Raw Onions

I love raw onion sandwiches on my sourdough toast with mayo for breakfast with black coffee. This is also why I am enjoying lots of solitude.

Who Moved the Tomato

"Who moved the tomato!" my mother shouted, rummaging through the refrigerator. She had the fridge interior and its contents and placement memorized, just like my favorite card game 'concentration.'

"I did," I confessed. Another demerit on my permanent record. I could feel her seething with rage, hating that I existed, breathed and took up space in her house. I tried to stay hidden but she always barged into my bedroom without knocking and found me.

"I made you an artist" she once shouted. "All those terrible things I did to you caused you to be an artist," she screamed, standing in the doorway.

She had taken me to many specialists: school psychologist, dentist, family doctor, orthodontist, hair stylist, radiologist, therapist, psychiatrist, chiropractor, skin doctor, gastroenterologist. And she wasn't finished - she planned more.

Another time: "You eat too much yogurt, I can't afford to feed you!" This in spite of loving to throw lavish parties for my step-father's prospective advertising clients.

I stopped eating, and wouldn't join the family at mealtime. I was terrified of her. I was rapidly shrinking. I would make my own home-incubated yogurt and sit in the dark kitchen and eat it late at night. My mother went to bed early, so I thought I would be safe. Somehow she could feel that I was eating and she would swoop downstairs into the kitchen wearing her long sheer nightie, scaring me half to death.

I scrambled to find a place to be safe, sleeping on the floors of friends' living rooms, hiding, hoping nobody would mind. "She can't stay here" my friends' parents would finally say. I realized they were terrified that their children might do the same thing. So off I'd go to the next house.

Someday I would have my own kitchen in my own apartment in my own state. I had already collected a few cast iron frying pans at yard sales and flea markets and stashed them in my closet. I was ready. I imagined having hanging plants and a cat and a dog and a record player.

I loved the comfort of rainy days. I wanted to live where it always rained.

Three Fortune Tellers

The three seven year old little girls across the street set up a lemonade style stand on the sidewalk and asked me if I wanted a poem, my fortune, a foot or hand massage, and my nails painted black, blue, beige, red, maroon with glitter, or six shades of pink.

At first I said no thanks to the nail polish, and yes to the illustrated poem:

Summer is the best
Umbrellas are the best
Nature is full of animals

Then I went inside my house and thought about it. They were so adorable! I went back out and let them paint my nails.

I was their only customer for a while but then people started to stop by.
The girls forgot to write in the fortunes (origami style fortune telling)--so we thought of stuff and I wrote it down on the inner flaps of the folded paper:

put lipstick on your nose,

wear your hat backwards,

eat a spider,

a wolf bites your face,

werewolf in your house,

spider bites you while sleeping

drink water and sing a song

sit at the table backwards

sing upside down

Then a neighbor they know from the building came out and sat in the big brown barcalounger on the sidewalk. She ate a chicken dinner with a white plastic fork and knife. She told them she was leaving the leftover roast chicken for the girls, and I put it in the shade so it wouldn't spoil. When they took a break from selling poems, two of the girls hid behind the Barcalounger squeezing against the chain link fence and they picked apart the roasted chicken. There was a lot of food there but they only had one fork.

I ran in and got them another plastic fork. This is our breakfast Arianna said. Nadalia wanted to try sucking the marrow out of the bones. "There's lots of vitamins in the marrow," I said.
---

If they're outside this weekend maybe I will bring out my baby red Hohner accordion and see if they want to make up songs.

The new Dominican-American market opened on the ground floor on Monday. Now the kids can go downstairs and get anything they want! Candy, candy, candy! And ice cream!

They all live in the same building - summer, weekends, nights, rain, snow, anytime they have each other. Their fathers work odd jobs and their mothers hang loads and loads of laundry on the porches to dry. They beat the rugs clean, against the porch pillars and they shop and cook. They have lots of children to manage.

Everything is audible here - the fights, laughter, yelling, barking. It is a neighborhood with invisible walls. Like a doll-house.

I would love to do art projects, right on the sidewalk so the parents are nearby. We could make apple dolls, papier mâché puppets, pizzelle-making, sew costumes etc. I have two folding card tables, paper scraps, and fabric scraps.

I hope for a long Indian summer season except that Lily is itchy from ragweed pollen even with her pond swimming and generic Benadryl tablets taken in peanut butter, she is scratching.

Our new neighbors have three cats and they are house cats that they have decided to not let back inside. They put out food and water but the cats cry all night in the alley which is like a microphone.

Most two bedroom apartments here have 6-8 people living inside. The poverty in the 'hood is phenomenal. I see it when my neighbors hang up their towels and sheets -- they are worn-through like gauze.

Luckily our city is not afraid of poverty. There are no snobs here. We have a great Salvation Army and bargain stores and loads of charities. All you need to do is ask for help and the generosity is there.

Some days, I feel like Margaret Meade watching, studying peoples lives.

Midnight the Cat

Midnight was blamed for my stepsister's asthma attack when she visited one weekend. My parents rushed her to the hospital. Later my mother said she almost died. So she decided Midnight had to go. They drove one Saturday to the Westchester Humane Society with me and Midnight in the ugly brown Ford wagon. I took Midnight inside and placed her on the counter. It was raining hard. My mother and stepfather stayed in the car. I was sobbing. I was 8 years old.

When I went to adopt Lily, we drove three hours to the Humane Society in Elmsford, NY. "We don't adopt out to people outside the tri-state area: NY, NJ, CT," the woman had said over the phone.

"But I am from this area," I said. "And I've had the same vet for 30 years in RI - Dr. Belinsky. Would you like to talk to him?"

When we arrived, I had a déjà vu feeling. Standing and looking at the low gray cement building, waiting for it to open, I thought, "Oh my god this is where we left Midnight."

Eggs in a Hole!

I toasted my bread and cut a circle and fried and egg in the hole. So cool! Try it. Directions

Sweet Apple Cider

The full moon woke me at 1:30 AM. I finally got up at 2:22 AM. After reading the New York Times online, I dug out my 1970's stainless steel Acme juicer that Grandpa Nat bought me when I lived on Mott Street NYC. Grandpa's fans and motors store, UNITED BLOWER was on Centre Street around the corner. I visited him daily. We would sit together at his big wooden school teachers desk and he pulled out the sliding wooden panel and I would eat my apple and orange for lunch. I was a fruitarian.

Grandpa signed me up for telephone service on my black rotary desk phone (back in those days the phone came with the service!) and he had the electric company turn on the lights. I was 17, in 1978, still technically enrolled in high school in Mamaroneck NY although I wasn't attending. I was on my own living alone in Chinatown NYC and getting school credit for it.

I didn't know anything about anything but I was trying my best not to be afraid. I got a job as a cashier at Gillies 1840 on Bleeker Street in the village. I got off work at 11:30 PM and ran home through Little Italy, to my Mott street apartment in Chinatown. The gods protect the innocent and I was very lucky. More to come on that adventure.

I am making apple cider from bushels of fallen apples that Jeff and Francine harvested from Northern New Hampshire. They filled four gigantic boxes the size of washtubs, almost too heavy to lift and hauled them over here in their big pickup truck. They live 1 mile down my street but you have to cross state lines to get there. Everything is different in Massachusetts compared to RI. For example, they can have chickens in their backyard.

Spontaneously I sweetened my morning black coffee with cider and it was delicious. I have three more bushels to go!

from Jon Frankel: I remember the old machine and gizmo shops on Canal Street well. It was amazing walking down the broad sunny street packed with small stores and people, the boxes of oscilloscopes, meters, and electrical devices, tools stacked up outside of the stores, which were themselves crammed floor to ceiling with obscure machinery. And Mott Street! Chow Fun for $1.69….old mafia guys in cadillacs, and dark social clubs with flaked gold lettering on the windows.

Black Coffee

Black Coffee

by K. D. Lang (Lyrics)

I’m feelin’ mighty lonesome
Haven’t slept a wink
I walk the floor from nine to four
In between I drink
Black coffee
Love’s a hand-me-down brew
I’ll never know a sunday
In this weekday room

I’m talkin to the shadow
One o’clock till four
And lord, how slow the moments go
And all I do is pour
Black coffee
Since the blues caught my eye
I’m hangin’ out on monday
My sunday dreams to dry

Now man was born to go a lovin’
But was a woman born to weep and fret
And stay at home and tend her oven
And down her past regrets
In coffee and cigarettes

I’m moonin’ all the mornin’
Moanin’ all the night
And in between it’s nicotine
And not much heart to fight
Black coffee
Feelin’ low as the ground
It’s drivin’ me crazy
This thinkin’ ’bout my baby
Might maybe come around
Come around

Late Summer

Late summer ragweed pollen causes my hands and feet to burn. I am holding two frozen bottles of water, one in each hand and standing in a bucket of ice water.

Harvest Joy

Last time I was waking at two am from joy bubbles, was in the spring.
This morning at 4 AM I made sesame scallion ginger spicy peanut garlic noodles while listening to French radio classique.
C'est bon!
I threw in frozen corn and red bell peppers for color!
I mixed everything with my fingers.

Matthew W. Sanford

My life has taught me that there is a wealth of strength within us, there is nothing we cannot handle. Life presents it's purpose and beauty in all sorts of ways. The trick is to stay open to one's strength, to not deny or strive to prove it, but rather to simply have it.

If nothing else, my life has taught me one thing: The mind and body that I have are the only mind and body that I have. They deserve my attention. And when I give it, I receive so much more in return. Learning to fall gracefully through one's mind-body relationship is not a submission. One learns to fall gracefully in order to roll.

There is still so much to realize. My experience tells me that the silence within us can be experienced energetically as a nourishing sap. When this happens, consciousness changes shape. For example, I have never seen anyone truly become more aware of his or her body without becoming more compassionate. A mental state like tolerance can deepen into a three-dimensional state of true patience. Nonviolence can become more than a moral principle, it can become an integrated state of consciousness that includes the body. And, of course, for good or for bad, the silence within us also contains the opportunity for choice.

Silence is the word I use to describe the empty presence we experience within our experience — between our thoughts, between each other, between ourselves and the world. We feel the silence when we daydream, when we appreciate the beauty of a sunset, or when the love of our life truly walks away. It is an inward sense, often experienced as a longing or an ache. It is a feeling of emptiness and fullness at the same time. The silence is the aspect of our consciousness that makes us feel slightly heavy. It is the source of the feeling of loss, but also of a sense of awe.

As I wake up to the horror of traumatically induced body memories, I am forced to feel death — not the end of my life, but the death of my life as a walking person. I absorbed death as I watched that young boy having screws twisted into his skull. The silence within which I found refuge was a level of dying.

In principle, my experience is not that uncommon, only more extreme. We all experience different levels of dying throughout our lives — the process of living guarantees it. As each day passes, especially in our later years, we become increasingly aware of our own mortality. If we can see death as more than black and white, as more than on and off, there are many versions of realized death short of physically dying. The death of a loved one sets so much in motion: grief, a sense of loss, tears, anger, a transcendent sense of love, an appreciation of the present moment, a desire to die, and on and on.

Then there are also the quiet deaths. How about the day you realized you weren't going to be an astronaut or the queen of Sheba? Feel the silent distance between yourself and how you felt as a child, between yourself and those feelings of wonder and splendor and trust. Feel your mature fondness for who you once were, and your current need to protect innocence wherever you might find it. The silence that surrounds the loss of innocence is a most serious death, and yet it is necessary for the onset of maturity.

What about the day we began working not for ourselves, but rather with the hope that our kids might have a better life? Or the day we realized that, on the whole, adult life is deeply repetitive? As our lives roll into the ordinary, when our ideals sputter and dissipate, as we wash the dishes after yet another meal, we are integrating death; a little part of us is dying so that another part can live.

-Matthew Sanford Waking: A Memoir of Trauma and Transcendence

listen to interview online

True Confessions

I love to touch my food. I eat with my fingers.

Delia Ephron

Read article here.

Impromptu Biscotti

My accidentally puddling like pumpkin cake turned into biscotti with my help. I sliced the cake thinly and baked the slices on my ribbed cast iron pan at 350 turning the slices over after 10 minutes. Delicious with black coffee.

The Whole Way in the Dark

When I called, my aunt said "Do you know what day it is? Jewish New Year!"

Eighteen years ago I had just bought my house and I still had a car. I cooked up a feast: roasted red peppers, apple crisp, tofu whipped cream, spicy kale cooked in olive oil and garlic with corn niblets for color, and a basket of my whole wheat bread. I packed the food in my beloved cast iron dutch ovens, loaded up my old silver Subaru wagon, and drove west an hour and a half to my parents country house, a 1750 farmhouse with a view, out in the middle of Massachusetts. It was a surprise but my aunt and uncle knew I was coming with a feast. They were driving up from Brighton Beach to converge.

When I showed up there was a scarecrow displayed out front leaning against the barn. It was wearing my mother's old hospital-beige neck brace, which made my stomach turn. I went inside and my Aunt Irene and Uncle Ron were glad to see me but my parents weren't thrilled by the surprise. They like to be in control but I didn't understand that back then. I set the table and we ate my banquet lunch in their designer kitchen. When we were about to have dessert my mother said "What are you on?" "What? Nothing!" What was she talking about? I was so insulted. After the meal as I packed up to leave my mother said "I am keeping all of the food." I explained that I was hoping to bring some food back for my husband's dinner when he got home from work. She reluctantly parceled out a portion as if I were twisting her arm - there was plenty of food. I drove home angry and sad. I missed the highway exit and ended up taking the local road the whole way home in the dark.

Seltzer

I have been craving seltzer lately. I found this great blog by Jessica Leshnoff called Lunch at 11:30. She has a great post about seltzer. She is a professional journalist.
Read.

Pumpkin Bread Pudding

This morning when baking my pumpkin bread recipe I used a double sized can of pumpkin, adding coffee as liquid and I got a pudding texture as a result. I love it. I am calling it pumpkin-bread-pudding. I am not sure the neighbors will understand so I won't give this one away. Perhaps if I slice it and bake the slices flat on a tray it can be pumpkin biscotti! Stay tuned!

Recycling Joy and Dust

With my new found transmit energy, I'm tackling the dust, washing the cat and dog hair off the couch cover, washing three pairs of sneakers a friend gave me, and dismantling the mountain of cardboard boxes: 18 years worth, piled up in the cellar. Dust city! Eventually, God and dog willing, I must tackle the teetering paper stacks in my studio it is now a health and safety hazard.

I dug out my little red wagon from underneath the boxes. It is a wooden wagon with detachable sides for grocery shopping or attaching Lily to haul stuff - a joke. This wagon is just like the one I sent my brother down the driveway in, when he was two and a half and I was seven. He turned at the bottom of the hill and hit gravel. He got a weensy cut over his top lip the size of an ant, in the shape of a musical rest. I am forever blamed for his cosmetic imperfection and it went on my permanent record. When my mother introduced me to his girlfriend, she said "Oh, she's the one who gave Peter the scar above his lip".

I'm baking pumpkin breads for neighbors - new and old, cleaning the crumb tray in the toaster, vacuuming the dog hair. This is what shrinking daylight does to me.

Savory Sisters

I love savory food: meat muffins and mashed potatoes on a cone!

Barter

How many loaves of my home made sourdough bread do you need to cut my grass?

Meat Muffin

When I made meat loaf last night I added five cups of oats and two cups of chic peas to my regular formula. It is more like a Thanksgiving stuffing or a savory muffin, a meat muffin!

Monks Hours

We are back to monks hours here at the ghetto palace. Bill's alarm goes off at four AM and although I have not been able to get up at that hour the past two mornings, this morning I was on his schedule. I made coffee, clipped the cats nails and ate two bites of cold leftover meat loaf. The neighborhood is quiet. When I poured a shot of milk to heat in the smallest size jam jar for my coffee the cat leapt over to it and Lily made one loud baritone bark. I glanced over to the window above the sink, luckily it was closed. The new neighbors bedroom windows are four feet away. They have small children, and I don't want to wake them. In our town when two people rent an apartment six people move in. Families spill out onto the street playing, shouting, fighting, barking. It's the opposite of the town I grew up in but I wouldn't trade it for the world. My unemployed neighbors spend the day watching their kids, and the traffic driving by, and I spend the day watching them.

Jim Sollisch

Jim Sollisch article. Cooking is Freedom!
The Art of Repetition article here.

Alley Cat

Sammy has a new friend, a black cat with white whiskers who sits on our windowsill in the alley and meows at him! This cat moved in with our new neighbors next door. This is the first time Sammy has not paid attention to our toast making. It must be love.

A Dirtying Machine!

My washing machine is rusted and now stains our clothes. A washer in reverse. A dirtying machine.

Skunk Alert

Last night I put Lily's leash on and opened the door to the back yard. Lily pulled and I could see that it wasn't a cat she wanted to chase, it was a black skunk with a white stripe and its tail was up. I yanked her back inside. Luckily she didn't get sprayed.