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.]

---

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.

We Shall Overcome

Me, heathen atheist, I only set foot in churches for weddings, funerals, and sightseeing. Yesterday morning, though, found me in pew 12 on the far left aisle, trying to be inconspicuous. The girl joined a youth choir earlier in the year, and it rehearses at a nearby Presbyterian church, and as a "thank you" the choir sings at a service once in a while. So I went, as designated driver and good sport.

Anyway, as I told the girl, part of knowing how to be a human is learning things about what other people do, like worship, especially if you yourself are not a worshipper. Going to church is a chance to experience the physicality of standing and sitting (and maybe kneeling), and to hear the susurrus of the "trespass against us", and to think about the call & response so often embedded in services. I secretly love singing hymns - it's a chance to exercise my sight singing chops. And yesterday there was a Ghanaian folk song included - so I got to think about the subtly non-Western rhythm and melody of that particular hymn.

But mostly what I was thinking about, in pew 12 on the left aisle, was Christianity. The people in that church yesterday were good, right-minded people, people with a social conscience, working on homeless outreach, looking for a new leader of the LGBT committee, praising the Iranian accord and that it resulted from diplomacy, not war. The sermon was given by a visitor, a white man who spoke well on white privilege, and on the slippery slope from complaisance to complicity. I was genuinely interested in what he had to say. And it made me wonder about the general state of American Christians. Is that church I was in yesterday something far on the lefty fringe? Because to me, we'd be a lot better off if there were more church-goers of that ilk. But what I hear about, the Christians who are making waves, are the bible thumping haters, the abortion foes, the Muslim demonizers and the refugee rejectors, Kim Davis and Jerry Falwell and their fellow close-minded mean-spirited right-wing-nuts.

I can't begin to unpack this. But like I told my kid, the more you know, the better able you are to understand where someone else is coming from. Right? So I googled "christians in america" and ended up reading an interesting piece called "Are We Finally Witnessing The Death Of Christianity In America?".

The state of America is dismaying. But even so, the glass-half-full part of me wants to think that sanity will prevail and that we shall overcome.



Let's work together, let's have peace one day.

People Watching, N.Y.C.

​Big props to the young man getting off the subway with The Power Broker tucked under his arm. Excellent book. Ought to be required reading for anyone who lives in New York.


To the guy on a bike in the white helmet in the rain in the dark: I'm sorry. I didn't look. It was my fault. Thank you for not yelling at me when you bumped into me because it really was my fault. I'm glad neither of us got hurt, but if you'd yelled at me I probably would have burst into tears.

​
I want to apologize to the mother with a baby strapped to her chest. She was crossing the street, at a crosswalk, with the light, and my cabdriver yelled at her, complete with unnecessary profanity. I gave him a 28¢ tip, intending 20¢ but my finger missed the zero on the key pad. I also gave him a piece of my mind.


Morning commuter train to NYC. Pin-striped suit, snappy tie, braided leather suspenders ... and an unzipped fly. Yes, I told him. It was ruining his look.


Dude! I have to salute the guy with no elbows (or forearms or hands) and no knees (or lower legs or feet) riding a skateboard down Broadway, propelling himself with one leg and talking on a cellphone held to his ear with an arm.

I love that her scarf *almost* matches her laptop.

A photo posted by @magpiemusing on Jan 5, 2016 at 5:58am PST

Good looking guy with salt & pepper hair and beard, on the train in black sneakers, skinny black jeans, a black hoodie, and a snappy black motorcycle jacket. But the myriad zippered pockets weren't all zipped and they gapped unappealingly otherwise, ruining his look.


I'm waiting for the cross town bus on a blustery cold day and a guy arcs around the corner upright on a straight handlebarred bike, hands jammed in his jacket pockets. I wonder if it's the same guy I saw last spring.

The Bachelor

You know the Toast, right? The Toast is funny. The Toast has Mallory Ortberg writing things about refrigerators (yogurt never goes bad at her parent's house) and refrigerators (the only thing that belongs in there is mindfulness).

Not so long ago, she posted a list: Code Words For Spinster Throughout History. Oh that Katie Cloisterneck, she's a porch witch (wink, wink, nudge, nudge).

And I remembered my grandmother.

Gigi, pronounced with two hard Gs, a toddler-mangling of Marie, was born in 1911. [Damn. She'd be 104 if she were still alive.] One year, my friend Peter came for Christmas. I think that might have been the year he showed up with prunes soaked in Armagnac and stuffed with foie gras. You know, a little nibble before dinner, as one does. Peter is a dear, and no one will ever take him for a straight man. So, Peter disappears into the kitchen to plate his stuffed prunes, and my grandmother leans over and says "so, he's a bachelor?"

I'd never heard it before, and I've never heard it since, but there it was: bachelor as code word for gay man.

True confessions

Sometimes when I'm brushing my teeth at night, standing before the bathroom mirror, in my horizontally striped nightgown, I notice - to my chagrin and with the help of the lines - that one nipple is lower than the other.

I have a little twinge of regret every time I remember that when we packed up the hospital room when we were discharged after the girl's birth, I forgot to take the little card slotted into the clear plastic bassinet that read "baby girl" and so her files are incomplete.

My armpits never stink. That said, Trader Joe's deodorant? Does. Not. Work.

because I'm feeling sappy this evening

Several years ago, a friend - one of the semi-imaginary ones, someone I've met in person a few times, but a person I mostly know on-line - sent me a link to a poem. The subject of her email read: "because I'm feeling sappy this evening" and the poem was about sisters. It's titled "I wish I Had More Sisters" (and it's by Brenda Shaughnessy, and was in the New Yorker in 2010).

Here's the thing. It is wonderful to have friends and relatives. It is wonderful to call people on the telephone and to have them over for dinner and to swap plants with your next door neighbor. It's gratifying to send silly postcards and to mail books across the country. It's terrific to hang out with my sister and my sister-in-law getting my annual pedicure. It is grounding to have friends that you have known since 1977. But I feel, really, that my life is infinitely richer as a result of the many people - mostly women - I've had the chance to know since I started blogging and hanging out on Facebook. And that's the reason I held onto that email for so long - it's been in my inbox since 10/31/2010. That poem, and my friend's sentiment in sending it out to me and others, cemented that feeling of sisterhood, togetherness, "Each of us could be all of us."

Here's to a new year - full of friendship, sisterhood, connection and joy. And to finding forgotten gems when you clean out your inbox.

2015 = 79

Goodreads tells me that I read 79 books in 2015. I know that included in that total are five books that I abandoned because I just couldn't finish them. Included in that sub-list were biographies of Jerome Robbins and Bruce Springsteen, and a book of Leonard Bernstein's letters.

I also read 8 cookbooks, and if you're into the Great British Baking Show, I highly recommend Cakes (one of the River Cottage handbooks) - it's like it could be the text book. I've also been reading books about baking bread, mostly because I acquired a sour dough starter last year, and it needs to be used. I'm pretty good at maintaining the mother, but I need some handholding and inspiration to make the starter into bread. Getting there, though.

Maggie Glezer's Artisan Baking has been the most useful, and is what helped me to that if-I-may-say-so-myself terrific loaf above. The Bien Cuit cookbook is GORGEOUS, inspiring and intimidating. All of the recipes require a big commitment of time, and some have a lot of weird ingredients. That said, I'll plunge in and try something. But in the meantime, I can enjoy the book as an art object - glossy black paint on the page ends makes it look almost like a lacquered box, and it has a lovely exposed binding. (I hope it holds up in the kitchen - it's almost too beautiful to handle with sticky, floury fingers.)

During the summer, I fell into a wormhole of Regency romances, by Georgette Heyer. They are delicious, and like eating peanuts, you kind of can't stop at one - I read seven:

Frederica
Sylvester
Venetia
Cotillion
Regency Buck
The Reluctant Widow
Cousin Kate

The Toll-Gate is still on my list but it's been out of the library every time I've checked.

Somehow, Georgette Heyer inspired me to re-read all of the Lord Peter Wimsey mysteries by Dorothy Sayers. If you're inclined, read them in order:

Whose Body? (1923)
Clouds of Witness (1926)
Unnatural Death (1927)
The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club (1928)
Strong Poison (1931) *
Five Red Herrings (1931)
Have His Carcase (1932)
Murder Must Advertise (1933) *
The Nine Tailors (1934)
Gaudy Night (1935) *
Busman's Honeymoon (1937) *

If you only want to read a few, read the ones that have an asterisk next to them. I mean, they're all great, but some are more great than others.

In the department of utterly delightful, I loved My Grandmother Asked Me To Tell You She's Sorry. It's comic, anarchic, tragic, fantastic, eccentric, and wildly imaginative with a truly compelling voice.

In the graphic novel/memoir category, I read both of Alison Bechdel's books: Fun Home and Are You My Mother? Both stabbed me in the heart repeatedly, but two bits from Are You My Mother? stood out. First, when she asks "What's the main thing you learned from your mother?" and the answer is "That boys are more important than girls". I never asked my own mother that question, but I know that she thought her mother thought that girls were less than boys, that she was respected less than her brother.

And the teddy bear. I have that teddy, that very teddy. But when, because of old age and rough handling (but not by a dog), Teddy's felt palms and soles split open revealing the tightly packed wood shavings, my mother sewed on felt patches: my teddy was fixed, by my mother, and sits next to my bed atop the pile of unread books.

In non-fiction, I loved Skyfaring. It's a lovely and lyrical book about flying, by a pilot, chock full of history and physics and geography, rendered in a poetic and accessible manner.

And in the category of books that were far better than I expected, The Royal We was a delightful roman à clef about Wills and Kate. If your guilty pleasure is Go Fug Yourself's royalty coverage, you'll like it too.

Tart Shells are Round; or, The Kind of Circular Thinking In Which Nothing Is New

A couple of weeks before Thanksgiving, we were invited out to dinner. I offered to make a dessert, and planned to make the lemon tart from Patricia Wells' Bistro Cooking, because every time I have made it, it's been perfect. And I love a lemon dessert. That tart calls for a pâte sablée crust, which is kind of like a sugar cookie and a great foil for the quite tart lemon custard filling. Alas, that day, the crust failed, epically. It cracked all over the place, and wouldn't even come out of the pan. I switched gears and made something else, but I still don't know why that pâte sablée didn't work.

For Thanksgiving dinner, I decided to make the cranberry curd tart that had been in the Times food section in a Thanksgiving round up. That recipe uses a hazelnut crust - a loose mix of ground hazelnuts pressed into the tart pan like you would a graham cracker crust. It was okay - the hazelnut crust was nice by itself, but we thought it competed indecorously with the cranberry filling.

Not being able to leave behind the failed pâte sablée, I did a bunch of googling. Butter in visible chunks? Butter thoroughly amalgamated with the flour? Somehow, I stumbled on a tart shell recipe on David Lebovitz's blog that blew all of that away - it was a 2009 recipe that started with a lump of butter and a splash of water and a spoonful of sugar, all dumped in a bowl and put in a hot oven for 15 minutes. Boiled butter! Then you add the flour. Intrigued, I had to try it. We'd been invited to a Boxing Day party so I thought I'd re-engineer the cranberry curd tart by putting it in Lebovitz's shell.

The crust is fascinating. It comes together almost like a roux, a wet looking ball of flour & butter, which you smush into a tart shell, gingerly because it's fiercely hot. It gets baked, while you make the curd, then both cool to room temperature. Then, you spoon the curd in the tart shell and bake it together for another 10 minutes. [Naturally, I wonder why everything has to be cooled down before that final run through the oven, but that's an experiment for another day.]

The boiled butter crust was delightful with the cranberry curd. A keeper, if you will. I decided that David Lebovitz was onto something.

Last night, I climbed into bed with a Christmas present: a copy of Food52 Genius Recipes. I wasn't reading it straight through, but jumping around looking for things that I need to make right now. You read cookbooks in bed, right? It's a compilation cookbook - 100 recipes from 100 sources - all alleged to be "the best". The reason I wanted the book is because there were enough recipes that I knew already, and knew to be good - the bar nuts from the Union Square Cafe, Jim Lahey's No Knead Bread, Kim Boyce's Whole Wheat Chocolate Chip Cookies, that butter & onion tomato sauce from Marcella Hazan, Marion Cunningham's Raised Waffles. I figured with that kind of track record, there were probably other great recipes. I turned to page 236, curious about the "eggless lemon curd", because it sounds like a non-sequitur, eggs being pretty essential to curd, in my experience. [It uses agar, in case you're wondering.] But what to my wondering eyes turns up in the book, on page 235, as a vehicle for the lemon curd? "Brown Butter Tart Crust, from Paule Caillat" - in other words, the Lebovitz boiled butter crust. I confess to being both dumbfounded and even happier to have the cookbook in the first place.

There really is nothing new under the sun, is there?

Merry Christmas!

Half way through its decoration, the tree fell down. We wept, and swept up the broken ornaments. But their beauty cried out, so we spread them on a sheet and took a picture of the shattered yet ineffably lovely shards - honoring them in our remembrance.

All best wishes for a happy 2016, and may you too stop to note a moment of unexpected grace.

Perma Hedge, the cousin of fake Christmas trees

Do you know that there's a product out there called Perma Hedge? It's the green fuzzy plastic stuff that's supposed to make a chain link fence look like a perfect trimmed up evergreen hedge.

I don't know why I even know that, but whenever I drive by one, I need to sing out Perma Hedge.

I digress. I read a wonderful book recently, called My Grandmother Asked Me to Tell You She's Sorry. It's comic, anarchic, tragic, fantastic, eccentric, and wildly imaginative with a truly compelling voice. And, circling back to Perma Hedge, there's a wonderful passage about Christmas trees:

Mum, of course, was very angry at Granny about the whole plastic tree thing, because she likes the smell of a real spruce tree and always said that the plastic tree was something Granny had duped Elsa about. Because it was Granny who had told Elsa about the Christmas tree dance in Miamas, and no one who's heard that story wants to have a spruce tree that someone has amputated and sold into slavery. In Miamas, spruce trees are living, thinking creatures with--considering that they're coniferous trees--an unaccountably strong interest in home design.

They don't live in the forest but in the southern districts of Miamas, which have become quite trendy in recent years, and they often work in the advertising industry and wear scarves indoors. And once every year, soon after the first snow has fallen, all the spruce trees gather in the big square below the castle and compete for the right to stay in someone's house over Christmas. The spruce trees choose the houses, not the other way round, and the choice is decided by a dance competition. In the olden days they used to have duels about it, but spruce trees are generally such bad shots that it used to take forever. So now they do spruce dancing, which looks a bit unusual, because spruce trees don't have feet. And if a non-spruce tree wants to imitate a dancing spruce tree, they just jump up and down. It's quite handy, particularly on a crowded dance floor.

Doesn't that make you wonder about the sentient quality of your Fraser fir, your blue spruce, your Scotch pine? Mine's been standing in the corner of the living room since Sunday, dark and naked, because I've not mustered the time or energy to drag the boxes of lights and ornaments out of the cellar. I imagine that the tree is feeling morose; it's contributing nothing to home design, and has been completely neglected since we winched it into its stand, not to mention the fact that it was brutally cut down and hauled miles away from its friends and neighbors.

If I keep this up, I'm going to be morose.

Here's to Christmas trees, decorated with abandon, redolent of pine, lit with love and little white lights.

See The Forest For The Trees

Back in 1988, I had a job at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. I was living in Manhattan, with my then boyfriend/now husband, and more often than not, I commuted back and forth to Brooklyn by car, because the BAM staff could park as cheaply as subway fare and my car lived on the street and was going to have to be moved for alternate side of the street parking anyway. And then there were those late nights when, in 1988, one did not want to take the subway home alone anyway, and cabs were expensive (but cheaper if you made the driver go over the Manhattan Bridge and up First Avenue, please, which they never wanted to do because the other way was both faster and longer and therefore more lucrative).

One of the productions in 1988 NEXT WAVE FESTIVAL was a Robert Wilson/David Byrne shebang called The Forest - which was apparently based on the Epic of Gilgamesh but I can't remember a thing about it, although somewhere at home I have a hard bound program complete with a synopsis and photos and essays and (I think) a CD of some of the music. It matters not that I can't remember the show. What I remember very clearly is that the opening night performance was followed by a party on the Opera House stage.

The decor for the opening night was butt simple. It was December and Christmas trees had sprouted on every street corner in the city. Someone bought 25 big, skinny, fat, little Christmas trees, a stagehand nailed two pieces of 2x4 to the bottoms, and lo, a forest grew on the stage. We danced, we drank, we gloried in the performance. And at 2 in the morning, intrepid souls shouldered trees and took them home, the ultimate centerpiece.

I drove a little white Ford Fiesta then, a tiny hatchback. Someone helped me get my tree into the car - into, not on top - and I drove home from Brooklyn to Manhattan, perhaps less sober than I should have been. Happily, I found a parking space right near my apartment, and I muscled the tree out of the car, into the building, up the elevator, and into my apartment. My then boyfriend/now husband was duly startled when he stumbled out of bed the next morning and found a Christmas tree in the kitchen.

Origami tree at the American Museum of Natural History

Nowadays, we drive to the tree sale at the church in the next town, and tip the kid who helps tie the tree to the roof of the car. But somehow, the tree that stood on the opera house stage holds a sweet spot in my heart.