A few times each year, my wife and I leave our home in Columbus, Ohio, and make the five and a half hour drive to visit family in southern Illinois where we grew up on country cooking. Often, we fall into a game where we recall the foods of our childhoods, foods that for the most part we no longer eat because we’ve been vegetarians for twenty-five years, and I’ve been mostly vegan for twenty-three of them.

When we first changed our eating habits, we caused our families no end of bewilderment and in some cases downright anger because we so suddenly and certainly turned our backs on the land of beef. We spoke a foreign tongue—tofu, tempeh, bulgur— and left those who thought they knew us to shake their heads and wonder about these aliens in their midst. “How will I ever cook for you?” my mother-in-law said in despair. “I’ll never be able to cook for you again.”

“Remember pan-fried chopped steak?” I might ask Deb when we tire of listening to music, and too much silence and boredom fill the car. Then we’re off and running, playing this game of free association.

“And meat loaf with Velveeta cheese melted on the top,” she might say.

As the miles go by on Interstate 70—Dayton, Indy, Terre Haute—and finally down Illinois Route 130 from Greenup to Olney, we tick off the dishes we recall.

“And fried ham.”

“And pork chops.”

“And roast beef.”

And away we go, all the way home, letting our memory feast on entrees, and side dishes, and desserts.

Olney is a town of a little over 8,000 people on the flat plains of southeastern Illinois just off U.S. Route 50, thirty miles west of Vincennes, Indiana. I haven’t lived in this part of the world in nearly thirty years, but I still think of it as home. I still imagine that one day, perhaps in retirement, I might come back to stay. It’s an odd thought, one Deb can’t quite abide, accustomed as she now is to a city of good size, but, I have this small-town boy part of me that I can’t quite shake—that boy who longs for fewer people, more familiarity, a chance to walk down a small town street and enter a diner or café, knowing that there are friends waiting for me inside, to sit over food and drink and take comfort from the kinship. “What would we do there?” Deb says when we have this conversation about living in Olney. “For one thing, how would we eat?” Then she asks the question more pointedly: “How would you eat?”

I have a number of food allergies: processed sweeteners, corn, milk products, citrus fruits, chocolate, nuts. These sensitivities developed after I gave up smoking twenty-six years ago. Suddenly, I couldn’t enjoy cornbread slathered with butter, cold glasses of milk, beer, orange juice, chocolate cake, cheese. Now I’m the dinner party guest every host and hostess dreads. What in God’s name can they possibly serve me?

Whenever Deb and I come back to Olney, we end up bringing food with us, knowing that there are few restaurants in town that can accommodate us; on occasion we’ll pick and choose from Ty’s Buffet or have pasta at the local pizza place, and now a café called Ophelia’ s Cup has opened for business, a café where you can get not only cappuccinos, espressos, lattes, frappachinos, but also nut burgers and vegan soups and herbal teas, and—Lord-a- mighty, I never thought I’d see the day—cucumber-infused water. For the most part, though, Deb and I do our own cooking at my mother-in-law’s apartment. When we have a meal with Deb’s brother and his wife, we cook something and take it with us. They don’t have a clue how to cook for us.

This is farmland, land of grain and cattle and swine. The countryside, in the heart of summer, is prosperous with fields of golden wheat, straight green rows of soybeans, and cornstalks higher than a man’s head. The towns, though—ah, the towns. They’ve dried up and gone to hell. Oil, the region’s other industry, has all but petered out. The small towns are filthy with methamphetamine, the drug cooked up from anhydrous ammonia, Sudafed, brake fluid. Meth houses sometimes explode in the middle of the night because someone cooking anhydrous, a volatile chemical that often gets cantankerous, makes a mistake and the whole shebang goes sky-high with a boom and a flash. In the daylight, people can drive by these same houses, many of them with paint-stripped clapboards weathering gray, and see the warning signs: Keep Out, No Trespassing, Private. Spot someone buying Sudafed at the Wal-Mart Supercenter and you can’t help but wonder whether they’ve really got seasonal allergies or whether they’re crank addicts.

The Supercenter sits on Illinois 130 on the north edge of town, with a strip mall to its east: a Hallmark Cards, a Dollar Tree, a Fashion Bug. As is the case in so many small towns, Wal-Mart has dried up the downtown area. Main Street is, for the most part, a sad-assed lineup of empty storefronts or buildings turned into meeting places for fringe church congregations or political parties and social service organizations. Gone is the Tresslers’ Five and Dime where I used to drink root beer floats. Gone is Sherman’s Department Store where I worked one summer as a clerk. Gone is the Janet Shop and the Ball Rexall and Beal’ s Newsstand. No more Town Talk Restaurant or Gaffner’s Jewelry or True Value Hardware. Even the Bradford pear trees, which were always so pretty each spring with their white blossoms, have been cut down so the blackbirds won’t have places to roost. That’s Olney’s downtown now, a place not even the trash birds care to visit.

Lately, though, there have been attempts at renewal: in addition to Ophelia’s Cup on Whittle Avenue, an Olney institution on Main Street, feared lost forever, has reopened under new ownership—Hovey’s, an old-style fifties-era diner, home of Big Murt hamburgers, greasy French fries, malted milks, fountain Cokes.

Why is it that Ophelia’s Cup doesn’t completely satisfy me? I had a wonderful vegan soup there one winter’s day—a bean soup that was hearty and delicious, a soup I could have just as easily found at Benevolence, a vegetarian restaurant in the Short North district of Columbus. Ah, there’s the rub. A soup I could have found in the city, not one I’d expect to find in Olney, not one I associate with my memories of growing up in southern Illinois. “It’s like we’re not really in Olney,” Deb says each time we go to Ophelia’s Cup, and she’s right. It’ s like we’ve escaped back to the city, and though I enjoy it, it’s not enough to fill the hunger I have for my memory of this place where I first knew family and community and love.

My mother-in-law lives at Brookstone Estates, an assisted living facility on East Street. Because she has moved into the intermediate stage of Alzheimer’s disease, Wilma often forgets that she’s eaten a meal. She can come back to her apartment after having supper in Brookstone’s communal dining room, and say, “I’m hungry. What you got good to eat?”

One evening, after she’d eaten her supper, she went for a drive with Deb and me—a quick trip to Blockbuster’s to return a video. When that chore was done, and I started driving back to Brookstone, Wilma piped up from the backseat. “Where we going now?”

“Back to your apartment,” Deb told her.

“My apartment?” Wilma said this with dismay.

“That’s right, Mother. We’re going back to Brookstone Estates.”

We drove a little ways in silence. Then Wilma, her voice sharp with disgust, said, “Well, cripes. I thought we was going out to eat.”

My appetite has always been good, and given free range, I would, no doubt, stuff in all the foods I remember from my childhood—not only the meats, but also the cheeses and the candies and the desserts. Maybe it’s lucky, then, that I have the food allergies that I do. Still, I often find myself wishing that I could eat whatever I want without having to worry about the sinus headaches and respiratory distress that usually follow anytime I mistakenly think I can eat something from my forbidden list. This is especially true when I find myself wistful for certain foods—the “Remember This?” game that Deb and I play on car trips can set off my yearnings as can glancing at the candy section at the grocery checkout line or seeing Unwrapped on the Food Network, that program about how certain products are made: Twinkies, Three Musketeer Bars, Little Debbie Snack Cakes. Just like that, I’m hungry for candy bars—Snickers and Milky Ways and Zagnuts; snack cakes—Hostess Cupcakes and Snowballs and Honey Buns; and frozen desserts—Fudgsicles and Popsicles and ice cream drumsticks.

Then there’s the Christmas holidays when I remember the chocolate-chip cookies my mother baked, and the dishpan cookies, and the sugar cookies. My father bought candies at the general store near our farm and toted them home in brown paper sacks: chocolate drops, ribbon candy, peanut clusters, sugar-dusted orange slices. I can conjure up a taste right now for those candies and cookies as I can the divinity and fudge and Mexican wedding cakes and bonbons I encounter each Christmas when Deb and I visit family and friends in Olney and they haul out the goodies, and say, when I politely refuse to sample them, “Come on. One won’t hurt. Jeezey Pete, it’s Christmas.”

Times like these, I ache for that food. I guess you’d say I get nostalgic. Nostos, from the Greek, meaning “return home”; Algos, meaning “pain, grief, distress.” That’s the etymology of the word, but I’m not sure that’s sufficient to completely explain what happens to me when I’m back in southern Illinois, unable to completely commune with the people I know there because I can’t eat their foods, can’t accept their hospitality. No roast beef for this little piggy. No pecan pie. No milk-whipped mashed potatoes. No oranges or grapefruits or tangerines. Not even those. No, it’s more complicated than a sentimental yearning for the past because my longing is countered-weighted with the thanksgiving I feel because I’ve escaped the place I now sometimes desperately want to return to and call mine, that place— oh, I know Deb is right—that would never really be a good place for us to live. Still, I can’t help but feel that I left a little boy there—the little boy I once was—and the only way I can get back to him is by making myself part of the culture there. How can I, though, when I can’ t share the most essential custom of eating the native foods?

My father was a glutton. He gorged himself on anything fried, anything laden with sugar and fat. My father-in-law, too. He and Wilma’s nephew used to have contests to see who could pack away the most food at a single meal. Whole pies, he ate. At one sitting. An entire pie.

I come from a land where a man’s appetite is proof of his industry. A good worker has a good hunger. The more he shovels down, the more evidence there is that he’s work brittle, a man who can work as hard as the day is long. And the women? They keep cooking it up, Mister. Platters and platters of food. The greatest compliment you can pay a woman in this place is to eat and eat and eat until you’re loosening your belt, unfastening your pants, letting your swollen belly hang free while you groan with a delightful agony, and say, “Lord, have mercy. I’ve done died and gone to Heaven.”

If there is such a place, I bet my dad and my father-in-law are up there now, clamoring: “Enough of this angel-food cake. Bring on the cheeseburgers and some apple pie, and put some ice cream on it. Better yet, just leave the carton. Save yourself a trip.”

Understand, then, why it was my idea last year at Christmas to stop at Hovey’s one evening. We’d been out to the City Park to look at the Christmas light display—Deb and Wilma and I—and on the way back down Main Street, I suggested Hovey’s.

“Just to see what it’s like,” I said. “You know, now that it’s been redone.”

Deb gave me that look she has when she’s convinced she already knows the answer. “What do you think it’s like?” she asked.

“Right,” I said, “but what else do we have to do?” Another evening at Brookstone stretched out before us, an evening where Wilma would repeatedly tell us that someone was sneaking into her apartment and stealing her angel figurines. She’d ask us if we’d ever heard her stuffed skunk play “I Can’t Help Myself” when she pressed on its stomach. We’d listen to that skunk again and again. We’d try to watch a television program or carry on a conversation but neither would be possible because Wilma would interrupt with the questions she liked to repeat—“Did you ever know my husband?” “Is he still alive?” “Now where do you live?” Or the stories she kept circling back to—“My brother, Everett, brought me this angel.” “I’ve got nine ceramic roosters on top of that cabinet.” “When I’m taking a nap, someone comes in here and steals things.” I pulled the car into a parking spot in front of Hovey’s. “We’re just killing time, right?” I said to Deb, and she agreed to go inside.

That wasn’t the whole truth, that part about killing time. I wasn’t aware of it then, but I am now. Somewhere inside me that evening was the ridiculous belief that I could walk into Hovey’s, order anything I wanted from the menu and make myself at home, order a Big Murt and fries and a chocolate shake, and shoot the breeze with the waitress about the holiday basketball tournament at the high school, the Christmas lights at the park, the dark days of winter we’d face together, by golly, in this small, wink-you’ll-miss-it town.

Only this town wasn’t mine, not anymore. All I had were the memories of eating at Hovey’s when I was a kid and at other diners and cafés around southern Illinois. I remembered the cheeseburgers and the hotdogs and the hamburger steak platters and the fish sandwiches and the ham and beans. The sizzle of grease on the grill. All manner of pies and cakes in the glass case, the malteds and milk shakes in their tall glasses. Banana splits, chocolate sundaes, cherry parfaits. The bell ringing on the door when it opened or closed. Customers calling out to one another. “Hot enough for you?” someone might say in summer. In the winter, a man might shiver, stomp snow from his boots, and say, “Colder than a well- digger’s ass out there.” And everyone would agree. Yes, colder than a well-digger’s ass. Women untied scarves from hairdos freshly styled, and the exciting scent of Aquanet hairspray spiced the air. High school kids played the small tabletop jukeboxes. The waitress wrote your order on a small pad. “Just a sec, hon,” she said when she cleared the dishes away from your table. “I’ll be back with your ticket in a jiff.”

Oh, what a bunch of sentimental tripe. Let me say it straight out: there was a part of me that wanted to walk into Hovey’s and travel back to the person I once was, a person who could eat anything and not give it a second thought, a person who could feel connected to this place and its people. It wasn’t the food I wanted—I can see that now—it was the feeling that I belonged to a group. I remember Sunday dinners when relatives would come to our farmhouse, and my aunts and my mother would put out a spread, and all afternoon, as we lazed under the shade trees in summer, cars would come down our lane, dust rolling out behind them, distant cousins or friends come to visit because it was Sunday and everyone, free from work and chores, had time to lollygag. On Thanksgiving and Christmas and Easter, we’d take turns gathering at a relative’s house, everyone bringing a covered dish, and we’d be this family, tainted with various tensions as all families are—a set of brothers who hadn’t spoken for years, for example—but at the same time full with the sense that we were a tribe, well-fed, fat and sassy, in a place we knew as home.

In Columbus, I can go months and months and never walk into a store or a restaurant and run into anyone I know. The servers in the chain restaurants are usually college students picking up extra money, but even after four years in this city I’ve yet to be waited on by one of my own students. The young men and women who greet us at our table are strangers. They don’t even write our orders on a pad; they punch them into a computer. These servers are interchangeable, and I’m sure to them we are, too. Just another couple of customers in a long line, none of them regulars because in a city of this size there are just so damned many places to eat, and no one really gets to be a regular at any of them. But in a town like Olney—in a restaurant like Hovey’s or any small-town diner with customers who have their own coffee mugs hanging on pegs behind the counter, who have their regular booths and tables, for Pete’s sake—you can see the same people. It can be as close to your mother’s kitchen as you can get these days, and that’s what I wanted, that sense that I was in the company of people who knew me and who would miss me when I was gone. I wanted to be in a place where home cooking provided communion for the tribe.

“Take, eat,” Jesus said, when he broke the bread at the Last Supper. “This is my body.” He lifted the cup and blessed it as well and said it represented his blood. He said that whoever should eat the bread and drink the cup should first examine themselves to make sure they were worthy of such spiritual union.

I walked into Hovey’s—yes there was a bell on the door that jingled—unwilling to admit what Deb already knew; I was an imposter.

We sat at a table along the wall, and a waitress, a woman wearing a white uniform dress and a red apron tied around her waist, said she’d be with us “in a sec.”

“Why’d we come in here?” Wilma asked.

“We’re going to have a snack,” Deb said.

The menus were on the table, leaning against the chrome napkin dispenser, and anchored by the salt and pepper shaker.

“A snack?” Wilma said.

“Aren’t you hungry?” I asked her.

“Oh, maybe a little. They start serving at five o’clock. What time is it now?” The one thing she always remembers, no matter how faulty her short-term memory becomes, is the fact the Brookstone Estates serves supper at five each evening. “We’re not at Brookstone now,” Deb said. “It’s seven-thirty, Mother. This is Hovey’s. Do you remember eating at Hovey’s?”

Wilma looked around the restaurant, which was brightly lit. She was facing the front so she could look out the plate glass windows to the street where cars were driving through the cold night, exhaust coming from their tailpipes. She could see the heavy front door and the screen door that slapped back against the jamb when a man and woman came inside. The man lifted his hand and waved to two women who were at a table on the other side of the restaurant. The woman with him saw the other two women and she said, “Well, look who’s here.” The man wore an orange stocking hat. He took it off and stuffed it into his coat pocket. The woman with him unzipped her parka. She had on a blue sweatshirt with three snowmen dancing across the front and white script that read, “Let It Snow.” “Weather man says snow’s coming,” she said to the two women who were drinking coffee at their table. Then she and the man went over and sat down with them.

Dishes rattled in the kitchen. The grill hissed. A radio on the counter played Christmas carols. The café air was pungent with the smell of beef frying and hot grease, and it seemed to me then, on that cold night shortly before Christmas, the most wonderful place on earth.

“Hovey’s,” Wilma said, and she nodded. “I ate lunch here sometimes when I worked at the Weber Medical Clinic just down the street.”

“That’s right,” Deb said, and she looked at me with her eyebrows raised, as is our habit now whenever we want to silently communicate to each other how amazed we are by something Wilma says. We were startled by the fact that she so clearly remembered that she had once been a clerk at the medical clinic, that it had been on Main Street, and that she had sometimes come to Hovey’s for lunch.

“They had good chili,” she said. “You think I could get some chili?”

“I imagine you could,” Deb said. “Let’s just see.”

She handed me a menu and opened one for herself. I read the list of sandwiches, soups, platters, beverages. The selection was, of course, limited. The Big Murt was there, the hamburger steak, the chili, the fries, the apple pie, the lemon meringue, the coconut cream.

I felt—well, how shall I say this? Like a fool. What had I expected? That my menu would be the “special” menu, the one that listed The Big Boca Veggie Patty, the seitan steak, the black bean chili, the baked vegetable sticks, the no-sugar apple crisp, the tofu cheesecake?

The waitress’s rubber-soled running shoes squeaked over the checkerboard tile floor as she came to our table, order pad in hand, pen at the ready.

“You folks decided?” she asked.

Deb looked at me, again, her eyebrows raised, as if to say, Okay, Mister. What are you going to do?

“Chili,” I said. “A bowl of chili.” I pointed across the table to Wilma. “That’s what you want, isn’t it? Chili?”

“A bowl of chili,” Wilma said. “A big bowl of chili.”

Deb ordered French fries, and I knew she was invoking her “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy when it came to the question of whether the fries were cooked in animal fat.

Which left me, and all I could say was, “A combination salad.”

I’ll tell you how that made me feel. Like I did when I was in the second grade and my school took a trip to the amusement park at Santa Claus, Indiana. It was a hot day toward the end of May, and on the two-hour bus trip home we stopped at a small-town diner, and everyone ordered pop—Coca-Colas, Pepsis, Seven-Ups, Grape Nehis in ice cold bottles. They cost a dime. “I guess I can’t have anything,” I told the waitress. “Why not, hon?” “Cause,” I told her. “I don’t have a dime.” She brought me a glass of lukewarm water, and I sat there and drank it while all my friends gulped down their pop.

When I got home, I was parched, and my mother filled an aluminum drinking glass with ice cubes and poured Pepsi Cola into it. I drank it down. I told her the story of not being able to get a pop at the diner because I didn’t have a dime. “All I had was this,” I said, and I reached into my pocket and pulled out a quarter. “Son,” she said, “I think it’s time we had a talk about money and change.” Then she went on to explain that a quarter was twenty-five cents and told me I could have used it to buy a pop and the waitress would have given me a dime and a nickel back. “You mean I could have had a pop?” My mother assured me it was so, and even today I feel so sad for that boy in the diner, sipping that glass of free water. I still get this ache in my throat when I think of that kid, too stupid about money—too stupid for his own good—drinking a lousy glass of water like he didn’t have... well... like he didn’t have a dime to his name while everyone around him slugged down those pops.

“That’s all you want?” the waitress in Hovey’s asked. “A salad?”

I knew what she was thinking. What kind of thing was that for a man to order on a cold winter night when there was steaming chili back there, when there was the by-God Big Murt ready to do business? A salad? A combination salad? Iceberg lettuce, flimsy radish slices, a single cherry tomato?

I looked her straight in the eye. “And a glass of water,” I said.

Such an insignificant night in so many ways. A Tuesday. Pine flocking on the light poles along Main Street lifting and falling with the wind. Snowflakes just starting to flutter down. If I were to stand outside in that cold, as I do now in my imagination, I’d be able to look through the plate glass windows into Hovey’s, into all that bright light, and see the woman with the snowmen on her blue sweatshirt toss up her hands and laugh, and the man with her laugh so hard he has to hold his stomach, and the two women drinking coffee, one of them lifting her mug, so the waitress will see and bring the pot.

But first she carries a tray of food to the table on the other side of the café. Well now this is all right—those people laughing and drinking coffee and the ones on the other side glad to see that their orders have come. What a place to be, out of the cold and with all the food and drink they could ever need. But what’s really happening at that table with the chili and the fries and the salad is this: Wilma eats a few bites of her chili. Then she makes a face like she’s just tasted the worst thing in the world.

“What’s wrong?” Deb asks her.

“I don’t like it,” she says. “That’s not the way I remember it.” She pushes the bowl toward the center of the table. “Here,” she says. “You and Lee help me eat it.”

“We can’t,” Deb says. “It has meat in it.”

“Ground-up hamburger,” Wilma says, not understanding why this might be a problem. “It’s cooked up real good.”

“Mother, we don’t eat meat.”

Wilma draws back her head and studies us with suspicion, trying to make sense of it all. “You don’t eat meat?”

“No.”

“Well, then what are we doing in here?”

Deb turns to me. She raises her eyebrows and waits for me to respond.

I don’t have the answer yet. All I can do is close my eyes and bow my head. If I were outside looking in, I’d think the man was asking grace, saying a small prayer before taking up his fork to eat. Even now, I can imagine all the smells and the tastes and the food inside that café, the food that makes me hungry—starved to death—just to think of it.