Going All The Way

After making sporadic stabs at food celibacy, I went all the way tonight.  I drove, solo, to Cappy's-- my favorite restaurant in San Antonio--and didn't hold back.

While I love dining out with other people, tonight I just wanted to just sit in that candlelit room, phone off, and savor the flavors of crab cake, field green salad with pecans and Gorgonzola and a creamy dressing.  And a basket of my favorite bread, full of gluten and smeared with soft butter.  But I didn't stop there. I had creme brulle with raspberries and another glass of iced tea, caffeine and limes included free of charge.

Sometimes you just have to go for pleasure--and Cappy's, alone or with others, is a place of palette pleasure.

I'm a lot happier indulging in forbidden pleasures than following rules.  Coming home from Cappy's and having a smoke, American Spirit Menthol Light, is a smorgasbord of pleasure.  I heard someone on my trial Sirius Radio saying: "We need to accept ourselves for who we are--even ourselves when we had a hell of a good time doing something we had no business doing." I'd drink to that--if I drank.

Yesterday Sandy and I--in her  colorful downtown apartment--watched six episodes of Masters of Sex on her Showtime channel.  It tells the story of William Masters and Virginia Johnson, sex researchers in the Sixties, the decade in which Sandy and I came of age.  What fascinated us both were the attitudes toward sex and marriage in the era that grew us up: we didn't even talk about sex with the people we were having it with, for one thing.

The only words I ever heard spoken about sex, per se, were words from my groom's uncle at our wedding:  "If you put a penny in the jar every time you do it your first year, then take a penny out every time you do it from then on, you'll never empty the jar."  Like all curious girls of the mid-Sixties, I found out about "it" from books and movies, and in college we all passed around Masters and Johnson's book in the dorm.

"Going all the way" was our Sixties euphemism for sex.  Only after promising "til death do us part" could we know if the plum was worth the decades we were signing up for.

Thinking that sex was "going all the way" (with so far yet to go that we'd not even imagined) was a bit like claiming that the candied pecans on the salad made the whole meal at Cappy's.  They were great candied pecans, worthy of praise.

But still, I'm glad I didn't have to sign up for a lifetime of meals at any restaurant based on a handful of nuts.