Fireworks

The fourth of July fireworks show in Tucson this year had a strange hiatus; after the first few rockets exploded, silence. There was murmuring among all of us ranged along the streets at the base of Sentinel Peak--or "A" Mountain as it's usually called because of the huge "A" on its flank that the University of Arizona students refurbish each year. The fireworks are launched from near the top of Sentinel Peak. But nothing happened for a full half hour. The crowd began to disperse after ten minutes or so, and probably only half of us were still there when the show suddenly resumed, ran its normal thrity or forty minutes, and concluded with a noisy, colorful finale. We found out later one of the pyrotechnic crew needed medical assistance, so they stopped the show while they bundled him off to the hospital. But it was not, as many of us suspected, an injury form the fireworks themselves.
     As any live fireworks show does, this one made me recall the most spectacular fireworks display I've ever seen. During my high school years in Chandler, a hundred miles north of Tucson, the Independence Day show took place on the football field of Chandler High. My girl friend and I climbed into the bleachers early for the show in the last summer I lived there. A few ground displays were lighted, including the usual American flag in sparklers and pinwheels. Two rockets shot up; one exploded into color and the other gave a tremendous bang. Then a trail of fire shot diagonally across the field on the ground; a rocket had fallen over. A small fire started, and in its light we could see people running off the field in all directions. Almost instantly, with many crackles and bangs, everything went off. The field was covered with a hemisphere of fire--colored, intense light, ranging up perhaps fifty feet, but somehow, mercifully, contained on its sides. Had rockets fired into the bleachers we all, with no time to move or place to go, would have been doomed. As it was, we just stared. The blaze of light hovered over the field for perhaps thirty seconds. As it was succeeded by a layer of smoke, the fire engines stationed on the track moved slowly onto the field. Several minutes passed before anyone said anything.

Long and Short Months

If you can't remember--and I never can--Coleridge's rhyme about "thirty days hath September," try this: make two fists and put them together, with the knuckles up. Starting at the left, with the knuckle of the little finger of your left hand, let each knuckle and the depression between knuckles represent a month. January is the knuckle of your little finger, February the dip between that and the next knuckle, March the knuckle of your left ring finger, and so on. The knuckles are long months of 31 days, and the depressions are short ones, usually 30 days, but of course February is an exceptionally short one. This shows you graphically that, except for the two long months July and August, the knuckles of your left index and right index fingers, long and short months alternate through the year.

The Big Book

            I’ve been reading the third edition (1976) of Alcoholics Anonymous. The first edition of what A.A. members call “The Big Book” appeared in 1939. The important sections remain the same in subsequent editions, though appendices and additional personal stories have been added.

            The heart of the book is in the discussion of “How It Works”—this and subsequent chapters explain the implementation of the twelve steps—and in the two narratives of the movement’s co-founders: “Bill’s Story,” and “Doctor Bob’s Nightmare.” In the latter, “Doctor Bob” says that the company of the man who helped him get sober was important because “he was the first living human being with whom I had ever talked, who knew what he was talking about in regard to alcoholism from actual experience.” This keeping company with those who actually understand because they have been there seems to be part of the reason A.A. works, and the rest seems to be in the steps, including acceptance of one’s helplessness in the grip of alcoholism and the attempt at complete honesty with oneself and others.

            Another way in which the rest of us don’t get it shows up in the narratives, which seem to me to tell the same story and to each be very repetitive. I remember an A.A. meeting I attended in Tucson, where after the second person detailed her woes, I thought how cliché-ridden and predictable these narratives seemed to be, and tried to find some interest by looking around me. To my shock, everyone was listening intently and not a few of the listeners were in tears.

Food V

            Another life-changing food experience was our first trip to Spain in 1983. I started keeping a journal during this trip.  Katharine and I took a swing north from Madrid through Leon, Cantabria and the Rioja and then back to Madrid.  Later we were joined by three close friends for a drive down through La Mancha to Jaen and then on to Córdoba, Seville, Granada and the Mediterranean coast.  My journal records sightseeing, but it mostly talks about what we ate.  And the meals were worth recording.  It was my first exposure to many foods: my first baby eels, eaten as a first course for lunch in the basement comedor of the Alfonso XIII Hotel in Seville (eels Bilbao, with garlic and a trace of peppers), my first suckling pig, at Botín in Madrid, a restaurant famous for the dish.  At El Caballo Rojo in Córdoba I had my first taste of the meaty vegetable from the thistle plant, cardos, or cardoons in English.  Cardos are the bottoms of the European wild thistle, Cynara cardunculus, like a miniature artichoke heart, sweet and tender, served in this case in a cream sauce flavored with jamón serrano.  “Cardoons with ham’s cream” was the quaint translation on the menu for the English-only speaker.  Cardoons sounds distinctly Scotch, and I suppose Scotland is known for its thistles, but the cultivated cardunculus is a southern European phenomenon.  Other foods that I had disdained before, I found prepared in magical ways on this trip.  The homely eggplant in the hands of a cook in Almagro became a savory appetizer; elsewhere, prepared with ham or with cheese it had inspired the sixteenth-century poet Baltasar del Alcázar to sing its praises.  Spinach, never a favorite of mine, was transformed by sautéing with a little olive oil and pine nuts into a delicious side dish. In a marisquería in Madrid’s tapas zone around the Plaza Victoria my friend David Earnest introduced me to percebes, goose barnacles, steamed and requiring a fair amount of unwrapping of tough hide to get to the tender meat, juicy, salty, and with the slightest hint of iodine. The many novel tastes overwhelmed the other novelties of this trip.

Food IV

            While I was in Europe my parents moved to California. My first artichoke I ate in Huntington Beach, where my parents’ apartment was in a complex across the street from artichoke fields, less than three miles from the beach itself.  Here, too, I had my first taste of Sand Dabs, that delicate Pacific flat fish, usually no more than six inches long, with buttery flesh.  I’ve never seen them in a restaurant away from the California coast. The frog’s legs I ate at Le Petit Moulin in Santa Monica one Christmas vacation I would never have ordered; they were a surprise on the prix fixe dinner: tiny little joints in what must have been a classic poulette sauce of white wine and mushroom stock.

            My next big food revelation came when I married and my wife Katharine and I moved to New Orleans in 1970. I know that my first encounter with whole Blue Crabs was in our first days there, at the lakeshore restaurant called Fitzgerald’s—gone even before we left the city in 1976.  Katharine waited patiently, having already finished her own dinner, while I worked slowly and awkwardly through a dozen of them.  Later I learned faster techniques from the locals.

            Our first batch of whole boiled crayfish came at the French Quarter apartment of Bill McCarthy, Cormac McCarthy’s brother, who taught with us at Louisiana State University in New Orleans, later renamed the University of New Orleans.  Pounds of heaped, steaming crayfish at the center of a newspaper-covered table, with bowls of red beans and rice on the side, and a technique considerably simpler than that for Blue Crabs: pull off the head and suck its juices; put a thumb on each side of the projecting tail shell from the bottom and push with the fingers, cracking the tail open.  Learning the speedy separation of a crayfish tail from its shell gives almost as much pleasure as eating the little morsels.

Where did I have my first oyster?  I can’t recall, but when Katharine and I moved to New Orleans in 1970 I had already developed a taste for them, and sometimes made a lunch of a couple of dozen with saltines and a Jax beer—made down on Decatur Street until the brewery was closed in our third year in town.             I often went on oyster hops, eating two or three dozen at several places such as the Acme, Felix’s across the street, and the Desire Oyster Bar on Bourbon.  As I have said, one can make a meal of two dozen oysters, eight or ten soda crackers, and a couple of beers that will now have to be Dixie, since the Jax brewery is closed.  I have eaten eight or nine dozen without feeling I had overdone it.

Four Strong Winds

Sometime in the early seventies I went with friends to a club in Annapolis, Maryland to hear the duo Ian and Sylvia perform. They were a Canadian couple who had half a dozen hit songs in the sixties that had been popular in their own versions and in covers by other groups or individual performers: "Lovin' Sound" and "You Were on My Mind" were a couple of examples. Their signature song was "Four Strong Winds," as wildly popular in the U.S. as it was in Canada--the province of Alberta is mentioned in the first verse. Before they sang it they announced they were making a change in one of the verses, but shortly after they began (with the chorus) the audience started to sing--not along, exactly, but more instead--and whatever change Ian and Sylvia made was drowned out by the version the audience knew.
The moment was my first realization of what all artists learn, I suppose, as soon as their work gets out into the world: what it means and even what it is no longer belongs to them.

Food III

By the time I went to college I had developed enough taste discrimination that I could not stand to eat in the school cafeteria for more than a couple of days together; since I had a meal ticket this made for budget problems when I wanted to eat in restaurants. As Jonathan Lehrer says “This is the power of cooking: it invents a new kind of desire.” And then, in my sophomore year I went to Europe.

I wasn’t prepared for the variety of foods I found when traveling, not only in moving from Germany to France to Italy to Greece and Turkey, but also the regional variety between a Milanese cutlet and a Tuscan beefsteak. And in truth I sampled very little of it, lacking the money, the languages, and the imagination to go beyond some of the simpler dishes. But what a revelation they were! I reveled in pasta with meat or fish sauces so complexly flavored, so savory they compelled slower eating. Late in my trip, in St. Germain-sur-Seine, the father of a friend taught me the rhythm of one bite of food, one small sip of wine, as we ate his superb lapin au vin blanc. “It dissolves the fat,” he said. But in Italy, early on, there was one discovery after another. In Rome I ordered a plate of spaghetti alla vongole at a waiter’s recommendation (though neither of us understood the other’s language—and the menu had no translations) and found with surprise that the excellent sauce was filled with tender clams. Like Henry James some time before, I was pleased, surprised, and curious about how long all this had been going on over there. Adam Gopnik describes a similar experience as a young teenager when he and his family spent a year in Paris: that first night, he writes, “we went out for dinner and, for fifteen francs, had the best meal I had ever eaten, and most of all, nobody who lived there seemed to notice or care. The beauty and the braised trout alike were just part of life, the way we do things here.”