Pop! POP!
Champagne. Oysters. Closed worlds pushed, twisted, and pried open. The bubbly fizzes up, up, up to the oxygen, to life on the other side of the cork. Striped of its roof, the oyster glistens and quivers naked in the air, wincing under a single drop of lemon. Beginnings and ends collide. Eating oysters is a nod to the past, both in terms of personal history (that first oyster, that place, that time) and a nod to the future (which, in terms of oysters, may actually be expanding as beds are restored and nursed back to health).
Jon Rowley, the former fisherman who is an oyster lover, connoisseur, and scholar in Seattle, tells people to tuck into a few on New Year’s and to “think of oysters on the half shell as a prelude to the good things that are coming.
I say use the occasion of the first Y-month—before cultivation and modern transportation and chilling months ending in y were the best time for eating the bivalves–as an excuse to buy enough to have oysters in many guises for a week.
