#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.

#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.

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

#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.

Class of '94....1894, that is.

I was perusing the archives of my alma mater, as one does, looking for an image that had been used in a presentation that I'd been to over the weekend. The speaker had said it was from the 1894 yearbook, and happily, all of the yearbooks exist as pdfs on the college library's web page. I love the intertubes.

That 1894 yearbook turned out to be 317 pages long what with covers and endpapers and advertisements, and it is completely wonderful in an unexpectedly whimsical way. Oh sure, there are pages and pages of lists of names, but there was a banjo club! Complete with banjeurines and a factotum! And two members named Florence. The whole yearbook delighted me, actually.

One page was given over to a ditty about bananas:

I found the image I was looking for:

There's a whole riff on the Declaration of Independence, rendering it applicable to a graduating class:

A Declaration of Dependence.

WHEN, in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for a class to dissolve the bonds which have connected them with college life, and to assume, among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the laws of nature and their own opinion of their learning and importance entitle them, a decent respect to their Alma Mater requires that they should declare the grief which moves them at the separation.

Prudence, indeed, would dictate (this have we learned line upon line, precept upon precept, from our foster mother) that conditions long established should not be changed for light and transient causes. But when a long train of courses and matriculations, pursuing invariably the same object, has fulfilled its design of reducing us under an absolute sense of our profound ignorance, there is its beneficent task ended, and it is our right, our duty to throw off such conditions and to provide new fields for our future activity. The history of the present Faculty in its relations with the Class of '94 is a history of continued kindness and of repeated benefits (sometimes, we confess, these blessings were so disguised that we failed to recognize them), having in direct object that knowledge of folly which is wisdom, and that mild and submissive disposition which is the crown of womanly character. To prove this let facts be submitted to a candid world.

They have maintained, often against our will, laws the most wholesome, and the most necessary for the public good.

In every stage of our history we have petitioned in humble terms for that which seemed necessary and convenient for us; our repeated petitions have been answered by repeated refusals. Thus has an overruling wisdom preserved us from error.

We, therefore, the representatives of the Class of '94, do, in the name of the class, solemnly publish and declare that this Class of '94 is not, and never can be, unmindful of these benefits; that nothing can absolve them from their allegiance to their Alma Mater; and that the affectionate connection between them and Wellesley College cannot now, or at any other time, be totally dissolved.

And near the beginning was this heart-stopping and ever true statement from Tennyson:

Just that, alone on a page. Wise words. Witty women. I'm so glad I stopped to read that 1894 yearbook.

What's Old Is New Again

In days of old, once upon a time, over the river and through the woods, an eon ago, you know, back when I was a kid, there was an Italian deli. It was on Main Street and it had sawdust on the floor. Its fragrant stock included wheels of Parmesan, tubs of olives and giardiniera, enormous wax covered provolone hanging from the ceiling, sturdy little cacciatorini, seeded semolina breads. Exotic but not, for it was the stuff of childhood. For cocktail party nibbles, my parents would buy cecis and favas - roasted salted chickpeas and fava beans - the cecis crumbly to the tooth, the favas requiring a good snap of your back jaw. The juxtaposition of textures chalky and smooth in that bowl of salted mixed not-nuts was what always kept you going back for more.

Recently, I got a pitch from a PR company touting roasted salted chickpeas as new "very unique" snack:

Health Conscious Friends Launch Perfect Crunchy Snack
Cooking "accident inspires new product, Chic-a-peas

I said, sure, send me a sample. But it wasn't until I tasted them that I realized that they really weren't anything new - they were a repackaging of the cecis of my childhood. That's not to say they aren't good - just not new.

Now what I need to do is find some favas to go with the cecis. And throw an old school cocktail party.

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Disclaimer: I didn't buy the Chic-a-peas, and I wasn't compensated for writing about them.