“If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away.”
— Henry David Thoreau, Walden
BARBARINO-TAVARNELLE, TUSCANY—For 25 years I have owned a company named after that line, and until this week I would have bet good money that Robert Frost wrote it. Maybe Walt Whitman. It turns out it was Thoreau, a man better known for living in a cabin by a pond than for writing poetry.
I have published a shelf full of books under that name and never once looked it up. That’s the literary equivalent of naming your restaurant after a dish you’ve never tasted.
The company is Different Drummer Publishing. I started it when I decided to publish my own books, which was something people just didn’t do back then. Bookstores call it a vanity press.
Granted, there was probably some vanity involved (I have enough ego to go around, and the people who work with me would be happy to provide sworn affidavits). But it gave me 100% creative control.
I’m writing this from Tuscany, where I am hosting a group of travelers, and something happened over here last week that got me thinking about that quote, and that company, and 65 years of bucking what folks expected of me.
I grew up in Hattiesburg, Mississippi and I loved it. Still do. My childhood was a good one, and so were the people in it. Nothing I’m about to write should be read as a 65-year-old man nursing a grudge against his hometown or his upbringing. Whatever bucking went on, it went on inside my own head.
My mother was big on manners. My brother and I were corrected constantly— grammar, table manners, pulling out chairs, and how to conduct ourselves at every social function in town. I heard “It’s ‘may I,’ Robert, not ‘can I'” so many times I assumed it was my middle name.
By the time I was 10, I could pull out a chair for a lady faster than most maître d’s in New Orleans, and with a lot less attitude. My mother was right about all of it.
Though manners and expectations are two different animals. In Hattiesburg, like a lot of small Southern towns, there was some groupthink, an unspoken agreement about how everybody should dress, act, work, and live. If you didn’t know the rules, somebody’s aunt would be happy to explain them to you in the fellowship hall after church.
I have always felt a pull against that. It wasn’t about bucking authority, though there was a stretch in my late teens when I bucked plenty of it (my mother could have provided that sworn affidavit). It was more of a need to be my own person, and I have had it as long as I can remember.
I fell in love with the restaurant business early. By 19 I was managing a deli during the day and waiting tables at night, and I ended up waiting tables for close to seven years.
Some of my friends thought that kind of work was beneath them, and they would have felt lesser than if they ever had to stand at a stranger’s table and ask whether he’d saved room for dessert, but it never bothered me one bit, because I wanted to be around restaurants and in restaurants, and carrying plates was the only door I could find that was unlocked.
Granted, in the early 1980s, a lot of people in the restaurant business were doing a lot of drugs. That wasn’t a great environment for someone with my personality, and it’s a big part of the reason I was in rehab at 21. I’ve been sober for 43 years now, one day at a time.
So there was a tug-of-war going on inside me for a lot of years, with part of me pulling toward the person I really was and the rest of me getting yanked back toward the comfortable, accepted way of doing things, where you’re a restaurateur, you stay in your lane, and that is the way it’s supposed to be.
I have never liked “that is the way it’s supposed to be.”
If this column is starting to sound like a man staring at his own navel, I understand. At 65, there’s a lot more navel to stare at than there used to be.
The reason it’s on my mind is the business I’m working in over here. Ten years ago, some people asked if I would take them to Tuscany. The place had gotten to me, and apparently other people wanted to see it, too. One trip led to another, and Yonderlust Travel has now hosted more than 80 of them, which is a lot of trips for a guy who never sat down and decided to start a travel company.
Every so often that old voice still shows up and asks the same question. You’re a restaurant guy, so what are you doing leading 25 people through the Italian countryside? It usually shows up at dinner, over a Florentine steak as big as your face, and I just tell it to pass the bread.
Last week I had a guest in my group whom I have known since the day she was born. Her brother and I were in kindergarten together. Our families were friends, we all went to Main Street Methodist, and our mothers were in the same Sunday school class.
Because she was younger, I mostly knew her from a distance, but I always admired her. She marched to the beat of her own drummer, and she never seemed to break a sweat doing it.
One afternoon I pulled her aside and told her so. I told her how hard that is to do in a small Southern town, and that watching her do it over the years probably helped me break loose, too.
“I’m not sure you ever knew it,” I said, “but you made it a lot easier for me to be ‘different.’”
The times I spent trying to fit somebody else’s idea of who I should be, wearing what I was supposed to wear and saying what I was supposed to say, were restless times, and I wasn’t much fun to be around, but the times I’ve just been myself have been the happiest years of my life, and those are the years that I was also the most productive, I started businesses, wrote books, founded Extra Table, and did the most good for other people.
The best example was my paternal grandmother, Eunice Holleman St. John. She was the picture of a Southern lady, and decorum and manners mattered to her as much as anything. But she was also real. She was genuine and sincere, and she was the same person at Sunday lunch, carving a leg of lamb for a table full of family, as she was anywhere else.
She never marched to a different drummer in her life (I’m not sure she would have approved of drums at all). But she never pretended to be somebody she wasn’t, either, and of all the examples I’ve borrowed over the years, hers is the one I’ve leaned on most.
Take this for what it’s worth. I’m 65, I’m sitting in a little bakery in Tuscany, the same one I walk to every morning over here, with a hot tea and a pastry I have no business eating, and I’m doing something nobody would have predicted for a restaurant guy from Hattiesburg.
Thoreau said to step to the music you hear, however measured or far away. Mine turned out to be more than 5,000 miles away. Better late than never, I finally know who wrote the song.
Onward.
Sweet Potatoes and Not a Marshmallow in sight
4 cups Sweet potatoes, cooked, peeled and mashed
1 cup Sugar
1/2 cup Honey
2 cup Brown Sugar, divided
4 Eggs, beaten
1 cup Heavy cream
3 sticks Butter, divided
1 tsp Cinnamon
1 tsp Nutmeg
1 cup Corn Flakes
1 cup Pecans, chopped
1 cup Slivered Almonds
Preheat oven to 350 degrees.
Lightly butter a 13 x 9 casserole dish. Combine prepared sweet potatoes, sugar, honey, one cup of the brown sugar, eggs, cream, half of the butter, cinnamon and nutmeg in a bowl; mix thoroughly. Place sweet potato mixture to lightly buttered casserole dish.
Combine Corn Flakes, pecans, almonds and remaining butter and brown sugar into a bowl. Mix until crumbly. Sprinkle over sweet potato mixture.
Bake 40-45 minutes or until center is hot.
Yield:10-12 servings
(Robert St. John is a chef, restauranteur and published cookbook author who lives in Hattiesburg, Miss.)