original sin

A few nights ago my best friend in my home town, who we will call R, and I went off for an evening on the town. Since we both had to work the next morning, our wild night out consisted of watching March of the Penguins and heading off to a swanky restaurant for dessert.

R and I have known each other since grade eight when he had a bowl cut and no friends and I wore plaid flannel shirts and wanted desperately to be popular. (In retrospect it was no wonder I had no friends- plaid flannel shirts?!?)

R is witty, intelligent, self deprecating and a great observer of the absurd. Which serves him well as he is the only one of my highschool friends who has stayed in our hometown and never once ventured abroad to a larger city. He is the guy I call when my love life is in the toilet, when my house is about to burn down and when I need to laugh so hard I spew juice through my nose. He knows me better than I know myself most of the time, and he is one of those fundamentalist Christians who believes that Jesus is coming back next Monday at 4 pm, just in time to roast the sinners and the gays and to exalt the pious before a dinner of wings and watching the football game. I, on the other hand, am the kind of liberal Anglican who, if the big JC arrived on my doorstep, would offer him a beer and continue watching The Daily Show-extrapolating during the commercial breaks on the joys of pre-marital sex, the value of contraception, the importance of a woman's right to choose, why I think the phrase hidden agenda has been grossly overused by the Conservative Party, and the relative value of The Walrus vs the Atlantic Monthly.

Needless to say, R and I are the kind of friends who will be friends forever, even into the afterlife: our respective ideas of hell is where the other will end up, so I am pretty sure, if God has a sense of humour, we'll see each other there.

The highlight of the evening was dessert at the aforementioned swanky restaurant. A friend of mine tends bar there, and took great pleasure in plying us with various spectacular alcoholic creations. Dessert was (and I will put this in layman's terms for those not fortunate enough to work in the service industry) ginger creme brule, with apricot spring roll and roasted brandied apricot slices. AND... chocolate mashed potatoes with home made raspberry sorbet and coulis.

In case you missed that, I said chocolate mashed potatoes, people.

They were divine. One of those life changing experiences that happens in a split second, leaving you wondering how you could have lived your life up until now not knowing about chocolate mashed potatoes.

On the drive home R and I were unusually silent. For my part, I was savouring juxtaposition of the magnificence of the bleak and vast Antarctic landscape against the magnificence of the recently consumed potatoes.

I have no idea what R was thinking about. I like to think he was mulling over how to rationalize consuming something so obviously sinful. But he's evangelical, not catholic, so I am still at a loss...