[Michael Cantor]

For André Lambion

I owe my life—at least the parts that count—
the cooking, eating, and creative times;
the fressing, noshing, snacking, stuffing, tasting
that make most days a minor festival—
I owe it all to André Lambion:
In three hours, in a tired restaurant in Liege,
halfway between Brussels and nowhere,
so long ago it was a time before time,
he grabbed my life and redirected it.

Andre was Director of European Sales.
He was a man of tailored suits and walls of shirts
so white and starched they crackled as he moved.
The office rumor mill advised of ties
to the royal family. He drove a vintage Porsche
and spoke French, Flemish, English, German.
His wife was an ex-Olympic swimmer.

And me? I was a schmuck from the Bronx:
an achingly young engineer assigned
for a year to our new Belgian subsidiary.
I had never even been on an airplane
until I flew to Brussels for this job.
But I had no wife, no kids, no family,
no relocation costs – I was a bargain!

We sometimes made sales calls together;
me dragging bags of samples and catalogs,
and André holding a crisp leather folder
in his long and manicured fingers,
as he disdainfully translated my English
into precisely manicured Francaise.
We had visited a customer in Liege,
and missed the train back. Three hours to wait.
We settled into a nearby restaurant,
and André ordered food and wine for us,
without bothering to ask what I wanted.

Within minutes, steaming bowls of mussels
were placed in front of us. I hated mussels—
their stench, their dull, dumb bottom-feeder-ness.
I’d been in Belgium for almost two months,
and every week the Chief Engineeer
and his wife took me to a popular
seafood restaurant, where they devoured
cauldrons of mussels on the company dime,
and tried to persuade me to try the same.
“I don’t eat seafood” I explained repeatedly.
After a few visits they stopped pestering me.
I always had the veal parmesan,
buried at the bottom of the menu
and often served still partially frozen.

André saw my look. “It’s a seafood restaurant.”
“I don’t eat seafood. Do they have fried clams.”
“Enjoy the bread. You do eat bread, don’t you?"
Hours and hungry hours until the next train.
and then the long ride back to Antwerp.
Andre stared at me across the mussel bowl.
“You don’t speak French or Flemish, do you.”
I shrugged. He knew perfectly well I didn’t.
“And you don’t really know where we are,
or how to get back to Antwerp.” Another shrug.
André just sighed. He stared at me and through me.
“Try a mussel or I will leave you here.”
It wasn’t necessary to add “to die”.
He was a cousin of an uncle of the King.
He went to parties at the Royal Palace.

So I tried a mussel. And another.
And a third. And all of my bowl and half
of André’s, and we had one more each after that,
And several bottles of a modest but intriguing
Muscadet that André recommended.

In just three hours that man had changed my life,
and set me on a path to not just bivalves,
but the exotic and the challenging.
By the time I was assigned to head up
a new joint venture headquartered in Tokyo
a few years later, I established myself
with our stone-faced Japanese partners
by devouring live shrimp and a carp’s eyeball
at the launch party with practiced panache.

I’d like to think that André saw inside my soul,
and sensed the inner man beyond the Bronx,
but I suspect he was simply bored and annoyed.
Either way, he made a different man of me