Smokin in Boston revisited

Lightning strikes twice!

Spencer and I were in the neighborhood of Symphony Hall and Berklee School of Music today, and once again, I smelled a fine cigar. Glanced around, and there was the red-headed woman I saw in May puffing a slim cheroot. This time, her hair was very curly, possibly a concession to the drizzly day when the natural look is the best grooming option.

Our mission was to find architectural model supplies for Spencer to use in crafting airplanes. He builds model planes 1/48th and 1/72nd scale, primarily up to 1950. We went to Dick Blick's in the Fenway and Utrecht across from Symphony Hall in search of tiny aluminum rods and thin sheets of plastic.

The area between Fenway and Mass. Ave. is one of my favorites in Boston. It's a little seedy in places, a bit upscale in others, and just teeming with creative types of all stripes. We lived near Fenway Park for a few years; used to abandon our dinner and rush to turn on the TV when we heard a cheer rise from the ballpark on summer evenings.

The place got too expensive, and when we finally bought a condo, Allston was as in-town as we could get on a shoestring. We love being a 3-minute walk from places selling everything from molly bolts to mandolin strings.

The only time we hate it is Saturday nights at 1 a.m. when we wish the college kids would either find someone to screw or go to bed alone.

Chess Pie

Spencer's sister Barbara asked me if I had her mom's recipe for Chess Pie, a rich, gooey, family favorite that was as important to the Morrow Thanksgiving as the turkey. It's nothing but butter, eggs, sugar and flavoring (including vinegar) baked in a pie shell.

Well, I've baked Candy Morrow's chess pie a dozen times and always with the same result: a sloppy mess that does not at all resemble the divine confection I had at her house. It doesn't matter how long I bake it; it never firms up.

So when I got Barbara's request, I didn't know whether to send her mom's version or my own, The Joy of Cooking's pecan pie without the nuts that includes a heretical ingredient, corn syrup. I also add the all-important vinegar. Spencer thought it would be silly to give her a recipe that doesn't work, and that I should just send mine without comment. As far as he is concerned, it's Chess Pie.

But given my love of family history, I felt obligated to preserve the authentic recipe from Barbara's mother's kitchen, so I sent it to her with the explanation that I can't make it work, and also sent my Pecan Pie Without Pecans.

And guess what?

Barbara has Candy Morrow's recipe, but it has never come out right for her either! She thought maybe she wrote it down wrong because she always ends up with a sloppy mess too, and that's why she requested the recipe in the first place.

So this year, she's making the kind with corn syrup, and I know from experience that it will be marvelous.

November in Harmony, Maine

At our little cabin, the rusty leaves are all down covering the yard and the floor of the woods.

The pointed evergreens, deep green cones reaching for the sky, dominate the landscape against the gray net of naked branches around them.

Mornings everything is frosty: cars, leaves, milkweeds. The milkweeds and cattails have exploded, sending their genetic messengers out into the world.

Second-time empty nester

After a stint in Europe, my son Jesse moved in with us for a couple of months. Most of the time, Spencer was in Maine, so it was just the two of us.

Having him as a roommate required adjusting shower schedules, different shopping habits, brewing more coffee each morning, and watching more ESPN. He slept on the fold-out and stowed his worldly goods next to the recliner. Not a very happy living situation for a 36-year-old.

It was stressful for him and for me, but it was also a gift to spend time with him. We haven't done much of that in recent years. We looked up stuff on the internet, went hiking in New Hampshire, talked on the fire escape, cooked dinner.

He's moving out this weekend, sharing a place with his old roommates. It will be great to have things "back to normal" in the apartment, and great for him to be able to do his own thing without his mom in the mix.

But a gentle sadness wells up inside me. I'll be away this weekend, and when I get home Monday, he and all his stuff will be gone.

I skipped the empty nest syndrome when he left at 18 because his father was very ill, and my mind was otherwise occupied.

To my surprise, I'm having it now.

Birthday Barbie

For my birthday last week, Spencer got delicious cupcakes with bright green icing that made our fingertips look like the Jolly Green Giant’s.
I thought back to my 8th birthday, when I received a Barbie doll.
I already had a “Babette”, a disappointing knock-off that could wear Barbie clothes, but was made of squishy, unnaturally pink plastic like dolls won at a carnival.
However, my birthday present was the real thing by Mattel, sturdy, substantial, and beautifully tan, the classic Barbie with a blond ponytail and black-and-white-striped swimsuit.
She came with a wire stand, and I stood her up on my dresser and admired her that night before I went to bed. I loved her pouty, red mouth and her tiny feet permanently molded to accept little plastic high-heeled shoes.
I was totally infatuated with my Barbie, but more than the doll itself, I was infatuated with ownership. The next day at school, just knowing that she was on my dresser made me feel good, and I rushed up to my room that afternoon to look at her.
Few possessions have given me that Barbie feeling since. I felt the same thrill when I first walked out the door with a cell phone in my purse, even though I had not particularly wanted one and only got it when it became a business necessity. The feeling came back when I took my perfect, white Mac iBook out of the perfect, white box. Most recently, I got the Barbie joy when I took my new Dahon folding bike for a spin.
What do these items have in common?
I had coveted the Barbie, the iBook, and the bike, but I hadn’t cared about the phone until I had it.
All are well made. All but the bike were practically required equipment to be a contemporary human being (although the laptop doesn't have to be a Mac; any brand will do, as long as you use it occasionally in a coffee shop), and even the bike has a certain up-to-the-minute cache. Bicycles skyrocketed in popularity when gasoline topped $4 per gallon two years ago, and the Dahon is billed as “personal transportation.” Its advertising depicts hip, unique people always on the go and always ready for anything.
Perhaps what gives me the Barbie thrill, then, is becoming part of the contemporary community of owners of a well-designed thing.

Allston graffiti

Here's a couple of enigmatic graffiti declarations found around Allston, both done in an even hand in black spray paint:

JESUS IS A SHOE COMPANY

I AM THE LION KING

Pyrography

It's a fancy word for wood-burning, as in drawing with a heated stylus on wood, as kids once did at scout camp before things like environmental studies and Photoshop came along. It's very earthy, the perfect craft for our cabin in Harmony, Maine. I've been playing with it for a couple of years drawing birds and making plaques with people's names.

My hairy woodpecker plaque won Second Place last year at the Harmony Fair. But it didn't go to my head because there was no first place, and the only other wood burner did a tray featuring Mickey Mouse and all the gang. I received a red ribbon and four dollars, which I squandered foolishly.

This weekend in Harmony, I made a plaque for my brother's upcoming birthday. It took me hours to draw the design and transfer it to the slab of wood, but only about half an hour to actually burn the image.

There are a couple of problems with this craft. I'd like to take a class or join a club so I can improve my technique, but I can't find any. Wood-carving clubs open their membership to wood burners, but most have few or no takers. I've also seen some fine work online by very talented artists, but the subject matter gives me pause. They favor portraits of John Wayne, eagles, and deer. And they all seem to be in Arizona and New Mexico.

So for the moment, I'm a New England wood-burners club with one member.

Omaha, October 2009

As my plane descended on its approach to the Omaha airport, it flew over an emerald baseball diamond completely surrounded by farmlands brown after the harvest but still showing their even furrows following the contours of the land.

Reflecting its surroundings, Omaha is an orderly place with clean, wide streets: no random storefronts among the tall office buildings, no irregular jutting in the architecture, no meandering streets. Everything is rectangular and spotless.

The occasion was my niece Julie’s wedding, a stylish celebration in orange and cream that spotlighted the creative genius and profound love the couple shares. On the door of the reception venue, a dance club, a sign said, “Closed for a private event.” What fun to be among the invited instead of the disappointed. We Kush sisters comprised the old generation, the gaggle of aunts at the elders’ table.

Three of us yukked it up in the hotel elevator after the party and told another passenger that we were sisters.

“Who’s the youngest?” he asked.

We froze.

That would be Betty. We had last gathered in Omaha four years ago for her funeral.

But in a flash, we recovered the festive mood and replied with good humor.

I’d opted to return to Boston at the crack of dawn Monday, and by mid-afternoon Sunday, the rest of the family had gone. Alone in a hotel in the heartland, I felt like the last person on the planet.

I wandered the streets of “NoDo,” the up-and-coming neighborhood north of downtown. I saw signs of an artsy community on the verge of bursting out: the Tip-Top Apartments in a rehabbed, 90-year-old factory; a sculptor’s studio in a low, orange-painted building, the lawn and driveway covered with metal creations. The place was deserted; no sensible person walks around downtown on Sunday evening.

At a squeaky-clean bar in the Tip-Top, I drank a Tall Grass beer brewed in Kansas and watched football while waiting for a to-go sandwich.

I was a long way from Boston, but even farther from the Midwest I knew when the nine Kush kids lived in Lake Zurich, Illinois, more than 50 years ago. We were together in that house for only a few years between Betty’s birth and Jackie moving out for college, but the experience still defines a part of each of us. We ended up in nine different states. Betty landed in Nebraska when our parents moved there, and she stayed.

Although Julie and Jason reestablished the Kush connection to Omaha after Betty’s children moved away, I sipped my beer and doubted I’d ever return. I had a strong feeling that at first felt like sadness, but before my sandwich arrived, I knew it was something else, an intimate awareness of the passage of time.

Smokin in Boston

Walking down Massachusetts Avenue toward Symphony Hall, I picked up a rare and earthy aroma, and a glance around me revealed the source. A woman of a certain age with neat red hair puffed a slim cigar.

Joyless in Mudville

During the fourth quarter of last night’s Super Bowl, the street below our window was eerily deserted. Everyone was indoors staring at a television somewhere. The Patriots didn’t look sharp and never found their steamroller rhythm. They lost by 3 points.

After the game ended, young people trickled onto the sidewalk in twos and threes for sullen walks home from parties and bars. A tiny, bent Chinese lady trudged up Brighton Avenue pulling a tandem of shopping carts laden with black garbage bags of pickings from dumpsters.

In the eye of Hurricane Super Bowl

Red and white signs warn that vehicles parked on Brighton and Harvard Avenues within two blocks of the intersection will be towed between 8 a.m. Sunday and 2 a.m. Monday. Presumably, this will provide fewer targets for over-zealous fans who may have the urge to overturn cars either in celebration of a perfect season for the Patriots or in frustration should they lose the big game.

Six years ago when the Pats won their first Super Bowl, our college neighbors spilled out into the street seconds after the winning field goal cleared the uprights, and within two minutes, the incongruous chant, “Yankees suck,” rose from the crowd. Four blocks away on Commonwealth and Harvard, the revellers turned into vandals, and a couple of years later, a pepper spray pellet killed a college student in Kenmore Square as police tried to control rowdy students after a Red Sox playoff game.

But things should be calmer tonight. With two World Series and three Super Bowl championships behind them, the fans no longer experience the same burst of adrenaline. Brighton Avenue was practically deserted after last year’s World Series.

Other evidence that the big day is near: Printed signs in the windows of the White Horse Tavern urge fans to come in for “The Big Game,” avoiding any licensing problems with the NFL, but the Sunset Grill has no such scruples. Their blackboard on the sidewalk invites people to watch The SuperBowl. Yesterday at the grocery store, demonstrators offered samples of snack foods from card tables scattered throughout the store. We bought two kinds of seafood spread, which was not even on our radar screen until an old lady in a pastel baseball cap offered us a taste.

Good-bye Mom

As my plane taxied toward takeoff in Denver last Sunday, I stared out the window through silent tears at the gleaming mountains my mother loved. I was returning home after her funeral. I recalled the many times I sat on that tarmac eager to get home, but grateful for the time I had spent with her and knowing I would be back soon.

Joanna Altenkamp Kush was the last of our family pioneers who came to America from Germany and founded dozens of families now prospering from shore to shore. She landed at Ellis Island on Aug. 1, 1926, barely 3 years old. A photograph of the Altenkamps some 77 Christmases ago hangs on my door. Joanna is a little girl with a new doll, snuggled against her proud father, a blacksmith enjoying the leisure of Christmas Day. The family is gathered around the tree, under which is a photograph of Joanna’s grandparents in Germany. I imagine my grandmother placing the picture there and decorating it with evergreen boughs. Leaving them behind was the greatest pain of her life, and she must have felt the loss deeply at Christmas.

My mother loved Christmas and created magic each year with a big, beautiful tree dwarfed by heaps of presents for nine children. One year, it nearly didn’t happen. She waited until the last moment, probably until payday, to order toys and clothes from the Sears catalog. They promised delivery by Christmas Eve, but as the day grew late and she placed desperate calls to Sears, she faced a nightmare of no Santa Claus. Hours after the children left cookies for Santa and went to bed, the truck finally arrived. I heard the commotion downstairs, my parents laughing and the driver booming “ho, ho, ho” as he hauled endless packages into the house.

Most of Joanna’s many hard times did not have such happy endings, but she remained optimistic. Struggling through a marriage with too little money and too much drinking, she took comfort in family celebrations, summer evenings, murder mysteries and watching her children craft fulfilling lives.

She crafted one of her own after she was widowed at 56 and we children were grown. She became international customer service representative for a computer company in Omaha and received her bachelor’s degree from Bellevue College at age 59. Soon thereafter, she moved back to Chicago to care for her declining mother and her housebound brother. But characteristically, she made the most of an emotionally and physically draining situation. She renewed a warm friendship with her Aunt Bridget, who was losing her memory but not her high spirits and taste for fun. And she forged a tight family circle with her daughter Judy, son-in-law and three of her 25 grandchildren.

Bridget and Judy’s family accompanied her to the Grand Canyon, Yellowstone National Park and Alaska. She returned to her birthplace in Germany with daughters Gerry and Jackie. But she went alone on her dream road trip when well into her 70s, driving 10,000 miles to visit all her children scattered from Washington to Massachusetts.

When Judy’s family moved to Colorado, Joanna joined them and renewed her childhood love for tap dancing. Her life was a whirl of family outings, dancing, and aerobics, but she relished quiet mornings and evenings with crossword puzzles, coffee, and books.

Those tranquil pursuits shaped her final two years, and she faced advancing cancer calmly and bravely. She died at home on December 18, 2007, with three of her children at her side. She was 84.

At her funeral, we placed her tap shoes on a brocade-covered pedestal beside a photo quilt Judy made for her 80th birthday. A recording of the Vienna Boys Choir singing her beloved “Stille Nacht” played softly.

Schlaf in himmlischer Ruh, Mom. Sleep in heavenly peace.

Read more about Joanna's passing on my niece Missy Keenan's blog, http://huggingthemidline.typepad.com/my_weblog/

Snow falls on Allston

Hollywood snow floats down on Allston, fluffy flakes sparkling beneath the streetlights and muffling the traffic sounds. For two desperate hours, cars inch down Brighton Avenue toward the turnpike for a longer crawl to suburban homes. But by evening, the street belongs to intrepid, grinning pedestrians who mince along slippery sidewalks to procure the elements of survival on a snowy night: frozen dinners, beer, DVDs. A shopkeeper sweeps the white fluff away to invite customers inside. Most folks dress as for a polar expedition, but a few women show off their urban winter chic in fur-topped, high-heel boots and pricey felt hats.

A television newscast predictably gives New England winter the “breaking news” treatment, complete with a reporter in a parka standing beside a clogged highway in swirling snow.

A few hours later, the snow has stopped and the spell is broken. Wet pavement whooshes under tires, muddy black strips form along the edges of the pristine white blanket and the neighborhood resumes an ordinary Thursday night.

It’s beginning to look a lot like …

The first glimpse of Christmas in Allston came out a few days ago. Two-foot-wide, shimmering white snowflakes of modish design appeared in the window of Punjab Palace, an Indian restaurant.

The place opened a year ago this week. As if totally unaware of Thanksgiving and the associated emptying of this college neighborhood, baffled waiters in their white-starched best stood at attention amid empty polished tables set with new glistening glassware.

But the students came back hungry for anything but leftovers, and gradually the tables began to fill. Now enjoying steady business, management has seized the holiday season.

The only other Allston storefront with decorations so far is a high-fashion Brazilian clothing store. Tinsel garland snakes through its window display of sexy summer dresses, perfect for Christmas in the Southern Hemisphere.

Linda

Afro pick

A young black man on the 66 bus in Allston wore a modest Afro. Though it could not compare the bushy wonders of the 1960s, he had more hair than the average hip man today. A Black Power Afro pick with a handle ending in a raised fist ornamented the back of his ’fro.

Forty years ago his uncles, maybe even his grandfather, nestled picks like that into magnificent globes of hair to remind the world that black is beautiful and they weren’t taking any crap from anybody, no matter how much the honkies ridiculed or even denounced their symbols.

In 2007, the Afro pick bore no revolutionary connotation. The man on the 66 bus sporting the black plastic pick and fiddling with his iPod looked positively retro, even quaint. And he looked like he knew his heritage.


Read about Afro picks at http://www.metalafropicks.com/history_of_afro_pick.htm