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In Mom's Kitchen
Home-Cooked Memories By Greg Downs
I felt estranged from this "tradition" for years, until one day while walking my college's city streets on a spring afternoon, I wandered away from my college dormitories into the row houses that fill the rest of the city. It was a Sunday, and I passed men and women fresh from church, standing on their porches, chatting across the street to each other.
At one intersection I came across a crowded restaurant. I didn't slow down or bother to read its sign. It seemed just like the dozens of chicken and fish shops I'd already passed, and I was nearly across the 
street before I caught a familiar scent. There it was, among the perfumes and colognes and fish smells. There were the pork chops smoky and clean. I walked back to the restaurant, staring through the window at the tables packed with cornbread and biscuits and fried chicken and, yes, the fried pork chops.
I stood outside that window a few moments, feeling increasingly melancholy, uninterested in walking back to school, unsure where to head next. After a while I walked over to the line of families waiting by the door. It was a long wait, and once I was inside, I felt peculiar because I alone was not dressed in my Sunday best, because I took up an entire table, because I had no companions.
I didn't need to look at the menu. When the pork chops came, they were hot and crispy. I evaluated them; they weren't quite as tender as my mother's. They had been overcooked. The tops and bottoms weren't evenly fried. I had as much to say about those pork chops as a movie critic ever had to say about an Altman picture. I could discuss its flaws, its merits, the good bites, the bad bites. I was sitting in a restaurant in Connecticut, but also, in my mind, I was sitting at my mother's table in Tennessee, listening to my friends brag on my mother, the best non-meat-eating pork chop chef that any of us have ever known.
