I was sitting last evening in my favorite spot in the Peanut Butter Cafe & Roadhouse when my cell phone rang. Thank God for cell phones or I would have been forced to bestir myself from my spot and go to the phone. Imagine the inconvenience. Anyway, it was Quentin calling from a small Asian market, but, of course, given my previous problem distinguishing between Secret Agent Man and Secret Asian Man, I had to make certain he was not calling from an agent market, which I suppose would be a place that provides the Maxwell Smart’s of the world.

He – Quentin, not Max who somehow fumbled his way into this discourse – was looking for lemongrass and kaffir lime leaves, produce with which I have no familiarity. So he asks if my computer is nearby and I then look up pictures of the stuff. I inquired why he didn’t ask a worker there, but he said he had and they didn’t speak English. Apparently there were pictures of produce so I told him to grab an Asian and point, but he didn’t think that would be productive.

I describe kaffir lime leaves, telling him it looks like grass, then realizing I am looking a picture of a knife next to cut-up lime leaves (kaffir, don’tcha know.) Thinking, “Oh,” I tell him to forget that and visualize two shiny green hedge-like leaves, one coming out of the other in an end to end fashion. Not managing too well with this, we go on to lemongrass, which I told him looked like the weedy reedy grass that you see along ponds around here. This is also not too helpful.

Finally, I tell him that his mother, me, is a 60 year old product of a childhood in Northern Indiana where all I knew was a menu that came from the north of Europe. Okay, we did have spaghetti, but I’ve learned long pasta and a bland tomato sauce isn’t necessarily true spaghetti. I didn’t have pizza until well into my teens – probably at some college summer program for high schoolers. The closest to Chinese food I got was rice. To tell the truth, I suppose it was quite a long time before I realized not everyone ate staples of meat and potatoes and fuit pies.

Now he’s talking Thai food. He and his dad, Der Bingle, like it. I went to a Thai restaurant once in San Diego – it was a storefront jobbie with white tablecloths, an acoustic ceiling and absolutely no AmeliaJake type of atmosphere. And, of course, no meat and potatoes. Right then I knew, knew for a fact, there was no way I would ever be cosmopolitan.

For several minutes we wandered down the aisle of the asian market via cell phone and finally he checked out; he remarked it was the last time he was going there alone.  I suppose the clerks put their heads together and watched him go, this stranger in a strange land.

I don’t know how the Thai soup turned out. He wanted it to be spicy enough to clear out his sinuses.  And I don’t know much about leaves in food. Heck, when I was a kid, we would have been appalled to see a leaf in the stew. And, just a couple of years ago, we all gather round to watch the bay leaf float in the homemade hotdog soup. Ahhhhhhh….. Oooooooooh. And we scandlously wondered, “What if we put in two?”