I'm With Her, and I Voted

It has been a wild 24 hours. I got home from work last night, and went to phone bank at someone's house. I then went home and took a nap, and headed to the airport at 3:00 am to greet Secretary Clinton as she arrived home from Raleigh, NC. Yes, 3:00 am, in the cold, in the dark, in a huge crowd. It was crazy, awesome.



We got home from the airport at about 4:30 am, and went to bed...only to get up at 7:00 am to go vote. [We paused to make coffee, and stopped at the deli for bacon/egg/cheese sandwiches.] I loved filling in my little circle for Hillary Rodham Clinton; I loved having my 12yo in on the action; I was a little bit verklempt about the whole thing.



We were still in the building when the Clintons arrived, but we were already in the exit hallway. So we made our way to the crowd at the front of the school, and joined the waiters and watchers - another crowd of fans and supporters. Best of all was a woman carrying a vintage "Votes For Women" umbrella, who turned out to be Elizabeth Cady Stanton's great-granddaughter.



Eventually, the Clintons emerged to greet the crowd and talk to the press. I wasn't close enough for a selfie or a handshake, but I did get a picture.



And then I went to work, where I found great graffiti on the sidewalk near Union Square.



I think it's going to be a long night, but #imwithher.

I'm With Her, And You Need To Vote TOMORROW

Tomorrow morning, I'm going to get up at the crack of dawn, and haul on over to my polling place. Polls open at 6, and I aim to be there plenty early, so I can catch my usual train to the city.

What are you going to do? Do you know where your polling place is? Are you going to vote before work, after work? Do you know what time the polls open, close? (I hope it goes without saying that you know that you CANNOT vote by text or online.)

If you're thinking "I don't have to vote; she's going to win my bluest blue state", think again and make a plan to vote. There are down ballot races everywhere: governors, senators, representatives, state assembly members and state senators and local judges and mayors and town council members and dogcatchers. Go vote for them.

Here, check to see where you vote - the League of Women Voters has an easy tool:

And if you need some encouragement, this We Are The World parody is seriously funny and possibly completely not safe for work (or children or people with delicate sensibilities).



VOTE!

I'm With Her, And Doing Everything I Can

As I drove down county today for my shift at the Field Office, I thought about the fact that lots of other elections in my lifetime have been important to me, but this is the one I’ve really plunged into.

I helped canvass before the NY primary, I’ve donated money, I’ve got a window cling on the car, and another on the garage door. I’ve got two lawn signs (and a third for a woman who’s running for the State Senate). I’ve bought pins, shirts, candles, cards; the pins I wear on a rotating basis and most of the other stuff is living on the mantle in a quasi shrine. I’ve worked the phones at the Brooklyn headquarters, at houses in my town, at the field office. I helped organize a fundraiser, I’ve gone all in.

And I ask myself, why? Why this year, this election. It’s this woman, it’s my child.

Hillary is qualified – “There has never been any man or woman more qualified for this office than Hillary Clinton,” said President Obama. She’s a policy wonk. She’s been doing this for years. She’s even-tempered, she’s warm, she works like there’s no tomorrow.

My child – and your child, and yours, and your grandchild, and the next door neighbor’s child – deserve a world in which women get to make decisions about their own bodies, in which Black Lives Matter, in which children do not grow up in poverty and education is a priority. Where nuclear weapons do not proliferate, where climate change is understood as real. Where science matters, and the 1% pays their fair share in taxes. Where everyone has access to the health care than they need, and where military weapons are off the streets. Where people of all religions are free to worship without persecution, and LGBT people are free to marry whom they choose. And where women’s rights are human rights.

And she’s my Wellesley sister and my Chappaqua neighbor, and she's the best person for the job of President of these United States.

I’m With Her.

VOTE.

I'm With Her, And You Need To Vote

Like everyone I know, and everyone you know, and everyone else, I’ve been thinking a lot about politics and the imminent presidential election in these United States. I avoid the polling data, but I’ve read every piece that David Fahrenthold has written about the Trump Foundation, I’ve read so many thoughtful, nuanced essays on why people love Hillary Clinton, I've read countless lists comparing his crimes to hers, and today, I sent an all staff memo out reminding everyone in the office to vote:

As you may have heard, Election Day is next Tuesday, November 8.

Please vote.

And if you have issues with timing or lines, keep in mind that there is no school and we would rather that you vote than worry about being late to work.

Polls in NY are open from 6am to 9pm. [I don’t know about NJ.]

VOTE!

I’m worried. I’m worried about the possibility of our country being led by a man who has admitted sexual assault, who has used his foundation for personal gain, who’s on trial for fraud with regard to Trump University, who hasn’t released his taxes (because he doesn’t want to show us that he hasn’t paid any), who has called for the ban of an entire religion from entering the US, who belittled John McCain for being a POW, who’s called Mexicans rapists, who attacked a beauty pageant winner for being overweight, who wonders why we can’t use the nuclear weapons we have, who thinks women who have abortions should be punished, who makes fun of disabled people, who disregards the First Amendment and wants an end to freedom of the press, who thinks global warming is a Chinese hoax, who loves Putin, who doesn’t pay his contractors, who … do I need to go on?

No.

There is simply no contest. Secretary Clinton is smart, informed, thoughtful, practiced and measured. You may find something, one thing, that you want to quibble with on a point of policy. But overall, there is no contest. Politics is about compromise, about being able to reach across the aisle, about being able to get to 95% and letting that other 5% go because the 95% is better than nothing. She’s the 95%. He’s ZERO.

Don’t forget to vote.

In On The Action

Not to be outdone by the Republican candidate's toupée, Rainbow got into the action this afternoon.

Her toupée is purely decorative, not covering any bald spot. Further, it is not made of cat hair, but rather rabbit fur. Although I'm not sure what that has to do with anything.

Cat. House.

The cats have some kind of death wish. They perch atop the newel post, and then they walk along the banister rail.

If you look closely, you'll see scratching on the part of the banister in the foreground. Yes, one fell off once.

But that's not why I took this picture.

The cat, Rainbow, seems to be mimicking the painting of a house on the wall behind her.

I made that, back in, oh 1967? It's tempura on now yellowy-brown newsprint, framed by my mother behind glass in a nice oak frame. For about 40 years, it hung in the back bathroom of my mother's house, on walls patch-worked with framed treasures from the elementary school careers of all of her children. This particular one? Somehow it went home with my sister when we sold the house. She, in turn, wrapped it up and gave it to me for Christmas.

And now, my cat is imitating it.

Life is weird.

Or maybe I am.

A Year, Sped Up Towards The End And Yet Static

Most books, you just pick up and read, more or less straight through. At least I do, unless I put the long complicated novel aside for a little detour through a fast mystery. But then there are the books that have a year as an organizing principle. And because I have some deep seated necessity to make order of things, I cannot read that sort of book in one go. Instead, I read the January chapter in January, the May chapter in May, taking a full year to read it. If it's a cookbook, like Nigel Slater's The Kitchen Diaries, I might find myself puttering around in front of the stove, making something with rhubarb when the rhubarb is freshly sending up its pink stalks. A gardening book, like Henry Mitchell's One Man's Garden, has me making lists of bulbs for fall planting in April and contemplating the location of a plot for spring peas, to be prepared and dug in November for March planting.

Last year for Christmas, my mother-in-law gave me a book of Verlyn Klinkenborg's little essays, called The Rural Life. For a time, he had an irregular column on the editorial page of the New York Times, where he waxed rhapsodic about so many things, like snow in January:

By nightfall the snow in the fields was fox-deep.

And spending in March:

Living in the country you learn to spend money in the meanest ways, and you also learn the most extravagant parsimony.

Reading September in September, I was dumbstruck last month, when on September 11 I came across his passage about September 11.

On the first Friday after that sudden Tuesday, I took an afternoon train back homeward out of Manhattan and into the country. Do you remember the day? [snip] Life is bearing witness. In some superficial sense the morning of September 11 sifted us all into difference circles of witnessing. Some people narrowly escaped the collapsing towers. Others watched in terrified safety from windows and rooftops further uptown, Many, like me, saw it live on television from midtown, while an incalculable number of people around the county and the world watched as the tapes were replayed into the night and the coming days. But we're all witnesses, no matter what we saw or how we saw it. Our burden is very different from the burden the victims bore and their families still bear, but it's no less real. Witnessing is a matter of knowledge and of conscience. We know what we saw, and yet we watch the televised tapes play over and over again because we disbelieve what we know.

I've gone back and read that passage several times over, thinking on so many disasters, natural and otherwise, and how we do witness, disbelieving what we're seeing. This election year is a good example.

Yesterday, I found myself on the train to New York without the newspaper (I'd forgotten it) and with a pitiful charge on my more-than-three-years-old-phone (the only problem with which is the pitiful battery). Happily I had the Klinkenborg, but I had to break the rule of read November in November and read December in December, because what was I going to do? Be rigid, or read? I read.

He is a lovely writer and manages to make even a horrible destructive heavy wet December snow sound beautiful:

The snow that fell at home this past weekend was a predatory snow, heavy, wet and punishing. It fell hastily, clumsily, and by the time the storm ended, there was as much precipitation stacked overhead in the tangled woods, waiting to precipitate, as there was on the ground.

Precipitation waiting to precipitate.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * *

Fall is that time when trees change from green to gold and scarlet, the hosta looks decidedly rough around the edges, the tomato plants are mere skeletons though yet with fruit.

And on October 16th, my patient impatiens are still blooming their little hearts out. The suburban life, it is confounding.

In Which The Good Grey Lady Drops All Decorum

I know that this happened on Saturday, but the hard copy of the printed paper has been sitting on my kitchen table since then, and I want to record this for posterity.

If you embiggen that so that you can read it, you will see that the lead story on the front page of the New York Times on Saturday, October 8, 2016 prints the words bitch, pussy, fuck and tits.

This is two of George Carlin's Seven Dirty Words and newspaper journalists of a certain age have collapsed into puddles of ectoplasm and/or rolled over in their graves.

We may have actually reached the end of Western civilization as we have known it.

If you haven't figured it out, I'm With Her, and the orange man must never become President.

This Is Just To Say...

There are plum cakes other than the plum cake.

Yes, the New York Times published ... yet again ... the plum torte recipe. It's divine. If you haven't ever made it, it's spectacularly easy and absolutely perfect. Tender, buttery, sweetly spicy, laced with tart plum bombs.

But right around the time that plums were coming in, my friend Erika posted a peach/blackberry cake on Instagram:

Bet you can't bake just one. Roden's Plum Tart w/peaches and blackberries instead. #baking

A photo posted by emdbarrie (@emdbarrie) on Aug 22, 2016 at 5:48pm PDT

I was intrigued by the reference to Plum Tart and Roden, so I asked and sure enough, it's a Claudia Roden recipe for a plum tart, even though Erika used peaches and blackberries.

At first glance, the recipes seem similar - a dough with some fruit on top. But the Roden version was different enough that I needed to try it - and it turns out to be more like cookie/pastry/cake under the plums, not sweet tender airy cake.

It is delightful! And even if you are committed to THE plum torte, it's worth trying this one.

Besides, who doesn't love a recipe header that says "It is very simple and easy to make, with pure fresh flavors and a marvelous biscuity base. You must try it. We all love it."

Swetschkenkuchen / Plum Tart
Adapted from Claudia Roden's The Book Of Jewish Food

Ingredients

2/3 cup (125 g) sugar (divided)
1 1/4 cups (175 g) flour
1/2 t. baking powder
3 oz (75 g) cold butter
1 small egg, lightly beaten
1 tablespoon Mirabelle eau de vie (or brandy)
1 1/2 pounds (750 g) Italian prune plums, halved and pitted

Preparation

Preheat oven to 375° F.
Mix half of the sugar with the flour and baking powder.
Cut the cold butter into cubes and rub into the flour and sugar mixture.
Stir in the egg and Mirabelle and mix with your hands until it forms a dough.
If the dough is too sticky, add a little flour.
Press the dough into the bottom of a round 9" tart pan - and up the sides a bit - make a 1/4" lip if you can (you don't need to go all the way to the top).
Arrange the fruit, cut side up and tightly packed, on top of the pastry. Sprinkle the remaining 1/3 cup sugar over the plums.
Bake at 375° F for about 50 minutes or until crust turns golden brown and the plums are soft and juicy.
Serve hot or warm or cold, sprinkled with confectioners sugar. Whipped cream would not be amiss.

Glass Ceilings

Last weekend, there was a book festival in my town. It's a great event - lots and LOTS of authors, each at a smallish table with a big pile of books, chatting and signing, signing and chatting. There were food trucks doling out wood fired pizzas and artisanal grilled cheese, and portable mini-golf for toddlers, and lots of friends hauling boxes and running cash registers and ferrying cups of tea to parched chatty authors.

I bought a bunch of books: a September head start on my Christmas shopping, and a baby present for Flutter's baby. There is something wonderful about buying a goofy pull-tab book and getting it signed "Dear Baby Rob" by Matthew van Fleet himself.

The authors cover a wide spectrum - one lives in our town and has written one book, others have been writing tons of books over years and years. I had a copy of Vicki Cobb's Science Experiments You Can Eat when I was in middle school; Vicki Cobb was there with it and lots of other books.

Jane Yolen was there too. She's written a pile of books, all over the map. I'm kind of fond of Bad Girls, because I have a subversive streak and I am working hard on teaching my twelve year old to stand up for herself, to recognize sexist behavior, to be no shrinking violet.

But the sweetest part of the day? Jane Yolen gave a copy of a poem to the force-of-nature organizer of the event, who happens to be the number one rabble rouser in support of Hillary Clinton in our town, and asked that the poem get to Secretary Clinton. It's a terrific little poem:

HC: A Modern Ode

She stands there,
hammer in hand
staring at the ceiling,
measuring with her careful eye,
finding just the right spot
to ding it down.
No wasted effort,
no casual boast,
the eye not the I.
A flick of the wrist,
a perfect strike.
The suffragettes smile
in their iron cradles.
Shards of glass
fall around us
like the Perseid stars.

–©2016 Jane Yolen all rights reserved

I've given a copy to my little unshrinking violet, because glass ceiling? Here we come.

In Which My Mother Eats An Apple

Today would have been my mother's 81st birthday. Would have been.

Since she's no longer here to celebrate with nine times nine candles, I have to remember her here, eating an apple, sometime in the 1950s, when she was in college.

I've always liked this picture - the red in the foliage, the red apple, the red red lips, the red fingernails. The grey of the wood fence / rock wall matching the grey sweater. The oh so turned up jeans. Jeans! The dorky socks. The bottle of wine, clutched in her hand, the open brown bag it came from.

Who took the picture? Is it the photographer's shadow at the lower right? What kind of shoes is she wearing? Where are they?

Happy birthday, Moky. I'm sorry you can't tell me the answers to all of these questions.

The Once Good Grey Lady, or, here comes USA Today

I am annoyed at my newspaper of record. I have been reading the New York Times since I was a child. I remember the ENORMOUS headline when Nixon resigned. I remember when they went from 8 columns to 6. I remember when it was truly grey - there were no color photographs or advertisements.

Last week, I learned that they had dropped coverage of suburban arts, restaurants, and theater. This is a terrible move. Not only is it a disservice to the institutions that will no longer be covered, it's a disservice to readers who might frequent those institutions.

I grew up in one NYC suburb and now live in another. For all intents and purpose, The New York Times is my local paper. I want to hear about openings at the museum a couple of towns north, and what an objective writer thinks about the new restaurant at the train station down the hill from me. And the flip side is that those institutions need the imprimatur of the Times for their success.

Days after I heard that metro coverage was being curtailed, I spotted a little announcement:

Right. The New York Times is upping their coverage of California, while jettisoning coverage at home. So I can find out what's happening 3000 miles away, but not in my own backyard.

Then, adding insult to injury, I read the really nice New Yorker profile of restaurant critic Pete Wells, only to learn that Pete's gonna be reviewing restaurants in California.

Sigh. They stop covering local venues, and start reviewing restaurants in Santa Monica. It makes me spitting mad.

I think the good grey lady has downwardly mobile aspirations to become USA Today.

Always Send A Condolence Card

The other day I came across something on the intertubes that struck me, hard. It turns out to have been posted more than 10 years ago - on NPR's All Things Considered - but good things are still good, 10 and more years later. Except eggs. Eggs are not good 10 years down the road.

Back to NPR. Always Go To The Funeral. It's a lovely little essay which says just that: you should always go to the funeral, because it means so much to the living.

A couple of weeks ago, the father of an imaginary friend died. I've never met her in the flesh, though I sent her a copy of Jenny Lawson's book for her birthday last month, and she sent me a wonderful hand knit scarf about 10 minutes after we'd met online. She is indeed a friend, though until I've had a chance to hug her and share a bottle of Sauvignon Blanc with her she will continue to be imaginary. It's a term of art, yo.

Last weekend, the sister of a local acquaintance died. She's someone I know her mostly from Facebook because we poke sticks at similar town- and school-related issues, but I run into her at the farmer's market from time to time, so, not imaginary. I had never met her sister.

Stumbling on Always Go To The Funeral in the aftermath of these two arms-length deaths, something resonated deeply in my soul.

I would like, therefore, to offer a corollary, or perhaps a subtitle.

Always Go To The Funeral. And if you can't, Always Send A Condolence Card.

Honestly - get out a card, or your good writing paper, and a pen, and write two or five sentences, and put it in the mail with a live stamp on it. It is the least that you can do, and in my book, it's acceptable if you have never met your imaginary friend's father or your casual acquaintance's sister.

#firstsevenjobs

1. Babysitter. One family paid me by check, $2 and $3 at a time. Another had The Story of O on the living room bookshelf.

2. Mail sorter at Publishers Clearing House. We sorted the incoming sweepstakes entries by hand - and ripped the corners off of all the postcards that had uncancelled stamps. I think I didn't buy a stamp for about four years.

3. Legal Assistant at a small family owned law firm. I sorted a lot of paper. When I became a mother upteen years later, that same lawyer drafted wills for my husband and me.

4. General office worker (typing, bookkeeping, filing) for a production music library. One day a tiny black cat wandered in the front door. She weighed 2 pounds on the mail scale. I took her home and my mother named her Peeve - her pet peeve.

5. European Sales Representative for that same production music library. I'm not sure that I earned them back the expense of sending me to London for four months, but I had a good time. The lasting result, though, is that I'm not allowed to give blood: too much time in the UK and I'm at risk of mad cow.

6. Records Department Clerk at a big New York law firm. Friday lunch was usually hamburgers and beer. On an extreme Friday, it was more than a pitcher of beer per person. Filing in the aftermath was not so good.

7A. Office Services Special Projects Assistant at that same big firm. Did I even have a title? I had a wonderful boss who set me loose on all sorts of odd projects, like finding a new cafeteria vendor and rethinking the office supplies department and planning alternate transportation in case the MTA carried through with a threatened transit strike.

7B. Teaching Assistant while in graduate school. All the undergraduates at Columbia had to take a basic music appreciation class, so all the graduate students in the music department had to teach it. I actually loved teaching that class; it taught me a lot about what I know and what I can do. But I never wanted to teach again afterwards!

(7A and 7B were contemporaneous.)

Somehow, I have never worked as a waiter or a sales clerk or any other job that requires regular interaction with the general public. It's probably for the best.

Your turn, if you haven't already.

#TBT Child In Shopping Cart

Throwback Thursday to ... back when she was a toddler, or a month ago when we were at Target?

When she was little, she always wanted to ride in the truck shopping carts at the supermarket.

Now, she can't even get inside.

How TV Can Lead To Education

So we dropped the kid off at camp the other day. And every time I tell someone where she is and what she's doing, I find myself explaining that it all has to do with the Gilmore Girls.

Back in the fall, the girl and I embarked on some mother/daughter TV watching: we set out to watch the entirety of the Gilmore Girls - all 153 episodes. This is not a show that I had ever watched, but enough smart women that I like told me I'd like it, and that she would too. If you have no idea what it is, it's a TV series which ran from 2000 to 2007, about a girl (Rory) and her single mother (Lorelai) who is only 16 years older than she is. Frankly, it's kind of adorable. And Rory is a pretty good role model for a tween, because Rory is a good girl who loves books and is educationally aspirational: at the beginning, she is dead set on going to Harvard.

A couple of weeks into what turned into a seven month marathon of kicking Daddy off the couch so we could watch another episode (or two), the girl came downstairs and told me "Mama, I want to go to summer school at Wellesley. I searched it up and I found this program. I really want to go there; can I?" I don't know about you, but when my kid seems hungry for something that isn't a new pair of shoes or lousy fried rice from the local pan-Asian restaurant, I pay attention. We looked into it, and found that it seemed like a really interesting summer camp - more geeky/academic and less sportsy/crafty although there are plenty of sports and lots of crafts. It's just that they take courses like Girls on Film and So, You Want To Be A Doctor? every morning - and they live on a college campus, in the dorms (and have to do their own laundry). And I swear, the reason that my daughter decided she wanted to go to summer school at Wellesley was because Rory Gilmore wanted to go to Harvard.

* * * * * * * * * * * * *

She needed to be there on Sunday. While we could have driven up and back in one day, it occurred to me that it would be nice to break the driving into two days, and stay overnight in Boston. So we found a hotel room, checked in on Saturday afternoon, and played tourist. We went to see the USS Constitution, which was in dry-dock - a phenomenal structure built of granite in 1833 when Andrew Jackson was President. From there, we took a ferry across Boston Harbor to the aquarium, where we consorted with rays and tortoises and sharks. We migrated back to our hotel by way of Quincy Market, which was depressing as hell - so crowded and tawdry. Sunday morning, after a nice breakfast, we continued our touristing, and rode to the top of the Prudential Building so we could look at the Hancock Tower,

and the boats on the Charles,

and even Fenway Park.

It was a nice mini-vacation.

* * * * * * * * * * * * *

Because this started with the Gilmore Girls, I'm going to leave you with this sweet tweet video, in which Rory drops in on Michelle Obama to give her a pile of books to read on her flight to Africa for Let Girls Learn:

Just a couple of girls talking about books... (👻: michelleobama)https://t.co/CS48LB9fk7

— Gilmore Girls (@GilmoreGirls) June 25, 2016

Because girls everywhere need to get the education they deserve.

21 = Hair

Today, our marriage has reached the age of majority: twenty-one. Or it would be, if we lived in Mississippi. As we are in New York, we reached adulthood three years ago.

But never mind that, because the real question is "what is the appropriate gift?"

The thing is, the charts generally go year by year until year 15 or 20 - and then they start skipping. So 21? Who knows?

McSweeney's to the rescue. According to their list of TRADITIONAL WEDDING ANNIVERSARY GIFTS FROM MEMORY, the gift for the 21st anniversary is ... hair.

I could buy a hair mattress. A hair shirt. I went down a crazy rabbit hole looking for things made out of hair; there are surprisingly many very very strange items out there.

But the single oddest and most intriguing find was a leaf. A textile artist works with human hair to recreate leaf skeletons, ineffably lovely objects.

Happy anniversary, honey! I didn't make you a leaf out of my hair, but know that I was thinking of you!

#TBT Dining With Danny

My mother loved to rip things out of the newspaper. She'd sit at the kitchen table, with a cup of coffee and a paper cutter, and go to town. If she was really exercised, she'd get out a red pen and underline egregious turns of phrase and typos. Then, she'd leave them on my bedside table for me to read the next time I visited. Eventually, after all of her children had read them, they'd get tossed - unless they were really special, in which case they got filed.

Dining With Danny was special. Dining With Danny was so special that my sister inherited a handful of clips of Dining With Danny. Well, not inherited as in bequeathed in the will, but laid claim to when we were cleaning out the house. Last summer, Pinky was moving and instead of moving Dining With Danny to a new house, she mailed the clips to me.

Here's the thing about Danny. Danny had a restaurant review column in the local newspaper, but Danny couldn't write. Danny says things like "the milky base tasted valid" (about a clam chowder).

Or the dressings were "lopped on the center of the salad".

"Fruiti de Mare was a dainty presentation of chilled shrimp, crab, lobster enticed by grated onion." Of course, the onion was doing that enticing because Danny had just had some wine out of a very special, um, wine glass? It may be that Danny had never before seen a wine glass.

Then again, Danny pays attention to the glasses; a Margarita "could have been served in a more decorative glass". But at that august establishment, the host "stood up and 'attempted to' serenade us."

I'm not sure that Danny understands the difference between posh enclaves and "upscale", but the chicken cutlet was "a large hunk of flavor".

What does it mean when Danny says that soup is an "ongoing project"? It sounds a little too much like learning on the job!

Danny tries hard to find something nice to say. Even though the coffee was very bland, "the food and ambiance is not pretentious. This is a respectable, all-purpose eating place."

Except sometimes, there's really nothing to say.

On the one hand, I kind of feel for Danny. On the other hand? These gems are too good not to share, and that my mother so carefully cut them out and marked up her favorite bits makes me wistful and delighted all at the same time.

---

If you want to read the full reviews, I uploaded them all as a pdf. You're welcome.

Remembering on Memorial Day

I think often of the street I grew up on. It was a lovely neighborhood with kids my age and older and younger, and interesting people up and down the street. As time went on, children grew up and moved away, adults got older and moved away, one house got knocked down and replaced with a ticky-tacky McMansion-y thing, one child moved back into the family home (after his parents went elsewhere) and one couple is still there. But I'm still in touch with so many of them, of all ages, many through the miracle of Facebook, others because we share Christmas cards and a certain history.

Before my husband and I got married, we scratched our heads about who was going to perform the ceremony. We're heathenpaganatheists and it didn't seem quite right to ask a cleric (though that is what we ultimately did). I had the whimsical idea that we could call in three of wise men from the neighborhood: the Methodist minister from across the street, the rabbi from next door, and the Joyce scholar from down the hill. It'd have been a gloriously high-minded cross-cultural mess with a certain je ne sais quoi about it:

The Methodist minister died in 2002; I was on my way home from his funeral when I learned that my second IVF had failed.

The Joyce scholar died in 2012; his widow is still living in their house, still throwing a holiday shindig, though recently she's made it a New Year's open house instead of a Boxing Day party.

And last winter, the rabbi died.

He was a mensch, tall and courtly, and a scholar. When I was a kid, he was just Gene Borowitz, neighbor. Later I learned that he had a big profile out in the world, a life of "working to advance race relations and civil rights" and helping to "shape Reform Jewish thinking and practice". I remember him today because it's the time of year when the azaleas and rhododendrons blaze away in hot pinks and soft lavenders and creamy whites; his yard was full of fancy azaleas and unusual rhododendrons.

My three wise men are now all gone, but azaleas will always remind me of Gene.

#TBT Grandparents

My aunt came over for dinner recently, bringing with her a couple of photos of her with her three brothers (one of whom is my father), as well as a picture of her parents/my grandparents.

On the back, the photo is date-stamped 1970. She was born in 1903, he in 1900, so they are 67 and 70 in this photo. And to me, they look just like they always did, and they look old. She had long long white hair, white by the time I knew her, and always wore it piled on top of her head. When we cleaned out their house after she had died, I laid claim to a Victorian silver-plate hair receiver - a small vessel to sit on your dresser, next to your hair brush, to collect the hair you clean out of your brush. It still had a snarl of her white hair in it, which eventually disappeared, victim of a move or a cat.

1970 doesn't seem all that long ago...and yet, it was 46 years ago.

Dipping One's Toe In The Internet

You know what? The internet is the best. The other day, my sister-in-law sent out a picture of a whale in San Francisco. I - for reasons one need not go into - figured that a poem was the appropriate response, so I googled "poems about whales" (or something like that). And I found this:

Whales Weep Not!

D. H. Lawrence, 1885 - 1930

They say the sea is cold, but the sea contains
the hottest blood of all, and the wildest, the most urgent.

All the whales in the wider deeps, hot are they, as they urge
on and on, and dive beneath the icebergs.
The right whales, the sperm-whales, the hammer-heads, the killers
there they blow, there they blow, hot wild white breath out of
the sea!

And they rock, and they rock, through the sensual ageless ages
on the depths of the seven seas,
and through the salt they reel with drunk delight
and in the tropics tremble they with love
and roll with massive, strong desire, like gods.
Then the great bull lies up against his bride
in the blue deep bed of the sea,
as mountain pressing on mountain, in the zest of life:
and out of the inward roaring of the inner red ocean of whale-blood
the long tip reaches strong, intense, like the maelstrom-tip, and
comes to rest
in the clasp and the soft, wild clutch of a she-whale’s
fathomless body.

And over the bridge of the whale’s strong phallus, linking the
wonder of whales
the burning archangels under the sea keep passing, back and
forth,
keep passing, archangels of bliss
from him to her, from her to him, great Cherubim
that wait on whales in mid-ocean, suspended in the waves of the
sea
great heaven of whales in the waters, old hierarchies.

And enormous mother whales lie dreaming suckling their whale-
tender young
and dreaming with strange whale eyes wide open in the waters of
the beginning and the end.

And bull-whales gather their women and whale-calves in a ring
when danger threatens, on the surface of the ceaseless flood
and range themselves like great fierce Seraphim facing the threat
encircling their huddled monsters of love.
And all this happens in the sea, in the salt
where God is also love, but without words:
and Aphrodite is the wife of whales
most happy, happy she!

and Venus among the fishes skips and is a she-dolphin
she is the gay, delighted porpoise sporting with love and the sea
she is the female tunny-fish, round and happy among the males
and dense with happy blood, dark rainbow bliss in the sea.

Honestly, did you have any idea that DH Lawrence wrote an erotic poem about whales?

Yet Another Edition of What Not To Put On Your Job Application

Once again, we are looking to hire someone at my place of employment. Once again, we roll our eyes at some of the letters and résumés. I am torn between offering these gems with snarky commentary, or letting them speak for themselves.  [I can't resist.]

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I am seeking a job in a non-for-profit where I could participate in the development of projects that help people's development. [Nice use of development twice, but what does it mean? Also, it's either non-profit, or not-for-profit, not a hybrid.]

I am sedulous in arts advancement, theatre and dance educated, office experienced individual looking to obtain a position in a stable environment utilizing my education and past experience in a role where I can feel good about the work that I am doing and develop my skills and experience. [My head hurts trying to unpack that sedulous sentence.]

SKILLS
• I have travelled to Canada, France, Monaco, Italy, Germany, England, Austria, Croatia, Bosnia Herzegovina and Czech Republic. [Is travelling a skill? Maybe for a roadie.]
• I also have years of office work experience.  [But what skills do you have?]

I hope that you will give me this amazing opportunity that I have been hoping to achieve.  [I fear that we will be dashing your hopes of achievement.]

I have experience in speaking on the phone.  [Don't we all?]

Some like to think of themselves as out-of-the-box thinkers, I prefer to think of myself as able to make origami out of the box.  [Truth be told, I love this.]

SKILLS
• College Graduate  [This is a skill?]
• Fluent in English [Okay, this is a skill.]

Helped raise over $5,000 independently to dance and did not sit or sleep for 46 hours in connection with the world’s largest school-wide philanthropy efforts to raise over $6.6 million for pediatric cancer. ["Independently to dance"? Stayed up for two days?]

INTERESTS
• Electric bass and vintage mopeds [Okay, this is pretty adorable too.]

Seeking Program Development, Coordination, and Administration especially in a people-oriented organizations where there is a need to assure broad cooperative effort through the use of sound planning, strong administration, skills of persuasion to achieve goals. [Word soup.]

PERSONAL DATA
Age : 63 Height: 5’ 10” Weight: 240lbs Hair: A little Eyes: Brown [But what color is your thinning hair? No, scratch that, I don't care about any of that personal data and I wish you'd left it off of your résumé because we are not casting a TV commercial or Broadway show.]

I consider myself one of those lucky people who were born with a split personality- not in the clinical-crazy sense, but in that I am capable of adapting easily between being wacky and creative, and incredibly organized. [Wacky. Wacky!]

"The Many Portals of The World"

Dear Patti,

On a whim, I picked up your book M Train at the library last week. Okay, maybe it wasn’t quite a whim, because the book was on my Wunderlist of non-fiction books to read, but I hadn’t gone looking for it - it was out on one of the “Rapid Read” shelves up front and it just leapt into my arms. And it blew me away.

Somehow, I had no idea that you were such a gifted writer. Songwriter? Sure. Singer. Yes? But writer of books writer? This is something I didn’t know.

I’m hard pressed to pigeonhole the book. It isn’t really a memoir, it’s too non-linear for that. It might best be described by a line towards the very end: “An aria for a coat, a requiem for a café.” It meanders all over the place, back and forth in time. So many books! So many cups of coffee! Objects galore, intriguing articles of clothing in spades. How did you come to own a pair of Margot Fonteyn’s ballet slippers? [When I was a kid, my mother and I saw her in the audience of a ballet performance, and she refused to give me her autograph. If she were still alive, would she refuse a selfie with a pre-teen fan?]

A few pages before that phrase about the coat and the café, there's a paragraph about lost possessions. Are they still with us?



My house is full of objects, clothes, furniture that mean something to me - but perhaps not to anyone else. Sometimes I want to catalog them, but who has time for that!

Your simple domesticity slayed me – Patti Smith sews curtains, Patti Smith makes packing lists, Patti Smith cleans up her room. I feel stalkerish in that I jotted down books to read (Frankenstein, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle) and a toothpaste to hunt down (Weleda salt). I’m thrilled to know that you have cats: one of mine is currently chasing a housefly all around my living room and I think she wishes she had wings. You like Luther, and your favorite Doctor is Tennant – could we hang out and watch Broadchurch one day?

I took the book out of the library, and it slipped into being overdue – I never do that! I’m itchy fingers away from buying my own copy, so that I can re-read it and dog-ear some pages and scribble in the margins.

Hey, thanks. I'm grateful to have been given a portal into your world.

Love,

A New Fan

Little Pitchers Have Big Ears

A friend saw that I'd been reading Georgette Heyer, and thought that I might like a set of mysteries set in Victorian England. So she sent me a stack of five paperbacks, three of which I've finished and mailed off to my sister-in-law. The high-falutin' series name is The Robin Paige Victorian-Edwardian Mysteries - such a mouthful! They are fun, though, and very undemanding, which is what one wants once in a while.

I was distinctly amused to open the second book, Death at Gallows Green, and find a bright pink post-it with a "necessary spoiler":

Okay, thanks! When the girl finally turned up missing, I remembered that she was not going to be hurt or killed and that therefore, she had to be found. And she was!

More amusingly, to me anyway, was finding the word "pitcher" scratched out on page 55, and replaced with "jug".

On page 56, "pitcher" was unassaulted.

And on page 58, it was again struck out!

The great mystery is why a jug and not a pitcher. Why? British vs. American usage. The book - though set in England - was written by a pair of Americans.

My favorite part? Adding my own annotations to those the book came to me with.

Do you write in your books?

FRANTICALLY, FRENETICALLY

It used to be that I never wrote in books. Then I decided that if it was my book, it was okay to write in. But library books? They shouldn't be written in, even if there are errors that ought to be edited. Right?

Imagine my amusement at finding that someone perceived there to be a typo in a library copy of Georgette Heyer's The Toll-Gate: fractionally.

Clearly, the reader thought fractionally was wrong, and so crossed it out and wrote in franctically.

In fact, fractionally is correct, because the whole sentence is "Fractionally, as they struggled together, shifting this way and that over the damp, uneven rock-floor, John was moving his grip nearer and nearer to Coate's wrist." That is, John was moving his grip fractionally, not that they were struggling frantically or frenetically.

But it's the misspelling in the correction that slayed me.

Another Reason Why I Blog

Every couple of years, I sit down and dump my blog to one of the printing services, so that if (when) the internet blows up, I have a copy. Recently, I printed the last four years, from 2012 to 2015.



The books were sitting on the coffee table, because I hadn't put them away yet, and the girl picked one up. She proceeded to read all the entries about her, in all four of the books.



"I did this?" "I said that?"

And in that moment I realized that it really does act as a sort of baby book. No first words, but her height's in there at least once, and there's a haircut, and the first day of kindergarten, and the first day of middle school, and various and sundry other milestones.

And it makes me happy that I now have printed, bound volumes from 2006 to 2015.

---

UPDATE

Because a number of people have asked, the service I use is Blog 2 Print. It is not perfect, but it is fast and reasonably easy, and there's not a lot of futzing required. It supports Blogger, Wordpress, Typepad and Tumblr. You provide the URL for your blog and select some parameters (like date range, whether or not to include comments, whether each post is on its own page). You get to write a little dedication, you choose from a bunch of preformatted covers, and you're able to choose (or upload) a picture for the front and back covers. Because I'm cheap, I go for the most compact layout (because it's fewer pages), but it does mean that the photos aren't necessarily where they had been in the original post. Also, I found a handful of places where the wrong photo got sucked in - I think in every case it was an instance where the photo had been hosted elsewhere, like a book cover image from Amazon. And it doesn't play nicely with Instagram - a photo inserted using the Instagram embed code comes through as just the widget code. While I'd rather the final product had been perfect, I'm not concerned enough to spend a lot of time going back and making it perfect (and paying for a reprint). In short, it got the job done.

(PS Blog 2 Print didn't pay me to write anything, and didn't ask me to do this.)

He Named Me Malala

I confess that I never go to the movies. Or maybe once a year - which is awfully close to never. It means that by the time the Oscars roll around, I've rarely seen any of the nominated films. One movie that I missed when it came out - though it didn't get an Oscar nomination - is He Named Me Malala. I'm pretty happy that it's going to be on television next week, and at a reasonable hour so my twelve year old daughter can watch with me, and on a commercial-free channel so we don't have to DVR it to watch later.

If you'd wanted to see it too, it's on on Monday February 29 on the National Geographic channel at 8:00pm (Eastern).

Would you like some freshly ground wood shavings?

Today's entertaining/appalling news story is that "The Parmesan Cheese You Sprinkle on Your Penne Could Be Wood".

Now, they aren't talking about fancy aged Parmigiano Reggiano, freshly grated with your super sharp Microplane. No, they mean those cardboard cans of cheese dust:

According to the FDA’s report on Castle, obtained through the Freedom of Information Act, “no parmesan cheese was used to manufacture” ... [snip] ... Instead, there was a mixture of Swiss, mozzarella, white cheddar and cellulose, according to the FDA.

Yum.

However, I am reminded of my childhood. In the pantry, screwed onto a shelf, there lived a cheese grater. It was sturdy metal, with a wooden handled crank, and a knobbed wood block to force the cheese down towards the grating cylinder.

On spaghetti dinner nights, one of us children would be deputized to cheese grating duty. Moky would hand us a lump of cheese and a bowl, and staring idly out the window onto the driveway, we'd grate enough for a few plates of pasta. Sometimes, she'd be more ambitious, and we'd have to grate enough to fill up an old blue quart-sized Mason jar. That Mason jar, with a zinc lid, lived in the door of the refrigerator, cheek by jowl with a Mason jar full of sweetened grated coconut. Once, I was sick, confined to my bed on a spaghetti night. My mother decided that I could have pasta with butter & cheese for dinner, no red sauce. One of my siblings brought up my dinner; it was pasta with butter & coconut. The blue Mason jars of grated white stuff were unmarked. Happily, it wasn't as awful as it could have been: no red sauce.

I digress.

The wood block pusher was shaped at the grater end - rounded to conform to the shape of the cylinder. One day, I was doing the grating, and I put that wood block pusher in wrong - it was rotated 90° and therefore no longer conforming to the cylinder.

Yes, Virginia, there were wood shavings in the parmesan that night. And the wood block was never the same.