On Leaving the Great American South

For dinner tonight, I had "Southern Fried Chicken and Spaghetti" at a place called Cafe Annie in Pass Christian, MS. Cafe Annie was once a chic bistro on the beach in Pass Christian, but since Hurricane Katrina, it has moved to a building that looks like a portable classroom of the type they park behind overcrowded schools. The interior design looks like a cross between a chic bistro, a Starbucks and a Cracker Barrel.

I guess, in my mind, I had pictured a pasta dish adorned with little fried chicken strips. I thought of the "chicken ranch salads" I used to buy for $4.99 at the HEB in Austin, which amounted to an entire head of iceberg lettuce with an entire fried chicken breast sliced and laid on top. I thought the "Southern Friend Chicken and Spaghetti" would be a fitting tribute to the low cost meals I used to buy in Austin, as well as an accurate representation of the a kind of posh soul food southern style of cooking. Instead, what I got was a KFC four piece value meal with spaghetti and bread as my two sides. It was a forlorn little dish, the fried chicken confused to find itself paired with spaghetti, the spaghetti buried and forgotten underneath the meat, a curious sprig of green languishing in the corner. Confused and disappointed (I don't much like fried chicken, actually) I ate as much as I could, wolfed down the spaghetti and politely asked the waitress for the desert menu (which she never did actually give me).

I mention all of this because that fried chicken meal is likely the last serious meal I'll have as a southerner. Tomorrow morning, my parents and sister and I will pack up our two cars and drive the 17 hours back to Maryland and I probably won't see this side of the Maryland-Virginia divide (the real division between North a South) for quite a while. I ordered that dish because I wanted something momentous, a symbolic dish to be the last of this chapter of my life. I wanted it to be memorable and important. I wanted a meal that said something.

And looking at the half eaten chicken and the greasy plate, I realized that that's exactly what I got:

1) It was something I thought I wanted, but turned out not to especially care for.
2) I consumed and enjoyed a part of it (maybe even a large part of it), but found some of it distasteful.
3) It was constituted of things I thought I liked but turned out not to like in combination.
4) It was unfulfilling.
5) I left it and asked for something I really wanted and got it.

So, that's the symbol I offer, for now, of time spent living in the south: "Southern Fried Chicken and Spaghetti" half eaten, at Cafe Annie in Pass Christian, Mississippi.