My Tickety Tack Trip Home (2 of 3)

Melissa, affectionately called “WE”, and I met up for dinner after the NEACUHO conference. The plan was to surprise her in my dad’s car, since I had been driving it all day, and because we have history driving in that monstrosity of a machine… including a variety of brushes with death gassing up the car and defying the rules of the road and physics.

In an effort to truly embrace the fact that we were together in West Haven for the first time in about a year, we decided to have a West Haven date. This meant walking down the beach a little, as is the main form of entertainment in the place, as well as doing dinner at Jimmy’s, which is the restaurant that says “this is the best we got… we clean and fry our scallops”. The thing about Jimmy’s is that its what my father considers fine dining-- right up there with Outback and the Texas Roadhouse. Fine dining entails, it seems, nothing against wearing a “proud to be american” tee shirt or a "from the fryer" section of the menu. They also serve their Whiskey Sours with an orange wedge, which is my own personal pet peeve. It’s a cherry or it’s a disaster.

Our conversation was interesting and hilarious, as usual. Melissa confirmed my belief that if you come back and stay for too long, you’re going to get stuck. She then told me that, according to a state project on which she’s working, Connecticut has a hard time retaining its population. She blames this on a lack of real cities, a point on which I must oblige her. New Haven is built almost entirely on its relationship with Yale, and Hartford is a stinking pit of rotting flesh and insurance firms. Of course, it is also partially our proximity to Boston and New York that makes it tough to create our own distinct metropolitan experience, which is a shame considering the former history and vitality of New Haven county.

Post dinner, we went to the package store at the beach and bought a cheap bottle of wine. Upon returning to my house, we realized to my slowly creeping horror that my mother apparently got the corkscrew in the divorce as well. However, Melissa and I are bright, college educated people. So what do we do? Turn to Youtube.

Youtube tells me that you can open a bottle of whine with a screw, a screwdriver, and a hammer. You screw the screw into the cork, push it in until there is just a half inch of space left with the screwdriver, and use the hammer to pull the cork and screw up. The internet made it seem so simple. SO SIMPLE. So we head down to the basement, where my father keeps the tools. We get the screw in, get the screwdriver to work, and grab the hammer. Well… it doesn’t work.

…and there is photo documentation.

After half an hour of pulling, hammering, screwing, and whining, I eventually take the screwdriver and push and push on the cork. This is when the cork flies down into the bottle of wine, splashing up all over my shirt and into my eyes. Oh, and then we realize that cork is stuck in the bottom of the bottle’s neck, and the screwdriver is stuck in the cork. So more pushing and pulling, more wine in my hair. The damned thing, though, yielded wine and laughs and everything I needed to that point.