Call Me Captain

First, let me tell you what is on my plate. From the left, going clockwise, we have cucumber spears, halved radishes, extra sharp white cheddar cheese, smoked clams, and sliced tomatoes. I’ve touched up the cucumber spears with Tajín, the Mexican company’s eponymous seasoning. The very small orange-colored slices amidst the clams are slivers of habanero pepper. And the tomatoes received a generous sprinkling of smoked black pepper.

Why, you may wonder, am I telling you this? And why do I feel compelled to show a photo of my lunchtime meal?  Good questions. Let me attempt to explain.

I was born at the wrong time in the wrong place. Save for a cosmic fluke, I might have been born  by the seaside and lived my entire life in Halifax, Nova Scotia. The demonym for residents of Halifax is Haligonian. I might like to be a Haligonian. Instead, I was born at the tip of Texas and spent most of my youth on the Texas coast. Now, I am an Arkansan.

Arkansans do not eat smoked clams and cucumbers and radishes and cheese and tomatoes for lunch. I suspect Norwegians do. And I reckon Haligonians do, as well.  And if they don’t…well, they should.  Some months ago, while I was enjoying similar fare with bristling sardines, it occurred to me that my penchant for eating such victuals might be traced to a tiny piece of the universe that once was a part of a Norwegian fisherman named Kolbjørn Landvik who had died at sea. “Just molecules, microscopic bits and pieces of Kolbjørn ended up in me, purely by coincidence, out of the randomness of the universe,”I wrote at the time.

The idea that my gustatory preferences might have once belonged to a now-dead Norwegian fisherman appealed to me. But now, I think my explanation for my taste in food might not have come from Kolbjørn. What if, I asked myself just a short while ago, a simple cosmic fluke put me in the wrong place at the wrong time? What if I should have been born a Norwegian or a Haligonian, a person for whom my frequent choice of luncheon grub is more appropriate? What if I should have been born in Halifax as Diego Slocum, great-great-grandson of Joshua Slocum, the first man to sail single-handedly around the world? How does one rectify a cosmic mistake of such magnitude?

The more I thought about this matter, the more I realized how completely that scenario would explain my taste in food, as well as my fascination with the sea. Joshua Slocum, like Kolbjørn Landvik, died—lost—at sea in November 1909, just a few years after his book, Sailing Alone Around the World, was published, and eleven years before Kolbjørn’s tragic death. Oh my god. Another coincidence! And he was a writer! And people called him Captain Slocum, a moniker I secretly believe people often apply to me.

This brings me to the reason for the photo above. I want your honest opinion; doesn’t that photo offer at least a modicum of evidence that I was born in the wrong place at the wrong time?  Uh huh, I thought so! I knew there was a reason I enjoy your company; you’re brilliant!