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The dirty bird returns. Beard Award-winning chef Gabriel Rucker recently launched the Bird Box, a $65, three-course meal for two inspired by both Le Pigeon and Canard’s menus. In a surprise to no one, these sell out quickly. Orders open on Sunday at noon for Friday or Saturday pick-ups at Canard. Previous menus have included an arugula salad with crispy quinoa in a citrus-mustard vinaigrette, roasted pork belly glazed with an orange truffle lacquer alongside truffle mac n’ cheese and strawberry tiramisu cake cups. Wine director Andy Fortgang has also selected a handful of bottles to pair with your meal each week. Keep your eyes peeled, too, for the select 30-count Canard steam burger kits for $30 to recreate the upscale White Castle favorite. Find more details here.
I grew up in a small and fairly underdeveloped town; a poor town, let’s say. While I never felt that I lacked for anything in my childhood, I’d get occasional reminders of objective misfortune around me. Children who considered meat—any kind of meat—a delicacy, not for reasons of dietary restriction, but because it was costly. A fifth-grade classmate I spotted digging through a dumpster, and assumed he was doing it for fun, and walked away from briskly when his dad emerged from the dumpster as well, having proudly fished some food out of it.
Not the most depressing display of this was the way kids cherished the rare and special goods they were given. I say not depressing, because it’s a bit silly when you think about it; but it’s heartbreaking as well. What I mean is, if a child was gifted a soccer ball or a basketball, they would gleefully show it off, display it in their room, bring it out to the yard for other kids to ooh and aah over. But they would be hesitant to… play with it. It was new and unblemished and it had cost a lot of money. In a country where soccer was the default pastime for all children and most adults, a new soccer ball went unkicked, because it was precious. This annoyed me then and it just slays me now.
It may have also resulted in a personality quirk I’ve noticed in myself: I have absolutely no “collector” mentality at all. I wince at the the idea of collecting new-in-box products, amassed simply because they exist and not for the purpose of using them. Toys that stay in their packaging. Limited-edition shirts that don’t get worn or washed, limited-edition notebooks ones certainly does not write in. (I immediately hand my special Field Notes books to our kids so they can doodle all over them.) Even LEGO sets that get built according to instructions and never end up sharing the big brick box with other sets—though those got “played” with one time, at least.
Now, I don’t believe there is anything inherently wrong with collecting things; “wrong” meaning morally objectionable, or even ill-advised. YOU probably collect something, and that’s fine. I’m writing this not to judge you or change your mind—what would the point of that be, anyway—but to dig through my own head a bit. I started this post with a sad image, and I’ll have to include one more of those before I wrap this up.
I grew up in a small town in a war-torn country. One day, war came to town, and we had to flee—my family left behind the house my grandfather built, and we crossed the river to the safer town on the other side carrying what we could in a few plastic bags. From there on, those were our belongings. That was our collection. We started from scratch that day. Then we did it again when the Mrgans moved to the United States in 1999, carrying a few suitcases this time. I moved once more in 2007, from Florida to Oregon, carrying very little again; by this time, there was no pressing need to reduce my belongings, but there was an instinct, honed by these previous experiences, I’m sure.
There’s a sappy, hipster reading of all this, as if I’m saying “live in the moment” or something. I promise I’m not that precious about it. I’m as materialistic as anyone living in the US in the 2010s—I love products, items, packaging, stores. I excitedly buy things to make myself (and others) happy. I enjoy these things, in their boxes and out of them. Maybe what stops me from getting too attached to them is not spiritualism but something like zen nihilism, a cheerful fear that nothing lasts, and that you have few chances to play with it while it’s around. Maybe this is why I can’t have nice things.