I bought these shoes six or seven years ago at Carlsbad Company Stores (an outlet mall that was home to a Starbucks where I used to work):

That's where and roughly when I made the brilliant decision to start smoking. Good times. Anyone who has spent time working for Starbucks knows that working at a mall store is a highly concentrated version of the unrewarding, hectic and demeaning experience that typifies a regular neighborhood store. Yes, I know it's my own damned fault for working retail in the first place, but that's another story. Anyway, combine the shitty job with a couple of shitty relationships, and smoking cigarettes on your ten minute break from Busloads-of-Asian-Tourists-and-Rude-Americans-Frappuccino-Ass-Rape starts to make sense.

These shoes are the ones that I wore running every day when I tried to get into the army (this was after 9/11 and before Vietnam II, uh, I mean the Iraq War). I failed to get the security clearance necessary to get the assignment I wanted, which probably saved my life. I was crushed at the time.

I still had these shoes when my life was saved again. I fell in love with Lindz, and I asked her to marry me. She said yes, but it was never in doubt that she would not actually marry me until I quit smoking. So I did.

These shoes were on my feet, if I recall correctly, when I drove across the country. It's silly to attach too much sentimental value to material things, and yet I do. They were good shoes, and a lot of water has gone under the bridge since I've owned them. Today, I threw them away. I take comfort from their successors, a pair of Merrell Moab Ventilator hiking shoes.

Cigarette ashes will never float down upon them, and I doubt they will pound the gravel of the train tracks at Del Mar.