The moment: Saturday afternoon, May 7, 2008, 2:11 pm. The place: a house on the top of a hill, not far from the small town of Saxtons River, Vermont. The view: a southeast facing window in which a vividly green meadow, exclamation-marked with a stand of tall silver-white birches, is framed first by woods, then sinuous curve after curve of… Read More
blue-ribbon silliness
I’m still going through business cards gathered at April’s International Association of Culinary Professionals conference, catching up with what I scribbled on the back of each, reminders of promises made (probably foolishly, but with the best of intentions). If you look at the May 1 post, you’ll see that April was a whole month of bebopping above and beyond IACP…which… Read More
Ohhhhhhh-krahoma: eat/be eaten, “write naked” , vegetable chameleons
Ohhhhh-krahoma! (Or, the color purple). On Thursday I found actual okra plants, starts, seedlings! (If this doesn’t seem like big news to you , please go back and read the post for May 27). So maybe I will get some honest-to-goodness non "curiosity" okra from my very own garden this year. I’m still going to plant my okra seeds, though,… Read More
why every life should have a pugilistic 98-year old in it
Aunt Dot beats the odds again. Aunt Dot (Dorothy Arnof to the rest of the world except my brother, Stephen) is out of the hospital and back in her apartment on East 57th Street. (If this doesn’t sound like stop-the-presses news to you, please go back and read the posts for May 21 and May 19). Aunt Dot’s 98th birthday… Read More
My boyfriend’s (almost) back…
It’s 10:57 P.M., Wednesday night. I’ve been expecting the phone to ring and it does: David. His plane has landed at BDL, the Hartford, Connecticut airport. He’s just pulling out of the rental car parking lot. In about two hours, he’ll be here. When David was here last weekend, at one point we were fixing something, or maybe doing summerization… Read More
Playing Scrabble with the dead, feasting at the Brattleboro Farmers Market (with the very much alive)
The other day, Saturday, I’m driving down the unpaved road which leads from from my home at the top of the down to Westminster West Road. I’m with Traca Savadago, my "pan pal" and all-around buddy. She’s a friend in the meet and instantly feel you’ve known each other a long time category, though we’ve actually only known each other… Read More
Relationshape-shifting: change, constancy, love, time, and “blace”
From Toni Morrison, in Inventing the Truth: the Art and Craft of Memoir: "When I hear someone say "truth is stranger than fiction," I think that old chestnut is truer than we know… it doesn’t say that truth is truer than fiction; just that it’s stranger, meaning that it’s odd. It may be excessive, it may be more interesting, but… Read More
night drive with rain, arrows, gingerbread crumbs, too-big numbers, and, as always, questions
"… so perhaps the work is the arrow, flying from the writer towards what she will become…" This may not be the exact quote, but it’s more or less what I remember from May Sarton’s Journal of a Solitude, which I read some thirty-five years ago. It was a book I found self-indulgent even then, but the idea behind the… Read More
Still life with owl, food writer, and cosmic goofiness
I’ve been working on culinary writing today. Besides my cookbooks, I do short pieces for Relish Magazine, which is kind of like a food-only Parade, and has hands-down the two nicest, best-to-work-with magazine editors for whom I’ve ever written, Jill Melton and Candace Floyd … I’ve just finished, minus one recipe I still need to test, a piece for them… Read More
A few quick post-Mother’s Day P.S.’s, re writing
1. The New Yorker cartoon showing the sullen college-age girl in seated in a window seat, cup of tea on the floor beside her, writing in a notebook balanced on her knees. Caption: "“Dear Mom and Dad: Thanks for the happy childhood. You’ve destroyed any chance I had of becoming a writer.” 2. My late father, Maurice Zolotow, telling me… Read More
me & my semi-famous aging mother: navigating love with fierce persistence
“Happy Mother’s Day,” we say, as if it were that simple. It usually isn’t. Complex, ambivalent, contradictory, with more layers than a baklava: that begins, barely, to describe the relationship my mother, Charlotte Zolotow, and I have with each other. That it has at last grown simpler and less ambivalent in the last couple of years, as she has entered… Read More
transparency, part 2: a little madness in the spring
Sometimes it seems to me that everything reflects everything. Becoming transparent in the human sense, as I wrote about in the previous post, means that more light gets in, and out, in a spiritual, or maybe for some, emotional or psychological sense. Transparency in the culinary sense, as I understand it, is both like and unlike this. Like human transparency… Read More
