Let It Be Fat

 “If you eat pork, let it be fat,” my father, Laurence (Larry) Israel Housman translated from the Yiddish so I could understand.  Yiddish was my father's first language growing up in Flatbush Brooklyn, although his only accent was a Brooklyn one. Another expression of his was "Don't be a question mark, be an exclamation point."

He wanted me, a quiet, introspective girl with her nose buried in books to embrace whatever I did with a full heart, even when it was wrong. The advice was great. But even better was what he showed and taught me.

He showed me how to feed squirrels in Riverside Park by tapping on the stone and pebble fence with a peanut in its shell to get them to come to me; taught me  how to pick out a good, second-hand novel and to eat kippers at breakfast on Sunday. He taught me how to fold the New York Times properly (lengthwise in columns) how to stand in a subway car without falling down (bend your knees and sway), and the pleasures of very long, leisurely walks from the Upper West Side of Manhattan to Greenwich Village.  Also how to bait a hook and fishing as meditation.

He introduced me to the Marx Brothers, W.C. Fields., Sherlock Holmes (I've been a Baker Street Irregular ever since) jumbo kosher beef hot dogs, and pistachio ice cream.

He adored my mother and believed she was the best thing that ever happened to him. He proposed to her by writing the names of their future children on a napkin in a Chinese restaurant. They were married three months after they met. They would dance around our living room to Cole Porter’s Songbook sung by Ella Fitzgerald. And by the way, he adored me too.

He believed in judging people by their acts, not their beliefs and did anonymous kindnesses quietly. He wasn't especially correct (at least at home). After a proper dinner served on china and a woven tablecloth at our dining table, he'd lie on the floor in the living room, loosen his belt and discourse and debate with guests, distinguished and not. He knew how to behave when dining out in his Brooks Brothers style attire with business associates or going out to dinner with friends. But at home? He just didn't want to. I was embarrassed as a teenager. Now I cherish those memories.

He relished chatting with people he encountered in the course of the day even if he didn't know them and arguing about politics with an old friend over lunch. These debates became a tradition almost a ritual part of their friendship, like his browsing in bookstores with me and his dances with my mother.

As I grew older, I introduced him to Japanese food, my first serious boyfriend and feminism. There were moments of tension  and conflict but always great love.

Then I moved to France and we only saw each other twice a year, once a year when I came home and once a year when my parents came to visit. Only at the end of his final visit did he tell me he saw what I found special in Paris. I'm glad he finally did since it helped us share something I cared about. 

I haven't mentioned it yet but he loved children, not just his one beloved daughter, all children. He could play with them endlessly.  Unfortunately, he died too young to meet his grandson, whom he would have adored, spoiled and played with like crazy.

When I have a big decision to make, especially an emotional one, I frequently think of him and that gives me strength. And I probably wouldn't be writing at all without his influence. He was one of a kind.

I miss you a lot dad.  Happy Father's Day.

Why I Love Chopsticks

I love chopsticks, not the tune a lot of us learned to play on the piano when we were very young but the eating instruments.  Not the plastic kind with ridges seen in budget Chinese restaurants that have red characters imprinted on them at one end, not the ornately carved ivory ones found in souvenir shops and at the backs of cavernous Chinese grocery stores and not even the high style modernist one chopsticks found in hip stores selling food accessories for the high-end minimalist consumer. No, I love the plain, wooden, rectangular chopsticks that come in a snug paper wrapper that I learned to use about the same time I learned to bang out "chopsticks" on the piano.

 Some wrappers have Chinese symbols or Japanese ones and colorful designs and some don't.  When you slide them out of the wrapper and pull them apart you're ready to go. I use them for stirring vegetables on the stove (but not scrambled eggs) to eat cottage cheese and stir fried meat and vegetables and bits of chicken both shredded and chunked, rice, frozen entrees and almost anything that does not need cutting or spooning to be consumed. They're not good for ice cream, or soup or steak unless it's in small, bite-sized pieces.

 I use them to poke food to see if it's ready to eat and to twirl pasta.  And I don't know why.  How do you explain love?  I do know it doesn't have much to do with learning to use them when I was little when Sunday lunch was spent with my grandmother at Chinese restaurants.  We went to old style "Cantonese" restaurants before people became sophisticated about Chinese food and discovered Szechuan and Hunan and all kinds of other stuff and learned to order what they saw people of Asian descent ordering. My grandmother always ordered "shrimp with lobster sauce" which is probably as close to what people eat in China as pizza is. My parents and I ordered all sorts of things. The chopsticks were one of the high points of the meal(visiting with my maternal grandmother was not) but I left them alone the rest of the week.

 I started to use them a lot in my 20's when I first started doing cooking regularly and some of it was Asian, but that's not why I love using them for everything I can.  It has something more to do with the taste of wooden chopsticks and their feel in my hand and against my teeth.  And  it has something to do with their rectangular shape and unpretentious nature.  No one ever chose wooden chopsticks for a wedding registry.No one cares about how heavy they are or if they're sterling silver.  I just use them and throw them out and get new ones and I know I should care more about wasting trees,by using them but I love them anyway.  And when I see them I want to smile.

What's In A Name?

People still call them coffee shops. The places with formica tables, plastic, colored, leatherette seats, sandwiches, soups (you're in luck if  they're homemade), chilis, bouffant desserts-and coffee-endless cups from a waiter or waitress who might just call you hon.

 Oh and the food's cheap, without being ethnic (unless it's Greek but that's another story) .  The menu doesn't focus on trendy or newly discovered to be healthy ingredients (pigs cheek, truffle oil, wheatgrass, amaranth or gluten-free anything). And there's a lot of food. Sometimes the food is very, very good and sometimes it's not. Busy, noisy and usually badly decorated, coffee shops are unlikely ever to be fashionable.

In New York City, they were around before Starbucks around before one-off coffee places with curated beans and maybe even before (but here I'm not sure) the Italian cafes called “coffee houses” in the Village (Greenwich ) and Brooklyn (pre-hipster, pre-boho). These "coffee houses" still serve great Italian espresso in small cups with lemon zest wrapped around the rim imparting its oily, acid flavor to the drink and provide sweet pastry, great or not- depending on the place. I'm partial to the cannoli.

Other old time places to get coffee and a light meal have fallen by the wayside. The wonderful Horn and Hardart Automats, which were like self-service toy shops in which food appeared seemingly by magic in little glass windows, are gone. Likewise, Schraft's, a chain of lunchrooms where my grandmother would meet other ladies, clad like her in Chanel inspired suits and white gloves . They'd eat nondescript, refined and not very memorable food followed by yummy ice cream, those visits displaying eating as an assertion of taste and class, as it so often is.  Unless you count Starbucks for its shine and chrome, and I wouldn't, the Automats alas have not been replaced. Nor has Schraft's.

Th newer coffee places, frequently with brown or dark green sofas and original  paintings for sale on the walls, have their charms, not least among them comfort and wifi. They're great places to go when you want to write a blog, meet a friend or chat with the curly haired guy with soulful eyes at the next table. I prefer the homey, simple ones to the sweet looking, overpriced frou frou type my grandmother might have preferred (maybe I was wrong about Schraft's not being replaced). But none of them are coffee shops. They lack the bustle, familiarity, large-enough-to-drown-in menus and quickly moving patrons and wait staff.

Coffee shops are unique snapshots of the city, although they're a little harder to find than they used to be.  And they welcome everyone. Inside you'll find breakfast regulars, tourists, lunch pals from the office and people in a rush going God knows where,who can't wait another minute to eat something - sometimes at 10 o'clock at night. And emerging from the maws of an unseen kitchen come homemade bean and chicken soups, mammoth portions of meatloaf, mashed potatoes and string beans, endless varieties of eggs and the biggest piece of apple pie you've ever seen, all at breakneck speed and sometimes if you're lucky, delicious. In a nod to modern tastes and appetites you might even get a veggie burger if you ask for one, maybe even a chopped salad. Always open,usually rushed but with someone always ready to pour you another cup free - and offer you a mint at the cash register. Don't forget to leave a good tip.

.

Home Sweet Home

I live in a place where people mostly live in houses, not apartments. Many have lived in the same neighborhood, not just town or city, for generations. Most people live with another or several others. I live alone. It's the kind of place where when I tell people I lived somewhere else, they ask if I “moved back.” I didn't. Minute differences are acutely observed here. A neighbor remarked upon the fact that I use my front door and not my back to enter and exit. Gardens, local sports teams and restaurants that closed two decades ago are subjects of lively discussion. Sometimes I feel a little lost, a little off kilter. I come from a city with millions of inhabitants, large apartment buildings and, a lively, loud, but friendly street life (New York City) and lived for nine years in a charming,beautiful much more formal one (Paris). You can be ignored in both and I miss a sense of discovery, anonymity and bigness.

In times of personal turmoil and chaos, when my daily assumptions were shattered, or even when I just needed to refresh myself, I would go for long walks in both and lose myself in new streets and unknown faces.

I remember back before SOHO in Manhattan was SOHO, my boyfriend and I used to go down  there occasionally to visit our friends Tony,an artist, and his wife Hatsie in their loft  apartment in a former warehouse. We'd play poker with a loose knit group of friends.  They were like homesteaders on the frontier surrounded by warehouses.  The warehouses were empty and untended looking against the night sky, seeming to lack any context. An Italian bakery was the only homey thing in sight.  Even then, I found the strange, unsettling skyscape somehow soothing and comforting, as if it spoke to something in my soul.

And when I lived in Paris, I'd sometimes get off at unknown metro stations in unfamiliar neighborhoods, sometimes in immigrant areas with North African accented French and see spice and garment stores where I knew the names and uses of nothing and loved being wrapped up briefly in another world.

And now, here I am in a place that lends itself more to discovery by car than on foot, and where so much is different from what I've been used to.  And so, I have adapted. At first, when I was in turmoil or in need of refreshment, I didn't know what to do. But I have found a solution. I have discovered a parallel to the soothing, walks I used to take on crowded streets of strangers.

Here, I take a ride. It needs to be far, past suburbs to small towns and hamlets onto 55 mile an hour two lane roads with simple, clapboard houses standing by the roadside. And then,  in isolated hamlets and onlittle used roads, I feel at peace. It's the same kind of peace I used to feel when I walked unexpected streets in New York or Paris and saw rundown warehouses or stores with foreign writing selling things I'd never seen before. And then I can come home and feel it it really might be home. And that feels good.

Scarier Than the News

Even more depressing than watching the news on TV is watching the ads that go with it.

Hawkers of hemorrhoid remedies, ED cures, adult diapers, affordable funeral homes, drugs to slow memory loss, false teeth cleaners and home nursing services march through my living room hawking their wares and a vision of present or future misery.  All of which they promise their remedies will help to make more bearable—or at least less expensive when it comes to the funeral home.

Hale and hearty as most of my ancestors have been, I'm less likely than most of my friends to need a majority of these services,  but they still cast a sad shadow over my evening, as I think of friends less genetically blessed and the sad fate awaiting them and maybe even me to be totally honest.

It also makes me wonder who is watching, or who the networks think is watching ,the nightly news.

Have the networks simply determined that the demographic watching the news is  a sub group of people over a certain age  which consists of those who  are deaf, incontinent, lack memory, have no money and are planning their imminent departure from this vale of tears.  Although I'm no expert, with ads like these I can't believe their target demographic is any younger than 50  ( even 100 might be too young).

If I'm right, what an insult. Whatever the age range they're targeting, the networks'  prejudices are certainly showing.  With an aunt who at 90 quizzed me about the developmental stages my young son was going through, I know what dangerous garbage age stereotyping is.  Even more scary is what this scenario, if the age assumptions are true, says about the US TV news audience as a whole.  Young people and those in early middle age aren't watching. And given the current state of the newspaper industry, they're probably not reading the news either. And that is even scarier  than both the ads and the news. Because informed citizens are essential for a healthy democracy.  So I can only hope the networks and advertisers are wrong.

Walking the Walk

If you are passionately committed to a goal, it really focuses your efforts.  My infant son so desperately wanted to walk that even when he crawled it looked like he was impatient to walk--and he managed to at 10 months.  But he didn't do it alone.  He had the very active and vocal support of those around him, especially his family.
Businesses and organizations also require support, both external and internal, to achieve their goals.
I've been doing some reading lately about different organizational models of how to make businesses and other organizations more effective and efficient.  Here too commitment and passion--in this case coming from the leadership-- really count, but so too do mobilizing all levels of the organization involved in achieving that goal. 
Doing so effectively depends in large measure on the quality of the relationships within an organization.
Trust, individual accountability and respect are all key components and I believe they depend on the little, everyday things: knowing that the agenda presented to the group is for real and not a pretense: trusting that the communication requested by leadership to accomplish a mission will in fact be welcome, even if some of the content doesn't paint a rosy picture of the current situation; feeling that cross-departmental work groups really exist to provide feedback, not just to comply with some external consultant's recommendations.  Leadership, communication and training can all help ensure the kind of quality I'm talking about.  And while no organization can ever achieve perfection in this regard, this kind of functioning is itself an organizational goal worth striving for.  We can always do better, but that's a reason to try harder, not to give up.

"Smart" Love

When is a phone not a phone? When it's really a mini-computer with a phone stuffed inside that you have to find the icon for and place in the right place even to make a phone call- and when doing this doesn't really matter for a lot of people, because they just want to use the internet connection part of the computer and don't really care about the "phone" at all.

And I discovered this recently when, as a late adopter I got and fell madly in love with my new "smart" phone--although its intelligence is at least debatable, it can certainly put me in touch with all the information, photos, music, movies and anything else our smart and stupid world produces in more places, times and ways than anything else I can think of. And despite my recently discovered addiction to Angry Birds (I swear this time it's uninstalled for good) and my vast new knowledge of more news about friends acquaintances and strangers, celebrity trivia and world events than could ever be useful, I am in awe of this tiny miracle.

Maybe it's the size- computers, netbooks, even ipads are too big to be cute and cuddly or to slip in your pocket and take wherever you go. Or maybe it's the sense that I am provided for, looked after and connected at all times through its many services and ministrations (I have a mirror and flashlight, an alarm and a phone, music and news even when I'm in bed at night). Or maybe, since I lived in France for 9 years and it feels like my second home, being able to listen to my favorite French radio stations on Paris time anywhere-as if transported back there by magic is what does it for me.

In fact, I think it's the magical aspect of the whole thing that gets to me.

Although you could make an argument that the addictive, connected at any cost, focus inhibiting ability to connect, scan, dissect everything and anything is destructive of attention spans, real human connections and serious work, I would say there's still something magical to it. As someone who grew up in the twentieth century, having access to people and things that are important to me, even at a distance, at the moment I am longing for them, being able to discover, even at a remove, people places and ideas I would not otherwise encounter, at least with such a sense of immediacy, is magical. And I am very happy to have that magic, even if, like all magic, it is in part based on illusion.

Negotiating Reality: Or Why I Don't Fold The Laundry

Negotiating Reality: Or Why I Don’t Fold the Laundry

When I first started to write this blog, I thought the subject was too provocative. I think I still feel a little guilty that I don’t do it. After all, part of what I do is encourage people to practice the self-discipline to achieve goals.

But, since choosing which goals we want to achieve is part of the joy of being a grown up, I decided to reveal my “dirty little secret”. Of course, that doesn’t mean we can do whatever we want to do. I wouldn’t recommend deciding not to shower or bathe, or not throwing out the moldy thing in the fridge that you left there 3 or 4 weeks ago, to anyone living with others, for example.

Anyway, to get back to my subject -- I don’t like folding the laundry. I don’t like doing the laundry either, but since I don’t want to smell like I spent the night in a garbage can, I do it anyway.

I was raised to believe that even if you can afford to hire someone to do your laundry and fold it for you, you should learn how to do it yourself so you can be self-sufficient and not spoiled brats.

Well, I didn’t become a spoiled brat, but I don’t fold laundry. If it needs to be hung so it doesn’t wrinkle, I do it (reluctantly, without joy and as slowly as possible). The rest of the stuff gets stuffed in drawers. Does it wrinkle? Not the sweaters – and I never really notice if my undergarments are slightly creased –although I have heard tales of people who (shudder) iron them.

Recently, I got this great idea, I’ll buy a set of large, attractive hampers with lids that can line my bedroom walls instead of dressers and drop the laundry in there, nothing crumpled, everything gained. No fuss no muss and attractive (to me) bedroom furniture at the same time!

So, why am I writing about this? No, it’s not because I want to share my deepest self or start a not folding movement. And it’s not because I want to eliminate those prospective clients/employers/friends or suitors who would be horrified by my lack of laundry etiquette, although I may have done so.

But I did want to share something I’ve learned about reality: Sometimes, it can be negotiated. If you examine your assumptions about what things mean (not folding= you’re spoiled, for example) you may discover some ideas you take for granted that you don’t really believe anymore, just like I did.

While there are some things I have to do even though I don’t like to, because of the costs of the consequences in terms of health, housing, morality or legal problems (cleaning the house, paying the bills, etc.) and there are some I love doing (writing, cooking, traveling, etc.) there are a lot of things that I don’t like doing that are negotiable.

They’re the things I may be able to get out of, if I examine my preconceptions about what I should do or should want to do.

In this vein, I remember when my son was tiny and he lectured me because, according to Barney, I’d left the faucet turned on too long. I didn’t like his doing that.

I’m all for water conservation, but I didn’t want my behavior at home legislated by some imaginary being on television. And, similarly, we don’t need the things we do in our lives legislated by some imaginary rulebook that we’ve incorporated internally but which was originally written by our parents, neighbors, friends or employers. Even if the rulebook comes from ourselves, it’s a good idea to re-examine it from time to time. We change and so do our ideas and circumstances.

If you hate doing something or don’t do it well, maybe you don’t have to do it at all. Or maybe, you can get away with doing it well enough to get by, and focus on spending time on the things that are important to you.

An ex-boyfriend used to say he wanted to do everything he did the best he could. He was shocked that I didn’t feel the same way. Well I don’t. I want to do what I love and care about the best I can. As for the things I don’t like doing, I’ll do them the best I have to or not at all if possible.

Life is short. I don’t know about you, but if I don’t focus on doing the things I care about, I never seem to get around to doing them.

So go ahead, don’t fold the laundry, or vacuum twice a week, or read the right newspaper, or keep up-to-date, or shave or jog – or whatever else it is you don’t really want to do. As long as you’re willing to put up with the consequences, it’s OK. Go ahead and spend the time doing something you really enjoy– or doing nothing at all.

Now that’s a really revolutionary idea!

I welcome your comments. If you enjoyed reading this, please share it with others.