National
Cheese Month
17 February 1997
I really have no news to
report, other than one surreal afternoon standing in a phone booth
in Castellina in Chianti with the rain beating a tattoo on the roof
and a weekly market still going on all around me oblivious to the
weather and me trying to call various restaurants scattered throughout
the Chianti to see which ones were open and reserve a spot and also
trying to track down Stan to let him know when I was coming back by
Rome and then all of a sudden, without umbrella or anything to protect
him, a Carabinieri went striding past my phone booth in full dress
uniform, walking with impeccable Carabinieri-school posture, carrying
two plastic bags of his shopping, and bearing the absolute spitting
image of Rowan Atkinson on his face. It was the highlight of my week.
Where was I?
Oh, yes. Other than "I'm still plodding along the travel writing thing"
reports, I have no news other than that which appears in the newspaper.
You may not have read about this, seeing as how it was strangely not
on the front page, so I will quote the story here (not in its entirety),
as much for the lead-in to the piece as to the point of it:
"New York has the official
state muffin (apple); Arizona its official neckware (bolo tie), and
Massachusetts its official dog (Boston terrier). The box turtle is
Kansas's official reptile; tomato juice the official beverage of Ohio
[I think that one scares me the most], and Oklahoma's state song is,
well, you guessed it.
"Now Texas
may be about to get an official state molecule: the buckyball..."
The thing is,
I wouldn't mind all this "Official State..." stuff if we actually did
something with it (we as in Americans). When an Italian village has
its wine or its strawberry festival, you know darn good and well exactly
what there's going to be plenty of freely available in town on that
day, and that everyone will be out celebrating it in a suitable manner.
We Americans,
on the other hand, go and declare a National Cheese Month (when it is,
I always forget), but then there's hardly any more cheese in it than
there is in a regular month. All we get is a bunch of wholesome commercials
by the Real(tm) Milk Corporation, pretending to be the United Dairy
Farmers of America, telling us to go buy cheese.
I would love
to see Bill Clinton up on the podium instead, giving a heartfelt and
emphatic speech full of his pregnant pauses and that downward
tonal slant at the end of each sentence that some speech coach at some
point must have told him made him sound more believable on the
importance of Emmenthal, the versatility of Velveeta (which is, technically,
not a cheese), and the olfactory qualities of aged gorgonzola. Then
he could finish with a bit of fist pounding and perhaps taking a big
ol' bite out of a hunk of Vermont cheddar (for patriotism, you see).
Then we would
all go out and enjoy picnic plates piled high with cheese, watch fireworks,
and sign petitions banning the further production, sale, and consumption
of Swiss cheese since it has all the taste and texture qualities of
rancid galvanized rubber, its only redeemable quality being the fact
that the holes mean you're spared more cheese volume-per-slice.
Where, I repeat,
where will the madness end?
I must get
to sleep now. ('No, Reid' you are thinking. 'You obviously needed to
go to sleep about two paragraphs ago.') But thank you for allowing me
to write about something that had nothing to do with the decor of the
restaurant I just ate in or the spring power of the beds in this hotel
(fair to middlin').
Copyright
© 1997 by Reid Bramblett. All rights reserved.
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