Kindle-Free Zone.

I've had a lifelong romance with books; as a child I was kind of a dreamer, and loved nothing more than to curl up with a story and while away an afternoon reading. When I think of those afternoons, I remember the stories but I also remember the books themselves; summer afternoons at my grandmother's North Carolina house I would prowl the upstairs bedrooms and attics, where bookshelves abounded, and help myself to whatever was there. I read "Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House", "Cheaper By The Dozen", "Little Black Sambo," "The Little Colonel", the Uncle Remus stories by Joel Chandler Harris.. so vivid in my mind: "Tarbaby, he don't say nothin....' There were :Kidnaped:, "Treasure Island", "Gulliver's Travels", I didn't discern between the books and nobody ever looked to see what it was that I was reading, so I just plowed through, devouring everything there was. There was a loveseat in the window on the stair landing, just large enough to curl up in completely, and I would disappear into the pages of a book for hours at a time, where I went down the rabbit hole with Alice, and to the English moors in Wuthering Heights, slipped into the sidewalk chalk drawings in Mary Poppins and through the wardrobe to Narnia. Toad Hall, Piglet, and Wilbur the exceptional pig were all my childhood friends.

I loved those books, but a love some of the strange ones because I loved that time, still nights with cicadas humming, bobwhites calling, old metal fans in the windows trying to move the still, humid air; reading on the porch by lantern light while June bugs clung to the screens. The house was rambling, a Gothic fantasy with rooms that roamed forever, and those books smelled of that wonderful house. Between those pages you might find a faint whiff of mold and mothballs, old paper, and leather, names scrawled on the flyleaf going back generations, stiff, faded illustrations protected by tissue-paper overlays, the simple yellow bookplates of my great-great grandfather pasted on the inside cover of many of the oldest ones. When I read those, (I have a set of Dickens of his of which I am now reading David Copperfield), I marvel at the faint smudges that appear to have been caused by long ago fingers, the occasional scrap of ephemera tucked in as a bookmark, wondering if it was he who'd been reading it and what he'd thought about it, back in 1880 when the books were new.

I imagine the creak of a harness and the measured clop of working horses as the mailman approaches the old home place, ringing the bell at the iron gate at the front of the drive until a figure comes to meet the mailman, a box is procured--a crate, slightly heavy, the postmark from overseas making the event even more exotic. Opening the lid impatiently, the governor picks up the first book and holds it reverently to him, the way you might hold a child, or an icon. The green cloth bindings are unpretentious, these books are for reading, not for show.

When I think of Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights, I think of the woodcut illustrations that brought those books to life for me. (They belonged to my mother, and have her bookplate pasted onto the flyleaf.) Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass, as well; Alice's attenuated neck as Tenniel depicted it, I think of the wonderful covers of those books, the feel of the cloth, paper, or leather bindings, their typefaces, the way the books are constructed. Some slim and compact enough to tuck into a pocket or a palm, like the Oxford Anthony Trollopes I have a few dozen of, some bulky and requiring a table for perusal, like the wonderful ancient botanical reference books with their hand-colored drawings that my Aunt Joan still has, that I remember leafing through in fascination, and the old family Bibles, with their frightening illustrations and pages of calmly recorded marriages, births, and deaths. The smell of leather bindings, fine old paper, and dust mix with the smell of furniture polish, lemon, and mothballs. And more dust.

I'm not anti-Kindle, though you might assume so. I can see right away that it has advantages, particularly in my own version which is on the iPad-- I can use Kindle, iBooks, Kobo, or a handful of other book apps that have libraries, and I've read Moby Dick, for example, for the first time, on my e-reader and loved the ease of it: the built-in dictionary, the brightly lit screen for darkened rooms. Lightweight, in the case of reading Moby Dick, easier to handle. I love tossing the lightweight iPad into my handbag and having all that printed matter at my fingertips.

But I think ultimately it is this, that when you buy a physical book, in analog. you own it. It belongs to you. You put your bookplate on the flyleaf, perhaps, or maybe just you scrawl your name on the inside cover, or even just scrawl your opinions in the margins, that book has been slightly altered by your reading it and in that process has developed further, even if that book has been around 200 years. My bedtime, as a child, was supervised by both "Goodnight Moon" and "Chicken Soup With Rice", tiny and weatherbeaten books with damp crumbly pages that barely hold together. But I don't own the Kindle version of "Atonement" I've just read, as much as I loved, loved, loved the story. A physical book will end up a bit dog-eared, perhaps, or with a couple of scraps, snapshots, or receipts tucked into its pages. A kindle story is untouched by human hands, pristine, belonging to some other world and unspoiled by contact with air and prodding clumsy human fingers.

So while the Kindles and e-readers have their place (particularly nighttime reading with that handy lit-up screen) I will always love my old, analog, decrepit books that, each time I read them, I make my own.

Pie for Dummies

When I say "dummies", I refer to the clueless, the culinarily challenged, the how-do-you-boil-water variety of chef. Which would have described me until fairly recently-- but the last few years have seen my cooking skills improve through practice, mostly because we now have a kitchen with some counter space. Remember the expression "easy as pie"? Here's how to make one, and don't be intimidated-it's supposed to be fun. AND easy. Plus, how bad can it possibly come out, it's fruit and sugar for goodness' sake.

1. See "pie crust for dummies", below.

2.Preheat your oven to 450 degrees, then butter a nine-inch pie plate.

3. Divide the dough into two roughly equal pieces, the slightly larger piece for the bottom. Squish down the ball a bit until it's flattened, then roll out your crust. Now, if you want to "cheat," here's a handy tip: I find handling the crust to be somewhat unwieldy, especially on a humid day, so the way around that is to roll it in between two sheets of waxed paper, then peel one back and use the remaining sheet to pick the crust up and deliver it to the pie plate.

4. Wash and pick over your fruit; for most berry pies you will need around six cups for a deep dish pie, four cups for a regular. Add in your sugar, usually around a cup depending on your sweet tooth, and then add your thickener: I recommend quick-cooking tapioca, this will keep the pie from being soupy when cooked. The tapioca container will give proportions for various fillings, usually somewhere around 1/4 cup is about right. For blueberry pie use a little lemon juice and a dash of cinnamon, for cherry-rhubarb use a little amaretto or almond extract, for peach pie use some vanilla. Play with the fillings, experiment, and have some fun, you may make a wonderful discovery (I discovered cherry-rhubarb and peach-raspberry, for example, and can't begin to tell you how amazing those combinations are!) Let the filling sit with the sugar and tapioca mixture for fifteen minutes before spooning it into your pie dish, this allows the tapioca to thicken properly. Dot the fruit with butter for a rich finish.

5. Roll out the remaining dough and cut it into long strips around 3/4" wide, placing them in a crisscross pattern on the top of the pie. Don't worry about getting it geometrically perfect, you can hide any mistakes with cookie-cuttered dough shapes as decorations. I often use star or flower shapes, or sometimes free-formed leaves and branches. When you have the top ready, use a chopstick or fork to flute the edges, then brush the surface with a little cream and sprinkle it with sugar. Put the pie plate on a cookie sheet to prevent the oven from getting all gunky if the filling spills over.

6. Place the pie in the middle rack for 10 minutes, after which you will turn down the oven to 350.

7. Tear several strips of tinfoil around three inches wide and pleat them together to form a circle; this you will place around the edges of the pie crust to keep the edges from scorching. Add this at around your ten-minute mark and the edges will still have a nice brown to them but won't burn.

8. Let the pie continue to cook at 350 degrees for around 45 more minutes, checking it occasionally, until it is lightly browned on the surface and smells irresistible. Remove the pie from the oven and let it cool.

9. Eat the pie.

10. Repeat.

Pie Crust for Dummies.

Don't bother with those frozen pie crusts---they aren't terrible, but this pie crust is really almost as easy as a pre-made one. I used them for years but then found this recipe was nearly foolproof.

Sift: 2 and 1/2 cups of unbleached all-purpose flour with 1/2 teaspoon salt and around 2 teaspoons of sugar (more to taste). Now, as far as shortening goes, it's a matter of taste. Butter will give you the best flavor, but some people insist that vegetable shortening gives a flakier crust, and others claim that half butter and half shortening is ideal. Sigh. Do whatever you want. But anyway, take a half-cup (that would be two sticks of butter) and cut it into the flour mixture with a pastry cutter or a fork. Work it in until the texture resembles little peas, and then add in a bunch of ice cold heavy cream, starting with around 1/4 cup. working it into the dough with your hands. Slowly add more cream if necessary, until the dough holds together nicely---don't make it too gooey, a dryer dough is easier to handle. Form the dough into a ball, wrap it in a tea towel, and chill for at least 20 minutes.

Looking Forward

There are different kinds of gardening. One kind I will call "Ta-Dah" gardening, because it involves buying fully-grown plants and flowering annuals, troweling them out of their flats and cell-packs and into the flowerbeds, standing back to admire one's handiwork and crowing, "Ta-Dah!" This is what I did for years, and I can assure you that it is immensely satisfying. Not only for your own instant gratification, but because then you can stroll with your admiring friends through the lovely petals, sagely taking credit for the nurseryman's toil. As long as you remember that they have to be watered, you look like a gardening genius.

More recently, however, I have discovered another kind of gardening. There's not much Ta-Dah-ing, or crowing, involved-- more like a variety of oaths from mild to scathing, occasional gnashing of teeth, and some tearing of hair--one could probably safely call it Tilting at Windmills Gardening. Why? Because it involves the quixotic, often fruitless, masochistic, deluded idea of starting the plants from seeds. Why, again, you ask--and it's a damned good question, considering that in March and April you can hardly get inside my front door for all the seedlings packed into the sunny south-facing foyer. And I'll tell you how it got started. Sweet Peas.

Even the best nurseries and farmer's markets have a relatively narrow selection of plants, while the larger nurseries have the advantage of space they nevertheless have to limit themselves to what they can expect to sell. But I started to run across seed companies that had hard-to-find heirloom varieties of things i was lusting after and couldn't find in nurseries, and eventually a few years ago I started with hollyhocks and sweet peas. Sweet peas became a yearly tradition, every south-facing sill in the house crowded with little peat pots holding tiny bamboo tripods. One year I found a treasure trove of sweet pea seeds: heirlooms, antiques,bouquet sweet peas, container sweet peas, and prizewinning new hybrids and even perennial varieties. I began to fill trays of peat pots by the front door. Then a few heirloom columbines, wild strawberries, heliotrope, herbs, cucumbers, baby lettuce and curly endive, and of course wonderful, luscious heirloom tomatoes. I harvest seeds from my best plants: jars of the tiny lobelia seeds, tiny waxed-paper envelopes of tomato seeds (cherokee purple, striped german), jam jars full of nasturtium seeds, marigolds, sweet peas, cosmos, nigella, hollyhock, hyacinth bean vine, moonflower. Curled up by the fire, I leaf through seed catalogs and place orders for new things to try.

In the dead of winter, often while there are still drifts of tinsel on the living room carpet and thank-you notes unwritten, I start soaking seeds and making little greenhouses from takeout food containers. (The kind with the clear plastic tops are perfect little terraria, the clear dome is ideal for humidity retention and the size is perfect for fitting three peat pellets across and four over and then tucking nicely into the windowsill. ) When there are still arctic winds and snowdrifts, and the cold ground seems so sterile and forbidding, I watch the little seedlings sprout and lift their tiny heads to the sun and it reminds me that, outdoors , there are stirrings below the ground and that spring is not so very far away.

When the snows finally melt and the days begin to feel more temperate, outside the daffodils leap out and remind me that I can start hardening off the seedlings outside, which is a tricky process because the nights are still frosty enough to kill off any young plants I may carelessly forget to bring indoors at sunset. There are many other hazards at this stage, too: damping off, which is usually a result of overwatering and will cause the young sprout to wilt and die, and of course the opposite--the peat pellets dry out; a mere half-day of dryness and a seedling will give up the ghost entirely, suddenly shriveling up altogether. Sometimes the seeds don't sprout at all, for various reasons. Or unknown reasons. Or no reason. There are seeds so tiny they are nearly invisible, and will just dissipate unless they are mixed with sand. I put my terraria on the radiator covers for a couple of days to start the germination process, then relegate them to their place in the sun so I can watch and marvel as they sprout their tiny green hopeful shoots.

There are always two little baby leaves on a sprout, ovoid and featureless, leaves that like a child's baby teeth eventually fall off when the adult leaves are out in full force. When the seedling has four of its adult leaves, it can, in theory, go outdoors. That theory doesn't always hold, because there are other danger factors like soil temperature, air temperature, neighborhood teenagers, peeing dogs, curious squirrels/raccoons, drought, flood, vandalism, well-intentioned weeding assistants, big feet, and absent-mindedness when it comes to watering.

A lot of things can go wrong, what can I say. And, when you've nurtured the seedling from its infancy, you really take it personally when the birds eat it or the squirrel digs it up or the neighbor's dog pees on it. My language has gotten pretty scandalous, I am thinking of starting up a cursing jar, dropping in a dollar every time I turn the air blue, and donating the contents to a charity. I save the foulest epithets for my own stupidity when I accidentally step on one of my own babies, or under/overwater it, or hack off a root when I am transplanting.

But eventually they do get transplanted, and they are out there now in the beds and containers, but my seed-started plants are way behind. The rows of green are healthy and happy, but haven't bloomed yet: lobelia in rows, its dark curly foliage happily trailing over the sides of the beds, is still entirely green. The zinnias are happily shooting up, but only a couple of tiny buds have appeared yet, and though a few of the cosmos have started showing some flowers, the nigella is a haze of green fern-like foliage, lovely but still without a single flower. Sweet peas, trailing up their trellises, just starting to form a few little clusters of buds at last, and the cypress vine with its delicate spirals is a quiet deeper green.

Then I look at the strawberry plants, not the big patch of everbearing strawberries but the tiny delicate ones that in France are called "Fraises du Bois', or woodland berries. There are similar wild strawberries in New England, but these berries are sweeter, tiny but plump, and the flavor is insanely, disorientingly, divine-- almost narcotic in its hypnotic intensity, a pagan ode to summer, a dionysian revel, a trip down the rabbit hole. I started some from seeds two years ago, beginning one January afternoon with microscopic seeds and soggy peat, and watching as tiny leaves the size of pinheads eventually emerged, dismayed and thinking I would never live to see these bear fruit, they were so tiny and the odds seemed so long. I nursed the tiny fragile plants and tucked them into the pockets of a couple of strawberry pots, then planted the rest of the seedlings in shady corners under the grape arbor in the back.

I started some more this spring, too, partly because I have friends who clamor for some of the plants. This morning I was looking at their tiny leaves in in a strawberry pot and thinking about the advantages of Ta-Dah gardening, grousing about how tardy all my seedlings are. Later in the afternoon I was weeding in the very back, though, and lo and behold on last year's plants were a huge crop of fat little berries, and as I greedily ate them and inhaled their intoxicating aroma, I felt as though I'd done a particularly successful magic trick, turning microscopic little seeds into pretty little plants that flower and fruit. And therein lies the lure of tilting at windmills, because success against all odds feels so damned good, and that success has been earned.

I guess some things are worth a wait.

Can You Dig It?

I have a chaise lounge in the garden, one I bought years ago--in fact, since before we bought this house with its' higher-maintenance garden. The chaise was to be the scene of much lounging and reading, sipping of tall icy glasses of lemonade, in my ferny but flower-laden bower and sighing happily in the sweet summer honeysuckle-scented breeze. Not happening.

I was used to a garden that had been two-thirds flagstone and more or less minimal maintenance, but when we saw this house with its peach tree, its berry patch, rosebushes, and grape arbor, we didn't think twice. Sometimes I'm not sure we thought once. But I get ready to sit out there, putting on a pair of shorts, getting my book and a glass of lemonade, a sunhat and an ashtray, and by the time I have the mise-en-scene prepared I have noticed some crisis or another that needs doing immediately: there are carpenter ants in the peach tree, or a thousand morning glories have sprouted in the tomato bed where Dale, not quite believing in the miracle of germination, plowed under all the seed pods and dried vines left from last year. Well, I tell myself, I won't be a moment--I just want to get those morning glories up but what on earth is that? Beginnings of black spot on the roses? And the roses need to be staked, there's a lot of precarious new growth, and oh dear the peonies, too, I haven't done the peony rings yet, so before you know it I am dusting the roses with organic fungicide, transplanting foxgloves, potting up some lily of the valley for a neighbor, and weeding, weeding, weeding.

And yet, back aching, when I finally do sit on that chaise to the now-warm glass of lemonade, I still don't look around and see the progress I have made--I am always looking askance at how much I should really be doing, or how much will look bad because I didn't spray or dust in time, and assessing what went wrong with this or that. But still, there I am year in and year out, on my knees before the miracles I witness every year in the garden: the transformation from season to season when the first green shoots peep out in spring, the families of finches giving flying lessons from the high branches of the old spruce where they have their nests, the dainty maiden lily of the valley and the brazen hussy peony, the countless splendors that make the aching and the swearing worthwhile.

Meanwhile, we probably end up paying forty dollars a tomato.

Press 2 if you've had it up to here.

I found myself yelling into the phone today, screaming like a lunatic, frothing at the mouth, and using the most shocking language, never mind that I was talking to a recording. Usually when I do this I am talking to a tech support person in Bangalore, but this time it fell on the nonexistent ears of one of those automated-response machines that fail to understand complicated words like "yes" and "no."

What difficult task was I performing? What life-and-death situation was at hand, you ask? I was canceling, or attempting to cancel, a subscription to a magazine that has been arriving weekly and that I read rarely, to wit, that paragon of mammon-and-real-estate-worship, the inimitably poorly-written piece of semi-tabloid journalism, "New York" magazine. I am old enough, mind you, to remember the magazine in its intellectual heyday, when Pulitzer-winning reporters wrote thought-provoking articles and there was even a rather cerebral word-game competition in the back rather than a less than lukewarm crossword puzzle that only TV Guide's equals for inanity. (though they do still, I believe, print one from the "Guardian" in London to tack on to theirs for a tinge of pretension to respectability.) Other than the "approval matrix", the occasionally interesting article amid the spam and money-fawning didn't seem to justify the yearly deduction from my credit card that had been going on automatically for something like the last decade, and I finally decided it was time to sever ties. (Besides, they insist on capitalizing the R in the word "realtor"! If the first letter isn't capitalized in the words "lawyer", "tinker", "tailor", or "candlestick maker", I don't see why "Realtor" must be written that way: it's a pet peeve, what can I say. ) Anyway, time to cancel.

Should be easy, you say? Well, the first step was going to the magazine's website. After a bit of clicking around, I found a customer service tab which then gave me all kinds of options: renew my subscription, get a new subscription, find out when my present subscription expires, and so forth, but no option whatsoever for "cancel subscription". Finally after much clicking and swearing, I found a "contact us" tab that allowed me to ask a question, and I sent an email explaining the complicated task I sought to complete. Twenty-four hours passed before a reply was posted in my inbox explaining that my subscription was through an outside service, and that I would need to contact that service in order to cancel. Fair enough. Weird, but fair enough. I contacted them, via that ancient instrument, the telephone. And this leads you to the scene I have described.

The recording asked me whether I would prefer to punch in numbers or use voice commands, and I perhaps wrongly assumed that the number-punching would be more frustrating, so I chose the latter option. "What would you like to do?" the recorded voice asked brightly, " would you like to renew your subscription?" "CANCEL!" I bellowed into the receiver. "Okay," we can renew your subscription." This kind of thing went on for several minutes until I finally got the machine to understand what I wanted to do, and with a sigh of relief the recording gave me a confirmation number.

I should have hung up immediately then, but I wanted to make sure I had dotted all the i's and crossed all the t's, so I kept going. "We're sorry you didn't like your magazine", said the recording, "so we are going to send you fifty issues of "American Whitetail" at a price of 2.94 an issue, and a subscription to "Ranch" magazine, all at a below-newsstand price. If at any time you decide to cancel your subscription, simply..." at this point I have been bellowing "NO" into the phone for ten entire minutes while the recording prates on and on obliviously. "I'm sorry", the recording cooed into my ear, " I didn't understand what you said." "Nooooooooooo!" I howled. "Nooooooo!" "Noooooooo!" I had decided to indulge myself in a new subscription if I succeeded in cancelling, perhaps getting "The New Yorker", and/or "Harper's", but "American Whitetail?" Thank God I hadn't chosen the button-pushing options, or I'd be accidentally subscribing to "Linoleum and You" and "American Roadkill".

It took me several minutes to get to a point where I was fairly confident that the recording understood I was not interested, but I won't rest easy until my mailbox has gone a full month without any strange magazines appearing. And I am going to stay off the phone for the rest of the day, all my swearing has got my little bird giving me dirty looks, and anyway I don't want her repeating my fowl language.

Fairy Tales

When I was a little girl, I loved reading fairy tales. The Brothers Grimm and Hans Christian Andersen, Melisande by E. Nesbit, and the Blue Fairy Book, Green Fairy Book, Japanese Fairy Book, my collection was impressive by any standards as that was what I spent every nickel on, and what I asked for at every birthday and Christmas. My father once said something to me about eventually outgrowing those books, and I was mildly shocked at the thought that they might not always be there for me. "Dad", I scolded him, "I am NEVER going to be too old for fairy tales."

Many of those old fairy tales, pre-Disney, were pretty scary--plenty of blood and guts, and there were often rather harsh punishments, fearsome repercussions, and thorny moral issues. Not the kind of thing we think of today when we think of fairy tales.

There was a fairy tale about a little mermaid, one that bears little if any resemblance to the Disney spectacle. In it the mermaid falls in love with a boy and eventually persuades Poseidon or whoever to allow her to exchange her tail for a pair of human legs and meet with her lover on land, just for one night. Upon coming back to the sea she is surer than ever that life without her lover is pointless and begs the King of the Sea to allow her to make the exchange permanent, which he finally does on one condition: every step she takes on those human legs will feel to her as though she is walking barefoot on jagged shards of broken glass; once human she will never for a moment not be suffering an agony of pain. The mermaid does not hesitate for a moment, and gladly makes the trade  in order to be with the boy she loves. 

There are days when my pain level is pretty spectacular, and on those days, when every step feels as though hot rivets are being shoved into my joints jackhammers are assaulting my spine, my head is caving in  and my muscles are in various stages of charley horse,   someone will invariably ask, "So, how are you feeling?" Sometimes this is a rhetorical question however and a mere simper suffices as an answer, but sometimes when an answer is required I say, "I am having a 'Little Mermaid' day".

I did get the handsome prince, so I guess I have to walk on glass. Could be worse.

Vinyl

The stack of vinyl records in my basement closet serves no particular purpose. I've ceased believing that one fine day I will hook up a turntable somewhere, but I do like having the albums to look at. There was a time that I had around 600 albums, that collection was culled and re-culled during successive moves and leaky basement events, until the stack consisted of around 2 dozen dusty cardboard album sleeves. 

In the stack: Sticky Fingers, with the working zipper on the fly of the jeans, designed by Warhol, something that won't translate into a zipped file or a CD jewel case. Chicago, the Blues Today, which was my introduction to Junior Wells, on the Blue Note label. Fats Waller. Jimmy Page with Sonny Boy Williamson. A lot of these were bought for 99 cents in the bargain box at Jimmy's Music World on Fulton Street in downtown Brooklyn, during a time when most people were buying the Bee Gees and these records were unwanted orphans. I discovered Bessie Smith that way, and Muddy Waters, the London Sessions. I would stand there for hours and flip through endless awful albums, waiting to discover treasure. And discover I did. Clarence Gatemouth Brown, Lightnin Hopkins, Sister Wynona Carr. And I still have Jefferson Airplane's "Bless Its Pointed Little Head," as well as some KC and the Sunshine Band, Parliament Funkadelic,  and James Brown. I also have Beethoven's collected symphonies, performed by the London Symphony Orchestra, and some Erik Satie. There's no rhyme or reason to what's still there, something just stayed my hand during the purges. In retrospect I wish I could have kept them all.

I can't tell you what practical purpose those albums serve.  A dedicated minimalist would have unsentimentally tossed such useless trash on the scrap heap of sentimentality long ago, but I cannot. I have too many fond feelings for them, they are my old friends who aren't on Facebook, they watched me grow up, made me think, laugh, dance, and cry. I can't part with old friends, they are a part of me, and every now and then I dust off a few and hold them in my hands, remembering the pop and hiss of ancient vinyl as it spun, remembering the days when music was something you could hold. 

Angstolescence

Twelve is an age when every day is momentous. What someone said to someone else, or who looked at whom how, or what new cruelty classmates had perpetrated on someone, or what note or slam book or graffitto had made whom burst into tears, all these things feed into  the daily angst-fest that is adolescence. But all this is the tip of the iceberg; in relation to those things we see, there is much that we do not, lurking under the water, massive and frightening. The rest of that mass is made up of the hormones ricocheting around from our emerging bodies, the terror and excitement both of the new beings we are becoming, but also the  things we don't know how to say. 

I think of my adolescent self as a kind of Easter Island statue, huge and solemn, silent and isolated from the outside world on an island, and massively, massively mute. Yet within that hulking self there are many secrets hid, stories that, when I was twelve, I had no way to tell. The sad thing is, those hulking figures stretch on and on for miles down the beach, lines of them, all equally desolate and tragic. The tragedy is that their muteness prevents them for sharing their pain with one another.

In the seventh grade, I was very excited about our new teacher. In sixth grade we'd had a nice but nerdy teacher who had talked to us as though we were still little kids, telling us for example that he came to work on a "choo-choo train", and it enraged me that he didn't see just how terribly adult we were, or at least, I was. When I found out Mr. R. would be our 7th grade teacher I was thrilled: he was the "cool" teacher, bearded, sandal-wearing and long-haired, a hippie, not only did he not wear a tie, he wore African printed dashikis over his unwashed jeans. And he talked to us about sex. 

The year before, I'd suddenly grown a pair of tiny breasts with which I was still so unfamiliar that when opening those schoolroom desks that swung upwards on a hinge, I frequently slammed the lid into my tender chest, forgetting that it stuck out an inch or two extra, and too embarrassed to let on what had happened I simply doubled over until I could hide the tears that had sprung up in the corners of my eyes. I was still unused to my new body. I was also fascinated to discover that boys suddenly stared at me, approached me in the playground and on the way home, whispered things to me or to each other in the halls. 

Our class was probably around eighteen to twenty five kids; probably a little over half our number had begun to show full signs of puberty. Mr. R. would look us up and down and take stock. The first time he did this, I nearly died of shame and wanted to climb under my seat.  I had worn a leotard top and because my mother insisted that I wasn't ready for a bra, my breasts I guess were pretty visible, because Mr. R. gave the entire class a running commentary on what he saw there, and on the state of my development in general. He proceeded to announce to the boys that most likely I had a fair amount of hair "down there" as well. I was mortified.

Now, this was all done in the guise of education. Telling the boys what they might expect when they had their first sexual encounter, which he intimated should be gotten over with as early as possible. 

I was horror-struck. At the same time, I was new to all this frank talk about sex that liberated people in the 70x were supposed to be capable of, and I thought Mr. R. was treating us like adults. Somehow I thought it would be childish to act upset or to tell an adult, so I didn't. Nobody wanted to be labeled what our cool teacher referred to as a "prude", and each of us assumed we were the only ones who were uncomfortable with his lesson plan.  A few days later, Mr. R. brought his pet boa constrictor to class, he took it out of its tank and placed it into a cloth bag which he proceeded to hand around to the girls. 

"This is what a man's penis feels like," he pronounced. We felt a massive squirming thing through the cloth and were terrified. 

Every day had fresh tortures, and as the year progressed we girls began to discover the lay of the land. We all had to go to a sewing class with Mr. R.'s wife, held at their house around the corner. Mr. R. would always saunter in, sometimes half-dressed, and lean across us, caress us, find excuses to come in when we were half-dressed for fitting a skirt or blouse. Without ever really discussing it we just stayed in groups, even to go to the bathroom. His wife seemed cowed, like the saddest person in the world, as she watched his antics. He stalked us on class trips, and during a sleepover trip he walked into the room where we girls were in rows on the floor in our sleeping bags, he wearing nothing but one of those Dashikis. "What," he said impishly as he sashayed between us girls, while  we in our nighties wrapped our sleeping bags tight around us as he tried to get a peek at any part of us left exposed, "does a red-blooded American male wear under his Dashiki?"  As he was standing right over me I had a pretty good view, and I announced: "Jockeys, and if you ask me they don't look all that clean". 

For that, I was punished nearly daily with new humiliations. He had an unerring instinct for hte jugular, worse than any bully our own age, and he wielded it mercilessly at anyone who didn't leap on board his fan wagon. He had a seductive charm that had students, parents, and school administrators in his thrall, and despite feeling that something was very wrong we all mostly vied to be in his good graces.The few students who were skeptical were treated to daily exposure: he would read their journal entries aloud to the class in scathing tones, ridicule their sexual development or lack thereof, propose theories of their probable sexual orientation, or simply rate their physical and psychological attributes, all in a diatribe to the class as a whole, who of course would chime in, making the humiliation complete. 

We never talked about this with each other; the desperation to be cool overrode all else. I feared that complaining would earmark me as a prude, a social kiss of death. If we admitted we were uncomfortable with it all, we were admitting to still being kids. 

It's also important to remember context. All this happened in the early 70's, at which time child-rearing was done very differently than it is today. Our parents were for the most part completely self-absorbed, and left us to our own devices much more than is done today. In fact, they barely noticed us, truth be told. I say this without bitterness, it's just the way it was.

Well, as you might imagine Mr. R. crossed the line many times. Usually 2 girls per class, sometimes 1, sometimes 3. The year after I had him as a teacher, a student forced the issue by running away from home and moving in with Mr R and his wife. (Mind you this is elementary school) Her parents threatened to bring in the police: Mr. R. was asked to resign quietly, no charges were pressed, no parents were told. In fact, that summer, he led his usual cross-country trip of a handful of eighth grade students, none of whose parents knew about the incident or his employment status. 

Back to the Easter Island image. Recently, thirty-five years after the fact, many of my classmates and I began talking about all this, and of course, a lot of new information came out. More than that, though, our adult selves were able to articulate all the complicated things that were going on back then and to share the equally complicated ways in which our year of learning dangerously had affected us over time. There were students who were sure they were the only ones being humiliated, or the only ones not having sex, or the only ones not cool enough fo Mr R to like, or the only ones who had been molested. Tears came pouring out in some cases, tears that had been stemmed for so many years they had turned hearts to stone. Tears from those who had been self-medicating and isolating themselves, from those who had buried all their emotions. The tears were therapy, the words were therapy, the stony Easter Island statues spoke to each other, no longer so incredibly alone.

Telecuisine

Cooking used to be, for me, mere construction. I viewed it as something to be gotten over with, a means to an end, and I used to calculate the time spent cooking and washing dishes versus the time spent actually eating, and think it was a tragic waste of time and energy. When I worked so many long days,  I kept energy bars in my handbag and chewed them when I'd forgotten to eat lunch or dinner; I hated taking the time to go out and get something when I had a lot of work to do.

Not to say I don't appreciate a good meal. Years ago I became an honorary member of something called "The Diamond Jim Brady Club, " to qualify for which honor one must consume, before witnesses, six dozen oysters. I managed that rather easily, one evening, and had another dozen or so along with some oyster bisque and a few oyster croquettes just because there were so many delicious varieties ( I recall Blue points, Malpeques, and a few of those long salty Pacific ones, along with many others), served with a sweet Riesling wine. I love good food, and love sitting down to savor it, it's just that sitting at table eating seemed to me much more preferable to slaving away in a kitchen, preparing it all. Traveling for business I often found myself in Paris, the gastronome's nirvana, and with delight I explored the restaurants in the evenings, and in the daytime I shopped for fresh crusty baguettes and pungent cheeses, tiny fresh Champagne grapes, patés, cornichons, and exquisite chocolates for lunchtime picnics. 

In retrospect I attribute my reluctance to cook to several factors: firstly, being engaged to someone for several years who literally demanded that I cook six nights a week as part of our living arrangement. (That's another story for another time.) After leaving him, I refused to have the gas connected on my new apartment's stove for three months, luxuriating in the array of takeout on the Upper East Side. For another, I spent many years in an apartment whose kitchen was miniscule; a half-fridge, tiny sink, two cabinets and a square foot of counter space. The oven was remarkably like the toy oven I had as a little girl, the Suzy Homemaker one with the light bulb inside that baked a cake the size of a tollhouse cookie. Growing up I'd learned a repertoire of a few basics so I wouldn't starve,  but they were workhorse recipes: steak, pasta, omelettes, Overall, though, I think the main reason was time. I was always working crazy hours, and rushing, so cooking tended to be done that way as well.

When Dale and I moved into this house, we found ourselves with a real kitchen for the first time in our married life. Our last two kitchens had been reasonably roomy by New York apartment standards, but that still meant that counter space was tight, plus I'd never really stocked my kitchen with the right tools so I was always having to do things the hard way when I did make any attempt to cook. Here we were with not only counter space and  a dishwasher, roomy fridge and freezer, a five-burner stove--but I'd also inherited some good kitchen tools from my mother and gradually I began trying things out.

I guess it really started with the guacamole. I 'd had a craving for guacamole for several days, and as we were in a new neighborhood, I didn't know the restaurants that well. Though we have a lot of good Mexican near us, I didn't know the lay of the land then and bought a plastic container of guacamole that I brought home and opened; inside was a pale green watery glue-like paste that looked nothing like guacamole and not even much like it had ever had anything to do with an avocado. It even tasted a bit like Elmer's glue. I was starving, and nothing but guacamole would do, so I went to the corner market and looked around. They had some bad prepackaged guacamole that didn't look promising, but I noticed they had some very ripe avocados, and the light bulb went on over my head.

I decided to just buy whatever seemed like it should go into a guacamole. I had some farmer's market tomatoes at home, I recalled, so besides the ripe avocados I bought garlic, lemon juice, onion, and jalapeno pepper, as well as some white corn chips. I minced a small purple onion, then chopped and seeded the ripest tomato, a small red Brandywine. I chopped some garlic, then scooped out two avocados. Leaving everything coarsely chopped I gently mixed it into a medium bowl and added in some ancho chile powder, then chopped about half the jalapeno and scooped it in.  Fresh black pepper and a sprinkling of kosher salt, a dash of lemon juice, and when I dipped a corn chip into the mixture I was incredulous..... it tasted exactly like guacamole, and not only that, it was just about the best guacamole I'd ever had. I think that was the moment when I realized I could actually make things, silly as that sounds in retrospect. It just hadn't dawned on me that my own utilitarian cooking could morph into delicious food, with a little effort. Of course, it helps a lot that Dale doesn't mind doing the dishes.

That was the beginning. Soon I was trying all kinds of things in the kitchen, mostly soups and stews in the beginning. I hadn't turned into some Stepford Wife, I liked making things that would supply us with leftovers for a few days afterwards, or things I could freeze batches of for quick reheating when needed. I began looking at the recipes in the Times and trying things, we have a wonderful local market with fresh herbs and terrific ingredients, and I was dumfounded as my kitchen began to turn out amazing concoctions. Utilitarian  but delicious pot roasts. Chili. Turkey with cornbread, walnut and sausage stuffing. Charlotte Malokoff and cherry pie. Crepes.  Fish chowder, maple-glazed meatloaf, homemade spaetzle.  In the summer we grilled constantly, fish, vegetables, chicken, and I began coming up with exotic marinades. Soon I bought an apron, something I'd never imagined myself owning. 

When it dawned on me that it had gotten serious was when I found myself making jam from the strawberries in our garden; they are always all ripe at once and we were overwhelmed with delicious juicy berries, more than we could eat ourselves, and I started processing them into jam jars, gradually getting the hang of doing it without using added pectin to get it to set, which allows for much less sugar and therefore a more flavorful jam. When the raspberries came in I kept going, and when the peaches ripened I was making peach jam, peach pie, and peach cobbler. My early pies had thick doughy store-made crusts, but gradually I've learned to turn out easy, flaky crusts that melt  on the tongue. I learned through practice to make airy, cloudlike biscuits, evolved from the hard hockey pucks I created as a beginning biscuit baker. I learned to fry chicken for my Southern-born husband, first soaking it well in milk with a little hot sauce and black pepper, though I am still aghast at how much grease the frying involves. I learned to make a garlic vinaigrette for artichokes, to roast tiny tender asparagus with a little sea salt and olive oil, to whip cream with a dash of Cognac to make it into Créme Chantilly and drizzle it onto freshly made crépes stuffed with strawberries. 

The funny thing about all this is, you'd think I would have put on a few pounds, right? Tell the truth, you've been sitting there muttering, "yeah, this chick is like the size of a house by now."

The truth is, I have lost a ton of weight (well maybe 15 lbs) and lowered the cholesterol to boot, despite all that cream and butter I cook with. You doubt me? Well. here's my theory. We Americans don't sit down and savor our food, we eat on the run, distracted, we eat when we're working or watching TV, and we just aren't satisfied. We snack. We nosh. We're always picking at this and that, so instead of three meals a day we probably end up having twelve. In France they sit down at meals and enjoy what they are eating, take their time, and get up from the table satisfied. Their diet is full of butter and cheese, wine, bread, meat, and nobody can figure out why they aren't fat--I think much of it has to do with how they treat eating; a enjoyable pastime as opposed to either guilty pleasure or a necessary evil. Perhaps its the Puritan ethic again. Anyway, Dale and I are eating much healthy meals now, and also enjoying cooking and eating them together. 

We no longer look at each other and say,"Oh, its my turn to cook, where's the phone?".

Trees

When Dale and I bought this house, five years ago in April, we were really pleased with our funny little block with its oddball houses and stoop-sitting neighbors, the ethnic mix and the friendliness we experienced right away from nearly everyone. What struck us, though. coming from the leafy, brownstone-y Heights, was how stark and treeless our street was. We're not in the brownstoned part of Park Slope, ours is the New Slope, the South Slope: lots of frame or brick one and two story little houses, many covered in odd patterns of siding. Of course, in my long-ago youth, this was not considered Park Slope at all, but some sort of wilderness with no name, where none dared to tread. While the architecture is kind of forgettable, what's nice is the large open sky above us, as most of the buildings are two and three stories. Walking in the spring and summer on the brownstoned streets in other parts of Brooklyn, you find yourself under a kind of Gothic arch made by the soaring branches of London Planes, Maples; graceful,  majestic and towering, shady, green, and lush. Yes, you are hearing a bit of tree envy in my tone.

There are two ways to get a street tree planted in Brooklyn. One way is to get a permit and plant it yourself, paying for it of course, and the other way is to go through the city and have them plant it, which is free. Dale and I just wanted a tree so we decided we'd apply for both and see which materialized first. That turned out to be the city method; about a year after we applied I'd begun thinking that they'd forgotten us entirely and was considering calling to find out the status of both applications, and then suddenly one day I was in the house and heard a deafening, grinding, inexplicable uproar outside, and stepped out to see what the hubbub was all about. There was a crew tearing a hole in my sidewalk:"Hey lady, you ordered a tree, right?" My neighbors began gathering in little clusters on their stoops to observe the ruckus. 

One walked over to my stoop to ask me what was going on. There are definitely two camps on the block: old timers and new arrivals, and they don't always see eye-to-eye on various subjects. The old-timers had been very nice and accepting of us, but you could tell they thought we were nuts to pay what we'd paid for the house, and when we'd had a crew there doing some renovating there were endless questions and I could see that we were definitely the object of much merriment on the street. On the tree day, one of the old-timers sauntered over to see what we were up to now.

When I, enthusiastically, informed him we were getting a tree, his face fell. " You know it's going to make leaves, right?" I assured him that I was aware trees made leaves and was OK with it. Pretty soon I had a coffeeklatsch of older guys  milling around telling me horror stories about trees of yore. One of the men was an ancient Spanish guy who had lived up the street since the 194o's;  he managed to coax astounding bumper crops of tomatoes from his rows of plants every summer, fussing over them and spoiling them like a proud grandfather. He pointed to a spot on the sidewalk a few feet away from our house. "There was a tree right there, in 1957!" said Tomato Joe, his voice shaking with emotion. "It was terrible!" 

I was so proud of our tree, watering and feeding, planting pansies and star ivy around its base, watching the leaves as they emerged and keeping neighborhood dogs and kids from doing too much damage. What struck us immediately was that the moment the square of earth appeared in the sidewalk, people strolling by assumed that it was an OK place to throw their trash, simply by virtue of its being unpaved. Every day I would fish out assorted detritus surrounding my poor baby tree: dog logs, empty bags of chips and soda cans, a disposable diaper. Muttering imprecations , I put on latex gloves and cleaned up the pit daily. Still,  I discovered that imprecations worked less well than the pansies and the tiny little border fence I put up around it. We still had litter, but I found that if our little patch looked more as though someone cared about it, there were fewer objects tossed into it on a daily basis. Still, I defended it daily, proud of my little tree. Even the dogs seemed to get the message, for the most part they chose the lamppost up the street instead.

(That summer was brutally hot, as I recall, and I set up a new hose long enough for me to water out front comfortably. In the evenings or early mornings I'd water the thirsty south-facing front yard, and of course, I would give the soil around the tree a nice soaking, too. More than once, though, passers-by stopped to ask me exactly why I was watering the tree. I think there is a perception that the street trees are "other"; either that the city waters them, or that the sidewalk trees should be able to take care of themselves. Sadly neither is the case, and during that drought summer I noticed many neglected street trees withering and turning brown.)

That fall, I was thrilled to watch the leaves turn to vivid scarlet, our own little burning bush. I kidded Dale that there was no need to go leaf-peeping in Vermont, that we had our own fall foliage tour right there in Brooklyn. One day I was with a friend, running some errands, and we got chatting about the tree, and she offered to drive me home so she could have a look. I'd been telling her how resplendent it was, a thing of beauty, and she wanted to see for herself. Driving down our spare and treeless block under gray skies as a windy rain whipped through the air. I smugly thought of the glorious shock of red leaves we were about to see, and gleefully imagined my friend's admiring gaze, her oohs and aahs. 

Pulling up to the house, I was taken aback. The wind had been fairly strong that afternoon, and there stood our tree, naked to the world but for one lonely leaf like a flag at its topmost branch, and without its layer of leaves I had to admit it was a tiny, spindly thing, barely more than a twig. My companion said cursory complimentary things about the tree but I could tell she was thinking I was out of my mind bragging to her about this little twig in front of our house. It was like my child, though, and I was proud of it, I just hadn't expected it to be completely naked all of a sudden.

Here were Dale and I, thinking that we'd start a trend of tree-planting, that if only our neighbors realized it was free, that it made the block look nice, and if nothing else, increased real-estate values, that they would all run to their phones and call the city, reserving Bradford Pears and Red Oaks, (actually we weren't given a choice of trees but did get a nice red oak) gleefully tearing up the sidewalks and that we'd have a beautiful, tree-lined street like other people do.  While that hasn't happened, gradually there have been a few young saplings making their appearances along the street here and there, standing lashed to their twin supports like the training wheels on a kids' tricycle; and some of the old-timers have conceded that our tree looks nice now, even as they shake their heads at me in the fall when they see me sweeping up the leaves.  

Green Beginnings

Spring seems to be making an appearance today, though we're technically still on the "in like a lion" end of March, the "out like a lamb" is going to take some time, still. Nevertheless, let's hope the snowy days are at an end and that we can slowly begin to shed the layers of fleece and wool that we've been swaddled in since October.

I went out to the front yard today and gathered up some debris. In New York the winter debris in a front yard is not limited to the usual twigs and leaves, but includes chewing gum wads, twinkie wrappers, and countless cigarette butts, bits of styrofoam, car-service coupons, and wet Chinese menus. Usually on my way in I'll use my cane to scoop out one or two offending bits of trash, but over the course of the winter things accumulate and as the snow melted yesterday it revealed quite a collection. Sometimes its the neighborhood raccoons; they enjoy snacking on the trash and will occasionally wash it in the birdbath, leaving a half-bagel or a chicken leg as a calling card. As destructive as they are, their sins are more easily forgiven than those of human passersby who think nothing of flicking a wad of Juicy Fruit into one of my rosebushes, or leaving a half-can of Old English 800 lying on its side amid the irises.I have become one of those old people who scared me as a child, muttering on my stoop and waving my broom at miscreants, ranting about manners and how the world is falling apart as I fish half empty Snapple bottles out of the birdbath.

I swept and clipped, raked and smoothed, and as I worked I took note of all the little green shoots of various kinds making their appearance. I can see the beginnings of tulips, daffodils, crocuses, irises, hyacinths (grape and otherwise), and the little pink nubs on the rose canes heralding the arrival of the day when the front is transformed from gray and brown to green and lush. The neighbors I had barely seen since October began drifting out onto their stoops, unwrapped from their winter layers and recognizable as themselves, everyone smiling and calling out cheerful greetings, waving, pointing to the blue sky and the green beginnings below. As people walk up the hill they smile when they see my garden with its rows of green spikes twice the size they were yesterday, babies in strollers hold out their little starfish hands to touch the leaves as their moms or dads call out the probable names of the flowers to come. I sipped my coffee on the porch, grateful for the sunshine, grateful for the opportunity to make something beautiful, and smile back, we are all complicit in this conspiracy, eager to see the beauty in this world.