"You are seated near the back of the restaurant. You have come, crossing roads tangled by more than just poor signage and the occasional appearance of a sluggish tractor whose operator, wearing the inevitable meshbacked trucker hat and wildlife-patterned cargo pants, is clearly unaware that this is the 21st century and roads are primarily intended for passenger cars (a fact that, in rural Mississippi, it is easy to bemoan as the driver, shaking the uncooperative GPS device frantically as if the physical motion will convince it of the direness of the situation, curses their foreclosure from the world of leisurely strolls down unpaved routes, ideally fanning oneself idly with a straw hat and taking periodic swigs from an iced beverage whose provenance is best left to the imagination) for catfish and perhaps also the atmosphere, though, admittedly, you wouldn 't journey to Taylor Grocery if it offered atmosphere alone since you have passed, on the labyrinthine way here, at least a dozen similarly weathered barnwood structures that would no doubt provide atmosphere aplenty even if it came at the cost of being bitten and stung by every variety of pestiferous insect that the humid subtropical zone has to offer, and so you rattle past them in the cab of your pickup truck or the back seat of your battered station wagon that reeks vilely of dog (though you have long stopped noticing this particular stench) or perhaps (scavenger of local dining that you are) in your gleaming, pear-shaped Prius with the optional Sirius radio package and the heated seats that mark you, on the sloppy and weedy edge of the Delta, as a hopelessly pasty and inept resident of one of the bleached-out states--Wisconsin, let us say--and are glancing furiously at the TomTom in hopes that it 'll pick up a signal soon, and you pass by the split-rail fences that you knew would be there and the place magically appears from out of the kudzu, bedecked with antique gas pumps and rocking chairs just as you knew it would be, and you enter and sign your name and are seated near the back of the restaurant. You have come for catfish, that ubiquitous and anonymous provisor of generic fish-meat across the South, its flesh drained of humour and vigor from a life spent in its glass-bottomed pools as surely as Rolling Rock surrenders any hint of the beer that it might have been over the course of its viciously sterilized and arduously controlled fermentation, a bottom-feeder, a bewhiskered ichthine Dustbuster roving across the polluted benthic verge, because you either know or have heard that the Taylor Grocery offers the best specimen of fried catfish to be found in the huge expanse of the world, though the best of catfish may perhaps be nothing more than the casket that imprisons it--the drywall etched with countless scrawlings and markings from those who desired to carve Kilroy was here before confronting the inevitable and unsurpassable wall of oblivion through which they must someday pass, the battered and beaten dry goods behind the counter, sealed and prepared for no one, the collapsing ceiling, the feel of old wood beneath a tentative hand or an unsteady foot, the grime--and, if this is true, the Taylor Grocery provides a lavish casket indeed; the order is made, the food is delivered, the teeth sink with silky grace through the miraculous and ephemeral confluence of cornbreading and catfish, the soul is comforted--this is true food, this is a real place, this is the best piece of fish I have ever had, full stop. [presented, with all due apologies, for WCF--belov 'd, go with God]"
