caviar and the bomb

The man's in the kitchen again, though the woman was some of the time as well. I myself was in charge of opening the door to the deck. ( i.e. zip). The man is actually in the kitchen opening oysters, I think from Maine, which he grilled with garlic, butter and parmesan. We then had lump crab remoulade, made by Alison. But first of all we had buckwheat blinis with smoked salmon, creme fraiche and paddlefish caviar. Which led me to try to tell Ed's story about caviar. I couldn't remember it then, but I talked to him yesterday, and he told it to me again.

   He had been covering the 1991 dissolution of the Soviet Union for Time magazine, and was in Riga, Latvia, on board his plane home, when police came onto the plane and hustled him off. 

    They took him out on the tarmac, where his duffel bag sat all alone.

    Somewhat hampered by language issues, they gestured at his bag. "Bom," they said.

    "No bomb,"  Ed insisted. "Caviar!" 

    "Bom!"

    "No bomb!"

    Tentatively, they approached the bag. Ed motioned to them to open it. Fearfully, they opened the bag containing a metal cylinder and a tangle of wires. The wires were camera chargers and sat phone connections. The cylinder was a stack of 10 tins of Beluga caviar. 

     "Oh, Oh! No bom! Caviar!"

     Ed and his caviar were back on the plane, and within a couple days we were feasting on it at our favorite Irish bar, with our favorite waitress, Marianne, providing us with toast and chopped onion and egg. That's the part I remember.