"do you remember the... christmas tire?" this was wayne a few years ago. i had met him at a time,…read moredecades later, we termed our missing years... maybe you had some of those? days you can't account for, likely stuck somewhere because you chose wrong, turned down a backstreet and came to a deadend. nothing to do then but hope another bus comes along soon to get you out, and wary that your next move goes wrong, too. at such times, heed the advice given to weekend hikers: "if you get really lost in the woods, stay right where you are and wait... someone will find you". what isn't included in that conventional wisdom is the caveat: "sooner or later".
all this came to me as i enjoyed the oxtail stew at the basque cultural center. I'd been curious about it for quite some time and finally decided to check it out. Basque restaurants have been one of my guilty pleasures since i made the wrong choice that lead to those missing years. since then I've sought them out when around Fresno, Bakersfield, Reno and smaller towns like Gardnerville and Los Banos: flat, grassy, agrarian places suited to sheepherding, which as far as I know was originally the main occupation for new immigrants from the Pyrenees where it's something of an artisanal career today. Since the 1800s Basque boarding houses were also in SF and LA, all gone now.
Newly arrived Bascos heading to the country for work were advised to get off the train and look around for a place called, usually, the Santa Fe Hotel. The menu at the restaurant was then and is still basic: choose chicken, steak, lamb or pork chops as a main item and the rest is the same regardless (soup, salad, beans with ice cream at the end). There's also a preliminary dish, an "appetizer" that is essentially a separate entree in itself. this varies everyday, often oxtail or lamb stew. That's more or less the offering around today, and would have been all I likely ever knew except for my travels a few years ago to the Basque homeland in the Pyrenees.
Basque cuisine is much more diverse there than you'll find at the Cultural Center, but you're closer to here than to Saint-Jean-Pied-de-Port. Everything from the meat department is very good, but I suggest avoiding the fish entree unless it's the daily special. My favorite was the oxtail stew, reminding me of the same dish at the Santa Fe Hotel in Fresno, during the time when I lived nearby during those lost years, longer than I care to remember. In fact, as I enjoyed the meal I recalled my thoughts after wayne mentioned the "christmas tire".
at first i completely blanked, what was my old friend talking about? then slowly it came to me, like a dim memory of something said or done during a particularly white and active night before, something so off-axis that the next morning your left eye looks funny and hurts.
it was our second christmas in a small farmhouse near madera. i had stupidly purchased it... leave new york to live here forever? ever wanted to grab someone, someone also rootless, and just walk out the door, run away with less than a half-baked plan about what happens next? well that's exactly what we did, my runway model friend of the moment and i.
by the end of the 70s we had developed a nasty habit quite common then, not a true physical addiction mind you but a very real psychological dependence. in the end we couldn't pay our "bills" and needed to be somewhere else, like now!, hard to find for awhile. at that moment a portal of change opened, deux ex machina!: a job offer in the middle of nowhere, relo expenses et al. i accepted without ever visiting madera, ca.
i suppose after all this you might wonder what that tire thing was about? i, too, wonder. christmas was memorable in my early years but then something unforgettably sad happened, such that i've disrespected religious events since. for a time i took to making odd abstractions of what alternative forms a "christmas tree" might take. that particular year i covered an old truck tire with that canned "snow" you spray on trees to approximate a "white christmas." but this result wasn't a tree at all, instead the remains of one that had been cut down to be decorated elsewhere, leaving a snow-covered hole in the ground where the tree had rooted. That was the concept, merry christmas
perhaps you can see from this that my creative energy in this period ran high... wayne and i spent many and regular hours testing various brandy beverages i was hired to develop. but the lovely Dierdre fell back on pricier habits we had vowed to leave behind when we left the apple. soon after she caught the next bus out of town in the form of a wealthy melon farmer. fortunately none of this mattered much after awhile.
all that aside, i highly recommend the cultural center for its displays of Basque art and artifacts, a full gymnasium for Basque games, and of course its excellent traditional cuisine.
