Table Manners

Of all days, I should not have chosen this particular one to run out of the house coatless. The sun disappeared by the end of my three-hour ESL class, and a cold drizzle has been falling ever since as I corrected exams and planned supplemental lessons for our remaining days. With so many students from so many different cultures, the textbook barely covers their needs, from puzzling grammar to pronunciation challenges. As for me, I need nourishment today beyond my usual Subway sandwich.

I need food for body and soul, and the Guatemalan place next door, with its upbeat music and usual contingent of laughing workmen in Carhartts, is just the place. It’s not fancy, but as the midday meal is the main meal, it isn’t cheap either. I go there when I want to practice my Spanish, eavesdropping on the other diners and listening to the music—about love mostly, as it is everywhere.

There aren’t many people this time, but I order the chicken soup and am rewarded with a steaming bowl of veggies in a broth rich with fat globules and garnished with lime wedges and cilantro. The chicken, however, a fried leg joint, is served on the side with a bowl of rice, some tortillas, and a spoon. What to do? I haven’t eaten chicken with the fingers since I was a child. My father, who wore Dickies like all blue-collar workers in the Sixties, ate chicken that way, as well as pork chops turkey drumsticks. Then Emily Post told me in a TV commercial that was just for picnics, and I took up my utensils. The waitress seems mildly surprised when I ask for a knife and fork, but I don’t mind. It’s not like a grey-haired white lady will look inconspicuous here no matter what she does.

 A crew of a dozen tree-trimmers hustles in from the rain, all jokes and back slaps. They push together the four tables nearest mine and, without consulting the menu, all order what I’m having. I’ve chosen well. As I finish sawing away at my meat and shredding it from the bone, I note how they scoop their rice into the broth and then tear into the chicken bare-handed, the way my dad used to., and for a moment, I am ten again. I hold that feeling for a long while, waiting for the waitress to bring my check. These people are in no hurry, and that’s fine with me today.

From the table beyond, a new diner catches my eye, a middle-aged black man. I’ve never seen a non-Hispanic here before, and we two outsiders swap conspiratorial grins as he consults the menu, visibly puzzled. I laugh in recognition.

By the time I settle the bill and pass him on my way out, he’s still reading the menu. He asks in a charming Caribbean accent what’s good here, and I recommend the soup, joking about how we both are out-of-place. He says he just moved here from Guyana, and that leads to a little discussion about languages.

I finally say I really must be going, and calls after me, “Are you married?”

“Yes,” I say, waving a cheery goodbye and thinking again about those universal languages of food and music—and how they’re mostly about love, all over the world.

All Who Go Do Not Return ~ Shulem Deen

The suddenness with which I was consigned to irrelevance left me stunned.

A memoir about a Hasid’s gradual disassociation from the strictures of the Medieval world in which he feels stuck could easily turn confessional, yet all I felt while immersed in this late-coming-of-age tale was empathy for an obedient boy turned renegade when his intellect contradicts his blind faith.

For fifty years, my sparse knowledge of the Hasidic world was parsed from comments by progressive Jewish friends and glimpses of somber looking men in side-curls along the Jersey Turnpike. Then I read [and reviewed here] Deborah Feldman’s 2012 memoir Unorthodox, and felt grateful by comparison for the strictures of my Catholic upbringing. Here is the flip-side of her story, told from a man’s perspective: early entrapment in an arranged marriage where society insulates its youth from education—where a wife is not something to think about excessively; where poverty is the price one pays for the expected life of Torah scholarship memorizing the ancient Biblical laws that governed agrarian survival, where the things we believed could be sustained only by suspending our normal faculties of reason.

Listening to this story [11 hours, 9 min./ 288 pages], I was riveted at first by Deen’s poetic soul throughout his search for knowledge, love, and fulfillment in a world that punishes independent thought. Then he makes his break, and I was heart-broken along with him for his family estrangement. Small wonder that his crisp and provocative writing earned the 2015 National Jewish Book Award. For more insight, watch this brief video of the author touring his old neighborhood and discussing his journey.

All the Pretty Horses – Cormac McCarthy

Between the wish and the thing, the world lies waiting.

Imagine you are a sixteen-year-old boy adrift in the Southwest of a Steinbeck novel—where horse smarts, in both senses of the word, are your only tool of survival. Kicking around with your best bud on your first grand adventure, you meet another kid something like you, but he ain’t quite right in the head maybe. Still, you do the Christian thing to help him along. You find your dream job and dream girl, and then that association comes back to kick your butt like a wild stallion. Think True Grit meets Romeo and Juliet with a slug of Bad Boys.

If you appreciate a good old-fashioned Western with heroes, villains, impossible love, bronco busting, and brawls, this coming-of-age epic is for you. Be warned, however, that McCarthy incorporates Spanish into much of the dialogue without translating, for which he received substantial criticism, but he offers enough clues to the meaning that an astute reader should be able to figure out what’s going on.

Winner of the National Book Award for 1992, this is the first in a series, the Borderland Trilogy, which I can’t wait to finish. It was also made into a film in 2000 starring Matt Damon, Penelope Cruz, and the trailer appears to be true to the author’s intent.   The hardback is 301 pages, but I listened to the audio (10 hours), masterfully narrated by Frank Muller.

Mother Nature's Last Fling

Ah, sweet Autumn at last, and a chance to share one of my favorite poems, first published in Third Wednesday Literary Journal. May the season bring you infinite color and comfort.

November’s flush of claret-rosy cheeks

is Mother Nature’s final lusty fling

before she lets her roots go dry and white

for three bleak months of solitary sleep.

Adorned in cranberry, persimmon, beet,

she flaunts her ripened femininity

and kisses with blood orange-tinted lips

the thinning shrubs and trees of Autumn’s rest.

She hangs her flaming paper party lamps

so maple embers glow at evening’s end

when banked in cozy mounds of ashen grey

to melt the fog of day’s reluctant dawn.

And pilgrims flock to her like cardinals,

impatient for the berries that she brings

to nourish them through winter’s abstinence

with incandescent memories in hand.

I Need to Tell You ~ Cathryn Vogeley

Don’t hold your child. Don’t look at your child. You will never be able to let her go.

From the 1960’s to her sixties, this was the mantra of Cathryn Vogeley’s existence after she became pregnant at eighteen. Betrayed by her loved ones and her church, she was shuttled off to a home and a crippling confinement, then told to resume life as if nothing had happened. That’s how it was for girls caught in the oldest predicament during a time that Vogeley christens The Baby Scoop Era. You’ve heard this story before, right? Wrong. Not with this many breath-taking plot twists. To hear her vivid account is to step back into a time many young women today could not comprehend, a time when they were taught to expect domesticity and to endure no matter how unhappy the union or the children it produced. Then there were the babies to consider.

During this time of heightened debate surrounding the abortion vs. adoption question, this story of a one woman’s tumultuous decision and its lasting psychological and physical repercussions is one that proponents on both sides should read. I would recommend the hardcopy (284 pages in paperback) rather than the audiobook (7 hours 25 minutes), as I found Michelle Morgan’s narration to have a one-style-fits-all delivery that robs the story of its drama. To watch a book trailer click here.

Fine Dress, Fine Dilemma

It’s amazing what a new dress did for my spirits. A flouncy floral with a scoop neck and flattering cut, it made me feel ten years younger. Tea-length it’s called, an anachronistic label, but as I strode through town kicking a flurry of melon-orange ruffle, I could almost picture myself a guest at the colonial mansion where I give tours.

I felt like a million bucks and then some, especially as I got the dress half-priced at a store where I generally can’t afford to shop. Granted, my price threshold is lower than my income dictates or my affluent town generally offers, but sixty years are not enough to negate the austerity of my raising.

It was my third day as docent, and I was just starting to feel comfortable enough to indulge a fantasy of sharing tea with the mistress. We could chat over our needlework. Perhaps she’d pour from her Qing Dynasty pot. Wouldn’t that be something, the great-granddaughters of nobility and penniless immigrants united in the sisterhood of motherhood? And why not? I hope that’s what America is about.

I turned a corner and saw a woman up ahead perched on a low brick wall. She wore jeans, a blouse that was little too warm for the weather, and blindingly white sneakers. New shoes, so often a pain. Poor thing. Drawing closer, I saw that she was not so much resting as wrestling with a dilemma. I nodded hello, and she gathered herself to speak.

“I’m sorry to ask,” she began, “truly ashamed . . . “

I knew, of course, what was coming, but I waited for her to finish. Her rush of words told me she needed a sounding board as much as a handout. A woman on the streets, an older one at that, is one of God’s most vulnerable creatures. That’s why I volunteer at a shelter.

“I used to be homeless, but not anymore,” she declared. Emphasis on used to. Urgency in anymore. Anguish in some muttered words about poor choices as she spilled her request. “I have a place to stay now, but I’m twenty-nine dollars short on my rent.”  

I recall my student days living nickel to dime, trusting in providence. It is a dismal feeling.

I opened my thrift-shop wallet to find a twenty and three singles, silently cursed the contents, and gave her the three bucks with some encouraging words.

A week later, I’m still second-guessing myself. Will I ever be ready for the responsibility that comes with privilege?

The Mall

It’s no big revelation that the mall isn’t what it used to be, not that it was ever anything great in my opinion. I once wrote a poem about my aversion to the place when I was trapped at Sears getting new tires. It was published in the Society of Classical Poets—a venue that sounds even less like a fit now than it did when it appeared a decade ago. Here it is:

On the list of things that I hate most of all

the one I hate most is a day at the mall

where all the offenses that rankle my brain

wage war on my senses: a full-blown campaign

to exact peoples’ cash, brains, taste, self-control,

individualism – a gluttonous toll.

Rampant consumption, pretense, bad food,

sales reps’ fake smiles all pushy and shrewd,

bass woofers blasting their arrogant noise

of play listed tunes the ad man employs,

shapeless bodies in too shapely clothes

show string thongs and cleavage as flesh overflows,

biker tattoos on ingénue skin,

spent kiddie cries in the echoey din.

Of all the musts the mall tries to ply,

escape’s the one thing that I don’t have to buy.

Yep, I thought I was so clever, so superior. Mall culture was never part of my experience growing up. My town didn’t even have one until I was sixteen. I thought only rich people shopped there. That my friends admired the wardrobe I scavenged from Woolworth’s clearance and bottom-feeder resalers was a testament to my resourcefulness. When I could finally afford to go, I quickly realized it wasn’t my thing.

Then I got sick. Not sick sick, but sick enough. I can live a pretty normal life by avoiding the sun and heat, but if I’m not careful, I could be truly sick sick forever and ever, Amen. Now, I lead a crepuscular existence. Like a fox, I restrict my ramblings to dawn and dusk; otherwise, exercise doesn’t happen. Thus, the mall with its 2-mile moebius strip of 3 round-trips past the kiddie train and sneaker polishers and barkers who step right up with free samples and compliments. Well, not so much the barkers anymore; they’ve kind of given up on me since I let me hair go grey during the pandemic. They’ve learned that I won’t bite, seeing me as just another summertime fixture like the samples of freckled lemonade slushies at Orange Julius used to be—gone now with Sears and two more of the original five anchor stores. And this is an affluent community!

The vacancies are alarming. I used to count the empty storefronts but gave up once they reached twenty-five percent. That’s when the county library and animal shelter opened satellites along with a gym, a music studio, and a martial arts school—services that require cavernous footprints. Nevertheless, the echo grows despite the many nail and braiding boutiques springing up around them with their sparse furnishings and hand-lettered signs. These hopeful newcomers look to me as lonely and forlorn as panhandlers in the subway.

It’s even worse at the mall I pass driving to work a half-hour away. Three years ago, on a rare visit of necessity, it was half-empty. Now, in August, I note their electronic signboard still advertising pictures with the Easter Bunny. There’s a true ghost mall, like a ghost town, further down the highway in a town overpopulated with the homeless. A bottom-feeder resaler is the sole occupant of that cavernous glass showroom of nothingness.

I can’t say that I miss what the mall once was, but I do appreciate now that if offers not just diversion but refuge. That’s what I envision for these wasted spaces, shelter, and not just an animal shelter. These places are already equipped with enough kitchens and bathrooms to cater to communities on the verge of extinction. Why not convert those empty storefronts into low-cost apartments? I’ve seen such conversions on TV, little econo-rooms equipped with a bunk and a microwave, with modicum of essential food services. It’s almost enough to make me exchange my pen for a podium. Isn’t it community needs that politicians and businessmen should be concerning themselves with? When will the god of consumerism fall to the good of the community?

On Animals ~ Susan Orleans

If I had never seen Janet Bonney reenact the mouth-to-beak resuscitation of her hen #7, which had been frozen solid in a snow storm, then was thawed and nursed back to life, then was hand-fed and massaged and encouraged to watch doctor shows on TV, I might never have become a chicken person.

An animal lover and staff writer for the New Yorker, Susan Orleans is uniquely poised to enlighten and entertain her readers with her gift for humorously understated astonishment. This collection of journalistic essays and memoirs will take you beyond dogs who, even though they break your heart, fill it up even when they’re gone. Not being a dog person, I would not have bothered to listen if she dwelled there. Instead, we meet domesticated lions and tigers, and a team of oxen toiling in a Cuban field where they are valued more than tractors. We learn about the rabbit industry, taxidermy, and the regulations protecting animal actors.  From the barnyard to the racing-pigeon coop, from military mules to donkey taxis, from captive baby pandas to the real-life saga of Free Willy, this book will take you behind the bars to explore the aptitudes and attitudes that make each of these animals uniquely loveable and valued by the humans who keep them.

A good read for travelers, these memorable stories are suitable for any age. 256 pages or 10 hours on Audible, read by the author, 2021.

Festival Days – Jo Ann Beard

The erased chalkboard of the rest of my life, a black background and then just swirls of things that have been taken away…

Jo Ann Beard has been the literary darling of essayists ever since her break-through essay The Fourth State of Matter appeared in the New Yorker sixteen years ago. Like me, she’s a small-town baby boomer with an encyclopedic memory for the ordinary. She typically relates her memories with such nuance that each moment of each scene feels like a celluloid frame on the film cutting room floor; every disappointment and surprising grace detailed to such extremes that even a fly on her arm might take on significance. She says as much in the essay NOW, advising This is how you write. You let the writing lead and you simply follow, letting the memories and the images and the language take over. You’re the writer. You get to decide… That’s the beauty of her work and, for me, often the sticking point. Such a stream of consciousness style presents challenges for the ADD brain. I find myself having to reread (or rewind) to see what I missed, but I found this collection of personal essays captivating. Maybe it was the somber tone; I’ve been dealing with some major life disappointments of late, and the title essay is about a clique of mature girlfriends helping one of their own through cancer with one final adventure to India. In Cheri we meet the world’s most sympathetic doctor; his name is Kevorkian. I’m not saying every essay was a win for me, but this book is totally worth your time, whether you’re an aspiring writer or just a mature woman dealing with a knot of baggage. Listen on Audible, 7 ½ hours, fabulously narrated by Suehyla El-Attar. Just bear in mind, this NYT Notable Book of 2021 is heavy stuff.

The Memoirs of Stockholm Sven – Nathanial Ian Miller

The Arctic does strange things to people, or strange people come to the Arctic. It makes little difference.

I selected this novel based on the life a historic fur trapper north of the Artic Circle out of an ongoing curiosity regarding hermits and life on the edge. I wondered why a man would choose to live beyond the reach of others, and here the story did not disappoint, for Seal-f@cker Sven, as he was called in jest, was already a young man adrift when a mining accident hideously disfigured him into an object of revulsion. Cleaving to a trapping mentor who becomes a lifelong friend, Sven apprentices for five years before he is deemed capable of surviving alone. Sven learns to tend his equipment, mush a reindeer, sneak up on a polar bear, and guard his sanity with routines and a faithful dog. Then his niece, another social outcast joins him, and the story takes a happy turn for a spell as she, a young lesbian, raises a daughter born of a rape.  Depression bordering on madness subsides with her arrival and the delights of childish wonder until the story turns tragic when the family caves to the carnal pleasures of summer in the city.

I anticipated lessons in wildlife but came away with considerably less knowledge than I could glean from a TV documentary. I expected to understand cold on a new level, but the poetic language necessary to convey misery was too often lacking. I wanted Sven to love his life, but instead found that he was merely able to tolerate it. The story is well written but too politically preachy and off-topic to hold my hopes. I finished more out of a sense of duty than involvement with the characters.

Just shy of 11 hours on Audible with narration by Olafur Darri Olafsson, whose characterization sounds thoroughly authentic, if a bit rushed and flat. To watch an interview with the author, click here.