The Halved, Beef Balls

I was out on the porch in the cool, dark drizzle of midnight and I noticed something sizable moving down on the yard.  I went over to look closer and surmised it was all but certainly a skunk.  He noticed me.  And walked a little and turned back again at me, up on the porch.  Fifteen feet up and away is probably enough of a buffer, but why take chances?  I backed away let him trundle off towards the woods.

My pizza last night was crap.  I stretched out the dough well enough without any parts too thin.  I didn’t overload the pies and I let them back for till the dough was crispy, but once again the pizza did not slide off the pan, but rather stuck here and there and if you used the pizza roller cutting tool, as my daughter did, you could scrape the slices off the try.  One pie came out better than the other.  But it was all rather unimpressive.  Later my wife came at me screaming, because I’d scratched the pan.  Next time I’ve got you use olive oil or sprinkle more flour. 

My wife picked up our daughter at school tonight and around five I put down my book to go and get the dinner started once again.  This time, I was playing it safe, with a stir fry or two.  Last week we’d visited a mom who had been spending some days in Poughkeepsie after a New Year’s visit with her son that got prolonged, due to the virus.  She invited us over and wanted to present us with some of the food she’d bought to cook but wouldn’t be able to, now that she was returning home.   It was like clowns coming out of a car with one after another bag of unopened meat, and condiments and vegetables. 

Down on my knees I spy a bag of rouwanr.  These are beef balls that should be used in a bowl of Pho.  I try to imagine what I could do with a bag of beef balls.  First, I’ve got to boil them.  As I go, I imagine a taste that might work and decide to chop up an entire bunch of garlic and the bag of oyster mushrooms she also donated to fry with the halved, beef balls.  Imagining the Pho, I decide to pour in a healthy dose of Sriracha sauce.  Done quickly enough, my sample tasting suggests it’s pretty damn good.

Wednesday, 02/26/20

She Puts the Car

I’d heard tell that my wife had allowed our younger daughter, fifteen years of age, to drive the car down the driveway.   In the wee hours of the morning, as the sun was just rising, and I’d made my way around the back yard spreading sunflower seeds on the ground so the critters would come, I took my reheated coffee out of the microwave and turned on the car so as to warm it up.   I asked and she was game to dry to drive it up the hill this morning.

Disconcerting, certainly.  The same person who was only yesterday in diapers is about to put this SUV in motion.  Hold the break and shift it into reverse.  Have you gone backwards yet?”  “No.”  The windscreen is covered in droplets from the night’s rain.  “Let me show you how to turn the wipers on.  That one.  Turn the tip of the knob.  Yes, that one, you see?  That controls the back wiper.   Turn the lights on as well.  Just twist it forward.” 

She puts the car in reverse confidently and the car slowly moves backward.  “Cut the wheel all the way.  Now turn it back as you go forward.”  She wants to know why this car is not a standard, because there is a gear handle that looks not unlike what Vin Diesel used in “Fast and Furious,” and I explain the difference between stick shifts and automatics.  We bank right and then left and arrive at the top of the driveway where cars are speeding by at fifty miles per hour.  She breaks just find but I found myself missing an emergency break I might grab ahold of, just in case. 

Neither of us are ready to fully imagine the world, where she continues up, puts on the blinker and accelerates out and up to fifty herself.  She’ll have a permit soon and then a license and like any normal teenager, she’ll want to drive off to see her friends.  For now, she agrees that driving into traffic would be terribly intimidating.  For now, that fear is comforting, to me at least and I exhale just a bit as we trade places: driver’s seat to passenger’s seat, and wait for the school bus to chug around the corner.

Tuesday, 02/25/20

Calmly if Reservedly

I was determined to finish S. Y. Agnon’s “Only Yesterday", from last evening.  This morning I was up very early and was uncharacteristically productive on a Monday morning.  My mediation was done early.  I enjoyed some good time with my daughter.  And I had bandwidth to approach the challenge that remained.

Agnon has been compared to Chagall and the simple peasant logic, ethereal connectedness and magical sense of travel all remind me of the Chagall print we have in our home.  I looked and it remains untitled. A peasant woman is talking to the man on the roof of a simple house.  He has rooster on his head and to the right a gigantic dream like young woman in flower pants is approaching the simple abode.  Agnon's Isaac also ponders love and never quite figures it out in the rapidly changing world's of Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, before a rabid dog suddenly bites him and ends his life. 

Trying to type.  I’ve got some gentle, swinging Tal Fallow on my earbuds.  And everything should be conducive to typing up here in the first seat of the bus, but my early morning rise now begins to overpower the simple double espresso I had standing at the Village Grind. The espresso, however still has me twitching like a frog responding to electronic stimuli.  I put away my computer and put away my phones and try to get some sleep, lying in the chair and every so often I spasmodically clutch at nothing and no doubt give pause to the woman sitting calmly if reservedly beside to me. 

Now we are pulling off for the Lincoln Tunnel.  Not exactly sure what we’re up to here in the city today.  An old friend wants to intro me to a good friend of his.  They're both in town.  We’re to talk Indonesia.  I’d like more reach in Indonesia.  Let’s see what happens.  Before I make the ten block walk up to meet him, I need to visit the Port Authority men’s room.

Monday 02/24/20

Experimenting With Annoying Noises

My nephew and I went for a walk.  First I’d had a good bike ride, up the Wallkill bridge and back.  I went a bit beyond the bride, early in the morning, past the Coppersea Whisky distillery sign and out int to the field by the no trespassing sign, which bars your way from a field out to this.  I’ try to take black and white snaps of the branches on an apple tree and of the line of poplars and all the shadows they make.  Ever since I read about Gustav’s wife Alma Mahler I’ve been listening to one of his ten symphonies, per-ride.  Up to the Fifth today with that insane, devastating opening that hooks from optimistic to doom. 

When I’m back home I make little one and my nephew who spent the night a bit of breakfast and after some chit chat, we agree that he had head out for a walk.  My nephew wants to know about my best funny faces.  I show him two.  He is experimenting with annoying noises.  I willingly share him one or two favorites. 

Down on the trail there is long drain on either side.  He wants to test if it will hold us.  It’s easy to tell the section he’s gesturing to, certainly won’t.  I walk out and sink to my ankles in my water-proof boots.  I stop and take a photo of some of the remarkable serenity of brown and green leaves decomposing within the water, beneath the ice.  My nephew suggests that the walk was fun.  He keeps saying "Sum Guk Yusa," which is the name of a Korean tale of three kingdoms but one can emphasize the “yusa” as "Loos-ah" and it becomes oddly mnemonic.   He is using it that way.  I have his commitment to unleash the nonsense phrase at school to see if it will spread, virus-like.  

When we got back, it was already time for him to change his shoes and head off.  He and I posed for a few photos, each holding up a wet boot making some of the new faces we practiced.  And with that, we wave them up and out the drive for their long drive down to Brooklyn 

Sunday 02/23/20

The Wind is Ripping

I’m thinking back to when I loved skiing because I’m skiing today.  When I was young I used to love to explore all the different trails, when I was good enough to do so.  I loved the trail maps and I enjoyed considering all the places you might be able to one day visit.  They all had maps that outlined their places as well.  I’m thinking back and I know I saw other trail maps but without the internet I wonder how it was I actually found them?  Perhaps it was going into my uncle’s bathroom and reading Ski Magazine.  There were probably ads. As an adult going to new places is all that I do.  That wiring may have first found a flowering n my early fascination for ski places and the maps to those places.

And, I found myself up on top of Suicide Six in South Pomfret, Vermont.  Who were the Green Mountain boys I thought as I saw one tight, rolling hill after another forming one after another hamlet?  There is something particular and snug to a Vermont scene that just isn’t replicated anywhere else.   The Berkshires, the Adirondack none of them 'feel' like Vermont. 

Looking out my knee told me it wasn’t so sure about sliding down a mountain in Frankensteinian foot ware.  I suggested my nephew and my little one should go ahead on and I shook my knee and bent down and up trying to have the knee pop and loosen itself  I took photo down at the next bluff and as I fiddled with my camera and twisted myself around and I somehow extended the stress my left knee’s had been feeling now over to my right knee.  I would need to be careful here as I regained my ski legs.  One wrong move and this would end rather badly.  Why hadn’t I bothered to stretch?  What, do I think I’m eighteen again? 

The cover is thick, if not exactly powdery.  The sun’s out and there isn’t a hint of ice, so the margins of the trail allow you to go fast and enough to test your ability to turn and stop on a dime.  Mentally I know all of what I should do but my body is reluctant to responding to the commands.  My daughter looks like she is reluctantly enjoying herself.  She holds a permeant wedge and turns conservatively.  I try and succeed to convince her to try an Intermediate and in fact, it’s a bit too tough for her. 

The second-to-last run of the day, after lunch and a beer or two my sister and I head over the crest of the mountain and head down the “Face", which has been well groomed.  It’s a steep broad plain and it’s easy to turn and forgiving when you do.  I don’t think I’ve sailed along at a speed like this in something that wasn’t motorized, in years.  Now.  My heart is rising to the challenge and the wind is ripping across my face, with a confrontational immediacy.  One turn and then another, barrel over the last crest and dive down towards my family who is waiting for me at the bottom of the run.

Saturday 02/22/19

This Listening is Emphatic

We’re heading up to Vermont today.  I’ve called the school and told them we’re taking my daughter out around noon time.  I turned the car on to get it warmed up and walked up stairs past the Chagall painting and the BTS poster to ask her how she was doing and if she was ready.  “Do you have all your stuff for the trip?”  “Yeah, it’s all in the basement.”  As if I’m supposed to get it.  “Why don’t you go down and put it all together so we don’t have to guess what you want.  I don’t want to get up there and have to buy a hat because you forgot one."  This elicits a sigh. 

She has been up since 3:00AM.  BTS have released a new album.  She’s already heard it and commented on it with her friends for hours.  A new album in my day meant a trip down to NYC, to locate such a thing.  For her, its immediate.  But retail isn’t completely dead.  She insists that we drive by Target, who apparently will have this release, before we head up to Vermont, so she can secure a copy of the album.  “Wait, why do you want to buy the album if you already have all the songs?”  This elicits a hearty “duh?” "So I can get the official release with all the photos." 

I ask and she’s game to play me the tunes in the car.  She hops in a fiddles with her phone.  I do the same.  By the time I put my phone down and back up the car and find time to ask a question about this new “Persona 7” album we’re listening to, I can tell she is annoyed.  “What?  I’m just asking.”  “Yeah, but you weren’t listening when I just played it for you.” Rules are she can use her phone, but I should pay attention.

“Is that V?”  “No. Its’ Jung Guk.”  “Oh.  I thought V was the deeper voice?”  “He is!”   We park the car at the top of the hill and wait for the bus.  Across to the east, in the woods, the sun is just starting to peer up from the underbrush of the ridge. Do you know what the lyrics mean in English yet?  She silently hands me her phone with the English translation.  “Can you play me the one where they’re all rapping.”  “It’s coming up next!”  Everything to do with this listening is emphatic.  There are so many, many ways to get it wrong.  I can tell Suga and R.M.’s voices and by default the only other rapper is Jay Hope.  It sounds good to my ears.  There is certainly some convincing flow.  I turn the mix up nearly all the way in the car stereo but before we can enjoy much of the song, the yellow school bus appears over the ridge and she is reaching for the door handle. 

Friday 02/21/20

Lonesome, Despite the Warmth

Walking along Cannon St. in Poughkeepsie and ducked into a wine bar with the Mrs. attending a parent’s mixer for my daughter’s school.  There are many interesting people to meet.  Mid conversation it dawns on me how different this sort of event always was at our kid’s school in Beijing.   All of the conversations were international in their own way.  But none of them had anything to do with China.  Nothing about the evening really, had anything to do with China.  I faced no challenges whatsoever speaking as all conversations were in American English.  I suppose this made me lonesome, despite the warmth of the evening.

One gentleman asked if I knew about Italian Poughkeepsie.  Yes, I do; I thought.  But it is through the lens of my Irish American grandmother.  I looked outside the basement window and imagined that young lady walking along these streets one hundred years ago.  Cannon St. must have been brimming with industrial and commercial activity in the twenties.  There wouldn’t have been any wine bars and there wouldn’t have been the wounded sense of partial recovery from urban decay that defines downtown Poughkeepsie today. 

When she was young, she walked through the Italian neighborhoods of Poughkeepsie, against her will.  And as she did, she was, as she explained, revolted by all the tomato’s drying in the windowsills and the garlic smells that permeated the neighborhoods.  What is so familiar and homogenized as “American” today must have been confrontationally other and Old-World to her and these impressions forged a life long repulsion to one of the world’s great cuisines.  No marinara sauce or garlic ever, in her kitchen. 

My mind returned to the present.  One of the parents wanted to know if I was familiar with the great Poughkeepsie humorist, Josh Billings.  A pal of Mark Twain’s it is apparently from him that the phrase: “He’s just 'Josh-ing' you" comes from, and he’d play down at the venue near the rail way station.  My grandmother’s grandfather apparently used to run a tavern down there and I imagined this satirist sharing a drink with my imagined great, great grandfather, but didn’t bother to mention any of this as it was all too far away. 

Thursday, 02/20/20