It’s all in the condiments

Robert McBryde Author: CBC radio, literary non-fiction, vignettes and sketches, immigrant experience, living in Quebec and in France, childhood and animal stories, creative memoirs, satire, autobiography, family relations, raising children, aging, travel, social commentary, love and marriage, driving lessons, self-deprecation, Dijon France, condiments, translation: English-French; French-English

Publisher’s Note: Funny, manic, and wistful… self-deprecating creative nonfiction…The author, Robert McBryde, a professional translator, has been compared to David Sedaris for the sometimes-snarky autobiographical satire characterizing his literary sketches. Many of the stories in his new book, titled My Time with You Has Been Short but Very Funny, have been featured on the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation radio network.

Author Robert McBryde

Author’s Note:
I’ve written a new book of creative non-fiction titled My Time with You Has Been Short but Very Funny, recently published and now on the market. The book is based on stories that I told over the years as a writer/ broadcaster and host on CBC radio based in Quebec City, Canada.

The book is available via my website. The purchase links are at the bottom of the home page. Apparently the Indigo platform has not yet been activated.

I will post two blogs per week, normally Wednesday and Friday afternoons at around 4:30 p.m. (Eastern Time). Stay tuned!

Here is the title vignette from a new book I’m cooking up, titled It’s All in the Condiments.

It’s all in the condiments
For Don Hembroff and Louisa Blair

Once upon a time, we were invited to a sprawling friends-and-family barbecue on beautiful Île d’Orléans, near Quebec City. These events usually feature at least one designated chef, who doles out charred delights to the assembled greedy masses. Such was the case on this mellow late summer day in 2005. The people’s choice for chief cook and bottle washer on that fateful afternoon was the wry and witty Don Hembroff, who sizzled and flipped with uncanny acumen, all the while maintaining an attitude and look of someone who had deliberately swallowed a goldfish and couldn’t wait to share his inside joke. Approaching the buffet of earthly delights prominently displayed for the ravenous hordes, we were inordinately impressed by the vast array of condiments that exercised a kind of hypnotic gustatory temptation, a compelling lure that felt more like a radically unnutritious spell.

Don was cooking up a proverbial storm, adroitly taking orders, deftly flipping deceased beasts that had once scuttled about barnyards, and squirting toppings from those garishly colored plastic containers that emit discomfiting growls and pops, reminding cackling children of ignominious yet hilarious flatulence.

Among the dubious collection of foodstuffs at our disposal were the requisite oxymoronic veggie weenies, looking for all the world like they were in search of their own appropriate pronouns, agonizing comestibles in the throes of a truly alarming identity crisis. There they lay cringing amidst heaps of far-more-popular meaty role models, like a quailing collection of virtue-signaling hall monitors from an elementary school of new-age nutrition.

When we asked Don, the highly skilled frankfurter-meister, whether he actually enjoyed devouring ersatz hot dogs, he uttered the immortal words that singed our consciousness like a brand might sear the rear end of a steer. “Ah, what the hell,” he opined. “Anyway, it’s all in the condiments.”

My life has been seasoned with a panoply of condiments that I want to share with you before I carry their remnants to my grave.

For each and every one of us, life, it could be asserted, is all in the condiments.

Here is a cover image for the eventual new book.

My wife and I are currently residing in Dijon France, the universal capital of condiments.

Meanwhile the book titled My Time with You Has Been Short but Very Funny is available via this website:

If you purchase a book via the platform of your choice, please leave a review!

And if you have comments about my blog posts, I’d love to hear from you. You can contact me on the website, and I’ll get back to you asap. That’s a promise!

Here is a link to a cool group book review blog

My Time With you Has Been Short But Very Funny by Author Robert McBryde