Once upon a time long, long ago, long before words like gluten, trans fats, cholesterol and diabetes were part of our everyday conversation there were Oreos.
Read More
Brisket
My mother was insecure in life and insecure in the kitchen. Having me around made her nervous, so I was forbidden to watch. I didn’t learn to cook in her kitchen…a story for a different day. With her limited cooking skills, she cooked the same menu every week: Swiss Steak on Monday (barely edible – an insult to the neutral nation of Switzerland), some sort of chicken on Tuesday, spaghetti on Wednesday, meat loaf on Thursday, standing rib roast for Shabbat on Friday. Sunday we either brought in deli or she made her company meal of brisket and had relatives over.
She had learned to cook from her older sister’s housekeeper; I have some of her recipes. The spaghetti sauce is pretty good. She prided herself on her brisket, which I’ve come to understand was dry and not flavorful. But that was her company meal, served with canned peas and scalloped potatoes. This particular Sunday, she had my father’s oldest sister, my Aunt Pauline and Uncle Harry over. We ate in the dining room with the good china and nice linens. My mother made a careful plate with a few slices for each person at the table. But Uncle Harry had an appetite and asked for more. Mother hadn’t counted on that. She had only cut and cooked so many slices per person…no extra servings. Harry was quite upset and told her so in no uncertain terms. This was not the hospitality he was accustomed to. I was a teenager and sat quietly, absorbing the lessons of gracious hosting, even when offering dry brisket. It was a lesson not lost on this young one.
Digger Bread
Baking Digger bread had only one stipulation — you had to give it away for free.
Read More
Eating Like an American
At Burger King, we ate with our hands!
Read More
Island Style by Peter Merriman
I started cooking because I was hungry. In fact, I'm still hungry—all the time.
Read More
Second career
At the time, in 2006, it seemed a promising idea. I had just retired (early) from a long career at Stanford. One is eligible to retire when age plus years of service add up to the magic number 75. Having started fresh out of college and worked straight through, my relative youth was augmented by many years of service, and at age 49 I bid full time work adieu. My new beginning was a launch into the waters of the then-emerging world of online retail.
My college roommate has always answered the siren call of wanderlust, so my husband and I joined her for a trip to southeast Asia. While there, she and I were much impressed by the handiwork of local women’s craft guilds. Hand loomed silk, and objects made in silver, are a particular regional specialty. Once back home, we plotted and planned, extended contacts made in Cambodia, and launched an online store. We named the company RH Pumpkin, combining our last names and the beautiful silver pumpkins that were a signature item in our retail line.
The fun part? Sourcing and choosing the products – beautiful handloomed scarves and pillow covers; silver boxes of all description; paintings on silk; Christmas ornaments (what did the Cambodian artisans think about those orders?) Photographing the items for our website. The less fun parts? Managing online shopping cart solutions before those were simple plug-and-play, dealing with customs, and managing inventory in two separate locations. The business of business is to make a profit, and since that didn’t transpire to the level we envisioned, we eventually shut down operations.
Nonprofits have picked up the idea of supporting women’s craft collectives globally and we salute their success. Third career anyone?
Would a Coalition Government be Possible in the United States?
What happened to the Greens and why doesn't the Tea Party split with the Republican Party? Musings from a non-expert in the matter.
Read More
1971: A Hair Odyssey
The late ’60s were exciting, turbulent times, especially for a young man growing up in a Catholic seminary. When I entered the Juniorate of the Brothers of the Sacred Heart in Pascoag, RI in 1966, there were 24 of us guys (most of whom were gay, I now realize), from all parts of New York/New England. We were the future of the Order, just as hundreds of young men who had come before us over the past half century. But something happened along the way–Vatican II, rock music, flower power, the anti-war movement, the political and cultural awakening enabled by the Beat movement and personified by the Hippie movement. That awakening decimated American seminaries, as religious candidates began to question their faith and tuned in to personal discovery and freedom. By my sophomore year, twelve of us remained; by my junior year, only 3. The Order, reeling from the loss of so many young and middle-aged brothers, shut down the Juniorate, sold off the property, and shipped the three of us seminarians to Woonsocket to attend Mt St Charles, one of the Brothers’ high schools.
There I began to reenter the secular world, going to school with regular local kids, and returning to the Brothers’ residence (a former hospital–my bedroom had been Minor Surgery, complete with blood spatters all over the ceiling) at night. During summer vacation after my junior year, I heard about the strange event called Woodstock, and shook my head in wonderment and confusion. When I returned to school in the fall, I remember vividly my friends recounting their adventures at Woodstock–they were profoundly changed by that experience, and suddenly the world had changed for me. I had had an aha! moment that changed the course of my own life. I quickly began to question my faith, all that I had been brought up to believe. Perhaps it was the times, because I very quickly shed the burden of all that Catholic weight from my shoulders–an epiphany of Paulian proportions.
And of course, my outward appearance began to change with the time. Even with the strict seminary dress code, I began to let my sideburns drop (like Neil Young’s), and my hair lengthen as much as permitted. By the end of senior year, I had donned a whole new perspective on life, as an idealist atheist, heading off to college to become a psychologist. As part of that new image, I vowed to let my hair down.
And just at the right time. The Boston of 1970 was a hotbed of antiwar protest and hippie culture, and I easily slipped into the student lifestyle. And, the music! The Beatles, The Stones, Cream, The Who, and King Crimson dominated the turntable in our dorm living room. And then Jethro Tull caught my attention–there was something about the English flute-folk sensibility combined with electric-guitar power that made me instantly follow Ian Anderson. Then and there, I vowed to grow my hair like my new hero.
And so I did, much to Mom and Dad’s chagrin. Dad would refer to me as my son “Jesus.” And Mom, who didn’t want me to go into the seminar at 14, now regretted that I had left, and was an atheist to boot! Mom had recurring happy dreams that I came home with my hair cut…
And so it went through college, all the way through graduation (see my attached booth photo right around graduation time). I had lived the hippie dream, as I had vowed. I wore a purple velvet suit (hand tailored by my talented teenage cousin) to my graduation dinner. And, when one of my parents’ friends approached me during the spring of my senior year about applying for a job with his organization–the CIA, I was aghast at the thought of having to cut my hair! You imagine correctly that the thought of working for the CIA was abhorrent, even immoral, and my prized hair remained unthreatened.
But of course, all things must change. After graduation, I took a temporary job managing TopCopy, a Xerox copy center, while I pondered my future. Not law school, not medical school, not psychotherapy, not an academic path…I gravitated instead to a career in public administration, and set about applying to masters programs.
To my good fortune, my terrific girlfriend had even more terrific parents who took an interest in my career. “If you’re interested in public management, why don’t you get an MBA with a public administration program,” they reasoned. Back then, business school was immoral to the Hippie world view, so that idea took some convincing. Thank god I listened to them, applied to business schools, and got into a dream program, just as they suggested.
It was time to grow up. Shortly after I signed my admission letter, I made the decision to cut my hair for the first time in five years. As my girlfriend accompanied me to the barber shop, my nervousness was only exceeded by the completely blase attitude of the barber. Quite a punctuation to mark the end of a life phase…
Wilbur
My very first car was a 1953 Chevy Truck we named Wilbur. Not much to say other than that right now, but it was a cool car to have in high school!
Bad Haircut
In sixth grade I was a bonafide punk rocker and wanted a haircut to match. I was living in an upwardly mobile community where fitting in and excelling were the norm. (This is perhaps why I was drawn to punk rock; I never quite bought the materialist zeitgeist.) I was at a friend’s grandfather’s house, and my friend (also a punker) was telling me how his grandfather had been the neighborhood barber in his village in rural Mexico when he was younger. I got the bright idea that we should both get buzz cuts right then, which other than the mohawk was the predominant punk-rock style. Luckily, Granpapa was game. He wouldn’t need scissors for what we wanted; just an electric razor would do. We asked for a “Number One,” meaning the shortest cut the razor could deliver other than baldness. I felt conformity drop off me with each lock hitting the ground. Twenty minutes later, I had nothing more than peach fuzz on my entire head. I felt proud but scared of what people would think. And yet I soon as I thought that, I’d remind myself that I didn’t care what people thought! (Though I did. The cycle between acceptance and independence has always been a roller coaster for me.) When my mother got home that night, she was shocked and told me in no uncertain terms how absolutely terrible my hair looked, and that I was going to be made fun of the next day at school. I was so upset that I ran out of the house and slammed the door and walked by myself for two hours, perhaps my first real foray into adolescent angst. The next day as I put books in my locker, I heard two kids whispering about how bad I looked. “You can see his scalp!” they giggled. Lucky for me I decided to not care and felt great the next week when I went to my first punk rock show, my scalp glistening with sweat as I slam-danced with abandon.
