Playing With My Food ~
A journal about food, thought, travel, and life; by Chef & Raconteur Chaz French.

In Absentia, Memoria, Florida. Part One

Indian River - Seriously Wide & Long

Starting with silliness and at the end of the story, my flight home departs from Orlando, thanks to my friend’s elite status I got priority boarding which meant having time to sit and watch everyone else board, and I’ve realized that there is a whole subset of the “Bear” community, that are seriously into Disney if they don’t already have a name I’m proposing we call them “Disney Bears” older, fat, hairy, gay dudes into Disney, hardcore.  It’s as bizarre looking as it sounds. The Disney Bear, it’s a strange, (gay) thing.

So, now that we’ve dispensed with some silliness let’s get down to what this post is all about, which is a whole lot of me and not much in the way of food.


Absentia, Memoria, Florida Part One: Absentia/Vacation

Things got quiet here, suddenly. I got busy in the run up to an unexpected trip and also had to cut back on recipe research/development to have the funds to pull it off.  In order to take the time off for the trip I also ended up doing all the cooking for the time I was missing at the school, I was running around a lot and not getting any writing done.

As I’ve previously shared, my teacher, Ma Jaya Sati Bhagavati passed away from pancreatic cancer last month; it’s been an incredibly painful time for all of her students, chelas, swamis, and most of all her family.  Thanks to the kindness and generosity of a friend who gave me a plane ticket, I was able to be there for Ma Jaya’s memorial service which was held on her birthday, May 26th. Coincidentally, yes, that is indeed — also my birthday.1, 2

With that, and a day on either side of the memorial, I treated most of my free time like a vacation, spent a couple hours in a hammock along the Indian River reading “The End of Marking Time” treated myself to good food and eating out, not at expensive places, but higher than I can usually afford, which isn’t much.  I wandered around a bit, walking as much as I could, which due to the heat and humidity wasn’t near my usual sightseeing walks, but I saw some lovely sites along the Indian River Lagoon, mostly I saw things from car windows or while wandering the 80 acres of Kashi Ashram, more on that later.

The day after the memorial I spent with friends from Los Angeles, that were also there for the memorial and reconnected with a lot of people, it was absolutely a good birthday vacation, even the memorial on the birthday…

To Be Continued.
1: It’s considered a gift to have the same birthday as your Guru.
2. And yes, it’s weird and hard to explain an atheist with a guru, the world is strange, get used to it.

(Yes I know the post title is complete nonsense and ‘faux latin’)