Monthly Archives: June 2006

No Food is Good Food

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When it's airline food anyway.

Jet Blue, the airline that took me (and my three hungry children) from Oakland to Boston last week, doesn't serve meals.  And we didn't miss the food one bit. 

 Instead, we packed:

  • a baguette from Acme Bread in Berkeley
  • thinly sliced ham
  • St. Andre and Petit Basque cheese
  • nicoise and kalamata olives
  • blueberries and white peaches
  • sea salt and vinegar chips
  • for the lox lovers — bagels w/lox cream cheese & cucumber
  • hummus, cucumber and carrots
  • a lot of nice Ikea paper napkins (they were green and blue plaid) and a few blue linen placemats
  • straws (children love straws)
  • a few pieces of gum for when you're taking off and landing.

Everybody got to order whatever drink they wanted.  I packed the meat, cheese & hummus in a children's lunch box with a cold pack.  Everything else went in a very stylish, lime green canvas bag that's made in Germany and looks like it should be carried by someone far cooler than I.  It was fabulous.  The whole thing. (And thanks to sourpatch for talking about airline food today and getting me thinking about this subject.) 

One final thing: somebody needs to start a blog devoted entirely to meals like this — packed meals, in bento boxes, tiffin tins, lunch boxes.  Every culture packs meals.  I'd love to know what that looks like. 

(Okay, since nobody's jumped up and volunteered to fill this important need, I've decided to do it myself. This is, after all, my own peculiar obsession. It's called The Tiffin Tin.  I figure at least one of my passions (this probably isn't an official synonym for obsession, but it's close) should have a home of its own.) 

A Father’s Day Playlist

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When I was little, I knew it was Saturday morning because I’d wake up to the sound of my dad’s music playing downstairs. It was one of the happiest sounds I knew. He worked nights and he worked really hard and Saturdays were important to him. I don’t think about this very often, but I did notice the other day that I’ve put a lot of things into my itunes library that I’d never have put there if I hadn’t been born into the particular family I am part of.

My dad’s from Texas, so you hear that part of the country in a lot of these songs. And even though you’d never guess this, he’s a teensy bit sentimental, even for a guy whose formative years were spent in the military. 

The playlist is beneath the fold:

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Words of My Father

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Today's Saturday Morning Blogroll post on BestBlog features something I found clicking on the "next blog" button. It's a collection of a man's poems, posted one at a time by his son, who found the poems after his father died.

Something about this site, Words of My Father, really gets me. A writer's chances of being heard by great numbers of people are not that great. Most people who write regularly do it because they find pleasure in writing itself: writing helps us organize our thoughts, and writing challenges us, and it allows us to remember and store up what we care about. But in the back of every writer's mind is some question about whether we are reaching anyone. We write in part to connect. That's what language is for.

Part of the landscape of the writing life is the possibility that you, like Emily Dickinson or John Kennedy Toole (who wrote the very funny book a Confederacy of Dunces before he committed suicide), may toil in obscurity but nevertheless achieve great posthumous fame. We all have visions of someone finding our carefully sewn books of poems (or our jelly donut stained manuscript) and, well, the rest is history. The idea behind these kinds of stories is that good writing endures and good writers may have to spend their entire lives alone with their words but if they are good enough, they will be brought into the light.

What I've never considered, and what this site — Words of My Father — makes me realize, is this: there are plenty of people who care about our writing right now. Before we're pushing up daisies. It's just that sometimes they're standing so close to us — in the next room doing the dishes or in the garage changing the oil — we don't notice them or don't think they count. But they do. This was true of Emily Dickinson, who did send her poems out while she was alive, to an audience who didn't quite get her. And although she had a pretty active social life, someone had to make it possible for her to spend so much time alone, sewing up her books, writing her poems. And that person must have respected her work enough to give her that time. And although I couldn't say for sure, I'll bet you anything that at least his mother knew John Kennedy Toole was up to something interesting.

You may not be perfectly understood, but people do know and respect your effort to write well. They'll talk about it with a friend, or they'll be inspired by it to do some of their own. They'll read what you post without telling you they've done it. Or they'll hear you tapping away on your computer or see you chewing on your pencil and feel lucky to know somebody who loves to write. And on places like WordPress, they will find you by just clicking around one morning and stopping, and recognizing a kindred spirit or a new voice. These people are our family and our friends, and they are the best audience I know.

Lime Fruit Slices

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There were so many things at Chutters (home of the world’s longest candy counter and today’s Big Event) besides lime fruit slices, but for some reason this was all I could focus on. I love these candies — not just lime, but all the other citrus fruit slices: grapefruit, lemons, oranges. They’re beautiful to look at, make great cupcake decorations and are nice to have around in a glass jar.

The drive through northern New Hampshire to the candy store took us toward the White Mountains. Everywhere we looked we saw green. And if you could ignore the child in the back of the car singing along to the Sound of Music, and the one next to him saying, “shush,” it was lovely country, mountains in the distance, the occasional barn and silo, here & there a little town with a white Congregational church at its heart.

The truth, though, is that nobody can really live in this lovely place because there just aren’t any jobs. As one of my sons pointed out, it’s a place for old people and college students.

Still, the boys talked a lot about how much they would love to live here. Why do we sometimes want to move to the places we visit on vacation? I suppose it has to do with confusing a place with the state of being on vacation. But it’s also the case that other lives are enticing when they are so different from your own. We live an urban life, in a small house, surrounded by many other cultures, a variety of foods and languages. The boys don’t really understand why we don’t live out here — it’s safe, and green, and the houses are so big, and the world’s largest candy store is not that far away. Why haven’t we packed our bags yet?

I suppose there are some things a parent can’t explain to a child. Sometimes I’m not so sure we made the right choice, staying in the Bay Area. We’ve given them a place where things are complicated — we can’t hide problems like homelessness here because the boys walk down the same streets we do. All the same, it’s beautiful at home. The bay, the fog, the hills, the bridges, the lemon trees, the wisteria in the spring and the bougainvillea and jasmine blooming in our back yard even in the winter — all are lovely. But it’s sometimes harder to see the beauty of your home than the beauty of a place like this. Today, what we all saw was what we don’t have at home: the spacious white houses, the green hills, the happy vacation minded people, and the candy store with the gleaming jars of candy, a penny a piece or $8.99 a pound.

Lobster Bake Casual

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That's what it says on the schedule for my husband's 25th college reunion in Hanover, New Hampshire, which is where I am today, and will be for a few more days. I imagine that means you should be wearing shoes with no socks. And a bib. I suppose some people will know immediately what the rest of their outfit for the Class of '81 Lobster Bake should look like.

I am not one of those people. I am not from New England, where Lobster Bake events are, apparently, so common people know instinctively what to wear to them. But I love it when we visit: I like how much closer it feels to the Real England (in California, the oldest houses were built in the mid 1800s, unless you count the missions; in New England, at least a century earlier.) I also like how the weather counts — every day it actually DOES something. Last night, for example, it rained for a long time and we lay in bed and listened, happily experiencing the primal comfort of being inside and warm and protected.

If my biggest problem today is that I have to figure out what lobster bake casual looks like, then I'm in pretty good shape.

Tomorrow, we're going to a town that features a store with the world's longest candy counter, and the world's largest collection of penny candy. There's no dress code for that event. We just have to bring pennies.

The Edible School Yard

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The Edible School Yard
Farmer Ben, the gardener at my youngest son's school, gave him a little milk carton a few weeks ago with some dirt and a strawberry plant in it. After intense watering and sunning, a single strawberry arrived. My son harvested it. it was pretty good. And that pretty much sums up what it's like to be a child in the Berkeley Public Schools when you go to the edible school yard with your class to find out where the food you eat comes from.

In the garden, the children taste things they've helped grow. They feed the chickens. They learn about what fertilizer does. Did I mention that they taste things? It's a big deal for all of them — they're in there being asked to put a tomato, or a pepper, or a piece of chard in their mouths. At home, they are unlikely to ever do this. At school, they do it at least half the time, if not more. At least half of THAT time, they discover a new taste they like. The other day my son told me, out of the blue, that he likes mint. 

This is supposed to create an openness among the children about trying new foods and to make a difference in the fight against obesity.  A mixed diet, full of new flavors, is a healthy one.  I'm watching. It's early still but I certainly do like how the garden looks.

This year, the school moved part of the garden into the center of the yard. There are lots of beautiful raised beds, full of flowers and leafy greens. On one side, there're corn and beans growing up a frame. Grape vines are beginning to grow along the top of the fence.

The garden is enclosed by a low and very nice redwood fence. So far, even though they could easily damage it, the children who've grown up around the garden, and gone to school here, and eaten Farmer Ben's strawberries, seem to respect it. The kids who come to the yard when the nearby junior high lets out, seem younger and more innocent the second they step into the yard. I think this is because the garden transforms the school yard into a green world, where all of us have good will and want to keep our garden clean.

Tea at the Palaz of Hoon

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Tea At The Palaz Of Hoon

Wallace Stevens

Not less because in purple I descended
The western day through what you called
The loneliest air, not less was I myself.

What was the ointment sprinkled on my beard?
What were the hymns that buzzed beside my ears?
What was the sea whose tide swept through me there?

Out of my mind the golden ointment rained,
And my ears made the blowing hymns they heard.
I was myself the compass of that sea:

I was the world in which I walked, and what I saw
Or heard or felt came not but from myself;
And there I found myself more truly and more strange.

For Debbie and Ben's daughters, Emma and Lucie, as they walk out into the world.

Along the Way

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Saturday Morning Blogroll is up at BestBlog.  

On my way to Robo, the Iranian site featured on that post, I found a few other interesting things.  Here they are:

Silent Seas. An American living in Tokyo. Very fun, very nicely written, frequently updated.

RSVP. I don't know much about gaming. But anyone who names their gaming site "RSVP" — respondez, s'il vous PLAY gets my vote.   It's well written too. 

Turquoisebleue and Figaro.  Put together a French speaker, a camera, a computer and WordPress and you get lots of good French photo blogs, like these two.

Saturday Morning Blogroll: Friday Night Report

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Half-hour Glass
Fifteen minutes into my alloted half hour of clicking, I found myself making a list of common tics, distracting habits, the things that can make a site unwelcoming. Most of them can be fixed with a little thought and effort.

–A surprising number of people give their blogs subtitles that are so underachieving you wonder why anyone would bother to write them. In fifteen minutes, I found: ruminations, ramblings, random thoughts, musings, a little bit of this and that, just the usual, nothing special and, my personal favorite, "another blog? You must be joking." I don't know about you, but I don't really want to read a blog somebody's already decided doesn't amount to much. Could be the person writing it just needs a little encouragement to see that what they're doing can have real value. I hope they find it.

–It's not hard to figure out if a blog is going to be rant-driven, if you, like me, aren't fond of this style of writing. One clue: if a blog is called "the screaming place" you might want to enter with ear plugs in hand. But note: there's another blog, called The Screaming Room, that's quite funny.  Maybe they're one and the same and I wrote the blog's name down twice, differently.

–It's not the bad spelling that worries me, it's the decision not to spell check when you've very likely been told more than once that you aren't a speller. I found these in a single (pretty short) paragraph: "truely," "exquisit," "there" (for their). This string of errors made it hard to concentrate on content.

–Finally, five emoticons in one page view are just way, way too many emoticons. That's as many as you should use in a lifetime. Maybe three or four more than you should use in a lifetime, in fact.

I did find some gems, and I'll write them up in the morning.

Hooked

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Every compelling piece of writing begins with a hook, a sentence baited with words so enticing you cannot resist taking a bite. Great hooks are hard to define. Some are an entire paragraph long. Novel readers in the 18th and 19th century saw a lot of these lengthy beginnings. Some are just a few simple words. ("I am an invisible man.") All of them share the magical quality of being irresistable, of making you want to read more. Like pornography, we know them when we see them. Among the many memorable hooks in English, one of my favorites is this:

"It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen."
(George Orwell, 1984)

You know immediately you are in a place where things have gone terribly wrong. And you know it is April, that cruel and atmospheric month in England. And you also feel urgently that you need to find out why the clocks are striking thirteen. I was eighteen when I read this. I hated books that made me uncomfortable, that suggested the future might be worse than the present. And yet here was a book I couldn't resist, even though it was about to make me very uncomfortable: I had been hooked.

All good writers must learn how to create hooks. I'm interested in hearing what your favorite hook is, dear reader. And why.

For your amusement, here's a link to somebody's idea of 100 great novel hooks. Orwell's hook is eighteen.

Thoughts On Writing

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This is in response to a challenge, by Lorelle, to come up with a post about someone who changed your life. I've been wanting to talk about this anyway, so here it is: 

The other day, for a reason I can't now reconstruct, I began to make a list of the biggest mistakes I’ve made in my life, but the list was so long and distressing, that I finally decided maybe I'd just stick to thinking about a single mistake. 

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Dear Reader

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I received this comment today from a faithful reader:

"In my opinion your best writing/thinking/expressing/intellectualizing (double redundencies in the preceding) are missed when you overwrite about food/cooking.

e. g. C.K. Fisher was extraordinary. I had dinner with her two times but that was enough.

Literature, children, law give a Miramax perspective to how life is looked at. And at the moment there are so many more important issues to be addressed. The sanctity of marriage. Flags being burned. Where is Berkeley when we need her? In Sweden this passes for humor."

Here's my response:
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