365 Memories

I have a kitchen angel. He's been with me in every apartment I've ever had, watching over culinary endeavors from his spot on the wall, giving a blessing in the form of a kiss. The angel was once a living man, a butcher in a small grocery near the intersection of Seventh Avenue and 57 th Street in New York City. His name was Frank, and he was captured through the lens of my mother's camera in the 1980s. In black and white, his portly frame leans toward the viewer, lips puckered and hand lifted in the moment of having blown a kiss. He's in his stained whites, paper hat on his head, an average workday. There's a story behind the photo, and I remember it this way: My mother was taking a photography class, and for an assignment she was focusing on service industry workers on their breaks, "taking five" from the demands of their jobs. I am pretty certain Frank was part of this series, along with a shoeshine man named Neal—his chair in front of the N/R subway e...

Eight years ago today, my husband and I were watching stars in the night sky, listening to the sounds of a creek flowing through the Woodland Valley Campground in Phoenicia, NY. Woodland Valley is a beautiful site in the Catskills, at the foot of Slide Mountain, which is the range's highest peak. In our tent, we curled close together. We needed beauty, badly. Just four days earlier, our sense of normalcy was shattered, permanently, along with our sense of peace and protection, of safety and justice. A half-day previous, we'd met my father in Grand Central Station, and caught a train with him up to Connecticut. He'd been in the city for a meeting; we were heading out to borrow a car and escape to the mountains. It was the first time I'd seen either of my parents since the 9/11 attacks, and something in me cracked wide open when I saw my father's solid presence standing at the terminal's info booth, waiting. I hadn't realized how much I was feeling the shock...

My First Crush In first grade, I had a huge crush on a boy with the initials N. B. He had brown hair, bowl-cut style, long lashes over dark eyes. He was nice, not loud like many of the other boys. I remember a little kiss, but not sure if I'm inventing that—some small, innocent kid connection happened below an overhang on the playground where I was hula hooping with some other girls. At home, I took a tiny notepad my mother gave me and wrote a story in it in pencil about how we would be married. I didn't think again about marriage until twenty more years went by. I don't know whatever happened to N. B., and I haven't tried to find him. If I did discover his adult self on social media, I wouldn't contact him; it would be too weird, there's nothing to say. I don't know if he liked me, too, or what "liking" a boy or girl would even mean to a first-grader in the 1970s, but still, I remember him as my very first crush. Fondly. First Crush on My Son Thin...

So, my mention of Irish colcannon in yesterday's Portugal post (both countries have traditional recipes with potato and kale) now has me thinking of Ireland. Ireland brings many memories, some I've already posted on the blog, but one I have not yet mentioned: bushwhacking. In September of 1995, my parents and I visited the Emerald Isle. It was my second of three trips and their first and only. My father made all the arrangements—he is personal travel agent extraordinaire, as I may have mentioned elsewhere—and he decided to rent a car for our travels up and down the rocky western coast. For small group travel through Ireland, car rental is a great way to go, but it does entail some hazards. Actually, this is another thing that Ireland has in common with Portugal: for some years, the two countries have seemed to compete fiercely for the unhappy distinction of having the most traffic accidents in Western Europe. For locals used to the lay of the land, things like extremely narrow...

Today, I purchased a fabulous cookbook: The New Portuguese Table , by David Leite . It has traditional recipes as well as updated recipes that bear the personal stamp of the author. The photographs are lovely, and I can't wait to try the recipes. But more than just whetting my appetite, this purchase brought back memories. In May of 1991, my parents and I had the good fortune to visit Portugal. This was following my college semester abroad in France, where I had stayed with an inhospitable host family and worked a job at La Defense. Study abroad is usually no holiday, despite how magnificent the surroundings and how eye-opening the experience; it's often quite difficult. I was in need of a vacation, and had a splendid one. My parents came to meet me in Paris, then we took a short hop to Lisbon and from there headed toward the resort town of Cascais . We stayed in a posh hotel by the the water—one that was at one time a private home, a royal summer retreat—the Hotel Albatroz . T...

It couldn't have been a gloomier day in New York City today, weather-wise. Lashing rain, wind whistling, dull gray sky. Outside this morning, with my umbrella not only flipping inside out but crumpling into a jagged mess of misshapen wires, I was about to recite a litany of complaints (running late, getting wet, and so forth), when I saw a group from our local fire department—Engine 16, Ladder 7, on East 29 th Street; the guys who routinely wave to my son and who welcomed his kindergarten class to the firehouse this past spring. They were in dress blues, one wearing a kilt and carrying a bagpipe, and my selfish bones to pick about the weather fell away. I was left with gratitude—not just toward the fire fighters but for the fact that I am alive to feel the rain and wind. September 11. This date sneaks up on me now, which shows the effect of eight years' time. I used to anticipate it as soon as the calendar page turned from August to September. It has become perhaps too indulge...

At one time or another, I think most kids are enthralled by some type of build-it-yourself model, be it an antique car, an airplane, train, or ship in a bottle. Ranking high on the list of parent-child "quality time" activities, model building seems almost cliché —makes me wonder how many models are built simply because it's something a parent is "supposed" to do with a child; one of those experiences like fishing or running a lemonade stand, that you are practically obligated to provide if you want your child's early years to be truly complete. And, especially if working on a historic model, it's a project with built-in nostalgia: even as you're only just beginning to work on it, you know you are making classic memories, constructing a keepsake treasure of time spent together, tweezers and glue in hand, brushes carefully caressing the miniature pieces. Something about the scene makes me think of a Norman Rockwell illustration. It's very Saturday...

Another Chicago memory, this one very fuzzy. I was perhaps six or seven. It was the mid-1970s, and my parents and I lived in the Lincoln Park area of the city. All three of us had gone out grocery shopping, so I assume it was a weekend morning or afternoon. Back then, the family had a car, too (thematic connection with the prior post unintended). I don't remember being inside the grocery store, although I remember distinctly that it was an A&P, and I remember the orange and red colors of the letters in the logo. My father was driving. The reason that this day of mundane domestic activity stands out, always has, is because of a little girl who was possibly my age, maybe a little older. I don't remember her name, though I'm sure I must have heard it. My mom must have asked. I don't remember anything about this girl's specific circumstances; I don't recall for certain how it came to be that our lives intersected for even the shortest time. The sequence of event...

I remember one evening in Chicago. This is when I was there as an adult, on my own. I was living in the Streeterville neighborhood, working at Edelman Public Relations. I still had my car, which was a liability downtown and not at all needed. I walked to work, but even if I hadn't, the public transit system is good enough to make owning your own wheels completely unnecessary. I would part with the car eventually, but for the moment, I was heading up Lake Shore Drive with a boyfriend in the passenger seat. He was visiting from out of town. We'd had an instant attraction at a friend's wedding, then started writing to each other, calling, and then he sent me cassettes (yes, they were still in use; that dates me!). He was a musician, a small-town guy, smart but hindered by an incomplete education and a general lack of exposure to anything beyond his backyard. His music didn't suffer for it—he wrote clever lyrics, composed catchy guitar riffs—but his emotional health did. ...

I don't remember what year it was—sometime in the mid-1980s, I believe; I know my parents still had an apartment in Miami at the time, so that gives some clue—but I do remember that the appearance of Keebler's Soft Batch cookies on grocery shelves revolutionized the concept of bagged baked goods. Until then, all supermarket cookies were crunchy. If you wanted chocolate-chip cookies from a bag, you were pretty much buying Chips Ahoy (maybe Famous Amos, a much better choice) until Keebler introduced the cookies "so soft they taste like they're right from the oven." Soft cookies in a bag? No way. And yet . . . no doubt about it; they were soft. Not long after the product launch, my mother and I decided to try them out one day while grocery shopping. Maybe we broke the cardinal rule of shopping: don't do it when hungry. Maybe we were just looking for an excuse to linger up and down every aisle, because there was air-conditioning, and this was Miami in the summer...

Warning: the content of this post is not for the faint. On our way to and from a baseball game today (the New York–Penn Minor League), my son and I crossed New York Harbor on one of the cheerful orange boats that make up the Staten Island Ferry fleet. The ride was fabulous, passing Lady Liberty on calm waters, and the second round-trip we've made on the S.I. Ferry. I hope we'll do much more of this. The thing about the trip, though, was that it brought up a not-so-pleasant memory of another ferry ride, in June of 2006. My son was three years old then, and my parents were celebrating their ruby (fortieth) wedding anniversary. Despite how not romantic it might seem to celebrate a wedding anniversary with a daughter, son-in-law, and three-year-old grandchild in tow, this was how my parents wished to celebrate: with a family vacation to Block Island, Rhode Island. I had never been there, though I had heard wonderful things. The island lived up to its reputation—it was charming, l...

We made the best of an unexpected stay in Brussels. Eight years ago, my fiancé (now husband) and I were on our way back to New York following a visit to his family in southwest France. We were flying Sabena , the national airline of Belgium that was in service from 1923 to 2001 (they declared bankruptcy not long after our trip). September 3, 2001. We were of course ignorant of what lurked just around the corner of history. If I'd known it would be the last time I'd fly with my safety taken for granted (as silly as perhaps that always was), I would have enjoyed the flight experience more, despite the hassles we encountered. The hassles themselves, in fact, would have seemed like nothing compared to the immigration nightmares to follow. The way our "layover" started was this: Despite having boarded our originating flight in Toulouse without a raised eyebrow, once in transit (in a different country, where we knew no one and could not call for someone to return to the ai...

Animal crackers, now red licorice. Not sure why the return to sweet treats from childhood—must be some escapist compulsions (which I tend to get whenever I have to pay bills)—but sometimes it's better to not ask why and to just enjoy, even if only in a bout of nostalgia. In a prior post, I wrote about black licorice and its unlikely pairing with wasabi . Today, I remember a love of red licorice. It's nothing I'd eat now, because it generally tastes much more artificial to me, or else (depending on the brand) just sweeter—none of the spice I crave in my sweets today. But I used to eat it often. Frequently in the form of Twizzlers candy, and then most often at the movies with my parents. We'd get popcorn, of course, and sometimes Goobers or Raisinettes , but I often loved the licorice twists, the cherry taste of them, the texture of tough and chewy, and the way the outer spiral pattern would form what looked like a star pattern if you looked from the bitten-off end of...

I remember how much I looked forward to a box of animal crackers. It was one of the simplest, best pleasures of childhood. I didn't have them too frequently growing up, just often enough to think of them as special. I loved the colorful box made to look like a circus wagon, loved how it had the little string attached to the top so that you could dangle it from your wrist like a woman's beaded evening bag, but the animal cracker box was so much better. I imagined the boxes as part of a long caravan, and I was always the circus master, deciding on the next destination. I was kind to the animals, or tried to be—I hated biting off their heads. I'd start with the feet and work my way up. (Really, though, is that any better? Maybe I should've just put them out of their misery, decapitating them after all.) But before getting at the animals, I remember that there was something very intriguing to me about the inner lining of the box as well: the waxy brown paper pouch suggeste...

I remember an olive green, plastic recipe box. Really just a filing box for index cards, I think, not necessarily designed in any special way for recipes. I remember it sitting on the kitchen counter of the condominium we lived in during our last year or so in the Windy City. I remember the window at the end of that galley-style kitchen; I think I remember a loose plaid wallpaper pattern left over from the family before us (excuse: it was the 1970s). I remember sitting on the counter, swinging my dangling legs, talking to Mom while she cooked or baked. I also remember that it was here I saw my first ever big-city cockroach, perched on top of the paper towel roll that was mounted under the sink, attached to the inside of a cabinet door. The roach was big, brown and glistening, and it sent Mom running to the store for boric acid. End of roach. End of roach memories, because really, it's not something you want to linger on—certainly not in a post about recipes. Like all memories, my ...

Welcome to September—to the U.S. Open, to crisper air and lengthening shadows, to a return to routines, and above all . . . back to school. Although my own son is still enjoying the liberty of summer vacation (why is Labor Day so late this year?!), we've already done a bit of shopping to get ready for the upcoming term: some tan corduroys, two pairs of shoes, new pens and pencils and composition books and flash cards. It's a ritual I love, always have: unsharpened pencils and unsullied erasers equal a seductive, if fleeting, perfection. The new academic year holds so much potential, be it for high marks or team tryouts, or else a respite from whatever social tyranny dogged the previous year (because when the newness of the year wears off, the drama tends to set in—and I'm not talking about the school play!). Here is what I remember most about back-to-school shopping from my own childhood: First, new markers and glue; three-ring binders (that ubiquitous scratchy blue kind t...