Many of us in 2020 understand that we must retreat from strangers, sometimes even from our very closest, and do for ourselves. The threat of death by a new plague makes any comparison unusual, although comparing different threats of death in past decades and centuries puts some of the present danger in existential limbo. Small comfort. But I've been told that context is important. When I hear "context is important," I usually screw my face into a please, no. So I did some lookback and realized I had rarely written about beans, now a … [Read more...]
Juice, Tomato
Of course, I had to grow, pluck my own and juice them. I even bit one on the vine like an animal -- I am an animal -- and sucked and chewed, thinking of another writer who acted on the same impulse before I was born, though with a different lure. Perhaps MFK Fisher transmitted that to me, a gastronomic Tesla. As I get older, and maybe as others do, I tend toward something I will call "jeweling" my past, surrounding habitual memories with Wordsworth halos. This happens more often now, under pressure to consider the present a permanent past. … [Read more...]
Finding My Chowder — Part 1
I don't know where she was born, and I don't know her real last name. When I say this to friends or even to party strangers, they quite rightly raise eyebrows. My late mother lived to almost 90. What kind of adult son would have been so profoundly uncurious? As of now, I've found no record of her before her marriage to my dad -- no marriage certificate, either. Her maiden name is "Browne" on the photostat of my birth certificate, but she told me later that that was not the case and offered another one -- also, as it happens, … [Read more...]