Chapter 60

One Potato, Two Potato

 

Though Golyat Thornapple was crazy, his was a standard or acceptable level of craziness. He was still able to teach me all sorts of neat things.

“Ah, Harold, just in time! I’m going to teach you how to eat a baked potato.”

“I already know how to eat a baked potato.”

“Are you sure?”

Golyat flipped open the oven door of his little gas range and drew out two big russet potatoes.

“First, with a fork, we poke a line of holes along one side of the potato,” he said. “Then, using thumb and index finger we squeeze the ends until the potato bursts open along the line of holes we’ve made. Cutting into a baked potato with a knife is something horrible and against God and nature.”

At my house, we always cut into the potato with a knife, slapped some butter on, a little salt, and that was the whole deal. I became interested in what Golyat Thornapple was saying and doing.

“Now butter, of course—then the salt and pepper, a dollop of sour cream . . . I shake some dried chives from a jar—fresh chopped would be better, of course—and here is your basic baked potato. Partake.”

I partook. It was pretty good, worth paying at tention to, and clearly better than baked potatoes as executed by my mother.

“Is this how you have them at home?” Thornapple asked me.

“No,” I said with my mouth full. “This is better.”

“In your future life, as it may come to you to prepare baked potatoes, would you say you are more apt to make them the way Mama made them, or this way?”

“This way, without question,” I said, dripping some butter on myself.

“I point out, in passing, that there are many variations on what toppings you may employ—cheese, for one, crumbled bacon, caviar, even.”

“Noted.”

“Now, if a kindly mentor had not, out of the goodness of his heart, given you the very potato you are presently enjoying—but if you read about it in a book, would you be inclined to try this approach to the Solanum tuberosum or common spud as contrasted with whatever your well-meaning but unenlighted mother might do to them?”

“Oh, without question, I’d give this way a try.”

“And now, I will relate the important thing. Are you ready?”

“Ready.”

“I am unable to make a baked potato as good as one I can imagine.”

“Yet this one is very good.”

“It is, and I thank you for the compliment—but mark you, every time I bake them, and as good as they may be, there is an ideal in my mind that they do not match.”

“And this is the important thing?”

“It is—because that is the reason some of us make art, and why all of us need it. Do you get it?”

“Almost.”

“Fair enough.”