I might be weird for loving radishes as much as I do, but right now I’m obsessed with eating their crunchy goodness with just a splash of olive oil, a spritz of lemon juice, and salt and pepper.
I had an Italian/chef boyfriend once upon a time who would prep radishes the same way only simpler — with only olive oil and pepper — and I can tell you that they’re delicious that way too.
For some reason, the stripped down nature of this treat reminded me of a snack my Dad used to eat — a slice of white bread with mayonnaise and pepper. It was considered a real treat, especially if served with a small glass of buttermilk.
Gross, right? But then I remembered that as kids we’d enjoy cold hot dogs right out of the fridge (fully cooked, of course). Also gross.
My father was born at the beginning of the Depression. In 1929, in fact. I don’t know of anyone in my generation who would slug down buttermilk and go, “Ah.”
Here’s another memory — and I swear on my father’s grave that it’s true.
One year, I might have been six or seven, we were heading down the Taconic Parkway en route to visit family in Woodhaven, New York (which was either Brooklyn or Queens depending on the year of the map), when I began to smell something gross. I crinkled my nose. Was it coming from inside the car? Did anyone else smell it? No and no.
I tried to dismiss it. I’d learned early, I’m sad to say, not to trust myself — especially in the face of opposition. But as we crossed the Verrazano Narrows Bridge, the smell got stronger. I knew we were heading toward it, but still no one else could smell it. How baffling!
Finally, we arrived and spilled out of our Pontiac Tempest. Scrambled up the steps and into Nana’s narrow and dark brownstone. Whoa! Right there on the porch I was hit with the smell. It was moist and animal. Something cooking, then? I followed my father into the kitchen where he lifted the lid of a giant pot on the stove and inhaled with pleasure.
Pigs’ feet.
Pigs’ feet? A delicacy I guess.
I can’t remember if I sampled them or not. I can’t remember if I said a single thing about how off-putting I found the smell. Probably no to both. Given what a treat pigs’ feet were to my father’s family, I’m pretty sure no one would’ve minded me taking a pass.
A million and a half people on the verge of starving and I wonder how is being on the verge of starvation different from starving itself?
Last night I made pasta. Defrosted sausages and heated them in a pot of jarred red sauce. A husband-away meal. Plated it up. Ate only a few bites, leaving enough to save for today. Too much to give the dog in other words, the dog who I guess is better fed than a million or more people in Gaza.
My husband would’ve eaten the pasta and sausage with gusto and I suddenly wonder if his healthy appetite and omnivorous palate have given me an inflated sense of myself as a cook.
Tortellini, the name, was inspired by the belly button of Venus, did you know? So said one clue in one Sunday puzzle or other.
Many friends recently cancelled their subscriptions to the NYTimes to protest ongoing failures in reporting — the relentless old Joe coverage based on a shitty poll that the Times themselves conducted being the final straw.
That’s why I did my Wordle and Connections this morning in a fugue of guilt. Why let principles interfere with enjoyable, habitual puzzle-solving though? I have so little else I tell myself when really I have so much. A full enough stomach to turn my nose up at a perfectly respectable bowl of pasta, for starters. A dog who loves me. Closets full of warm clothing which I still need but look forward to not needing in a matter of weeks.
I have enough long-sleeve shirts to give four or five away because I don’t like the necklines or the color, one a dusty blue that I never want to put on. I can order gum arabic without a second thought and plan to devote two solid morning to making ink out of wasp galls discovered out back, ink that I don’t even know what I’ll do with.
I can use expensive sake to make risotto because there’s no Chardonnay in the house and I live in a house where these usually is Chardonnay somewhere — in the fridge upstairs, or the fridge downstairs, or resting in the mini-wine rack. You heard that, didn’t you? The part about having two fridges?
I hope there are a succession of weeks where I can wear a long-sleeve shirt, one with a neck-line I like of course, and a light cardigan, weeks when I can leave the windows gaping open with maybe a fan or two running, before the stultifying heat arrives.
The stultifying heat used to limit itself to a string of days in late July or mid-August. You could certainly get by without AC. But now some years the heat arrives before I’ve even gotten all the storm windows raised, dropping like a wet blanket on the landscape, making gardening or walking a chore and forcing us to close our windows. All of them.
I am so tired these days. I try not to say that even to myself but there I am mid-afternoon frequently of late saying not out loud but emphatically to myself, I’m exhausted.
How many years have we been doing this, a fellow traveler asks. It’s creeping up on a decade. The frothy ribbons of fear, the grunge of despair, the hyper vigilance have long since taken up residence and gotten to know each other. They don’t care if the windows are open or closed as long as the internet and cable are functioning.
Yesterday I brought that sake-infused risotto to a friend — she is grieving a sister who died and died suddenly due to medical neglect and/or outright error — and I forgot my phone, the phone with the credit card wallet. It felt weird. Like having sex without protection or entering a party where you can’t remember the name of the host.
I’d intended to stop and get flowers and a sweet bite, but I could only scrounge up nine dollars — eight from the eyeglass drop down compartment in the car and one from the treat pocket in my hobo bag. So I only bought flowers.
Counting out those bills felt so strange, almost awkward and to realize that was to realize how in between I am, for I also find it strange to call up my square code and scan it — where? where do I scan it? — to get my Prime benefit, generally something like $1.89 off the total.
Amazon owning WholeFoods, Facebook catering ads to conversations (not even KEYSTROKES), Facebook owning Instagram, the hideous helmsmanship of a racist, immigrant billionaire over on Twitter or X, formerly known as Twitter (— imagine being such a dick that you force people all over the world to utter or print those extra words over and over — X, formerly known as Twitter), what a conflagration!
Such hideous monopolies and intrusions make it hard to offer more than a shrug at TikTok and the idea of an adversarial superpower harvesting data from our people. I mean it’s not like Amazon or Facebook are exactly on our sides, are they?
I know my kids are smart enough to not to input phone numbers, addresses, birth dates — I hope.
On TikTok, I have yet to get past the Chinese hip hop dancers and the comical wombats at feeding hour, so it astonished me to learn yesterday that some huge number of people rely on the platform for their news. All of their news.
I started with starving Palestinians and so perhaps I ought to come back to them. Good gracious, I want to say, fuck the pier Joe, just cut Netanyahu off!
Can you imagine if Biden lost to a corrupt, autocratic megalomaniac who needs to return to power to avoid going to jail because he couldn’t say no to a corrupt, autocratic megalomaniac who has to hold onto power to avoid going to jail? No wonder I’m tired.
My old habits of outrage will not get going these days. I hardly recognize myself sheathed in a passive silence. But to support one feels like condemnation of the other — a regular funhouse mirror tunnel of allegiances. And to protest the killing, the genocide, too much is to risk everything here. I am committed — committed — to re-electing the guy with a brain and a moral compass.
It was so easy to stick a Black Lives Matter sign on my lawn. Give to the good causes. Take history on. Our history. American history.
But it was so complicated to take down, after a horrid and violently brutal few weeks of IDF retaliation, my I STAND WITH ISRAEL sign.
And then, a small defeated part of me wonders if perhaps in fact I know as little about the fight for racial justice as I do about the Middle East. Is that possible?
I hadn’t toured the backyard in a minute. Look what I found.
Our old stump.
And these things! Wasp galls again? Whatever they are, I won’t be bringing them into the house.
From a step back.
Virginia bluebells emerging like heads of romaine. Brave hyacinth.
Our blanket will be bigger than the crib quilt.
Pieced it today while listening to as much of the hearing on the Hill as I could stand. I have two comments. One, Garland should resign. And, I don’t think it went exactly the way the Republicans wanted it to. Dems highlighting the differences between what Biden did and what trump did was damning.
Content warning: this post is about the going to the dentist.
My new tooth was installed this morning. It looks so much better than my old crown (the neon one? The one that was waaay longer than my other front tooth?). And it outclasses that fucking flipper by miles. Is it perfect? No. But I can live with it. The journey that began in July with my old crown falling out is now, hopefully, over.
But I must insert here that my dentist sent me home with the flipper. Just in case, she said. Blah blah slow drying cement blah.
JUST IN CASE? I have twice in the last two seasons had the experience of my front tooth falling out. Twice. Really don’t want to make it a trifecta.
There was tugging and pushing and pressure and enough pokes with that pokiest of all pokey tools that at some point novocaine was administered. Of course that’s no fun either — the roof of the mouth several times, my upper gums.
Even after being numbed up, I clutched my hands. I pressed my clutched my hands into my abdomen as if that could protect me. My trick of leaving “Little DeeDee” home required some maintenance. Enjoy Finn. I told her. I’ll be home soon.
Even numbed up, I had to announce at one point that I was starting to panic —
(they were blowing the air DOWN MY THROAT. And for a while. That was new, and by new I mean awful).
What’s next, I asked. Does the cord come out, I asked. How much pressure? And, what’s next again and again.
I was behaving like such a baby that at one point I felt compelled to let them know that I gave birth twice without pain meds.
Home again, now, I am breathing in ease and I can relax. I’ll work on the couch throw for K and me — what I’m calling the leftovers project.
I’ll make lunch. Walk Finn. Maybe watch another couple of episodes of the Korean series The Extraordinary Life of Attorney Woo, which I didn’t think I’d like but I do.
This is one of many Middle Passage quilts that I’ve made over the years. I began it a long time ago (2013?) while reading about the transatlantic slave trade but didn’t bind it until last week.
All the usual reasons for delay pertained, prime among them that I am a better starter than finisher. I lose track. Things pile up. But also this: early on a reader of this blog suggested that I was not “staying in my lane.”
All these years later, I say fuck that. Not fuck her, but fuck that. Fuck that. (Cultural appropriation discussed in part here and here and again here).
I will never tell Black women what to think or how to feel, but it certainly matters to me that learning about the history of slavery has made me a more informed, more sensitive person. A better citizen, a better reader of novels, a better writer, a stronger and more informed consumer of American culture and politics.
Before continuing, I have to thank the cadre of readers here, mostly older white women like myself, who have let me know over the years that what I share about American history and race is meaningful to them. It’s not that I set out to teach per se, but by sharing what I’m learning and having you along for the ride, the learning gets amplified and transforms what would otherwise be a solitary process into a communal one. It really matters to me. YOU really matter to me.
I like quilts to stand on their own, leaving interpretations up to the viewer but I thought in this case it might enhance the experience of looking if I were to explain the visual connections between fabric choices and the Middle Passage. So here goes.
The triangular shapes refer to sails. I suppose they could also refer to the triangular shape of the trading routes but I didn’t think of that until just now.
Adapted from History Crunch website
Swatches of indigo, bubble motifs, fish prints, and a black swirly-spiral print call to mind the Atlantic Ocean.
The half-circle black and silver print (at the bottom, above) looks African to me. The black and deep green hand-dyed swatch IS African.
The inclusion of a map print refers to the shores at either end of the Middle Passage — say, Sierra Leone on one side and Charleston on the other.
The brown stripes and the green lozenges both refer to the ship itself. The brown stripe is suggestive of the planks, while the green lozenges call to mind those illustrations that depicted Black bodies packed in the hold below deck.
One reason it’s important to focus on the Middle Passage now and again is because the number of people who died en route is often overlooked when relating the costs of slavery. It’s a huge number.
A conservative estimate puts lives lost en route at 1.8 to 2 million. Another 1.8 million died while housed in the barracoons awaiting transport. Another 1.5 million died during the first year of laboring here.
So one way to look at this is — roughly 14 million Africans were kidnapped to yield 9 million slaves.*
It is hard to wrap one’s mind around these numbers.
My photo from the Lynching Memorial in Montgomery
Check out the Equal Justice Initiative’s website — it highlights, among other things, the lesser known slave-practices and sources of slave-related profit in New England.
Below is another Middle Passage quilt. You’ll notice many of the fabrics are the same.
I’ve linked to these novel-adjacent pages before, but here again is a kind of warm up exercise done in the style of Colum McCann and describing the Middle Passage. It’s called Water Was.
* these figures and the framing of the figures came from a documentary I was watching about a week ago. I tried to back track and figure out what it was. No luck. If I do, I’ll come back with attribution.
