A Walk Along the Street

Years ago, it snowed on my block in Brooklyn. Then it got icy. Most of my neighbors shoveled and salted. One did not.

My elderly father was coming to visit on the subway. I looked at that one untended patch and worried about my dad. Later that day, the homeowner was outside, and I mentioned it to him.

“Oh, I didn’t get around to it,” he said.

Because this happened long ago, I am giving him possibly undue credit. Sadly, if memory serves, what he actually said was,

“I didn’t feel like it.”

In the last pivotal scene of It’s a Wonderful Life, George’s crisis is solved by the community coming together, one by one, to take care of him. It’s their way of giving back to the man who’s helped his neighbors, as did his father before him, for decades.

As the sadness sinks in from the devastation in California, one thing is clear. Many people are taking care of each other.

“The city has stepped up where elected officials have not. From firefighters and E.M.T.s to everyone who has offered shelter, volunteered and pitched in on GoFundMe pages, I’ve never seen such unity,” Amy Chozick wrote in The New York Times.

And in a beautiful piece of journalism, Ken Bennsinger and Ryan Mac wrote about an Altadena Arco-station-turned-help hub.

“Yet somehow this filling station, perched across the street from one of the most destructive wildfires in California’s history, had suddenly become the vibrant hub of a traumatized neighborhood, a harbor for residents desperate for food, clothes and, especially, community.” – The New York Times

First Lady Rosalynn Carter once said, “There are only four kinds of people in the world: those who have been caregivers, those who are currently caregivers, those who will be caregivers, and those who will need caregivers.”

Caregiving is what human beings do, whether we feel like it or not.

A Walk Along the Road

Capra is all about community. And I was going to talk about It’s a Wonderful Life this week. But I can’t get the girl out of my head.

She was young. She was walking down the road. And she was leading a horse.

I have family in Pasadena, and last year we drove through Altadena, high above Los Angeles, having just gone on a hike in the Angeles National Forest. It was ethereal, walking in the foothills of the San Gabriel mountains, minutes from a major metropolis, surround by cacti, pine trees, and nothing but the wind to serenade us.

As we drove back through Altadena, I noticed the historic cottages along the road. Modest, but full of charm, this seemed like the perfect combination of city and country combined. Indeed, locals refer to it as “paradise”.

And then I saw her, a young woman, walking a horse along the road. Clearly, for this community, this was the most natural thing in the world. A city girl myself, but from a very different city, horses are only seen in local parks.

As our friends in Southern California come together to process the infernos that have engulfed their communities, I wonder about the young woman and the horse along the road, and whether they are safe.

The Week in Writing: Holiday Edition, Part Two

It’s been a good year, writing-wise. Time for a break.

The holidays are a great time to get up from my desk and get out of the house. What else is going on out there?

For one thing there is the mind-blowing Alvin Ailey exhibit at the Whitney. No dusty- museum-experience-of-my-childhood here.

This is a “…spirited, sense-surround show…” that is “a relatively rare example of a traditionally object-intensive art museum giving full-scale treatment to the ephemeral medium of dance…

it serves as a kind of audiovisual backdrop to many dozens of objects — paintings, sculptures, collages, prints — rich in imaginative variety, diverse in content…

Basically, it’s an evocation of Ailey, and his dance, through the lens of African American visual art, which is a record and reflection of the Black culture that shaped him, and that he helped shape.” (New York Times)

Then there is the Frank Capra tribute at Film Forum; the delightful Mr. Deeds Goes to Town was a great place to start.

Capra made multiple films with screenwriter Robert Riskin, who was a master storyteller. I am a huge fan of what I call the Boom, You’re In! method, wherein you are rapidly plunged into the conflict of the story, leaving you no time to become disengaged by, for example, a meandering pace.

I was lucky enough to study dramatic structure with the great Joe Stockdale, at SUNY Purchase, and our first assignment was reading Aristotle’s Poetics, in which he gives the reader the framework of storytelling: Setting, Rising Action, Conflict, Crisis, and Denouement.

What is fascinating about watching the films of the Depression is how quickly you discover, say, the setting and rising action of a movie like Mr. Deeds. In the first two minutes you know the setting – the Italian countryside – and the rising action – a speeding car goes off a cliff, killing the American mogul inside. Newspaper headlines flash as a search ensues for said mogul’s heir. By the time we get to the third and fourth scenes we know the press and the lawyers are involved -- everyone wants in – and, before you know it, the heir has been discovered, a modest man and the mogul’s nephew, played by none other than Gary Cooper.

The Italian countryside served as setting for Capra’s own origin story – he was born in poverty in Palermo to parents who neither read nor wrote – and took him to the U.S. and eventually Hollywood, where, in one of his first jobs, he mucked out the studio stables. The documentary, Frank Capra: Mr. America, also showing at Film Forum, does an amazing job of capturing the complexity of Capra’s immigrant rags-to-riches story, without “Capra-corning” it.

Read my essay on studying with Stockdale here.

The Week In Writing: Holiday Edition

Freddy and Mo had met at a backyard barbeque on Douglass Street. He admired her sleek coloring a la distance. She thought his aerial acrobatics were quite impressive. However, he didn’t want to get too close. What if she was with someone else?

He waited for his opportunity and as the light was falling, he made his way over to her as she hovered by the picnic table. She had nice eyes. She seemed shy. That was good; he was a loner himself. He pictured them, two quiet loaners, hanging out in the shadows.

They chatted for a minute, then went their separate ways.

“Maybe I’ll see you at another barbeque,” he said as he flew off.

Later that summer Freddy was preening in the sun when he heard a familiar rustle. There, in the shadow of a flower pot, was his new friend.

“Oh, hello!” he said.

Ah, it’s you!” she squeaked.

“At your service, ma’am,” he said, as he bowed.

They caught up on the neighborhood gossip and agreed to meet again soon.

Freddy and Mo continued to see each other at various backyard parties in the neighborhood. One late summer afternoon, they found themselves talking through a garden fence. The weather was cooling, and the crisp fall air promised a long dark winter. Plans needed to be made. It was time to head inside.

Freddy was looking for a roommate. Mo needed a change. They agreed to find new digs together.

A great idea, not that easily executed.

“This one’s too clean,” he said, as they saw a Danish modern design, that was way too sleek. “And they’re vegetarians. That won’t do.”

“This one’s too cluttered,” she said, as they made their way through an old-school rent control. “Oh, no, no, no,” she added. “I draw the line at roaches.”

“Oo…this one!” Freddy said, as they snuck into an open house. “We could make this work.”

“No, we can’t,” Mo said, dejectedly. “They allow cats.”

“This is hard,” he said.

“I think we have to move on,” she said.

Mo had found the place on Douglass Street and spent the first few days checking out the interiors. It had good bones, she thought. The walls were not too solid. She could see herself settling in.

“Luxe,” he said.

“Bonus!” she said.

“We’ve arrived!” they cheered.

Freddy met her there on Thanksgiving. The door opened and he was home. This is it! he thought. Super warm. Very cozy.

There was a huge feast, with lots of food, and much to drink. Mo dragged a piece of bruschetta to Freddy, as he flitted over the banquet table.

There was, however, one problem. When the guests left, the place got cleaned up. Nothing remained. Nothing on the floor, or counters, everything put away in the highly inaccessible refrigerator.

“Well, this won’t do!” Freddy said.

“Absolutely not!” Mo chimed in.

They began hovering. They stalked the corners, and eyed the room, wondering what their next plan would be.

“We need water,” Freddy said.

“Food would be nice,” Mo said.

“Time for a new plan?” Freddy droned, as he nervously flitted about.

“Oh my…” Mo said, as she pondered a plan.

As luck would have it, hasty breakfast preparations were made the next day, with dishes left in the sink, and crumbs scattered on the counter.

“Our ship has sailed in!” Freddy buzzed.

“This will do nicely,” Mo added.

That night, Mo struck dessert gold. The candy dish had been left unattended and in the bottom, she discovered a bunch of sticky Mary Janes.

“Yum!” he cried.

“Sweet!” she said.

“Haste makes waste and a clean house doth not the creatures feed,” Freddy sang.

“Happy Holidays, my dear!” Mo squealed. “Who knew salvation could be found at the bottom of a crystal candy dish?”

A World of Worrying

“Poor Mr. Woodhouse was silent from consternation.” -- Chapter 15 Emma

There’s weather, then there’s worrying. And the world of Mr. Woodhouse is filled with worry.

In Austen’s Emma, the father is an elderly man reduced to his worries. Worrying about the weather. Worrying about health — his and everyone’s around him. And worrying about travel, both far and near.

In today’s world Mr. Woodhouse might be termed anxious. Indeed, his anxiety for everything and everyone around him reminds me of my late father, who worried about time — constantly checking his watch (even though he was chronically early for every appointment); the location of his wallet — patting his pants pocket multiple times after leaving the house; and, once he did, making sure he knew the whereabouts of his house keys. I cannot describe his consternation as we sat in a taxicab one winter’s day wondering whether we’d be late for a train from Penn Station.

One of the delightful features of listening to Austen on audio books is that you begin to feel the creeping claustrophobia of being in a room with an incessant worrier, such as Mr. Woodhouse. I walk while listening to Austen and whole city blocks can be measured by the amount of time taken to feel the fretting of Mr. Woodhouse on, say, a carriage ride in the snow, swimming in the sea, or the particular evil of eating cake.

The Return of Rain

Anyone who has spent any time in England knows about rain. And that particular damp chill that my late mother-in-law once referred to as “raw.”

In Austen, someone, always a female, sits inside looking out a window. At the rain, the clouds, the mud. The impossibility of going out.

We’ve experienced a drought – the first in a long time – and the days have been brilliantly sunny and mild. But this morning, as I walked the dog, it rained all day and it was raw. As well as grey.

Grey is very Austen – there is even a Miss Grey who mucks up the works for Marianne is Sense and Sensibility– and I once wrote an essay called “Getting Used to Grey,” about the seasonal shift in New York from the bright sun of the fall to the blanket of gloom that descends on the region around Thanksgiving, not to leave us until May.

This is the season of being inside, of tea and books, of distractions that take us away from the weather, which is certainly a character in much of Austen. An easy nemesis to many plans, it drives her heroines indoors, relegating them to endless games of whist or piquet or performances on the pianoforte. Indeed, there must be university shelves filled with weather as subject in the novels of Austen.

I am once more getting used to grey, battling my own tendency to stay indoors, and argue the impossibility of going out. Thank goodness dogs needs walking, errands need running, and bodies need exercise.

‘Tis the season of grey. And the return of rain.

Chaos and Comfort

It is always most evident that in times of great chaos a need arises for the utmost of comforts.

For some, it’s sports. For others, TV. For me, Austen suffices.

I have read most of her novels but am now listening to the most excellent Rosamund Pike on Audible. In order of publication, the glorious Sense and Sensibility, then the brilliant Pride and Prejudice.

I cannot describe how many hours my household spent watching the A&E P&P released in the 1990s, replete with the screeching Mrs. Bennett, and the ass-kissing Mr. Collins. But it is the extraordinary Anna Chancellor, who plays Caroline Bingley, that is most memorable, certainly for all the wonderful parts she has played over the years, but mostly for her “Duckface” moniker, aptly named by Hugh Grant in Four Weddings and a Funeral.

Why Duckface now? Because there is a marvelous scene where Caroline critiques Darcy’s handwriting, as he attempts to write a letter to his sister. She is all desperation, for of course she dreams of Darcy for herself.

Mr. Darcy was writing, and Miss Bingley, seated near him, was watching the progress of his letter and repeatedly calling off his attention by messages to his sister. Mr. Hurst and Mr. Bingley were at piquet, and Mrs. Hurst was observing their game.

Elizabeth took up some needlework, and was sufficiently amused in attending to what passed between Darcy and his companion. The perpetual commendations of the lady, either on his handwriting, or on the evenness of his lines, or on the length of his letter, with the perfect unconcern with which her praises were received, formed a curious dialogue, and was exactly in union with her opinion of each.

"How delighted Miss Darcy will be to receive such a letter!"

He made no answer.

"You write uncommonly fast."

"You are mistaken. I write rather slowly."

"How many letters you must have occasion to write in the course of a year! Letters of business, too! How odious I should think them!"

"It is fortunate, then, that they fall to my lot instead of yours."

"Pray tell your sister that I long to see her."

"I have already told her so once, by your desire."

"I am afraid you do not like your pen. Let me mend it for you. I mend pens remarkably well."

"Thank you—but I always mend my own."

"How can you contrive to write so even?"

He was silent.

I’m reminded of the woman in my cursive handwriting seminar this summer, who spoke of her Mexican fathers and uncles and their extraordinary handwriting. “It was such a source of pride!” she said.

Indeed, in our time it is hard to picture how one would comment on the typing of another. What would one say?

“You type with such speed?”

An Embarrassment of Signatures

“Oh, what crueler irony could there be than for the gods to infuse a young man with dreams of literary fame and then provide him with no experiences?”

Handwriting makes an unexpected appearance in Amor Towles’ delightful “Ballad of Timothy Touchett.”

The short story, part of the collection Dinner for Two, tells the tale of Touchett, an aspiring New York writer who sits in the Main Reading Room of the 42nd Street Library, lamenting his lack of experience. How will he write when he has nothing to write about?

Enter Peter Pennybrook, a downtown used bookstore owner who happens to notice Touchett practicing the signature of one well-known 20th century author.

“As he sat in the library staring down at a facsimile of a letter from F. Scott Fitzgerald, rather than taking notes on elements of craft or branching off on some promising tasks of his own, Timothy found himself copying Fitzgerald’s signature over and over, even as the minute hand on the Reading Room’s clock advanced irreversibly toward eternity.”

Suddenly Touchett, with a premise from Pennybrook, has a “promising idea” to branch off on, all because he can emulate the flourishes, loop-de-loops, and downward slopes of the American avatar of the Roaring Twenties, F. Scott Fitzgerald.

Handwriting Analysis

Late last spring, curator Robinson McClellan of New York’s Morgan Library and Museum, was sifting through an array of cultural memorabilia, including letters of Brahms and Tchaikovsky, and postcards signed by Picasso.

“When McClellan came across Item No. 147,” The New York Times wrote, “he froze: It was a pockmarked musical scrap the size of an index card.”

What McClellan held in his hands, it turns out, was an unknown waltz by Frédéric Chopin.

“…the Morgan,” the Times wrote, “…is confident the waltz is authentic, pointing to several Chopin hallmarks…the paper and ink are consistent with what Chopin used at the time…the penmanship matches the composer’s...down to the unusual rendering of the bass clef symbol…the museum noted that “another Chopin manuscript in the Morgan’s holdings shows a similar bass clef symbol.”

 One delightful bonus: the “manuscript is also embellished with a doodle by Chopin, who liked to draw,” the Times reported.

 And there we have it. Signature confirmation because of handwriting analysis.

 How utterly old school.

Hear a Chopin Waltz Unearthed

These Letters

When he entered The White House, newly elected President Barak Obama asked for ten letters.

 At the time The White House received 65,000 paper and 100,000 email letters – to say nothing of phone calls and faxes – weekly. Obama asked his correspondence staff to sift through them and choose – daily – the ten most meaningful ones they felt the President should read, representing all different sides of the American experience.

“Lately I’ve been getting a lot of health care letters, and this one is a good example,” Obama said, reading one about a family whose retirement funds were being drained as they supported a son who could not afford the cost of his insurance premiums because of a preexisting condition.

Another letter contained a photograph of a vegetable garden that a woman had sent, showing the president how she had used her stimulus payment.

And then there was the letter written during World War II.

“My dearest daughter,” it began, as the father, newly deployed, described to his newborn daughter what he was doing and why it was so important to him. And to the country.

“These letters do more, I think, to keep me in touch with what’s happening around the country than just about anything else,” the president said.

The Power of a Postcard

In the Season Three finale of Madame Secretary, Elizabeth McCord travels to Brussels, asking NATO’s alliance for their support in preventing an incursion in Eastern Europe. In doing so she removes a postcard from her jacket pocket and reads it out loud, illustrating the power of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.   

“This is a postcard my uncle sent to his father when he arrived in Italy, William Adams. He was in the Third Infantry Division, the Battle of Anzio. ‘We landed safely yesterday, passed the ruins of a school today. Kids in grey rags scrambling over the heap. We got out some K Rations but no, they only wanted to shake our hands. Greatest feeling of my life.’ ”

She goes on.

“He died the next day, at the counterattack. But the thing that strikes me is this validation of purpose. The invigoration of fighting for something greater than himself. For a future that he believed in. This certainty that he was on the right side of history.”

All on a postcard.

Postcard Pitch

Last week I cleaned out my desk. And there was lots of paper.

Notepads, and holiday cards, and postcards. Oh my.

Lots went out. Some stayed on. Postcards present a particular problem. Unwritten ones are mementos. Memories of museums, places, and trips gone by. Small images, perfectly preserved, gorgeous gems of moments in time.

A friend and I are currently sending each other postcards. It’s absolutely delightful. A message accompanies the provenance of the card, “I was here with…” “I thought of you when I saw this…”

The ones I can’t pitch are the vintage, mid-century jewels of color rarely seen in nature, the ones of London or Paris, Venice or Rome, where the streets are scrubbed clean, and the skies are a swimming pool blue.

Tags #writingblogs, #writing, #letterwriting, #postcard

The Letters of Miss A. G. Bushell

Mine is no mystery. And not nearly as elegant. However, I have every, single one.

My letter collection is still intact. From recent months, and years ago. Yes, indeed, even from childhood. The adult end met up with its former self when I cleaned out my dad’s apartment several years ago. There it was, untouched, in a childhood desk drawer, simply waiting to be seen. Letters from camp, letters from family, and, yes, letters from long-lost friends.

One is from high school and, just like that, I’m back, transported to the hallway, seeing the writer and how she dressed, her smile, as I now read her letter, pouring her heart out about – imagine – a boy.

Another is from middle school, a neighbor who moved away. How different her life was in sunny California, away from the grey of a New York winter, where we once made Lemon Squares together. She wrote out the recipe and my memory of her neat, manuscript printing matches the letter I now hold in my hands.

Then there are the ones unrecognized. I don’t know the writer. Were they friends not for long? Yet they took the time to sit down and write. I only hope I did the same for them.

As much as I adore the visual and tactile nature of my letter collection, what strikes at the heart is the sense of time, of its passage, of first loves and lost friendships, family that remains only in spirit, and memories that challenge us to think, reflect, and give context to a time gone by.

The Clippings of Mrs. H.R. Burdick

It’s a mystery, the contents of this box. Here’s what I know, so far.

Several years ago, I was cleaning out my aunt’s house. I found a box inside of a larger box, containing stamps from all over: Germany, Cuba, and the United States.

This box was nestled among clippings, hundreds of them, of letterhead(s) from mid-century American hotels, coast to coast: The Taft, the Biltmore, the Roosevelt. Beyond belief, though, were the train lines: the Los Angeles, and the Sunset Limited. The mind reels: there was a time when you could board an American train and write a letter on its personalized stationery.

The elegance of this speaks to an era when time spread out. I just started reading the letters of MFK Fisher and what is startling is simply the use of language for communication. This is no text speak time; this is when thoughts were developed, and full words were used. One pictures the writer, staring out the train window; locales pass by as thoughts come together.

To get back to Mrs. H.R. Burdick. It seems she collected both the stamps and the stationery, but not the letters. Luckily, there are many envelopes with multitudes of beautiful handwriting. Where does my aunt come in? Apparently, one of her many hobbies was stamp collecting, and she purchased these boxes from one David C. Burdick, of Sea Cliff, New York, the town in which she lived. One assumes David was the son of Mrs. H.R. Burdick.

There is no question that this treasure trove wants to become a book, or a museum exhibit. Or both. Stay tuned.

Austen, and Audrey, and Eric, as Well

They loved the letters, as did I.

At the second cursive handwriting workshop I taught this week, I showed the communications of Jane Austen, Audrey Hepburn, and Eric Clapton. Each had their own style. Yet there were similarities.

While Austen’s resembled the classic cursive of the 18th century – slanted and elegant – Hepburn’s was round and vertical, with no slant at all. Then there is Clapton’s, which is so distinctive it stopped me. It was the handwriting of a college friend, raised in England. Not quite cursive, but not just print. It’s a hybrid, and almost resembles calligraphy.

The reason for this? “In Britain, in the early 1890s, Professor John Jackson introduced vertical writing, which he felt had superior legibility, and was easier for students to learn.” (Lynn Diligent, Dilemmas of an Expat Tutor).

We spent most of the class writing letters to friends or family. Participants were so focused you could hear a pin drop.

The best part? One of the letters was addressed to me, thanking me for teaching the class.  

Jane Austen Letters

Audrey Hepburn Letters

Eric Clapton Letters

"You Write Like My Grandma!"

They came. They wrote. They conquered cursive.

This was the first of two workshops I am teaching at the New York Public Library. It was just delightful, connecting with participants ranging from 20- to 60-something, representing at least six nationalities. Only one student had not studied cursive as a child, so that made things easier. We spoke about our cursive experiences and then got hands-on practice, using blank or lined paper with soft lead pencils or Bic ball point pens.

There was lots of talk of which letters are hard to form, such as a lower-case R or V. I would add that long words, especially ones like constitution, declaration, and independence can be challenging when you try to keep all the letters connected. Even those of us who regularly write in cursive often lift our pen in the middle of a word to make things easier.

I briefly spoke about current research, which shows the importance of teaching cursive as well as typing: Efficiency (for notetaking and exams), developing signatures, reading historical documents, and cognitive brain function that is specific to cursive handwriting. Anecdotally, I told the story about my fourth-grade tutoring student who printed so slowly I had no idea how she would take the state exam at the end of the year. 

The two takeaways that fascinated me were the following:

One student spoke about learning cursive first in a French lycée and it seems that, although I have not delved into the research on this, other Western European and Latin American cultures teach cursive first. The U.S. started teaching print first, during the Progressive education era of the early 20th century, so that students would learn to read better.

The other was the kind of handwriting, whether in print or cursive, that seems to come out of adolescence, where letters are round, dots are circles, or perhaps hearts. I would venture a guess on this: if you got the cursive training for several years and did everything the teacher asked, perhaps you wanted to, in classic teenager style, do things your own way, imbue a little personality, stamp it with individuality.

Tomorrow I’ll share my favorite middle school story: a student watched me write on the board and yelled out, “Miss Bushell, you write like my grandma!”

A higher compliment I have never gotten.  

Reuters Article

Psychology Today

Scientific American

Pioneer Institute Article

A Ford and a Coke

An ordinary Wednesday. Walking the dog. Within one minute, I spy them: the Ford and Coca-Cola logos.

Normally, these sightings would mean nothing. But these days, they do. In honor of Constitution Day on the 17th, I’m doing a cursive crash course in preparation for teaching my first handwriting class next week at the New York Public Library.

As with everything else, there is so much information. And I have four hours, over two weeks, to whittle down, among others, the who, what, when, where, and why of cursive.

Here’s what’s important to know: cursive is on the comeback. Thanks to a teacher who sat in an assembly meeting with California Governor Gavin Newsom, the state has mandated the re-introduction of cursive instruction, beginning this fall. Other states, namely Idaho, Kansas, Massachusetts, North Carolina, South Carolina, New Jersey, and Tennessee, have followed, as well.

Here's another fun fact: The Ford and Coca-Cola logos are, according to The New York Times, “rendered in Spencerian script…Spencerian was a form of handwriting devised by Platt Rogers Spencer around 1840 as a modern, quickly written, clear script for business. It was widely taught in schools until being edged out by the faster Palmer method.”

Stay tuned for cursive notes from the field.

Transportation Time

Here’s the thing: objects transport.

First things first: I hate the word thing. Yet here I am using it. My excuse is it’s in a phrase. While I could write a whole paragraph about how unattractive a word it is, that it lacks lyricism, and has that short stop sound of words like pick, quick or rick, I will say I use it, like everyone else, in phrases. Somehow it turns itself on its side and becomes humorous in, let’s say, it’s a thing. Meaning, it – whatever it is -- matters.

Just like objects. The thing about them is that they usually don’t transport. They simply sit. On a shelf, in a drawer, around the house. Until they do. There is that moment when, for example, I am at a piano lesson – as I was, just a few weeks ago -- and I happen to look down. There on a shelf is a book, a large paperback, with a charming cover, called Heritage Songster.

Suddenly, I am a child, in Miss Bachleitner’s music class. She is using a book like this. We are learning American folk songs. I am surrounded by my friends. The room is filled with voices. Miss Bachleitner smiles as she guides us in song.

Perhaps this is my father’s day off. He will pick me up after school. We will go to the Viand Coffee Shop for French fries and hot chocolate. Later my mother will come home, and we will have dinner together.

“Anita?” the piano teacher asks. “Can you try it once more?”

I return. “What were you looking at?” she asks.

“This book.” I hold it up. “I was transported in time.”

I Saw It On TV

Special thanks to Christian for making this one happen.

I have a framed black-and-white photograph of two-year-old me. I am sitting in front of the massive Zenith TV. In terms of composition, is the photograph about me or the TV?

My late aunt took this picture and, while she was a good photographer, what is interesting is that she didn’t angle the snapshot to frame me. All she had to do was stand by the TV. Perhaps that would miss the point.

Mine was the TV generation. Wasn’t it on Mad Men that Don came home the day JFK was killed to find Sally abandoned to the boob tube, alone, while Betty lay in bed upstairs?

My mother might have looked at me and saw that TV had taken over, as well. Consider the Shake-and-Bake moment.

We were standing in a grocery store on Elmhurst’s Roosevelt Avenue. I wanted a box of Shake-and-Bake.

“Why?” my mother asked.

“Because I saw it on TV,” I said.

“But I can make this myself,” my mother answered, incredulous, as she examined the box.

She was a good cook who made simple nutritious meals. Why her silly child wanted bread crumbs in a box was beyond her. Oh, and the added price for the plastic bag to do the shaking in. By the way, this moment took place less than a decade after Desk Set’s Spencer Tracy showed Katherine Hepburn his version of Shake-and-Bake: flour, salt, and pepper in a brown paper bag.

My mother missed the part where the product, to say nothing of the red chicken image on the box, captivated me. Because I saw it on TV.

Has TV, like the image in the photograph taken over? At one time, it did. There’s no question I would have been a better student had I not done my high school homework to The Odd Couple. On the other hand, years later I watched my middle school students beg for music as they wrote their in-class assignments. The teenage brain may need more stimulation. These days, I can’t write unless in total silence. There’s too much surrounding stimulation.

What I love about the Shake-and-Bake moment is that my mother tried to reason with me, as if I understood that there was a connection between her lovely meals and a bag in a box.

She totally missed the point: I saw it on TV.

Carrot Cake

Last week I was in Boston. At a friend’s birthday dinner, we had carrot cake for desert.

Carrot cake. It comes in so many forms. There’s the way too sweet one found in diners, and the ten layer version — insert exclamation point here —  we had at dinner. At a Russian cafe in Brooklyn’s Bay Ridge I recently tasted one made with beets and a burnt meringue frosting. Lovely.

Then there is the Moosewood. Ah, the Moosewood. So many memories.  This iconic cookbook was given to me by a dear friend and college roommate alongside the Enchanted Broccoli Forest. One of the first recipes I made was carrot cake, only partly because my dad loved it. Almost as much as he adored cheesecake. 

The Moosewood was written in the era of processed sugar as mortal enemy and macrobiotic diets the choice of those who these days would most likely be vegan. 

The writing was comforting, and the visuals were charming. Indeed, founding member and chef Molly Katzen says, “The Moosewood Cookbook grew, in part, out of a looseleaf binder filled with random notes intended to help keep track of what we were cooking in the tiny kitchen of our modest 1970s restaurant.”

As a self-published author — should I be saying “independently published”? — I was thrilled to read Katzen’s introduction to the 40th Anniversary Addition -- wherein she discussed the Moosewood’s modest publishing history: “Our customers…also wanted to be able to replicate what we were making in their own kitchens. Requests for copies became routine…eventually I put together a series of pages…eight hundred copies of the resulting booklet sold out in a week.”

And here were are. Time to make carrot cake.