Jovial/Enormous

At Whole Foods on Saturday, this jovial fellow was showing off the enormous halibut he was about to fillet. Halibut always reminds me of the summer of 1976, which I spent as a medical student doing an externship under the guidance of a family doc in Machias, Maine. It is a small town on the coast not far from the Canadian border, about as distant and foreign in anyway one can conceive from Brooklyn, New York, where I'd been living and going to medical school. I was boarding in a room over Joyce's Lobster House. My boyfriend (now husband of 32 years) came up to visit me. He had been born and brought up on the East Side of Manhattan in an Irish blue collar neighborhood, so this was exotic territory for him, too. We had dinner at the Joyce's the second night he was there. He ordered the hal-i-but. The formidable Joyce stalked out of the kitchen and announced to him, "Hawl'but? You don't want the hawl'but." I can't remember what Joyce told him that he wanted...but that's what he had.

Camera: iPhone 4s Processing: Hipstamatic, Dynamic Light, PhotoToaster