Elizabeth McCoy

Counting by months, rushthatspeaks and I have been together for fifteen and a half years and married for five and a half and missed any formal celebration of our last anniversary because I was on my way to a hospitalization and so when we found ourselves this afternoon at Castle Island where an absurdly stiff breeze was scooting parasailers like hi-vis velella all over Pleasure Bay, the most natural thing when we tired of walking a wind tunnel around the faience-glinting waves was to pursue a meal on the brick-backed patio of our traditional anniversary restaurant, South Boston's ten-year-old Venetian-style bacaro SRV. We found street parking right around the corner. We ordered a smattering of cicchetti—the never-bettered polpette in their velvet of red sauce, the squid-black crostini topped with salt tufts of baccalà, a translucent dab of quince atop a sweetly plush mouthful of ricotta and salumi, an astonishing smear of uni and oyster butter sharpened with mignonette, plus a kitchen gift of lightly crisped eggplant—and a lambent scallop crudo dressed like the jeweled sea with tiny cubes of astringent kiwi and creamy pistachio and torn fresh mint, served on a shell I would have kept if it had come from a beach and not a restaurant I wanted to let me back through its doors ever again. Even the foccacia was bouncy, salt-skinned, assertive enough to eat even without wiping out the bright tomato sauce left over from the eggplant. My amaro mocktail was as darkly herbal as if it could have gotten me high and Rush-That-Speaks' Salt of the Earth was a tongue-spinning concoction of mezcal, fennel, and absinthe that should not have been able to taste so much like green brine. We wrote them an appreciative note and promised to return before autumn, declining their non-negligible roster of desserts in favor of checking out Uncommon Ice Cream up the street, which had not existed the last time we ate at SRV. Rush got the strawberry which really meant its cinnamon toast crunch swirl and I had the savorily flecked rosemary honeycomb. It had been actual ages since I just walked into a restaurant for an affordably luxurious meal with someone I loved, as in the pre-glacial world I could inhabit more or less safely. The two-hour free space on Mass. Ave. was just a present from the parking gods.