Possibly the best sandwich known to man.

Dear America,

Last week, I found myself in need of a 'main dish' to bring to a pot luck. I also found myself in need of something that would not require me to apply heat to food, since it's hot, America, it's hot, still, as it is still summertime, despite the fact that the community college teachers are back to work, the swimming pools are about the close, the days of perfect tomatoes and corn and peaches are, while upon us, numbered. Summer is almost over--kind of already is over--and yet it is still hot. Not that I'm whining. At least, I'm not whining more than I usually whine. Although really, who can verify that? What are the metrics? I ask you.

I considered my main dish options. Is tabbouleh a main dish? Is fattoush? They would be at my house. But I feared that, for purposes of the pot luck, they would be considered salads, because, in fact, they are salads. I was just about to venture down the road of the salad-main dish, prepared to make my argument (because that's a time-honored tradition at pot lucks, right? arguing over whether something is categorically a main dish or a salad or a side or an adornment or a garnish or whatever?) that a salad can be a main dish. But then, the idea of sandwiches came upon me and the debate was transformed.

Sandwiches, America, are a main dish. I submit to you the hamburger: clearly an item that is central to a plate. Accompanied, perhaps, by potato salad, or potato chips, or french fried potatoes--something something potato, in other words--and perhaps a pickle, and maybe adornments such as a sliced tomato or a leaf of lettuce or perhaps a slice of cheese. A hamburger is a sandwich, ergo a sandwich is a main dish.

Obviously, I would not be schlepping hamburgers in a  covered dish to a pot luck. But I could, perhaps, make the kind of sandwich that is built upon the baguette, and sliced into sections, a classic dish for a French picnic, such as Pan Bagnat, aka the Nicoise Sandwich, aka the French Fancy Tuna Sandwich of Glory. Also: a caprese sandwich. So two baguettes' worth of main dish sandwichery.

The pan bagnat is a wonderful thing. I had never made one before but I had a memory of a vegetarian version from the first The Vegetarian Epicure. Basically it involved stuffing a bunch of delicious stuff into the halves of a baguette with loads of olive oil, then pressing the sandwich firmly so that the stuff and the bread became intimately acquainted and not too fall-y apart-y. (That's a pipe dream, by the way, but anyway:). I Googled (as you do) 'Nicoise Sandwich,' the sandwich of the Niceans, hahaha, no: the southern French people who live in Nice, and found a glory of a recipe.

Dramatic reenactment of my sandwich

It was not so tidy as this one, but it 

also was juicier. I'm surmising.

One key factor: oil. All the oil. The bread will be madly oily and everything else with it: oily, too. That's a great thing, since oil carries the flavor and brings the bread into discourse with its destiny, which is to absorb and be the vehicle for all the sandwich's goodness.

So: the goodness: you take two kinds of onion, super thinly sliced, then add salt and pepper and olive oil and vinegar to it, and then you squish all of it together with your hands. For five minutes. Per the instructions: 'Do not rush this part.' Yes, I got all meditative with the onions, the oil, the salt, the pepper, the vinegar whilst all of it moved through my fingers and around the bowl.

A million minutes, or five, I guess, later, you take the oil-packed tuna--do not substitute your sad water-packed tuna!--and mix that into the whole situation, along with a squeeze of lemon juice, since lemon juice makes everything monumentally better.

Let me tell you, America, that tuna-onion-oil plus flavorings was already happening, as in, you'd want to eat it straight from the bowl. But wait: it gets better.

You sliced the baguette lengthwise. You open it up. You layer leaves of lettuce on one side, then slice tomatoes on top of that. It helps a lot if the tomatoes are amazing, as in, you picked them from your own vines or you bought them from the farmers market that very morning. The latter was the case for me. Then, you spread the tuna-onion situation on the tomatoes--by 'spread,' I mean 'dollop and gingerly edge outward'--and top that with: (a) slices of freshly hard boiled egg, (b) a strewing of sliced scallion, and (c) slices of radish.

If you happen to have Nicoise olives, you can also strew these. The recipe says that the olives can be 'pitted or not.' Hey, Nicoisians: I submit to you that an olive pit is not a nice addition to a sandwich. As I did not have Nicoise olives, I used a lovely olive tapenade, and spread it on the other length of baguette. Then, I put the olive-y baguette half on the tuna half, carefully, and wrapped the whole shebang in waxed paper and foil so that it could consult its own soul in a private hour, aka marinate in its own juices.

When I unwrapped this sandwich at the potluck to the tune of a great swarming of yellow jackets--yet another of the glories of summer--it was perfectly delicious and fresh tasting. Because it's supposed to marinate, it also can keep for a couple of days if you pack it and keep it cold. In fact, I just ate the last of this sandwich for my own workaday lunch, and it was still splendid.

Sandwiches, America! I salute them at the end of a summer and recommend this one to you, along with good wishes that the last ears of corn you buy be sweet, that your tomatoes be juicy, and that the remaining watermelons of August open with a promising crack.

htms

Saturday, summer movies, a departure.

Move out day for youngest
means dress up day for Bruiser.

Today, I kept working on my book situation. But first I cooked some oatmeal, to fortify myself. I spent just about the whole day. Fiction, nonfiction, literary theory and criticism. Two words: dust, and order. I had an intimate relationship with the former, and a grateful relationship with the imminence of the latter. I am currently sitting in a room where the books are in their places on the shelves, practically singing their names to me, and jostling in a friendly manner up against their various neighbors. It's a good feeling.

At 2, my son, who was wreaking order out of the basement, because he is in the process of moving out, came up and asked me if I wanted to get a sandwich. I practically dropped the books/dust from my hands and said YES. Because the Lord only knew how very much I needed a sandwich at that moment. We ate and chatted, and then returned to our respective tasks.

A bit later, he packed his worldly goods, wadded into white garbage sacks, into the van of his friend, and drove away. So we did the only sensible thing: went to a movie.

Actually, this weekend we saw two movies--Spy and Love and Mercy. Here are my thoughts and recommendations.

1. Spy is a winner, because it is super funny. I loved it, the historian liked it, my son liked it. Melissa McCarthy is at her best. Allison Janney: hilarious. Jude Law: very good. Jason Statham: a comic performance to cherish for the ages. Same director as the amazingly funny Bridesmaids, Paul Feig, and this is just as funny and just as wonderful, as fresh and irreverent and sharp, and feminist to boot.

2. Love and Mercy has a more experimental form, in some ways, and has some long spots--also, it tells a story with some dark and sad parts. But ultimately, the story of how Brian Wilson found his way back to enough health and well-being to take up music again. Since I got home, I've been watching this beautiful documentary about Smile, and it is making me cherish the music anew.

I recommend both, with the following caveats: see Spy if you know you will enjoy a ridiculously entertaining and hilarious movie with many many swears, and also some comic spy-type violence and gunplay. I looked away once or twice. But I laughed a countless amount of times. See Love and Mercy if you love that music, definitely--and if you love music and love thinking about how such music gets made.

We drove home in a rain and lightning storm, and took Bruiser for his walk in the cool after. And now, it's very quiet.

Today in sandwiches.

Today, I ordered a sandwich that turned out to potentially be in the running for the longest-to-make sandwich in the history of sandwiches. I'm pretty serious that it might have set some kind of record. I don't know who keeps track of these things, but I'd like to submit the following for the Committee's (there has to be a committee, no?) consideration:

LOCATION: Food court, at my place of employ.
TIME: 11:15 a.m.

I walked into the food court. The Mexican place? closed. Chinese place? too much dubious gelatinous biz. (Actually, I didn't even check the Chinese place--I relied on previous intel.) Pizza? looked heat-lamp scorched and otherwise unattractive. That left the cold case (too much empty shelves of nothing), the grill (#deepfatfried), and the sandwich place. So I decided to order a sandwich.

"Is this where you order?" I asked the young counter worker. Wordlessly, she slid a laminated order card and a grease pencil toward me.

I ordered a sandwich with the following specs:

• half
• wheat bread
• toasted
• pesto mayo
• BLT with
• cucumbers and pickles

Also: a bag of barbecue potato chips, in homage to the days when, in junior high, I used to start to salivate like Pavlov's dog in contemplation of the 

• white grease paper wrapped hamburger with 
• pickles on it, which happened to be hot,
• chocolate shake (oh! chocolate shake as a beverage, what halcyon days!), and
• bag of BBQ potato chips,

which remains one of the Platonic ideals of a lunch for me. For everyone, probably, I'm thinking.

Back to my sandwich: and then I paid, and I stood back to wait. Bag of barbecue potato chips in hand. I happened to note a guy who was studying his cell phone with grave intent. He had been waiting since before I stepped up to the ordering place. Why didn't I bring *my* cell phone?

I opened my bag of barbecue potato chips. The sandwich maker seemed to be approaching his work with a certain spaciousness. Spaciness, really. He'd study the laminated order card. Then he'd look up, as if perhaps someone were surveilling him. As, I suppose, in fact I was. Then he'd look down and--I'm not joking--look at the order card again. Maybe he'd put a little scoop of tuna salad on a slice of marble rye. Look up, check out the surveillance team (me, cell phone guy), and put some lettuce and maybe a couple slices of tomato on a small piece of white paper. 

This very leisurely pace of work caused me to reflect. I had not gathered, from the perfectly unbusy sandwich place, that there might have been an unmade sandwich pileup happening. Cell phone guy and me, I thought. But no. After about seven minutes of rather desultory sandwich making, the tuna sandwich was leveled into a plastic container and out of nowhere, another guy slid over to the end of the bar and picked it up. As if he had been waiting elsewhere. Probably in a "While You Wait for Your Sandwich Lounge," available exclusively to an A-List of which I was clearly not a part. Not the cell phone guy, either. 

I thought to myself, I can be calm. I can be patient. Which I was, for three more minutes. Then, I walked over to the counter and said, calm as all hell, "So what's the situation here? How are things coming?" As if, somehow, it would have been rude to say, MAY I HAVE MY SANDWICH PLEASE? 

Well, that would have been rude, surely. The young woman looked at the small row of order cards. She looked back at me. She pointed to the one second to her left (my right), and said, "Yours is next after that one."

I stepped back with the cell phone guy. I leaned up against a pillar and ate some barbecue potato chips like it was my job, or more realistically, like they were my lunch, which, in fact they were, at least until my sandwich came into being.

I watched the guy in the cap--sandwich guy--slap some heaven-knows-what on a slice of bread, then lay that bread on a griddle. Ah, "toasted." Young counterwoman assembled the lettuce-tomato-pickle etc. combo on a small piece of white paper. Another sandwich got made in a very leisurely and squirrelly fashion (to wit: young man performed one sandwich-related operation, looked up, checked out the surveillance, adjusted his cap, resumed the next sandwich-related operation). A few minutes or a half hour later, who could tell when time moves this slowly? the young man placed this sandwich in a plastic container and said, "Cell phone guy?"

Cell phone guy stepped forward and took his sandwich with no air of surprise or drama or sigh of complaint. None whatsoever. It was like this was how things were, and always had been and no doubt always would be, here in Sandwich-ville, the slowest place on earth. I resumed my lean against the pillar and ate some more barbecue potato chips.

It will not surprise you, the people, to know that my barbecue potato chips were long gone by the time my sandwich finally made it into its plastic coffin. "Megastore?" the sandwich guy said.

I stepped forward and he looked up at me with the friendliest smile ever. It became clear: he was a sandwich artist, this was obvious, and not some bread-slapping, pickle-mongering hack, and art cannot be rushed nor robotized. 

"Would you like some broccoli salad?" he asked, politely, pointing to several petite plastic containers.

Reader, I took some broccoli salad, and walked the sandwich back to my office where I ate it with relish, and where it perfumed my work for the rest of the afternoon. I should have taken a picture, but I really couldn't--I was starving, and I had a sandwich to eat. And it was damned good.

Dear sandwich that literally saved my life today,

Perhaps you recall the scene? It was 12:47 p.m., just thirteen minutes before my afternoon office hours were to begin. I had eaten the Triscuits, all three and a half of them, lurking in the bottom of the box; five Jujyfruits, the dentists' friend; and fifteen dry roasted almonds. But my soul cried out for more. Lo! in the depths of my afflictions, both physical and spiritual, I was anhungered, and therefore I headed over to the food court to obtain nourishment.

Which is how, sandwich that literally saved my life today, I happened to find myself in the sandwich line, next to my colleague. "What's good here?" she asked me. And so I proselytized my usual to her: the BLT hack (only a hack because BLT is nowhere to be found on the menu, but you can add bacon to any sandwich, which reminds me of that scene from Five Easy Pieces where Jack Nicholson is either an antihero sticking it to the man,or an asshole--but I am always nice about it, and the sandwich people are happy to play along), with pesto mayo. That's you, sandwich that literally saved my life today. Now, I have had other good sandwiches, and Lord knows that I have made many great sandwiches myself, but I think this might be the best sandwich ever.

I have no idea how my colleague felt about her sandwich, but after she paid for hers, I ordered the same--the sandwich that literally saved my life today--and went back to my office to eat. No students arrived, and I fell upon you like a wolf upon prey. While I was eating, wolfishly, I simultaneously wanted to keep eating forever, and to finish, so that I could reflect upon the glory.

Later, another colleague came to my office. We are working on a paper together, maybe. We spent a couple of minutes commiserating about things.

"But on the bright side, I had a really good sandwich for lunch," she said.

And so had I. Which just goes to show: sometimes a good sandwich can rescue a day. Can redeem it. Can, literally, save your life. Thank you, sandwich that literally saved my life today, for being that sandwich.

No really--thank you,

htms

No waiter shall be the boss of me.

At a venerable San Francisco restaurant, on the verge of the Pacific Ocean:

My friend: I'll have the porchetta sandwich.

The server: Have you ever had porchetta before?

My friend: ...no, I haven't.

The server: Then let me tell you what it is: it's pork belly, wrapped around a pork loin, and roasted. It is a very fatty cut of meat. I say this because sometimes people order it and then, when it comes, it's not what they expected. It's just very, very fatty. So if you're not sure, I recommend the ravioli or the fish.

My friend: [All this discussion of fattiness is enough to give one pause! She thinks it over some more.]

The server: ...it's just by no stretch of the imagination  a lean cut of meat. At all. And if you order, you cannot send it back because it's fatty! [The server is excited. He is exercised. He has clearly had people send the sandwich back, and it has scarred him. The kitchen crew must have mocked him mercilessly.]

My friend: The ravioli it is, then.

The server: Very good. [turns to me:] And for you, miss?

Me: [WOW. The sandwich does sound extra-fatty. But wait: is he daring me to order it? He thinks he has our number. He thinks we are the kind of women who can't handle a little fat. Or a lot of fat. He thinks we're ravioli eaters. No way: that server does not know my life! I am ordering that fatty meat, as God is my witness.] I think I'll have that porchetta sandwich.

...which was, it must be said, delicious.

And also, it must be said: fatty.

Today I rather enjoyed . . .

. . . doing preparatory work for the new semester, wearing stylish sweats all day, having a parcel arrive on my porch, taking Bruiser for a walk in the early afternoon, finding an $8 dress--purple! with sparkly stuff!--at Target, eating pancakes for breakfast and leftover jambalaya for lunch, getting an alert from the library's robot that there were detective novels waiting for me at the library, going to the library, watching The Good Wife, fixing sandwiches for the newly returned son, listening to The National while I worked, making soup for dinner, practicing hibernation whilst watching a little television and reading a little V.S. Naipaul before succumbing to crime. One of the detective novels, that is.

The Unwillingness.

Question: is The Unwillingness

a. the name of my new band?
b. the name of Jorie Graham's new book of poems?

or is it

c. the state of mind that has gripped me, now that it appears to be fall, really fall?

Unwillingness to buckle down and do my work, read my drafts, respond to student posts. Unwillingness to concede that I am obligated to send certain e-mails, set up meetings, follow through on commitments, give people answers to questions.

I just want to do other things, like make applesauce and add voile edges to certain clothes that I am itching to cut up and make into other, more interesting clothes. Like learn, finally, to make podcasts. Like hang out with the kids when they're home and they're willing. Like finally, finally get caught up on certain television shows I haven't gotten around to watching, like season 2 and following of Six Feet Under and Weeds. Or think of ways to support myself with internet activities. Or store nuts for the winter.

In other news, a genius contraption I recently purchased for the fat price of $8 is a little sandwich grill. Nothing fancy, I got it at Target when they were selling cheap microwaves, coffeemakers, and tiny refrigerators for college kids to outfit their dorm rooms with. The historian's son made us grilled cheese and tomato sandwiches with his one day when we dropped by for lunch, and they were so delicious that I got my own. Sort of like a panini maker, but American?

Anyway, it turns out that running son and college daughter are mad for these sandwiches, and they'll stand around and talk to you while you make them one, and they are grateful. Mothers and fathers of America: making your kids completely self-reliant is a little bit over-rated. You want them to be able to do these things for themselves, but to be willing to let you do these things for them, because the kids, who otherwise dole out information about their lives in tiny, tiny useless molecules of information, will chat in an affable and one might say even voluble way while you perform this modest service. It's a better-than-even trade-off for the parents.