W1: Nostalgia; oh how the taste of you clings.

I am not particularly transient, and rarely leave Athens county, but with the number of places I have lived, my relatively (no pun intended) minimal connection to family and the shaky quality of my long-term memory the idea of home becomes less centralized. There are some foods that have carried through all of my homes, though. When I lived with my mother, breakfast was generally cereal and toast, lunch would be an English muffin sandwich and dinner would either be a pre-packaged frozen meal or a canned soup base with extra rice, vegetables and seasonings added. The frozen dinners, milk and sandwich fillings would all be of the healthy, low-cal’ sort since my mother did the shopping and was a recovering obsessive-compulsive calorie counter. On weekends, I would make breakfast. This would usually be pancakes or scrambled eggs. Even though we never really cooked meals, the house is still full of hundreds of cookbooks, most dating from at least thirty years ago.

Dessert was the main thing both my mother and I actually cooked. Cakes and brownies began as boxed mixes and were modified with extra flavoring or unsweetened cocoa powder that was bought in bulk and stored in almost every kitchen drawer. I would make oatmeal, peanut butter and chocolate cookies by the sheet, coated in heavy fudge icing and cut them into squares. Over summer vacations I would determine the number and size of the cookies by the amount of time I intended to spend watching movies, with six roughly 2.5” by 2.5” bars allocated to an average two hour film. To this day, baking and breakfast remain the limits of my culinary ability.

The Wizards Guild, the local comic book shop, is as much home to me as any place. I have been going there, with a few exceptions, at least once a week since 1997 and have been an official employee for the past five years. The store’s location uptown and its proximity to various restaurants means that a bite of Bagel Street Deli carries as much nostalgia for me as any homemade family recipe. The particular routine I’ve developed is a trip to next door’s Donkey café before work for the mega-dose of caffeine that is required to do a Wednesday shift solo at a comic book store. I order a Large Shot in the Dark (capitalized to better illustrate the acronym that the counterculture-loving baristas so enjoy using to “save time” confirming my customary coffee order: The usual LSD for you, Sam?), which is two shots of espresso in black coffee, with dark roast and usually flavored syrup. A few sips of that puts me in the perfect mood to sit down behind the counter, open up a Gotham Central collection and wait for the first customer of the day to walk in so I can tell them that the comic they want to buy isn’t as good as the obscure ‘70s comic it was influenced by. Because that is what home means to me.

The last thing I ate was a slice of leftover Avalanche pizza with barbecue sauce, onion, cheddar, gorgonzola and mushroom toppings.