{"id":346,"date":"2010-09-23T17:36:18","date_gmt":"2010-09-23T21:36:18","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.jerseydevilpress.com\/?page_id=346"},"modified":"2010-09-23T17:37:30","modified_gmt":"2010-09-23T21:37:30","slug":"jersey-fresh","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"http:\/\/www.jerseydevilpress.com\/?page_id=346","title":{"rendered":"Jersey Fresh"},"content":{"rendered":"

by Kate Delany
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\nYou come home for a visit (your parents paid) and I pick you up at the airport, of course. We hug tight at the arrival\u2019s gate and I feel convinced and a little flattered. Right away, you want to eat, famished and indignant about the lack of anything fresh at the airport. You had pockets stuffed with plums but they took them away when you went through security. So we swing by the diner, which couldn\u2019t be more like coming home, you say. It\u2019s the same diner we killed so much time in as kids but now you revel in the kitsch, telling me you\u2019re seeing with fresh eyes. You just love how authentic and unpretentious everything is: the hyper-laminated menus, the dumpy wait-staff, the enormous windows with a view of the highway on one side, of a brick wall on the other. A mother in a nearby booth swats her whiny kid and you point, grinning, saying, no one would ever do that in Cali. No way! Now I\u2019m definitely home! For several minutes, you marvel over the chocolate chip muffin on the menu which no one, you insist, would ever eat on the West Coast and that\u2019s what\u2019s so great about being back here! No one gives a shit! I place my order with our waitress, a girl you don\u2019t recognize but who went to school with us, who works here nights and weekends while her mom watches the kids. You interrupt my \u201cjust a bagel and cream cheese\u201d saying, \u201cwait, aren\u2019t you vegan yet? Why did I think you were? Still just vegetarian? Huh.\u201d After you order scrapple, eggs, toast, you say, really, I should do it. I should become vegan. It\u2019s so much healthier, so much better for the environment. When you get back to Cali, you\u2019re going to become a raw foodist. Do I know about raw food, you ask? You tell me it\u2019s the new thing. Nothing above 114 degrees. So pure, so fresh! You tell me about a friend who made you a raw dessert the other day and it was so simple, so delicious. You can\u2019t wait to get home and get started, actually. You\u2019re saying this as your breakfast arrives. You dig in, shoveling in scrapple, blinding the eyes of the sunny side up eggs on your plate. Of course you don\u2019t actually have any cash on you so you put the whole thing\u2014eight dollars\u2014on a credit card. As for the tip, with a dramatic little flourish, you loosen your scarf made by some Tibetan monks and rope it around our waitress\u2019s neck, muttering shanti, shanti. After you head outside to bum a smoke off an old man leaning on his walker, who just looks so Jersey, you tell me, I press a fresh five into our waitress\u2019s palm. I watch her ball it up in her hand. Anything that fresh, she tells me, you gotta crumble up a little or else it sticks.
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\nKATE DELANY<\/strong>\u2019s previous publications include a book of poetry, Reading Darwin<\/em>, published by Poets Corner Press. Her fiction and poetry has appeared in such magazines and journals as Art Times, Barrelhouse, Chicken Pi\u00f1ata, Jabberwock Review, Philadelphia Stories and Spire Press. She teaches in the English department at Rowan University in Glassboro, NJ.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

by Kate Delany You come home for a visit (your parents paid) and I pick you up at the airport, of course. We hug tight at the arrival\u2019s gate and I feel convinced and a little flattered. Right away, you … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"parent":333,"menu_order":2,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","template":"","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-346","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/P15duy-5A","_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.jerseydevilpress.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/346","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.jerseydevilpress.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.jerseydevilpress.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.jerseydevilpress.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.jerseydevilpress.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=346"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/www.jerseydevilpress.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/346\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":348,"href":"http:\/\/www.jerseydevilpress.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/346\/revisions\/348"}],"up":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.jerseydevilpress.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/333"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.jerseydevilpress.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=346"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}