Bourdain, at His Best, On the Border

Tweet tributes to Anthony Bourdain are still flying by on my feed.

Facebook is filled with heart felt and anguished expressions of shock and despair. And a lot of pontificating and arm chair suicide psychology.

Some famous religious zealot has decided that Tony would still be alive if he’d just “known Jesus.” That Info Wars idiot has decided that Tony was murdered because he was about to come out as a born again Trump supporter.

Wow.

But what I’m going to do here is link the one episode of Tony’s No Reservations that told me, once and for all, that there was no better journalist in the whole world than this fearless former chef who insisted he wasn’t a journalist.

It’s the one where he went to the American/Mexican border. I’ve never forgotten it.

Because I live right up against it. It’s less than 45 minutes from my house. But in the 20 plus years I’ve lived here, no one, not even the “native” Arizonans I know, has been able to explain what it means to live here — what the border means, period — as well as Tony did in 43 minutes.

He just went to the border and talked to the people who lived on either side.

And then, he strayed ‘way south of that border by motorcycle to visit the family of Alfredo, a Mexican sushi chef — yes, you read that right — who had some presents he hoped Tony would deliver to them.

Alfredo reminded Tony of the many Mexican kitchen workers he’d met both as a chef and in his TV travels, people who often did the bulk of the work behind the scenes, even in some of the most celebrated restaurants in the world.

So he was honored to make the trek, admittedly hoping to also be asked to stay for dinner.

Tony got his wish. And his audience got a lesson in border culture and politics taught by a master storyteller who just sat down over heaping plates of whatever foods he was offered and listened, mostly.

As always, Tony allowed the viewers to come to their own conclusions as he comfortably conversed with every person he met and made us envy every morsel of food he sampled while listening to their words.

Except, perhaps, the rattlesnake liquor. Complete with headless rattler stuffed in the bottle.

In the end, that is what I loved about Anthony Bourdain. I could sense when he wasn’t down with what he was hearing, but he always let me hear it. And never told me what to think about what I’d heard.

He just took me there. Showed me what he’d found there. And left me to decide what it all meant. And made me glad that he’d given me that opportunity.

Here is the episode I need you to see. Take the time to listen to these people the way Anthony Bourdain did.

And then you will understand the grief. And that we owe him so much more than he apparently knew.

I am so sorry he couldn’t feel that. So sorry for our loss.

But I’ll let Tony take it from here. Go here, ’til I find a good way to embed it so you don’t keep getting a Star Wars commercial or have to pay to see it on YouTube: http://dai.ly/x2bdaq4