Yes — that’s my dad, happy — hard to believe from the grumpy look on his face — and he’s happy because I sent him a big box of mac-and-cheese for his birthday. Dad lives in the Czech Republic and he too has a blog, PragueWriter.com From Dad: Post lady stopped by yesterday morning with your birthday gift. Wow, all that comfort food. Your chef friends would crack up if they knew what you sent your dad for his birthday. The really amazing thing is that the box hasn’t changed a bit in 60 years–still all that great Dow Chemical…
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I’ve been seeing reviews all over the place of Barbara Kingsolver’s new book about eating locally — she’s not necessarily one of my favorite writers, but between this interview over at Salon, and this piece she wrote for Mother Jones I might just have to go get a copy. Here’s a quote from the Mother Jones article: Supermarkets only accept properly packaged, coded, and labeled produce that conforms to certain standards of color, size, and shape. Melons can have no stem attached; cucumbers must be no less than six inches long, no more than eight. Crooked eggplants need not apply.…
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It was cassoulet-o-rama last night here in Livingston — our friends are home from LA for their spring break, and we all gathered over there last night to eat Paula Wolfert’s Toulouse-Style Cassoulet from The Cooking of Southwest France. This contains pork, pork skin, duck legs confit, pancetta, proscuitto, sausage — oh, yeah, and beans. This has been a three-day cooking event involving Nina and Elwood and my MH and last night the gang of us all got together — it was so much fun, and the oeneophiles brought so many bottles of Bordeaux that after a while all I…
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Nothing says spring in Montana like six inches of new wet snow — I’m thrilled, actually — we need the water very badly — it’s been so dry that I had pulled out the sprinklers before I went to Arizona. My bathroom is all but done — we need to hang the towel bars etc… this afternoon, then it’ll be done! Of course, now I have to paint the pantry, kitchen and repaint my bedroom because the construction impacted all those rooms too, but the bathroom is done. And my fake kids are home for Easter week — we had…
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I’m in Arizona for a week — just south of Tucson, housesitting for my dear friend Jim who has taken his beloved and her daughter to Italy for two weeks. It’s a perfect writer vacation — I’ve got three little dogs to take care of, two of whom need to go for a walk in the morning and in the evening. This morning we spent an hour meandering through the trails in the riverbottom through which all the birds in North America are migrating — the entire place is alive with the twitter of songbirds. The MH was teasing me…
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I spent last weekend in Seattle — I had two days of meetings last week for my Corporate Job, then hung out with my stepmother for the weekend. Susan’s only eight years older than I am, and she and my dad have been divorced for a long time, but we kept her after he moved to Europe. During all those years I was the bratty teenager living with Susan and my Dad it would never have occurred to us that all these years later that Patrick and Dad would be gone and it’d just be the two of us together,…
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Although the house I woke up in this morning on my grandmother’s farm is not the house we all grew up in, the view out the window, a pale landscape of late-season standing corn, hazy Midwestern sky just pinking up to the east, and section lines marked off by rows of old, half-broken oak and elm trees is one I know in my bones somehow. The way we learn places as kids is so intense, so different than the way grownups know space that despite waking up in the new house my Aunt built on the site of my great-great…
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I had a long talk on the phone last night with my cousin Jennifer. Jennifer’s four years younger than I am, and her mother was my mother’s older sister. Every time there was a crisis in our childhoods, and there were plenty, we were shipped off to our Aunt Lynn’s house, so in a lot of ways Jennifer and I were raised almost more like siblings than like cousins. I have a very clear memory of Patrick and I, having been dropped off one snowy night by someone who had agreed to drive us from where? Our Dad’s house? Our…
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So, when I was home in June for my cousin Jason’s wedding, my grandmother bestowed on me Mrs. Baggot’s Ring. Mrs. Baggot’s ring originally belonged to my great-great grandfather, Charles Ambrose Plamondon, who had a gear company in Chicago and who died, along with his wife Mary (they were celebrating their 37th wedding anniversary) on the Lusitania. Apparently, the story goes that Doctor Murphy, who invented a major gastrointestinal surgical procedure, and who I think was some sort of cousin, gave this ring to Charles Ambrose as a gift, probably sometime shortly before the turn of the 20th century. Then,…
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Yesterday was the second anniversary of that sad event Maryanne has named, “Patrick’s Very Bad Day”. Last year I was in Paris for this day, wandering around in a tres melodramatic haze, thinking to myself “Mais, il est mort. Mon frere. Il est mort.” Paris is, in general a good place to go when you are feeling sad, melancholy or blue, because the city lends itself to soulful lingering at cafes, gazing into the middle distance while every once in a while using that little tiny spoon to stir the sugar you have, so sacreligiously, put into your cafe. Luckily,…