Author Archives: Tata

Never Have That Recipe Again

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Last night, Pete’s tenant had a houseful of children who are growing up bathed in the cool light of satellite television, which went out during a storm. I borrowed the little girl, leaving my car keys as collateral, and pulled a couple of Dad’s cookbooks down from the shelves. We studied recipes. We studied lists of ingredients. We gazed at the clock. A whole lot of breakfast recipes require rising time, and little girls, bored out of their sweaty little skulls, go to bed early. I slammed shut The Breakfast Book.

Tata: Do you trust me?
Samantha: Yes!
Tata: We’re going to bake french toast tomorrow morning.
Sammy: We what?

Mam’selle professes a desire to professionally prepare desserts. To this end, I have seen her – from a safe distance – mash up marshmallow, rice crispie thingies and Nutella, spoon it onto a plate, stab the chunks with toothpicks and toss the whole mess into the freezer. To my abiding regret, I ate one of these morsels. I may be diabetic now or developing a Hallmark Card fixation, I don’t know. I had a moment where I thought I might – Jesus Christ! – says something nice, but it passed. Whew! Anyway, we sliced challah rolls in half and slathered the insides with homemade apple butter. Then we mixed up spicy custard batter with lots of cinnamon, cloves and fresh ground nutmeg. On a lark, we added sugar-free raspberry syrup, turning the custard Barbie pink. Sammy was delighted as we poured it over the rolls and put them into the fridge to soak overnight.

Late this morning, Pete and I took a long walk through the park, where we saw lots of adorable little duckies doing adorable duckie things. The walk was difficult because we’ve both been sick so long that the slightest exertion leaves us breathless, so my incessant swearing was practically aerobic exercise. But look at these duckies, frolicking and playing, splashing and diving, quacking for all they’re worth: they seemed very, very happy and I slowly cooled to a slightly less homicidal state. You will be happy to hear I didn’t beat any children even a little.

As a general point, it is a goddamn shame that divorced parents, knowledgeable about food, nutrition and healthy practices, permit their children to gobble shitty Booberry and Count Chocula by the troughful, sculpt the Chrysler Building out of otherwise untouched custardy french toast and homemade stewed apples, then offer those surly children fucking Kraft Macaroni & Cheese in giant soupbowls, because real food is a little too goddamn real.

On the other hand, you know, duckies!

Tomorrow Goodbye That Day May Be Soon

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She calls me. It’s urgent. She doesn’t say hello.

Mary: Bread pudding?
Tata: Love it.
Mary: Stale bread?
Tata: The stalest. Thrifty. Good.
Mary: It’s not too stale?
Tata: The staler the better. Love custard?
Mary: Love it.
Tata: Add raisins, walnuts, fruit.
Mary: Not sure. Don’t like?
Tata: Use extra custard. All good. One more thing –
Mary: Ready!
Tata: Don’t let anyone talk you into using doughnuts. That shit’ll kill you.
Mary: Over and out!

I have every confidence that Mary, who tonight baked her first loaf of bread with her divine seven-year-old, baked a lovely, custardy, delicious bread pudding.

Next week: hard sauce.

See Her Much Since She Started To Ride

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In our vast old age, cable television or satellite or some pulse-pounding form of high-def radio will become increasingly important as we spend more time nursing ourselves back to health, because tonics and balms aside, few things make a geezer jump up and twitch like taking a gander at Darrin’s office in McMann & Tate. Think back! You’ve seen it a thousand times, and if you get colds you’ll need to see it a thousand more: desks are covered with ashtrays, cigarette butts and half-empty bottles of scotch. Obviously, we’re healthier than we know, and scotch prevents absenteeism. Obviously. The bug Pete and I and half the city have been trading, mixing and matching for over a month has settled into my lungs and makes breathing an unpleasant adventure.

If only I hadn’t quit smoking.

A Nice Day To Start Again

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This is my grandmother Edith, my father’s mother, my refuge, anchor in life I still miss daily seventeen years after her death. And an, um, friend. Edith called this picture “Two Mules.” She was six when it was taken and always hated it. You can see – or at least I can – that she never really had a child’s face, though it is charming to see her nose before she broke it playing football with her brothers. As the middle of seven children and the oldest girl in an immigrant Sicilian family, she always carried more responsibility than she should have had to bear.

I like the detail of the shoes, and that this picture was taken, if I recall correctly, in New Brunswick, where no one ever sees a mule just in passing anymore, though if one did, one would not expect this mule’s jaunty joie de vivre.

We are a long way from a post-racial society, at least in part because the issue of race makes us stupid. We say stupid things. We act against our best interests because we stupidly can’t see what they are. I can’t claim to be smarter than the next idiot but I can tell you this: anything that creates or prolongs suffering adds to the Stupid, and whatever works for the Common Good speaks for itself. Perhaps that is why I love this picture, below, so much. It’s nothing, it’s just a young man and his grandparents. They could be anyone and I would still feel the same way about it.

Very few of us are simply, genetically, one thing. There are remote places where people have not intermingled much with the world, but you should expect to find few teeth and supernumerary digits. Further, history is full of raping, pillaging, slavery and diaspora, so no matter how you slice it, a picture of your family tree will inevitably come up short a few branches – or maybe you’re missing from someone else’s.

I take the election season’s racial dogwhistling very seriously. It’s not hard to predict the outcome. When the Towers came down and Americans waved flags, I said, “Brown people are now going to die, as they do every time jingoism is the zeitgeist.” And now I say we are about to revisit that part of our comparatively recent history where white people act on their basest, most vile impulses and truly believe they are acting in the interest of White Pride or White Heritage or …whatever. But Americans really ought to know in 2008 that there is not now nor was there ever any such thing.

There is, however, you and your grandchildren. You and your grandparents. You and your cousins. You and your people, who may not be who you think they are. You and your own people are our people, and now is the time to ask yourself who they might be, because we cannot truly, absolutely know. You can’t know.

I Don’t Bother Chasing Mice Around

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This picture, found on Cute Overload haunts me. I cannot get over the terrible fear that I may be nothing more than cat staff to tiny, adorable pussycats who will one day climb me to reach the can opener. The current cold snap has done nothing to alleviate these fears, since Pete and I now feed two giant outdoor pussycats we suspect might be mountain lions – but, you know, with really good manners. They haven’t looked at us and licked their chops even once, so we put out a bowl of kibble for breakfast and another for dinner. They reward us by intimidating the yard squirrels.

We’re considering bringing in houseplants we put outside for the summer. Snake plants are pretty sturdy but these have become really large, vivacious and refer to us by name. Sort of. I distinctly heard one burble, “Hepzibah, dahling, bring Mama a drink,” though the plant might’ve been talking to Topaz or Drusy. That’s probably an in-joke between them.

And Meanwhile Back

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Pennies are humble and beautiful. People are careless with coins, but I adore them. It’s one of the quirks I’ve observed in men: they either collect coins or despise them – sometimes both at the same time. I can’t explain that. The Barrett-Jackson Collector Car Auction, where gleaming, museum piece cars trade for hundreds of thousands, is on TV in the living room, though my first car was a 1979 Pinto Wagon that by 1985 was still cheap enough to run that I could always get home from the Amoco station on just the change under the floor mats. And when you limp into the Turnpike Toll Plaza in a bland blue Pinto, they’re not surprised when you pay in pennies.

A Dry Dive From A Hotel Room

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When someone shows you his true colors, you should believe him.

Yes, “health” is such a nebulous term. It could mean practically anything, like “misogynist” or “complete sellout.” In fact, why don’t we take the dictionary, separate the words from their meanings – since we’re not using those anymore – and shift everything a nonsensical two or three over. Then we can all pretend to be shocked! and surprised! – whatever the new versions turn out to be – when women’s bodies turn up dead – oddly, still meaningful – on hotel floors. Just the way they did in the bad old days.

Won’t that be “funny”?

Like A Red Rubber Ball

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In an exciting turn of events, I woke up Sunday without a voice where I could swear I’ve had one all this time. And of course Monday I got that flu shot we’re all desperate to talk about, but beyond that, I immediately drove home and keeled over. Yet today, I bounce back, like one of those inflatable Bozo the Clown things we all punched as angry children. So far, I have to say, these metaphors could go better.

Anyhoo, blogging and hijinx will recommence in three, two, one, and –

Goldfish Shoals Nibbling At My Toes

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Topaz and Drusy cannot believe their sensitive ears!

Thursday, Pete went to the doctor and discovered that though he works in a toy store with children his insurance does not cover a flu shot. When I got home, he told me his doctor said it would be cheaper if he went to Costco. I stared at him like he was speaking Urdu, certain I’d misheard. Costco? What? On Thursdays, Pete and I work evening hours at the family stores, so figuring out what was going on took on a certain urgency. I had 90 minutes.

I called Costco and asked about flu shots. The woman who answered said there was a line by the pharmacy, it moved quickly, and though there were no guarantees we should be able to get a shot within half an hour. Pete and I looked at each other, gathered everything we’d need for work and jumped into the car, despite the feeling that we were driving into Bizarro Land.

At Costco, we marched with great purpose to the pharmacy and ran down almost zero little old ladies. I mean, they had it coming. Anyway, at the pharmacy, I didn’t see anything that made sense to me, so I made eye contact with a person waiting in line and said, “Are you waiting for a flu shot?” She pointed behind her to the intersection of dog food and fabric softener. Pete and I turned the corner and found three tables, six workers, buckets of needles and the deadest of dead-end Costco customers in a blessedly brief line. A blue-haired lady at a table parked in front of bales of kibble squawked, “It’s $20 unless you have Aetna! Do you have Aetna?” over and over.

Pete does not have Aetna, but he did have $10. I rummaged through my book bag until I found ten softly rumpled singles. Pete took a clipboard and filled out a form that asked little more about him than where he lived or if he’d ever had a fatal allergic reaction to drugs. Reading over his shoulder, I frowned. He sat down and got a shot. The blue-haired lady who stuck him made him promise he’d walk around the giant warehouse for 15 minutes, so if he had one of those fatal allergic reactions, we could all learn our lesson.

I now know more about bacon-wrapped scallops than I’d like to admit. Pete did not keel over, so we went to work and today, Pete has that touch of flu one gets after a flu shot. It’s disappointing, but he doesn’t fall asleep long enough for me to draw pictures on him with Magic Markers. The exciting thing is that I’m getting mine next week, lather, rinse, repeat. I’m hiding the Magic Markers.

It makes no sense to me that the bulk merchandise warehouse sells flu shots but doctors’ offices can’t administer innoculations because insurance companies decide who gets one by criteria that have little to do with the patients’ needs. My doctor laughed at me when I said I never imagined I’d need a flu shot. The Stop & Shop three blocks from my house is holding clinics. What’s wrong with this picture?

I can only guess what’s going on but I don’t like it, so here’s a present. It’s one of my favorite scenes from one of my favorite shows Red Dwarf. The episode is called Holoship. The confusion feels …familiar.