The glue here is Bourdain

Posted on Tuesday, February 28, 2017 by spoonbeams

Morgan – where & when?

My older son worked in restaurants while in school, during the summer, and when out of work. In fact my younger son worked in restaurants — how could I forget? I’m pretty sure both Sarah and Sam, their wives, did also. Morgan at the old wonderful Woodshed in Moultonborough, Egg in Brooklyn, even Chili’s in Nashua, someplace on Martha’s Vineyard, at a few ski resorts, and Alex at Court Street Grocers again in Brooklyn, both of them at our Olde Orchard Inn. They washed dishes, cleaned the stove, threw pizzas, shucked oysters; worked the line and the register; expedited, managed, served, and played various roles at our bed and breakfast.

They told stories of course, but nothing like those of Anthony Bourdain in Kitchen Confidential, which came out in 2000. I read it, learned from it, cringed at parts of it. It was a peak into what went on in kitchens and what happened after the kitchens closed. It was a frenetic read, but thankfully it was neither of my son’s lives.

I never forgot the book, in fact thought of it often, but never followed Bourdain nor watched his series. Now Journeyman, the article in a recent New Yorker has Bourdain calling to me again and hopefully I’ll catch up. He is not, yet he is, the same man whose book I read.

Bourdain takes Obama to dinner in Hanoi – $6

Why my inerest? His life, his work, his experiences are legend. He’s been everywhere, eaten everything, gets to film it, write about it. President Obama had lunch with him on one of his adventures. So cool. Would I like to go on one of those adventures? Not so sure I could do it. I once invited myself to lunch with Norman Mailer and then could barely say a word.

All through the New Yorker article I found snippets that made me think of my children, quotes to send them or not send them. I usually have to think it through — how often to email, call or text. How often to intrude into their already full adult lives. These are important decisions for a mom who is so proud of and so loves her sons and their wives but doesn’t want to be over-momming it.

Instead I’ll write them here. Perhaps they will read them some day.

For Morgan, who has done research on New York City’s food carts, and who with his wife Sarah works at the NYC Department of Health & Mental Hygiene, this quote from Bourdain describing his proposed Pier 57 “market modelled on Singapore’s hawker centers or open-air food courts.” Bourdain plans to bring in the “best street-food vendors” recruited “from around the world and awarded visas — assuming that the United States is still issuing them — ”

Singapore’s orderly hawker markets combine the delights of roadside
gastronomy with an approach to public-health regulation that could pass
muster in post-Bloomberg New York. They cracked the code with out
losing this amazing culture.

For Sam, who writes for Food 52, and Alex who is a frequent commenter, this clip on Bourdain confessing that he now seeks to “capture how people go about their daily lives amid violent conflict” while filming Parts Unknown — ”

As ‘Parts Unknown’ has evolved, it has become less preoccupied with food and
more concerned with the sociology and geopolitics of places Bourdain visits. . .
To viewers who complain that the show has become too focussed on politics, Bourdain responds that food is politics: most cuisines reflect an amalgamation of influences and tell a story of migration and conquest, each flavor representing a sedimentary layer of history. He points out that most shows about food are premised on a level of abundance that is unfamiliar in many parts of the world.

Go Sam! We all knew you were right to bring politics onto the website!

I’ve got a good one for my buddy Lee, who’s a firm believer in “if it doesn’t kill you it will make you strong” as he judges the edibility of some morsel that I question. It’s a conversation of Bourdain’s with Stephen Werther, his partner in his new market project, and Stephen Alesch of Roman and Williams, the design firm which has agreed to work on the Market. They are talking about those Asian food vendors again. “The new frontier for American tastes is fermentation. . . That’s funk. . . Aged steaks. . . Age is code for rot. . . Cured.”

“Alcohol is the by-product of yeast,” Stephen Alesch chimed in. It’s the
piss of yeast.”

“Basically , what we’re saying is that filth is good,” Bourdain concluded.

And I found one for me. Bourdain’s publisher Dan Halpern from Ecco and HarperCollins says of Bourdain —

“He can’t believe his luck. He always seems happy that he actually is Anthony Bourdain.”

I am so lucky too!

* * * * * * * * * *

Last night, after putting this post to bed for a quick review in the morning before publishing, the thought came to me that there was still more to do. Netflix streams Parts Unknown. I watched the first episode, filmed in 2013, in Myanmar. Bourdain presents an interesting, colorful travelogue, integrating the life of the people with the food of the country. His dining companions spoke out loud, but guardedly, of their new freedoms. The story is out of date because the papers today are filled with atrocities against the Rohingya, and I was left wondering what his experience would be if he went back. Bourdain seemed surprisingly uncomfortable in front of the camera. I will watch more.

If I believed spirits walked the land

Posted on Saturday, May 30, 2015 by spoonbeams

Morgan and I are planning a camping trip on our fragment of abandoned orchard in Moultonborough.

Both my sons are exceptional and they fill my heart with happiness. I emphasize my love for them both so Alex doesn’t read anything into our not inviting him to join us.

We three have good, hard, simple, strong memories of this tiny spot in New Hampshire. A lot of memories for the little amount of time we spent there.

People who have orchards write about them — Jane Brox for one. It would be hard to capture the struggle and resolve of working an orchard and the struggle and release of letting it go better than she has, and I’m not going to try. Rereading her books now, after putting our remaining 2.65 acres with apple trees up for sale, has rekindled memories and given words to many feelings never expressed.

Buying this orchard was really a crazy thing for us to do. My husband Clark had non-Hodgkins lymphoma. He was feeling good after his bone marrow transplant and wanted to spend his last years working for himself, with me, at home. He wanted a bed and breakfast. We looked at other b&b’s but kept coming back to the first one we visited — Olde Orchard Inn.

I’m not sure what he hoped for at this point in his life, but I like to think he found it.

On move-in day we stepped into the kitchen and the house gave me a warm, firm hug as if it were waiting for us for a long time. That feeling never wavered, even when I was alone in it day after night after day in the coldest of winters, with the snow piled high over my head, and the wind wailing outside the bedrooms windows.

The land took a little longer to get to know, but after our first harvest we knew we had chosen wisely. It was hard work, but there was constant reward. I still wonder about the people who lived and worked there before us and what they left behind. If I believed in spirits or fairy godmothers or guardian angels I might be able to explain it better.

There were two or three innkeeper/owners before us. But before them there were only the Young’s, the Larson’s, the Brown’s, and the Abenaki’s.

White settlers drove the Abenakis from their land around Lake Winnipesaukee in the second half of the 17th Century.

We know that Batchelder Brown bought 50 acres from the colorful General Jonathan Moulton in 1783 for 5 pounds. General Moulton received a large tract of land as a reward for his successes in the American Revolution and sold parcels to Brown and others who served under him. The Browns bought abutting property in 1791 and 1803 and members of their large family lived there for over 150 years. One of the Brown men made bricks from clay by the stream, and built the brick addition when the family outgrew the original center chimney wood structure. Mildred Carter (a Brown through a second marriage) married Peter O. Larson. They bought the home and land from the Browns, planted the orchard, and gave it the name Homestead Farm. They shipped apples all over the country and sold them at a farm stand on Route 25.

The Youngs, who bought the farm from the Larsons in 1968, perhaps like my family, loved the land too much. Kate Young Caley writes beautifully of her love for the farm in her memoir. Unfortunately as I read reviews of her book, this part of her story seems overlooked and unappreciated.

At some point lands were sold off, and houses were built on Orchard Drive. Homestead Farm became Olde Orchard Inn in 1987. I’m not sure of all the owners but one of them, was the town building inspector, and that may account for why the tiny bathrooms in some of the guest rooms and a good deal of the wiring look like they couldn’t have passed code!

We bought the land from the Senners who ran the inn for several years. Grandma Mary, who would ride in the bucket of the large tractor and pick the apples high on the trees, was sad to go.

People with connections to the land would visit. A Brown descendent sat down in the old kitchen and and spent some moments in the past. Two Larson women visited and told me that as children on very cold nights they would sleep on blankets on top of brick ovens behind the central fireplace. These pilgrims would walk the orchard and visit the family cemetery. We all agreed that there was something special about the house and land. Guests would ask me about ghosts and tell me they felt a presence. One couple came back to renew their wedding vows because they felt the orchard a spiritual place.

The 1790 house came with a barn built even earlier, and over 500 trees on twelve acres. We spent our first months there fixing pipes and moving snow and figuring out how to keep warm. But once spring arrived the apple trees exploded with a flowery welcome.

We learned how to care for the orchard by trial and error. We joined Beginner Farmers and went to workshops at the Carroll County Extension. We tried our best to figure out which apple was which, when to prune, how to keep the apples crisp for as long into the winter as we could.

The orchard was rather comical. The trees had buzz cuts. Old huge trees were mixed in with newer, younger, smaller hybrids. Some were espaliered but neglected. Others had grown so many suckers and water sprouts they reminded me of banyan trees. We found cherries (the birds always got them before us), pears, and a few peaches scattered throughout. The pears did very well, perhaps because there weren’t enough of them to attract their own pests and diseases. The peaches withered away.

You cannot imagine my delight when I discovered the gorgeous raspberries galore —enough to make the richest raspberry ice cream and still have plenty for muffins and kuchens. I liked them because they practically took care of themselves.

There were special moments. We were picking up drops one autumn afternoon. The sun hit the maples just right, and we sat down and took in the colors, said how lucky we were, and stopped work for the day.

We saw bear curled up under bushes; a baby cub up in the crab apple tree outside our window. Sleeping deer left matted ovals in the grass. Wild turkeys strutted across the field picking up whatever goodies they could find. Fox would jump up and dive into the snow coming up with a snack every time.

Pepper, our dog, would walk along with us plucking dandelions off their stems without missing a beat. He would pick the apples off low hanging branches.

Our second year’s harvest was our best. I doubt we had one apple that didn’t have a blemish or a hole, but that didn’t matter to us.

Apple Tree, written & illustrated by Peter Parnall

From Apple Tree, by Peter Parnall

The following winter Clark started to fail quickly. He continued to plow but I did the shoveling. We drove into Boston in early spring to meet Morgan for a Red Sox game, but Clark wound up in Dana Farber. He went home to hospice. The apple blossoms came and went and the grass grew up to my hips. One of my first mornings alone a mourning dove called to me from the top of the barn. A weight lifted off my shoulders and Clark was now free.

Mowing took 18 man hours. When Alex was up, they shared the work, one on the tractor, the other taking the lawnmower up close under the trees. It was my job now and it was when I really started to love the land. I understood why Clark gave up when he no longer could manage the mowing.

The new Woodshed — April 2015

It was too easy to stay put, protected and comfortable on this magical land, to be the widow at the old orchard who only went into town to buy cheese at The Olld Country Store, or walked across the street for takeout at the Woodshed. Too easy to create my fantasy of being the crazy lady standing at the door with rifle in hand, dressed in calico and little brown boots, telling the tax collector to get off my property. Too easy to imagine a slim handsome stranger with a cigarette in a pickup driving up and staying on as the live-in handy man.

I put the inn on the market, split off a small piece in the back orchard for myself, and sold the house to a a woman who had spent some time at the house before it was an inn and had felt the pull of the place. She and her husband moved over from England and immediately hung a Union Jack from the flagpole. Batchelder might have shuddered in his grave.

Now these 2.65 acres are on the market. My sons and I are ambivalent. We want to enjoy the land but we live too far away. My neighbor who lives in the former apple storage building is under the spell also. He mows the orchard while he can.

Perhaps someone will buy the property, put up a sweet little home, care for the pears, choose a few apple trees to pamper back to health, steal a few of the raspberry plants from the inn’s property, spend a few years carving out a tree from a behemoth gone wild, and find peace.

But if it doesn’t sell, that’s okay.

Mommy! Mommy!

Posted on Tuesday, December 3, 2013 by spoonbeams

: Zachary Kanin, in The New Yorker, 11/25/2013

“Mommy, Mommy!”

I’d hear my son’s baby squirrel voice from the back seat of the Caravan.

“Mommy! Where’s Daddy?”

We’d have just passed a squashed squirrel on the road – most likely Groton Road on the way to — to anything.

“It’s okay, honey,” he’d reply in his mommy squirrel voice.

My boys had a huge repertoire of voices. They’d invent characters and mimic others: Bush one, Spock, Jack Nicholson, and oh my goodness, a favorite teacher during a speech at graduation.

“It’s okay. Daddy had to go somewhere. He’s all right.”

I guess that’s why when I read the featured cartoon this morning my stomach lurched, I felt the blood drain from my face, and my entire day has been colored by the sorrow and pain of those stupid water toys.

It wasn’t all roses

Posted on Sunday, June 16, 2013 by spoonbeams

Today is Fathers Day and I had a show-stopping conversation with Morgan. His dad, my husband, passed away in 2006, when Morgan was 22. We were talking about choosing a partner for marriage.

Morgan said a thoughtful, tender thing to me, at least that’s what I heard. He said that he and his younger brother Alex have an idea of what a good marriage can be because of the way their parents, Clark and me, stayed together and remained committed to each other for over 25 years. That’s the model they have in mind, and they are looking for partners with which to do the same. But oh, my words are so clinical and cliché. His words were so very much more human, more Morgan.

Clark and I were truly each other’s best friend, there for each other, no question.

Morgan and I spoke about other things too – work, the addition, his cats, air conditioning, July 4^th weekend, the cicadas. And then we hung up.

And then I began to worry.

In my efforts to make sure my sons are certain that Lee does not mean more to me than their father, have I led them to believe that Clark and I had a fairy-tale marriage? Will they be endlessly looking for fairy-tale relationships? As a young girl I believed in fairy-tale romances and marriages. As an older woman I believe in fairy-tale romances and marriages. But in-between I learned that it isn’t all lovey-dovey and happy til death do we part.

There were days during my marriage, and sometimes there were weeks or months when I wondered why or how or when. Do I really love him? Would I be happier with someone else? Am I trapped?

We never fought and I can’t remember ever raising our voices at each other. I’m pretty sure that is true. Two of the men I dated after his death, and the one that I am living with now get to that frenetic, shouting state so quickly.

Arguing with men, with anyone actually except my mother and a few employees (I loathe being in a supervisory position) was new to me, and very uncomfortable, and so I talked about it, trying to understand this hurtful dynamic in a relationship. One of my “dates” thought that Clark must have been hen-pecked. How else could he not have gotten angry with me since I was such a controlling, demanding woman? I don’t see that.

Clark was level-headed, calm, comforting. When I totally crashed the computer in our bookstore, leaving us without any inventory or purchase and sales records, he treated me gently and with concern as I walked around constantly crying, mute, and in a shadow for three weeks. Even when he was hurting with cancer, he found the way to help me through my anxiety and craziness over my mother’s violent and ugly onset of Alzheimer’s and the difficulty of getting her, her friends, and her independent living facility to accept the fact that she needed help.

Another one of my “dates” thought that Clark must have been a saint. I don’t see that either.

Lee doesn’t analyze. He just knows that we are both a little bit (hah) high strung, and get frustrated easily. Of course, I think he is the provocateur, but we won’t go there. If we’re not laughing at ourselves in an hour, we kiss and make up in the morning. We know we’ve got a good thing going and we aren’t going to let our big fat egos and our insecurities mess it up.

Clark and I may have talked and discussed, compromised, but I don’t even remember doing that. We just thought the same way. We successfully owned and operated two small businesses together. We built one house and did major improvements on two others. I guess we were a good match.

When we were courting he had a dream of sailing around the world. This sounded like heaven to me. After several years I realized this was definitely just a dream. He was much too cautious, too responsible, and he had a nightmare of an experience sailing the Marion Bermuda Race in 1979.

Only once did I see him lose it.

That was right after Morgan was born. He had recently changed jobs, and had given up smoking. Who knows exactly what brought on the anxiety attack that sent him to the hospital and then to bed for months. If ever I would have left him, it would have been then. But somehow both he and I got through it. Yes, he did get stuck when he was diagnosed, but who wouldn’t, and he soon started looking for answers.

Later on, as he got sicker and weaker with his non-Hodgkins, our life got smaller and smaller, but it was actually a dream. We were living in a 200 year old home that smiled on us. We hardly ever left it. Our children were off on their own.

It felt to me as if I was getting to know a new Clark. We spoke of what was happening to him and what would become of me. We were delving into places that we never had entered before. We were falling in love again.

Perhaps I have rewritten history for myself and for my boys. It is hard when you are juggling jobs and children to take the time to love each other. As I look back now, which I am so lucky to be able to do, I wish we had taken more time for ourselves and were more expressive of our feelings. At the time I was proud of our stoicism. It seemed to me that we just understood we were with each other and we didn’t have to prove it to each other over and over. And I think he felt the same. We never doubted.

We were fortunate we had a quiet, close time at the end of Clark’s life. He made it possible. He is the one who wanted us to buy that big, rambling house – a bear to maintain – on nine acres which needed constant mowing and care. I wanted to say “No. We don’t need an apple orchard. What are you crazy? All that spraying, all that work?”

But because I knew I had another life on the way, I would have done anything with him.

And we did good

Musings on Mom and Shredded Wheat

Posted on Wednesday, March 20, 2013 by spoonbeams

This evening I bought three boxes of bite size Post Shredded Whole Wheat and two curtain rods in Walmart and I feel sullied.

It was on my way home from visiting my mom in her assisted living in New Jersey – a two-hour trip one-way. She was at the table napping in front of a magazine when I arrived, but one of the caretakers who likes to make me feel that my trip hasn’t been in vain, badgered her (but in a gentle way) until she lifted her head from her chin, opened her eyes, and together they sang a few bars of My Bonnie Lies over the Ocean and Cielto Lindo in Spanish. My mom never knew Cielto Lindo or any Spanish when she was who she was. I find it interesting that she has learned something new. She said hi to me and gave me a smile, and went back to sleep.

When my mom isn’t too deep into her own thoughts or too sleepy, she recognizes me and that makes me feel good, but I would have been okay going home without connecting with her. She’s 96 and she is tired. I have no idea what goes on in her mind. She has started to mumble when she is half-asleep. She might mention her oldest grandchild by name, or my father, but there is usually no context to her mumblings, and I miss most of the words if they are words.

Often when I visit the house is full of chatter. Her housemates talk to themselves, one speaks on an imaginary phone she holds to her ear, some talk to baby dolls. They are important conversations but only one-sided. They have their own languages and sometimes they talk to me, expecting an answer. I comprehend nothing except their desire to communicate. I try to respond but feel very inadequate. There is one man with the most beautiful smile and brightest eyes who speaks bubbly words of nothingness. What was he like when he was whole, and what makes him so happy now?

Why should my mom wake up to smile at me? I lowered my expectations a long time ago. My visits are opportunities for me to see how she is, which means is her color good, has she slipped further into her illness, is she in pain, is she miserable, does she look comfortable and peaceful, does she need anything, and we hold hands. If we talk, it is for a few minutes and then she drifts off.

When I left, I was already in my “why?” state of mind.

My plan was to stop at the bank and Lowe’s and to pick up cereal. Lowe’s had the paint but not the curtain rods. I don’t usually shop at Walmart. It’s too big, too much a bully, too destructive, but it was on my way out of the big box complex, and it would have everything I still needed. Just one stop on the way home instead of two stops in the other direction was a good idea.

The parking lot was very crowded. I cringed looking for a space and once again entering the store. Memories of my husband who would come home from errands excited by the tattooed ladies in the Walmart in Plymouth, New Hampshire made me smile. I stood on tiptoes and stretched to reach the three boxes of shredded wheat that were on the top shelf — so far back and high that I had to coax the last two forward by knocking them down with the first. Obviously PSWW is not a big seller. The price was nice, but it made me even more uncomfortable with my lack of resolve. It is so easy to slip into abetting the enemy.

PSWW is the only “just cereal” that I have found, even on health food shelves. It has nothing added – no sugar, no honey, no nuts, salt, dried fruit, cinnamon, additives. The back of the box proudly shouts out that Post shredded wheat has “an ingredient list that is so good, we have nothing to hide.” Why does this statement madden me instead of making me happy? I’ve researched it and it seems to be true. It’s not organic, but I want a “NO GMO INGREDIENTS” label, and no BHT, and more choices.

My body was quickly moving to rant mode, and eventually my thoughts caught up and settled on frankenfish; over-processed flour; chemical-laden apples ripening in boxcars; aspartame in milk; misuse of antibiotics; chicken breasts with no bodies, heads or feet lined up on shelves in a dark warehouse, hooked up to feeding tubes. I just don’t understand an agricultural-industrial complex that arrogantly tries to convince consumers they have no right to know what they are putting into their bodies. Individuals run agribusiness. Their families eat food, drink water, and breathe air. How can they greedily produce foods that negatively effect their children’s bodies and their children’s environment? How do they and the politicians who support them twist the reality which is that they are destroying the agricultural diversity and sustainability of our planet and the integrity of our food supply into the fantasy that they are graciously feeding the world?

My son, the one who works with food and public health, and I talk a lot about the world’s food supply. He has convinced me that a new round of make-millions-while-crippling-life-as-we-know-it will belong to the medical-industrial complex. They will discover ways to alter our bodies so that we can adapt to our unnatural diets, and of course we will pay with our health and our money to fix their “mistakes.” Maybe we already are on this path; there certainly are enough pills and medical procedures that help us cope with our debilitated digestive systems and allergies and ballooning numbers of ill.

One neighbor always tells me that we have choices. We can shop at natural food stores, grow our own vegetables, buy at local farms, prepare from scratch. These choices are still very limited and they take research and energy, commitment and time. They are luxuries not available to those who are struggling. They are not concerns of the hungry.

There is more to life than shopping for food.

____________________________________________________________________

Something new to think about:

http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2013-05-30/genetically-modified-wheat-isnt-supposed-to-exist-dot-so-what-is-it-doing-in-oregon

You can’t have too many extra virgins

Posted on Saturday, February 2, 2013 by spoonbeams

Lee moved into his new man cave in January. His old cave, which was his studio/office/storage facility/private space while we planned and built the addition on my, now our home, was in our friends’ house around the corner. He moved there in October 2011 so that we didn’t have to go across the river and through the woods to be with each other anymore.

One of Lee’s cabinets filled with spices and sauces

When I met Lee three years ago he was in the middle of moving from his home for over twenty years. His wife Caroline had died and his son had established his own life. He no longer wanted to be in a rambling empty house and he had recently renovated a two-bedroom apartment in a Victorian on a quiet but main street, in walking distance to all one could need — almost. One gathers lots of stuff in 60 plus years, and a lot of memories. He had filled his apartment with pottery and art and cool hand made things that he and his wife and son had created or bartered for. It was a very personal and comfortable space. We became the old couple who walked their big dogs through town.

Soon he made his second move, to his man cave around the corner. He minimized again, tossing some more, and moving large items into the barn he had built as the pottery studio at his old home.

Like Lee I’ve minimized several times. Even so, my home is still filled with furniture, dinnerware, blankets, and more that belonged to my parents and grandparents. I lived on the same street as my mother’s family, with grandparents, aunts and uncles, and cousins my own age who were playmates always near. We all spent summers together in a big house at the shore. Last year I broke the flowered pitcher that used to sit on my grandmother’s coffee table and I cried. I know the story behind every item that came from my family, or at least I once did.

Since my husband Clark was an only child, when his mother died, a moving van brought all of the contents of his parents’ house to our door. I still have much of it, and value it as a tangible connection for my sons to their father.

My sons Morgan and Alex saw my family and Clark’s family most likely two or three times a year, and once Clark’s folks moved to Florida, and the boys got involved in school and their own friends, perhaps once a year. We got together with grandparents for holidays and birthdays when they boys were young and the adults were healthy, and gatherings were always warm and fun. It was a different kind of family experience than mine.

I wear a wedding band from Clark’s family. I think it belonged to his grandmother – but which one? Morgan and Alex don’t know that my mom’s mother embroidered the raggy pillowcases in my linen closet when she was sick with cancer. They don’t know which dinner set belonged to my mom and which to Clark’s, or that the little scissors in the cup on my desk was the one my father kept in the middle drawer of his dresser, the only scissors in our house we could always find. They will recognize none of the people in the old photographs in the boxes of albums I have in the closet. I know so few in the boxes from Clark’s family. Sometimes my boys tell me stories that I passed on to them about people and things, and I look at them in wonderment. Did I tell them that? Is the story true?

Now that Lee has moved for a third time, into his new space on the first floor of the tower addition, he has picked through all he owns in the world after 66 years one more time. I don’t think he is as sentimental as I. Perhaps he is, but when thinking about it he is definitely more practical and efficient. He gets through it. I move on, but am never done.

His new space is a bit crowded and disorganized, and there are lots of unopened boxes and stuff piled under the staircase, but it looks great, is comfortable and cozy, and he’s enjoying it a lot. It will most likely stay that way until we’ve moved into the upper floors and all of our possessions mingle and spread evenly through the entire house. Then we’ll put pictures on the walls and sculpture on the shelves.

We did however integrate most of our kitchens. We’ve gone through the pots and pans and the dishes and glasses and mugs and mostly decided what to keep in the kitchen, what to store, and what to toss, although I haven’t yet made the plunge and tossed it.

The other evening we went through the spices and sauces. After combining jars and containers and throwing away items that had date stamps all the way back to 1998, we found we had:

Four

bottles of apple cider vinegar, as well as rice and balsamic
canisters of sea salt, but no kosher or iodized
jars of molasses

Three

extra virgin olive oils
black bean sauces
vanilla extracts
baking powders

Two

crushed red peppers
Lea and Perrins
oyster sauces
Hoisin sauces
oreganos
whole cloves
herbs de province
basils
sesame seeds
mustards
cumin
black pepper
black beans
sesame oils

We had singles of lots of common and uncommon treats, the most interesting of which are:

Big O’s $787,000,000,000 Stimulus Sauce (contains no pork)
Kotterin Mirin – did you know you only have to walk 11 minutes to burn off the 40 calories per serving of this sweet cooking seasoning? It is for glazes and sukiyaki. It has only 15 mg of sodium per tablespoon serving, but corn syrup is the first ingredient on the list. Funny thing – I just tried opening it see what it smelled like. It is still sealed. I didn’t open it. Maybe it’s a toss.

Tiger Lily Buds – which he never has used, but how can one throw out something with such a sweet name. It may have to go though because I’ve looked at them on line and they are a different color than ours. Ours may be from Caroline’s mother’s kitchen which would make them at least twenty years old. Would Lee’s son want shriveled up flower buds from his grandmother’s kitchen, when he can just walk into a shop in Chinatown and buy them fresh?
My favorite of all – Red Boat Fish Sauce. It is 100% First Press Extra Virgin ca cam (black anchovy) and sea salt.

Not wanting to take any responsibility or show any interest in what he considered a no-brainer project, Lee left the decisions of what to keep and what to throw away to me. We now have three cabinets full of sauces and spices as well as those in the refrigerator.

The only thing he did say as he flew out of the kitchen to hide in his man cave was “You can’t have two many extra virgins.”

Christmas 2012

Posted on Tuesday, December 25, 2012 by spoonbeams

One night mid-December dinner was meatballs and spaghetti a la Otto’s. My noodle man Lee had been looking for meatballs to satisfy my craving at our favorite grocers. I can’t remember where the craving came from. We have been watching a lot of Fellini. Does Marcello’s father eat spaghetti and meatballs in La Dolce Vita? Lee’s noodles are so good that I often tell him he should open Lo Fan’s Noodle House and finally bring a great Chinese restaurant to the Hudson Valley. But “meatballs and spaghetti” is not really his thing. He was also a little turned off because he had just read an article on the unsanitary – disgusting is a better word — conditions surrounding our meatballs on their way to the grocer’s meat counter – any grocer’s meat counter, not Otto’s in particular. We still ate the meatballs but he has given up his search for tasty ones. Maybe the craving will come back and I’ll start trying to concoct that meatball of my dreams.

My office is so crammed with stuff we piled into it because of the construction going on at our house, that I moved gift wrapping downstairs to the living room. After dinner I picked up where I had left off the evening before.

Lee was at the piano and he sounded good. He was playing Maria – and I realized he had discovered how to separate his two hands and play a single note in the right and accompaniment in the left – something he has been trying to accomplish for a while. Lee is a self-taught piano player – he needs to reinvent piano theory on his own in order to understand it. It takes time, but he does it. While at first it frustrated me, I now admire him for his persistence and success.

The boys and I were celebrating Christmas/Chanukah on the ninth night of Chanukah. The date is never as important to us as is the occasion.

But it was Christmas that was on my mind as I wrapped presents. Our Ch/Ch (pronounced chichi) gathering, was also the negative tenth day of Christmas. Usually wrapping presents brings on conflict of a sort. I enjoy wrapping presents, although, as my father used to say, not too much: it goes on too long, or there’s not enough scotch tape, or I worry if I’ve overdone, favored one son, or . . .

This year though something was different. I was having fun wrapping; there was a little scenario unfolding. I always use posters saved from our children’s bookstore for wrapping paper. It is getting harder and hard to cut up these posters as I am getting further and further into the collection and pretty soon only my very, very favorites and the signed ones will be left. I selected the posters so that each package had a full picture on the front – that was something new.

The leftover gift-wrap paper from the store which reads “the most important twenty minutes of your day” is always my choice for wrapping books. We read together every morning from when my children were babies until they went to school, and then every evening before going to bed. This year I actually stretched and chose books and other gifts for them on my own, not from their wish list. This made me feel good about myself as I must be feeling more confident. I think they liked them, although they are much too kind to their mother to ever say “What were you ever thinking, mom?” They always choose books for me in return.

I used red rosin paper left over from laying the floors in the addition. The paper folds so beautifully. It was a delight to work with, so my pleasure was not only emotional and intellectual, it was also physical

All the gifts to girls had angel tags, and all those to the boys had stars. (Oh my goodness. Did I really say girls and boys and not women and men?!) The tags were also left over from the “Giving Tree” that we used to have in the store. In the past I chose my tags according to color, or if the presents were from Santa, or Mrs. Claus (she always gave the clothes — a tradition carried on from Nanny), or from Mom and Dad, or just one of us, or by how many words I could fit on them, or – you really don’t want to hear any more. But I’d love to tell you the story about the snowman bags.

I had already been wrapping presents for three nights. No rushing, everything was well paced.

Being at ease in the living room was a new sensation. The room had never worked for me. At Thanksgiving Morgan and I repositioned some of the furniture and that helped. The fireplace always smelled, and above the fireplace is an empty cabinet built for a large flat-screen TV. That’s another story, which I will spare you, at least for now. It’s no matter because once television became hi-tech and the news became gossip, TV failed to interest me any more. And TV is something I always watched in bed, not with guests in the living room.

The fireplace is gas and an ugly one at that. It was necessary to turn the gas and the fans on full blast to avoid the stench, which meant that it was only on during power outages. The man where we bought our little gas stove for the tower suggested I take the whole fireplace apart and clean it well. That helped too. He also wanted me to remove the firebox completely and get the dust out from behind, but enough is enough.

The living room is starting to be a good space.

Our Ch/Ch gathering was very warm and we didn’t leave until much too late. Alex and Morgan’s new girlfriends were there and I hoped we did not overwhelm them, or even worse, frighten them away. When Morgan wrote and told me that he thought “the Ch/Ch that Alex and Sam hosted was wonderful,” I decided we had all done good.

Lee and I went out to a romantic early dinner at Ship to Shore in Kingston two nights before Christmas. When the food is good (it doesn’t have to even be great) and I can use my fingers to eat, the restaurant is quiet, it has a bit of elegance without pomp, the waiters are polished, personal and yet keep their distance, and we are happy, I consider the dinner romantic. The waiter asked us if we were all done with our Christmas shopping. (Perhaps we looked as relaxed as we were.) There are gifts that the elves didn’t finish on time and there are two in the freezer that I forgot when loading up our sleigh to Brooklyn. But we were not only done with our shopping, we were done with Christmas and all I had were happy memories.

Perhaps I had none of my usual Christmas angst because there are now so many people speaking out: we are not a Christian country; there should be real separation between church and state; God does not belong in school, on the dollar bill, or in party platforms. It was such a breath of fresh air to learn that the Democrats left God out, and such a disappointment to see God put in. There is even a growing movement ridiculing the so-called War On Christmas.

Last night, Christmas Eve, I worried a little. Were Morgan and Alex enjoying Christmas Eve and Christmas Day? Did they and I over-react to my last year’s rant by hardly mentioning the word? I hope they are enjoying themselves with friends and that we can look forward to many more Merry Christmases together in the future.

Dad on Mother’s Day

Posted on Wednesday, May 16, 2012 by spoonbeams

We did good —
he whispers to me,
out of sight and hearing from the others
at our Mothers Day dinner —
but who is that sitting next to you?

Oh honey, I’m so glad you’re here –
I smile back.

They are young men with lives —
he continues —
and they love you.

Stay, will you, so we can talk later?
And can you talk to them too?

I don’t know how —
he answers after a while —
Did I ever know how?

And I try to remember
what we spoke of back then.
The four of us at the table.
The two of us in bed.

Afterword to Then Again

Posted on Tuesday, May 8, 2012 by spoonbeams

Reading Diane Keaton’s cleverly constructed and unapologetically revealing memoir Then Again I’ve spent more time reflecting on my life and feelings than her actual story. Friends regularly accuse me of going off on tangents. To me, my rambles all are on track. Some books are favorites because of where they take my thoughts. It is a surprise and often a disappointment to reread one of these favorites and discover it isn’t what I remembered.

I feel validated when an author states my obvious. It’s disappointing when we’ve used the same words.

I feel pleasure when the author articulates emotions and feelings that are in my stomach and in my heart but haven’t yet been put into words by my head.

I also enjoy being struck by an opposing view when it causes me to pause and rethink. I can handle seeing the black and white turn grey

Diane Keaton has done all three.

Then Again, like the Jacqueline Kennedy interviews that I wrote about in an earlier post, was a gift. This was a gift from my older son’s girlfriend. They just recently decided to go their separate ways. It’s a difficult thing for a couple to do, especially a couple that worked so well together. I’ll never know why. Hopefully they both know why. But that is part of the baggage this book carries for me. Bittersweet baggage, because she is a delightful woman (and he a wonderful young man).

My other son has a new girlfriend who, and I’m not sure if this is because I just read Diane Keaton, reminds me of Diane Keaton. I don’t know her well enough to say that their personalities are similar, but she seems to have the same presence. She’s delightful too.

Diane Keaton’s mother kept 85 separate journals, and scrapbooks. Her writing started with letters to her husband while they were separated after the war. He was in Boston in the Navy. She was 24, in California, and had just given birth to Diane.

I kept an on-and off diary starting in high school, wrote copious letters in college, and influenced by Anaias Nin in the seventies, began years of a passionate outpouring of what I remember as drivel, whining, and moaning about the lack of exciting boys/men in my life, or their rejection of me, and my utter alone-ness. Finally I stopped writing. Things must have improved.

During one visit to my parents’ home, my mom brought me up to the attic and presented me with a box of things that I had left there while I spent a year in France. Included in that box were the journals. Oh my god, I thought. Did my mom read these? What would she have thought? I didn’t open them, but brought them home.

As my children grew, however, so did my anxieties about what was actually in those journals. If I didn’t want to read them for fear of what they contained, how would my children or my husband, react to them One day they went out with the trash.

As an archivist by profession – this was total heresy.

Sometimes I wonder what was in those journals and if I wrote well – but never enough to regret not keeping them, even after reading about Diane Keaton’s mother’s scrapbooks. The future has always been more important than the past to me.

The last chapter of Then Again is Diane Keaton’s reflection on the final chapter of her mother’s life – her death. Like my mom, Diane Keaton’s mother had Alzheimers Disease. We believe my father did also. But neither of my parents have been as debilitated by the disease – at least not yet. I can’t bear the thought of my mom curling up and shrinking away. It could happen. Maybe we’ll be lucky and one day she will just lie down to rest on the couch as she always does in the afternoon, but not wake up. The disease shows very little mercy. I have not yet been able to put my emotions and feelings stirred up by this chapter into words. Diane’s story with her mother has been no help to me.

I was supposed to read this book. Diane Keaton’s mom would cut out photos and headlines from magazines and she would copy quotes from everywhere. One day she had a cover from a New Yorker thumb tacked to her kitchen bulletin board. It read “ Is it possible to go backwards and forwards at the same time?” Yes it is – just as it is possible to grow younger and older at the same time.

Brothers-in-Law

Posted on Friday, April 13, 2012 by spoonbeams

My dad David and Uncles Eddie and Elliot home on leave, 9/5/1943

Several years ago my basement flooded and many of the family treasures were lost or damaged. The days of sifting through papers were bittersweet. My twenty-something boys came up for a long weekend to go through the boxes I had marked as “Morgan’s Life” and “Alex’s Life.” They contained drawings, writings, school papers, letters, whatever I thought precious enough to save for them when they grew up. It was a sad and joyful weekend of hard work — emotionally and physically. My sons were amazed at how clever they were as little boys! They told me they would love to go through the papers again, but not until the next flood.

Here’s a gem I found among my father’s papers. It’s an undated letter from my mother’s sister’s boyfriend to my father during the war. My mom and dad are Mil and David. Her sisters and their beaus are Thelma and Eddie and Shirley and Elliot. The little girl is my older sister.

______________________________________________________

Hi ya fella,

I hope this finds you well. I am alive.

Hey, don’t call me those names. I’m lucky if I can write a note home now and then, beside the fact that we are now not allowed to say anything. We are busy — to make a terrific understatement.

I guess you must have heard of my good fortune – the thirty day leave. It was like water to an old desert cat in a sand storm or land to a sailor in any kind of storm. In short and to put it mildly, it was great.

A picture for daddy, 1943

Now comes the flattery. Dave, you are the luckiest guy in the world, that kid of yours is just a dream, she’s beautiful. She’s got more sense than I have (maybe an insult but considering her age). She’s so sweet you could just eat her up. I spent half my time with her. I just can’t put into words what I thought of her. For the first time in my life I can truthfully say that I love a child. She’s not like the run of the mill. She doesn’t cry and pout all the time or make a pest of herself. In a nutshell, she’s wonderful.

I came home fully intending marriage in a year of receiving 20% sea duty pay and all I only saved about $250. As you can see, that is nothing to boast of. In the past few mos. in the Pac. I have saved easily that much. I got 2^nd class giving me $96 base pay & 20% plus $10 for extra service (running motion picture equip). I save about $86 per month, I could do worse. So we got engaged. All of which leaves me very unhappy, because I have been kicking myself ever since for not getting married when I was home or not saving dough when I could, well no use crying over spilled perfume.

Elliot, Thelma, David, Shirley, Eddie, Mildred

Getting back to an interesting subject, everything at home is as well as could be. I saw your family a few times and Doris quite a few, all fine.

Getting home to serenity and peacefulness is quite a shock though pleasant. I hope you can experience it soon. I know that whenever Mil or Shirl looked at me they saw you & El, but it was beyond my control, though I wish it weren’t. I probably caused them more grief than happiness by my very presence. If so I’m sorry, but I just hope you get home first this time just to square things.

If possible let me know where you are now. Take care of yourself,

Elliot, Eddie and David with the parents of the sisters, their loves, 9/5/1943

spoonbeams

growing younger and older at the same time

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