It’s one of our (Chicagoans) hobbies to make up seasons, my offering to the conversation is to suggest “Ribs by Lorde” as a specific time of year. Ribs by Lorde season is the one where you wistfully walk around thinking about stuff while Ribs by Lorde plays over your headphones. Typically this season overlaps with Fall, which is also a good season for reflection as days have been cut unceremoniously short and everything is decaying around you. This year, for me, it started before the equinox in September but I wasn’t aware of it really until after. When my friend Sara suggested she would make ribs for our friends. Marcella Hazan’s Spareribs Pan-Roasted with Sage and White Wine, Treviso Style. We opened a lot of wine and everything was good; some things might be better later but everyone’s been saying that too much and it’s gotten annoying to note.
You can purposely mishear the lyrics to the song if you’d like (I do like): I want ‘em back, The minds we had, The wines we had. At the restaurant where I work most of the wines we are pouring by the glass are newer vintages of wines poured by the glass when I worked at a different restaurant. A place that I was in love with actually. I think about BTG when I cross Ogden; I wonder if I’m being sentimental or nostalgic. One feels bad and one feels fine. Later I go to a party and talk with someone about her nighttime routine, she says she is very nostalgic. She looks at old pictures and imagines the little girl that she was and reminds herself that she still is. I asked her if that’s nostalgia or sentimentality. It is not a good conversation for a party with loud music especially since there might not really be a difference between the two.
We were drinking wine at the party because, as ushered in by the ribs dinner, Ribs by Lorde is the perfect time of year for wine. Slower minds and cooler temperatures are better for the fragile nature of what I like. And the fact that natural wine is a time keeper, a record of the time from growing season to cellar season; an archive of old fashioned technologies, grapes from “before”, other conventions that became unconventional. Wine is excellent at materializing the sensation of memory, as its reliably different in its moment of use. Always feels like a recollection, sometimes remembering for the first time.
The other day at lunch my friends ordered “ribs for the table” because “everyone wants a rib”. Our server is very young and he reminds me of an old crush. None of these people know that it’s Ribs by Lorde season yet. A season that pessimistically will just last through the weekend. Wine will be good after too, but the veil isn’t quite as thin. Something to be revisited in Spring.
