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.

We Weren’t That Old

Eventually I pick them up. Sometimes it just takes awhile.

Michael, the owner of the Chinese hand laundry was climbing on the counter to reach my shirts from a higher shelf.

I looked at my ticket. Apricot. The ones on the shelf below mine were pale pink.

“Are the pink ones newer?” I asked, needing to solve a nagging lifelong mystery.

“Yes,” Michael responded.

If the apricot-colored tickets are newer, I thought, what about all the other pastel- colored tickets? The ones attached to the ubiquitous brown paper packages tied up with string which line all the walls in the place.

“We weren’t that old,” I said to my husband as I walked out, feeling just slightly less guilty than I normally do.

I’ve been dropping off our shirts at San Toy Laundry since 1988, when I moved to Park Slope, Michael once told The New York Times, “This is an old-fashioned kind of laundry — you don’t have them anymore…there used to be five Chinese laundries in Park Slope. Not anymore.”

I grew up with these laundries, where Chinese immigrants pressed the shirts by hand. They were once all over the city. I remember my dad dropping off his shirts at Yike Lee, in Yorkville, where I grew up, on 85th and Second. He would carry the brown package home and let me untie the string. Eh voila – I was greeted by a crisp, neatly pressed stack of folded patterned shirts bound by a pastel green strip of paper.

San Toy has not changed one bit since the first day I entered. It might have looked new in 1962. As it turns out this space has been occupied by a Chinese laundry for over a century, changing hands throughout the years.

The thing about San Toy is that it is cash only. Which brings me to why it sometimes takes me awhile. It’s a bad habit, and I have no excuse. I just sometimes drop shirts off then forget about them. Sadly, judging by the packages along the wall, I’m not the only one.

“These are all old — years ago,” Michael’s wife told The Times, “waving at most of the shirts and reaching up to pull down a random package. Never claimed. Its tag was from 2006.”

“People move away, they forget to pick them up,” she said of the packages. “But if we threw them away, the shelves would look empty, and we would not look busy.”

Indeed, they are faded -- even the pastel blues, greens, and yellows are washed out — compared to the fresher ones on the opposite shelves. Yet, even though, you need the ticket to retrieve your shirts – Michael gives you one that matches the one he pins to your bundle – he was kind enough to find our shirts when I once lost mine. It took a little time but his patience, and ever-present smile, reminded me why the neighborhood business, whether it’s the deli, bookshop, or dry cleaner, is so vital.

Several years ago, I dropped off a jacket at a dry cleaner after I wore it to an event at a school which closed at the end of that year. Not needing professional clothing for several months, I completely forgot about the jacket, having yet again misplaced the ticket. Several years went by. Then I remembered. Humbly, I walked in and asked the owner if she could help me. I described the jacket.

“When did you bring it in?” she asked.

 “Two years ago,” I answered.

 “Two years?!” she asked.

 She searched, she parted plastic bags, then she emerged, holding my jacket, perfectly pressed on its wire metal hanger.

At my regular dry cleaner, the old school ticket is no longer necessary. The computer knows where my clothing is, so not matter how many tickets I lose, the lovely woman behind the counter can always help.

Yet those pretty pastel tickets – what is it about them? As long as they exist, they remind me of the almost anachronistic analog world I grew up in, one that was not necessarily better, but that was somehow simpler, a bit more tactile, that gave you a certain satisfaction in clutching a pale colored laundry check, one that required you to also clutch something else: cold hard cash.

One beautiful bonus of walking into San Toy: “The rotary phone on the wall still works, and San Toy’s phone number — NEvins-8-3477 — has not changed since the 1930s.” – The New York Times.

The History of the Chinese Laundry in America

He Irons. She Stitches.