Her room came to me in a dream last night. Just a door with a window straight across halfway down the hall in our pokey ranch. A room suitable for a penitent. One who had never committed a sin, and never would, except maybe to listen. There was barbarous cabinetry purpose built on two walls, the weird whorls of unsuitable fir plywood peeking out from the muddy Early American stain. A nightstand, nothing but a cube with a hatch, made from the same awful stuff, standing by the bed jammed up against the wall. Opposite was a closet with doors that slid back and forth if you stuck your finger in a little dish let into the wood. Inside the closet was a scuttle to get in the attic. We’d put a ladder up and I’d weasel up through the dresses made from tissue paper patterns bought at J.J. Newberry’s to get to the little hole to rescue the Christmas decorations every year until I got too big to fit, too.
Her wall had a bookshelf freighted with Nancy Drew mysteries and I don’t know what all. There was a little lacquered jewelry box from Japan, or maybe Korea, that her aunt the EVAC nurse gave her to hold all the jewelry she’d never own.
Her eye tooth and the one next to it was slightly misaligned. It was almost imperceptible, but it made her smile her own. They robbed her of even that with braces on her teeth. Her hair and eyes were the same color brown. She wore it ironed out straight with a part as straight as a ruler.
My mother took me to a dusty hall abandoned by odd fellows to sit on folding chairs along a wall with my legs swinging to watch her dance. She wore one of those glittering dancing bear costumes and tap shoes and a weird spangled dinner plate on her head with a strap to keep it on. When they all danced in unison they were anything but. They made a racket like a hundred typewriters bashing out a hundred different misspelled messages. But she could never possibly be more beautiful than that.
She was the only girl because a mother doesn’t count. My father had some special place in his heart where only she could enter. We wouldn’t bother knocking on that door, even if we knew where to find it. It was like the door to the only bathroom in a house when she was in it. Life was different for her.
She’d enlist her little brothers in her schemes. We sat like imbeciles while she reeled off the rules and laid out the board for Park and Shop, and we’d wander the board aimlessly because she wanted us to. My little brother cried when he got a parking ticket because he couldn’t make up his mind which make of car to buy, and was commanded to stop at two car dealers on the way home. He told her he didn’t know two kinds of cars and she said it was OK and he could go home anytime anyway. But I was a little older and even then I knew there were rules and you can’t always go home anytime.
Mom put Our Bodies Our Selves on her shelf to be her new bible and sent her to some frozen college to fill her head with anything they could conjure that wasn’t Nancy Drew. She spent her life wandering the country looking for some life that was never on offer no matter how many rocks she turned over. Eventually she died alone in a trailer in Arizona of nothing in particular. She can’t be my big sister anymore because I passed her on my calendar while hers stands still.
One never knows when it’s the last opportunity to play Park and Shop with your sister.
I will now attempt the lowest form of internet content. No, not pictures of cats.
Hey, leave me out of it. I’m not currently doing anything bad, mostly because I’m asleep.
There is a circle of intertunnel hell below the feline meme zone: recipes. Only taking pictures of restaurant food while on vacation ranks lower. But by golly, I’m wading into this pool. I’m going to teach you how to make roasted garlic tomato sauce. Why? Because I had to learn how to do it, and misery loves company.
I’m in Merida, Yucatan, Mexico. They’ve heard of Italians. Rumors, mostly. The local idea of Italian food drifts into the orange sauce category. We’ve always lived in the blood red culinary world. Other than jarred Prego, they don’t cater to anyone who wishes to cook Italian food at home. Their ground tomatoes come in a little box, about the size of your child’s juice box. If you make tomato sauce using it as an ingredient, it comes out with the flavor, texture, and color of off-brand bark mulch after a heavy rain.
It’s also nearly impossible to find things like ricotta cheese, pecorino romano cheese, or blocks of mozzarella cheese. They have their own cheese here, called manchego, and they like it better than they like me, I guess, so we have to make do. But we got weary of bad tomato sauce, and pledged to do better.
It’s interesting to note that Mexicans basically invented the tomato. They grew wild in the Andes (tomatoes, not Mexicans), but it was Mexicans who first cultivated them as a crop in a serious way. When the various conquistador types showed up looking for free-range doubloons, they discovered tomatl, and brought them back to Europe. I assume an Italian eventually stole some from Spain, because I’m Italian, and that’s how we roll, and the rest is history, and pizza.
So Roma tomatoes are grown everywhere here, called jitomate Roma, and they’re terrific. They’re not particularly Mexican, though, or Italian, or European of any stripe. They are grown here, but they’re the result of modern plant breeding in the USA. At any rate, with inexpensive, easy to find tomatoes available all over our city, I should be able to make tomato sauce. Then again, I should be able to understand differential equations, since I was taught them in school. I can’t recall what the drive train in a car has to do with math with letters in it, so don’t count on cheating off me in class. But I can make a fairly credible tomato sauce equation.
So here goes: first, go to the Santiago marketplace and get some tomatoes. We’re feeding four people, so get 18 or 20 of them.
If you’re new to the cooking game, I suppose I should mention the tomatoes are on the right. The fruits on the left are called limes. These are important. I don’t want you to get malaria, so mix the gin you see in the background with quinine water and put a slice of lime in it. I swear by it. I drank it in Maine all the time, and never got malaria.
Now cut the tomatoes in half lengthwise, and nip out the belly button from the stem.
If you haven’t had your gin yet, put your delirium tremens to work for you and drizzle some olive oil on your metal baking tray in a wild pattern.
With all your tomatoes face down, like a keg party at 3 AM, get a bunch of garlic and a big cebolla (white onion), slice them up, and toss them willy nilly on the tomatoes. The willy nilly arrangement adds zest, I guess.
Salt, pepper, and pepperoncino (red pepper flakes) are the last of the ingredients, except maybe the most important one. I’ll explain that later.
We’re cooking in Merida, remember? We need an oven. Ovens are pretty scarce around here, at least in the rental house market we haunt. We have one, though. It’s about the size of a shoe box, and the dials are all marked in soccer. You need to get about 425 degrees Fahrenheit, which is something like 220 degrees C.
Put the tomatoes up high on the racks in the oven for 45 minutes. They’ll look like this:
You grab the burnt skins and pull them off, because you will have no skin in this game:
Then you build a Time Masheen and travel back in time to buy a vegetable mill on Amazon, and have it delivered to an Amazon Locker down the street because the chances of anything being delivered to your house are pretty slim.
Then you put everything from the tray into the mill, and crank. I am a crank, so I find this easy. Your mileage may vary. After a while, the good stuff is in the bowl, and you can throw away the mulch that’s left in the mill.
And here’s what you get for your trouble:
Yeah. Red, not orange. A hint of arrabbiatafrom the pepper flakes, roasted garlic flavor from the, you know, roasted garlic, and some sweetness from the onion. Bad jarred tomato sauces and Clemenza just dump in sugar to kill the acid, but you don’t need it if you cook this right.
Now, climb back in your Time Masheen, go back a month or two, buy a bunch of pots, fill them with semillas de albahaca grande, otherwise known as basil seeds, and wait. Because you can’t find fresh basil here to save your soul. You’ll just get the same, “You mean cilantro, senor?” from everyone. You. Need. Fresh. Basil.
Why, yes, I do get strange looks from the cleaning lady, because I don’t grow dope like a normal gringo, but by gad, we have fresh basil in our salsa tomate.
It occurs to me now that the books I read when I was young affected me deeply, although it didn’t seem that way at the time. They weren’t presented to me in some sort of Skull & Bones ceremony as sacred texts or anything. It’s just what we had hanging around.
Over 50 years ago, many a child received a well rounded education outside of school. For us, books were scarce, because they were relatively expensive, but the libraries were much better than today, so we weren’t starved for reading material.
I think today’s children are much less well read, and they don’t get exposed to important, goodhearted allegorical images and concepts early in life as much as we did back in the day. Actually, I’m certain of that, because the third book on my list is currently banned. I’m sure others will end up on the pyre sooner or later, if they aren’t already. And the local library? It’s an expensive but useless civic appendix that only exists to collect vile stuff in one place.
This list isn’t intended to be exhaustive. I’ll only list what I can remember of books that were important enough to own, and have malingering on the shelf in our house. They got read all the more, some over and over, because there weren’t that many of them:
Aesop’s Fables– Aesop, I guess
It’s the bargain basement of morality. Something for everyone. Allegory is an important concept to grasp, and the sooner you get it, the sooner you realize that there can be meaning in the subtext of everything.
Aesop’s is training wheels for your soul. As an added bonus, if you’ve read Aesop’s you know where Bug Bunny re-runs got their material:
Grimm’s Fairy Tales– Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm
A fairy tale is a whole ‘nother kettle of fish from a fable. Grimm’s is a great introduction to folk traditions, some of which once warned kids off of accepting sweets and story hours from weird strangers. The concept stuck with you, even when the gingerbread house morphed into a man in a van with candy, or a welfare program with strings.
Disney ransacked the Fairy Tale aisle, and he understood them perfectly. The spice of danger was introduced into a young person’s life a little at a time. Now parents watch slasher movies with their toddlers, and worship Halloween. Not the same thing.
Disney wasn’t the only one to make hay from the Grimms. Drop the book and turn on the TV, and Fractured Fairy Tales reruns were on the case:
McElligot’s Pool– Dr. Suess
Dr. Suess showed us youngins that the English language could get up and mambo, and morph into ragtime if you mastered it. Since it rhymed, it introduced children to predicting where a sentence was going as you were reading, mixed in with the fireworks of surprising turns of phrase. Chat GPT could take a lesson.
The good doctor’s Prosody 101 course introduced children to fluency, understanding poetry, reading aloud (which supports public speaking), and is an excellent foundation for writers of all kinds.
Inside all the fun, there are important concepts introduced in books like McElligot’s Pool. It encouraged the reader to listen to others, but also to use their own imagination to see things others might miss. It argued that a vivid imagination and a healthy stubbornness might win over others in the long run. Suess encouraged the reader to look the world over for inspiration, without demanding an alienation from the familiar world to do it. His open-minded view of the world got this book banned for his troubles.
Mike Mulligan and His Steam Shovel– Virginia Lee Burton
I swear I was never able to become an Ivory Tower intellectual because of Mike Mulligan. That little book infects your mind with the concept that practical labor has value, both in a physical and a metaphysical sense. Ingenuity, hard work, and adaptation to circumstances can even happen in a ditch, you know. Those things are harder to find in buildings covered with ivy.
It’s not simply a soppy story because it has a happy ending. Mike Mulligan teaches you that time marches on, and you can fight progress with all your might, but sometimes it’s better to adapt and survive in a brave new world.
In case you don’t know what a steam shovel is, here’s one in action:
Greek Mythology–
I can’t remember the title of this particular book. It served as a pattern book for humanity. Archetypes. After fables and fairy tales, archetypes need to be introduced, and myths is as good a place as any to find them. Greek gods are mostly just descriptions of extraordinary persons, albeit with a key to the executive washroom on Olympus. The pantheon of gods is a catalog of human behaviors, writ large, if you discount the lightning bolts and winged shoes at par. The human horizon is bounded by myths, not facts. This is the book that taught me to look for them.
The Call of the Wild– Jack London
We had White Fang, too. It’s too facile to say you learn about nature from Jack London. What you really learn is that nature has no opinion. You’re supposed to test yourself against its arbitrary whims. It’s a scoreboard, not an opponent. London’s books showed that man, civilization, and nature are three legs of a stool, and something is always trying to saw off at least one of the legs..
Swiss Family Robinson– Johann David Wyss
This book is pretty old (1812), but doesn’t seem so. Unlike most man against nature tales, it pits an entire family against the elements, and eventually against the local pirates. It established the primacy of the nuclear family in overcoming odds together, and explored the friction that happens when people are added to it.
The Three Musketeers– Alexandre Dumas
Forget the Ginger/Mary Ann dilemma. You have to choose early on between Dumas and Victor Hugo. Dumas was ever so much more fun than Hugo. The book demonstrates what lies one step past the adventurous family. The Three Musketeers is a great introduction to growing up, physically, mentally, and morally, and what happens when a young man leaves the nest to make his way in the world. The story demonstrated that notions of individual honor should be subsumed in fellowship with others, or they don’t mean much. It was also a blast to read.
Treasure Island and Kidnapped – Robert Louis Stevenson
The original title of Treasure Island was the blase: The Sea Cook: A Story for Boys. In its day, it was well regarded by every author who mattered, but eventually fell into disfavor with the usual suspects who lord over libraries and faculty lounges. Robert Louis Stevenson has enjoyed a better reputation in the recent past, but still nowhere near his due. These two books are basically the Ur-volumes of their respective genres, and no matter what the original title says, girls like them too.
Treasure Island is a bildungsroman, and no one has mapped out the moral and psychological transformation of a young man in a more lively maelstrom of action. Treasure Island is in the running for the most durable stories ever told, with uncountable adaptations in text, radio, stage, and screen. Stevenson’s image of a pirate with one leg, an eye-patch, and a parrot on his shoulder remains the canonical form.
At first, Kidnapped seems like more of the same, but it’s more than just a coming of age story. It introduces the concept of justice, not just fairness, which are often two different things. It also illuminates the possibility that two very different people can come together to right wrongs for very different reasons. It’s a fantastic suspense novel, too. The mental image of young David Balfour creeping up his creepy uncle’s staircase in the dark, only to find out it ends in a bottomless pit when lightning flashes, is the scariest thing I ever read, at least until I grew up and got a look at a 1040 Form.
Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas– Jules Verne
I suppose you could lump Verne in with Stevenson and Dumas in the adventure category, but you’d be making a mistake. There’s plenty of adventure in his books, but the direction the adventure comes from is completely different. It’s technological, geographical, and scientific. It puts the explorer front and center in the action, and often has the whole world as its backdrop, indeed, other worlds, too. Jules Verne’s men of action are the wellspring of characters like Indiana Jones. Captain of the football team and valedictorian rolled into one.
A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court– Mark Twain
This might seem an odd choice as the primo example of Twain if you had The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn on the shelf. But Connecticut Yankee is a completely underrated book, especially for a young person. It’s funny as hell, which makes it lively reading. But it has trenchant commentary on economics buried in it (Hank almost gets hanged after trying to explain that how much you earn is not as important as what you can buy with it). It’s not quite the first science fiction story, but it’s close. It might be the first time travel book ever written.
It’s a better illustration of the evils of slavery than even Huckleberry Finn, because he points out its evils as a universal practice, not just a local problem. Twain also eviscerates the very idea of inherited nobility, but tempers his opinion by pointing out that progress without checking with Chesterton’s Fence first can be just as unpleasant as being backward.
It was pretty prescient, too. It was written in 1889, and it predicted the kind of slaughter that trench warfare and technology run amok would turn World War I into.
Also hidden in the text is an amusing and touching exposition of courtly love. Hank Morgan falls for “Sandy” while being constantly annoyed with her. A love that lasted centuries.
Of course there are many roads to enlightenment, so you can list all the books you preferred in the comments. If you put Harry Potter in there, I may come looking for you, though.
It’s useful to compare and contrast mundane things when you’re in a strange place, and your audience mostly isn’t. I’ve seen a metric boatload of videos about Merida, Mexico, where I’m currently living. I watched them, along with videos of all sorts of other places, to help make up my mind where to bivouac next. The most useful were the quotidian entries. People simply walking around, or driving around. The best of them had no narration or music. They were experiential, so they were useful for the task at hand, which is to figure out what it’s really like in a particular place.
These are hard to find, generally. Videos about far flung places are almost uniformly tedious chronicles of vacations. The current generation seems to worship Instagrammable vacations above all things. They aver that their lives won’t be satisfactory until they’re on vacation all the time.
They’re nuts. By necessity, I have been in consulates and airports and taxis and Ubers and hotels and restaurants recently. I don’t know what vacation is anymore, but it ain’t vacation. “There’s no place like home” once meant something it doesn’t in the parlance of our times. Ho hum.
When home is a vacuous gray-on-gray plastic and concrete dovecote in some megalopolis, you could end up thinking the way they do. The suburbs aren’t much better. I’ve often lamented the rise of the snouthouse. It’s a symptom of the same idea: Nothing matters about your home except leaving it. Remember to Live Laugh Love, of course, but do it elsewhere, not under the sign in your living room.
So instead of making a video of my wife and I stuffing food in our faces, declaiming that everything is amazing in Merida, I’ll treat you to a simple task here. A doctor’s visit. Not to worry. Nothing major. No splintered bones on display, or gunshot wounds or anything interesting.
I’m required by my health insurance to visit a doctor once a year in Maine, so I have recent experience with the same sort of low level appointment in both places. Let’s compare and contrast, shall we?
The Appointment:
Maine: A doctor in Maine is like Bigfoot, or the pope. Not often available for a sighting. A phalanx of grossly overweight women wearing pajamas and lanyards while drinking out of binkie bottles behind bullet proof glass fills out a little card with a date in the far flung future. No matter what the date, or the time, this appointment will not happen. They will contact you over and over to postpone it again and again. The last time, my appointment was rescheduled numerous times and moved in baby steps from March until it finally landed in October, even though I offered to come on any day of any week, at any time.
Merida: Appointments? Que? Just show up when we’re open. First come, first serve.
The Location:
Maine: A building appurtenant to a hospital. There are fourteen examination rooms, fourteen rotund tattooed nurse’s aides, and one obese doctor. They’re all full of health advice. You know, for you. The walls are covered with posters warning you not to contract diseases unavailable outside of San Francisco bathhouses and wet markets in Wuhan. They also urge you not to kill yourself, for obscure reasons.
Merida: They call them “Doc in the Box” here. These are consultorios attached to farmacias, which are all over the place. I can easily walk to a dozen farmacias. Not all of them have consultorios. There is a modest, clean, tiled waiting room with nothing in it for furnishings other than plastic chairs bolted to the floor. The posters on the wall tell you how to behave in a flood, a fire, or an earthquake. There is, I shit you not, a posted list of all the common medical procedures they offer, with a firm price listed for each. The list is laminated, so I know they don’t change the prices very often. There’s a dentist office upstairs from the consultorio I went to. Same deal. Price list, first come, first serve.
The Process:
Maine: You show up for your five-time postponed appointment ten minutes early. The waiting room is full of people who formerly could only find employment in carnival sideshows, but now represent the general population. I don’t know what they display at freak shows anymore. Maybe a clean-shaven guy wearing a business suit and a tie, with no tattoos on his face?
You wait in the waiting room (duh) for a good long while, because any doctor appointment is kept by sundial, not clock these days. Then you’re led to another waiting room to be pawed at by a noseringed dirigible girl with pink hair you’d forbid your grown male children to talk to, as if they needed that sort of advice. You sit there like a mook for another fifteen or twenty minutes and look at posters with the IKEA instructions for assembling a human on the wall. Then the young, flabby doctor, who you could beat up with both your hands in your pockets, comes in to give you health advice while ignoring any actual maladies you might have.
Merida: The place was open when I arrived at around 9:00 AM. Any doctors who are available are listed with placards on the wall, with their regular hours. I was alone in the waiting room, and had just enough time to figure out exactly what I should do if I was drowning while on fire and the ground was shaking. A mother and her son left the only consultation office and passed by me. There is no receptionist. I heard a voice from behind the door saying “Adelante!, so I went in. There was a trim, serious looking female doctor behind the desk. I’m informed that these are not Dr. Nick Rivieras. They are the same doctors you’d see in a public or private hospital. They just make extra money on their off hours by serving the public directly in consultorios.
She asked me my name, my age, my place of birth, and any allergies, and typed it into her desktop computer. Thus endeth the paperwork. I had written out a translated version of the reason for my visit, and included an acronymed reference to a condition that flummoxed my Maine doctor, but she never batted an eye. She inspected me a little for a few minutes, only interested in my problem, not inventing another one for me, typed some more, and her printer spat out una receta, an all purpose bill, summary of my diagnosis, and a list of four medicines I needed, with instructions, which she signed. She explained as best she could with our language barrier what the instructions meant.
The Bill:
Maine: Pricing is obscure in Maine. Since I was required to go to the doctor by the insurance company, I’m not supposed to pay. They did send me, probably erroneously, the paperwork for the visit, which listed a bill from the doctor’s office for something over $500. Then they haggled it down to $90, and paid that, if memory serves. If I was paying, I’m sure I wouldn’t have had the same luck.
Merida: I was confused a bit. I’d never been, so I asked in halting Spanish, “Where do I pay? In the farmacia?” The doctor smiled and said, “You pay me.” I counted $70 into her hand, and thanked her.
Of course I should point out that Mexico uses the dollar sign for Mexican pesos. At today’s exchange rate, 70 pesos is about four dollars.
The Pharmacy:
Maine: The doctor’s office promises to send your prescriptions to the pharmacy of your choice. They rarely do. You call them over and over, and eventually when you’ve run out, they treat it like an emergency, and forget to call it in even harder. Eventually they read the post-it note or something, and it goes to the pharmacy. They contact you and tell you it’s ready for pickup. You go, and they don’t have it ready, and tell you to come back in two hours. Then you go through a byzantine labyrinth of discount coupons they have on offer to have your wallet vacuumed.
Merida: The farmacia is attached. You just go in there. Although you don’t have to. Unless your prescription is for something very, very sketchy (I have never even met Hunter Biden, so it’s not a problem), any pharmacy will sell you anything they’ve got, whether you have a prescription or not. They’ll deliver it to you, too, usually by a Didi or Uber dude on a motorcycle.
It’s funny, but I mentioned the same problem I was having to the doctor in Maine. He looked in my ear and said there was nothing wrong with me. Then he asked me for the fortieth time to have a covid shot and a colonoscopy.
I also mentioned to the Maine doctor for the umpteenth time that I was still suffering from hypnic headaches. I told him that it was strange, but the only time I didn’t have them was while I was in Mexico. I wondered why that would be, since he and his predecessors had never been able to offer me any relief from them. He answered snidely, “Well maybe you should move to Mexico then.”
There are certain levels of creativity that transcend technique.
I don’t like nearly all modern painters. But have you ever stood in front of a Van Gogh? It’s terrifying stuff. There is technique in it. He did his thing, over and over, always pushing forward, getting faster, further out, until he was simply expressing himself directly. He was deranged. If art is a look into another man’s mind, he gave us a peek into a maniac’s thought process. For example, you don’t critique his painting of the postman. You deal with it.
I think it’s twice as ghastly because he liked the guy. This is my friend. his fingers are turning into snakes.
Just when you’re reeling from that sort of thing, he announces he can take it up a notch, or ten if you’re interested. Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds got nothin’ on him:
Moving on, what, exactly, made titanic egoists like Hemingway, Joyce, and Eliot flop on the floor in front of Ezra Pound, and declare him “il miglior fabbro“? It’s from Dante, and means “the better craftsman,” or something close to that.
In a Station of the Metro
The apparition of these faces in the crowd:
Petals on a wet, black bough.
— Poetry (April 1913)
There’s audacity figured into all this. Some people are good at eliciting gasps. Pound sure did. But audacity alone is just shamelessness. Madonna and a million other talentless people show you what 100 % audacity and a certain moral flexibility, bordering on contortion, can yield. It ain’t art.
The video is Dan Hicks, along with some agglomeration of his Hot Licks. I’m not sure what it takes to put yourself out there like that. He had the chops to be normal, but not the desire. He’s one of those people who needed to sail over the horizon, to see what’s out there. The danger, of course, is that no matter how far you go, the horizon remains the horizon. Whatever. At least he had time to break off rock music’s femur and beat it over the head with it while he was sailing along.
I got up at 3:30 this morning because I had to write something, or die trying. It was about the 1970s. In the dark, alone, sweltering in the silence, I scared myself, just thinking about it. I stopped for a moment to salute il miglior fabbro.
Tag: Bits of my life pulled out and flung on the Internet floor
sippicancottage
A Man Who Has Nothing In Particular To Recommend Him Discusses All Sorts of Subjects at Random as Though He Knew Everything.
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