Comin' Home Baby

I’m excited, like school kid excited. Going back to my hometown of Savannah, Georgia after a 2+ year absence. It’s a town, growing up in, I couldn’t wait to leave. It’s a town, now grown up, I can’t wait to see again. Lotsa ghosts here. Lotsa memories. Lotsa promise.

I’m already loading up on some of the things I just have to have back in my soul food kitchen in
Tel Aviv: Anson Mills grits and corn flour (both white and yellow) for starters. Would love to take back some local shrimp — doesn’t get any better than the ones found locally. But I don’t think they would survive the journey back. And produce like muscadine grapes, damn!

Not sure I’ll do much dining out, which sucks. Savannah is definitely open for business, but we’re being cautious as always, given the extent to which folks in the US have been throwing caution to the wind during the pandemic. But it’s something I will miss. The eating around here rocks.

I do want to get my fix of the small of the coastal marsh — and the lingering sights of azaleas. and the sounds of crickets from dusk til dawn. I look forward to seeing the sunrise out on Tybee. And being part of the play of light and shadow among all the mossed live oaks. And as hard as it is, I look forward to the conversations to be had with so many folks I knew there once and who live within me to this day: my folks, of course, my Aunt Millie, Ben Carter, pictured here, who wrote the jazz standard echoed in the title to this post. Ben knew a lot about the resonances of coming home.

The food that I cook in my soul food kitchen in Tel Aviv, seven time zones away from Savannah, is ultimately a simulacrum for all this synaesthesia: an effort, heartefelt if feeble, to infuse the present with a small taste of the richness some place (and some time) else.