No, We Did Not Attend Our College Reunion, But...

Recently, Miss Edith polished off the final chapters of Morningside Heights by Cheryl Mendelson (a re-reading; a pleasure) while The Most Ethical Man in the World, Notarius, polished his shoes. It was a placid moment. Notarius methodically applied the polish and rubbed it in and then buffed and buffed and buffed. “Shiny, shiny,” I said, glancing over at the finished product.
We were both reminded suddenly of a story from Notarius’s college years.
The chef at our alma mater was a wiry little man who had worked in very fancy New York restaurants and done well for himself; in his late middle age, he had basically retired to the country and taken this job at a small liberal arts college to keep a hand in and earn some money in a place where the cost of living was cheap.
The food at our alma mater was excellent; we had smoked salmon every Sunday morning. Dinners occasionally featured the best aioli sauce I’ve ever eaten. (Oh, yes.) The wiry chef also made the finest poppy seed cake I’ve had, the recipe for which I’ve been hunting down ever since, and never found. (It was a lemon-less poppy seed cake; these are apparently unusual, which is too bad.) The wiry chef was a genius.
He was also something of a queen, and an imperious queen at that. If you were on his staff, or crossed his path, and he didn’t like you, that was that; but if he liked you, for whatever reason, he could do some very nice things for you. One friend has a story about the time the wiry chef made some pierogies, from scratch, just for him, one night when he’d missed dinner because he’d been on a trip. Imagine that! From a college cafeteria!
Notarius remembers an afternoon when he was in the dining hall and the chef was polishing the milk machine. Notarius was on cleaning crew, sweeping up the place, and another member of the kitchen crew, an aspiring punk rock musician, with the requisite lunatic hair, multiple inkings, and so on, was wiping down toasters. The wiry chef, was methodically massaging the huge stainless steel front panel of the milk machine, and mused in his raspy voice, “You know, this reminds me of that song: ‘Shiny, shiny, shiny boots of leather’. “ All present knew what he was talking about: the Velvet Underground’s “Venus in Furs”. The punk kitchen assistant looked over with wide, faux-innocent blue eyes, and said, “No, I don’t know that one.” “It’s by Lou Reed,” the chef said placidly.
“Who’s he?” the assistant asked gamely.
The wiry chef rubbed the milk machine. “Lou Reed?” he said. “He was a famous botanist. He invented plants.”

Bright College Years.