Once Upon a Time

When the music plays

I hear the sound

I had to follow

Once upon a time

Kodiak. Winter of 1979. The great long tanner crab strike. I was not-fishing aboard the wooden schooner the F/V Comet. No one had any money. Everybody was not-fishing. We were all so broke that there was really no food in the refrigerator aboard as we all waited for the strike to end and the fishing to begin, providing us all with money once again. But for now we all sat in limbo, hungry and broke.

Generally we'd pool whatever cash we had between us and one of the other deckhands, Lenny, the self appointed cook would go uptown to O. Craft & Sons grocery store, get the ingredients and make a thick marinara on the diesel fired stove. Then we'd sit down to a pot of boat spaghetti.

It was the best marinara sauce I had ever tasted.

There was usually enough money left over for a few beers too, and we'd waste away the cold winter nights playing music and cribbage.

That marinara sauce was magic. I have tried all of these years to capture that essence in my own Italian mother sauce. I have never been able to do that although I consider my marinara sauce as solid as it gets.

Perhaps there's something else missing. Something ineffable and fleeting. Something not quite captureable... The favor from a cold and distant harbor, or maybe the incense of a diesel oil fired cooktop....I don't know.

Whatever it is, it keeps me trying every time to recreate that exact moment. I keep building and reinforcing that place in my life. each effort is the same, and yet new with every little addition or subtraction of ingredient. It will never be perfect, nor will it ever be the same.

But it's close.