Monthly Archives: February 2013

One Lump or Two?

Posted on February 22, 2013 by Kathleen Fox

Cleaning out the tea cupboard. It sounds so domestic. So tidy. So British, even. What the process actually resembled was an archeological dig. The only difference was that the layers by which I could date my discoveries went from front to back rather than top to bottom. I didn’t really find anything that could be considered treasure, but there were definitely some significant artifacts.

Like several lumps of stuff formerly known as cocoa mix that had hardened into free-form sculptures. These relics indicated that the inhabitants of this site liked chocolate and had access to it, but tended to forget about it once it was shoved toward the back of the cupboard. This theory was further supported by the discovery of two faded boxes containing a few desiccated blocks of Mexican chocolate.

Then there was the ancient container made from plastic tentatively dated to the mid-1980’s. Its label was long gone, but its size and shape indicated that it may once have held citrus-based powdered drink mix. This hypothesis was supported by the fact that the concrete-textured residue in the bottom of the container, when flooded with hot water, still smelled slightly of lemon.

Scattered throughout the cupboard were little plastic bags containing unknown herbaceous substances. Assuming these were tea, I had no qualms about considering them fully legal. Beyond legal, in fact. Most of them were clearly old enough to vote.

One of the most significant artifacts in this cache was an intact, unopened can of coffee. The Turkish lettering on the can was a strong indication that the inhabitants of this site had either traveled to Turkey or at least traded for Turkish goods. While the precise age of the container couldn’t be determined, it was clearly one of the oldest artifacts at the site. Not only was it made of metal rather than plastic, but it was designed to be opened with a T-shaped metal key. This was used to pull off a narrow strip of metal that circled the can just below the top.

The key was still attached to the top of the can. I couldn’t resist. In violation of all the accepted protocols for archeological sites, I decided to open the can. The little metal tab on the side didn’t come loose until I pried it up with the tip of a butter knife. Then I slid the tab through the slot in the key and started turning it.

I remember opening cans this way when I was a kid—not just coffee, but also ham. It came in flat cans, oval with one end wider than the other, that were vaguely ham-shaped. Opening the cans, which in today’s world would no doubt be considered child endangerment, was then a privilege and a challenge.

The biggest risk with this system was cutting your fingers. As the metal strip pulled loose and wound around the key, it ended up as a circle more than half an inch in diameter with lethally sharp edges.

The other difficulty was making sure to wind the metal strip around the key tightly and precisely enough. Otherwise, you would end up with a wobbly spiral rather than a tight circle. This not only increased the likelihood of getting blood in the coffee, but it sometimes meant needing to abandon the key and finish pulling the strip loose with a pair of pliers.

Fortunately, I didn’t have to resort to that with the Turkish coffee. The key worked just the way it was designed to, and I pulled the lid off without any risk to my fingers. The inside of the can was mottled in a way suggestive of way too much time in the cupboard. The contents had settled into unappetizing clods and clumps.

It still smelled like coffee, though, even when I dumped it onto the compost pile. Combined with the lumps of old cocoa mix, it provided a sort of backyard mocha latte experience for the browsing deer. I hope they enjoyed it; there was enough old sugar and caffeine to keep all of them awake for a week.

Categories: Food and Drink | 1 Comment

How About a Little Whine With Your Meal?

Posted on February 15, 2013 by Kathleen Fox

“Oh, and this one is my husband’s absolute favorite! I don’t even try to make it at home any more. It’s so much better here, so I tell him he’s welcome to have it any time he wants—all he has to do is show up here.”

The waitress was in full spate. With the menu in front of her so we could see it, she was gushing over one featured entrée after another. It was like a preschool teacher with a little too much drama training reading a picture book to a group of four-year-olds who already knew it by heart.

I wanted to grab the menu out of her hands and snarl, “I can read, thank you very much. And I don’t care what your husband likes. Just go away for a few minutes and leave me in peace to decide what I want to order.”

We had been in the restaurant for less than ten minutes and had already been reminded why we don’t go there very often. This is a well-known seafood chain. It has quite good food, a pleasant dining room, and reasonable prices. It would be a perfect place for a slightly-special-occasion evening out.

Except for the staff. Not that the service is bad. Quite the opposite. Everyone is obviously trained to be friendly and make light, breezy conversation with the customers. They take this training much too seriously.

It starts with the host or hostess: “Welcome! And what brings you out this evening?”

Um—this is a restaurant. Probably it’s because we’re, you know, hungry?

“Are you celebrating a special occasion tonight? Or off to the movies?”

Um—if I thought that was any of your business, I would tell you.

This chitchat gets us to a table, where the conversational baton is passed to the server. Usually they introduce themselves, ask about our plans for the evening, and enthuse over the menu. On this particular evening, our waitress went far above and beyond her training. She flooded us with conversation like a nervous hostess giving her first big dinner party who had fortified herself by over-sampling the wine before the guests arrived.

Every time she stopped at our table, she was chattier. By her third visit, my partner, who was sitting with his back to the room, had his shoulders hunched in a defensive posture and had begun to flinch whenever a shadow fell across his plate. I at least had the advantage of being able to see her coming. I tried to keep her from interrupting our conversation by avoiding eye contact. It didn’t work.

Trapped by good manners, we tolerated her chatty interruptions and ate as fast as we could. By the time we had refused dessert, paid our tab, and made our escape, we had learned far more than we cared to know about our server’s husband, her previous job, her food preferences and those of half the members of her extended family, and her opinions of several current movies.

We didn’t care. We didn’t want to know. We had gone out on a date. Our plan was to enjoy a nice dinner, a quiet conversation, and each other’s company. It wasn’t our intention to share the evening with a server whose goal was to become our new BFF. If we had wanted to include a third party, we would have invited one of the friends we already had.

Categories: Food and Drink | Tags: dining | 2 Comments

The Flies Are Falling! The Flies Are Falling!

Posted on February 8, 2013 by Kathleen Fox

First of all, a brief follow-up to last week’s column. Just in case anyone may have been concerned, I do not sort my M&M’s by color if I happen to be driving while I’m eating them. Such behavior would definitely go beyond quirky and might even be considered a teensy bit obsessive.

That’s why, when I was traveling this afternoon, I didn’t check the color of my M&M’s.

By the way, a regular sized package of M&M’s, eaten two at a time with sips of coffee in between, lasts for approximately 35 miles along I-90 in western South Dakota when one is driving the speed limit.

But on to other things. As all politicians and their advisors know, one of the crucial factors in being a good spin doctor is getting your version of the story out first, loudest, and most often. In that spirit, I just want to share the following:

First, I categorically deny that there was any deliberate intent or malice involved when I showered my mother with dead flies. I was merely trying to help. In fact, I was only following orders—her orders.

But when you are standing on a rickety wooden stepladder, removing the flimsy plastic cover from the fluorescent light fixture in your parents’ kitchen, accidents can happen. I had snapped off one side of the cover without disturbing the dead flies that littered it. The whole purpose of the exercise, you see, was to get rid of the bodies.

But when the cover came loose on the second side, it twisted sideways and slipped out of my hands. It crashed to the floor in a cascade of dead flies, bouncing off my mother as it fell. True, she was standing right underneath the light fixture at the time in order to hold the wobbly ladder. OSHA would not have approved of her being so close to an overhead maintenance project when she wasn’t wearing a hard hat or any other protective gear. Come to think of it, OSHA wouldn’t have approved of the ladder, either.

But at least a flimsy plastic cover weighing approximately five ounces is not a dangerous object, so she wasn’t hurt. More surprisingly, the light fixture cover wasn’t hurt, either. Even better, by the time I picked it up off the floor it no longer had any dead flies in it. So I gave it a cursory swipe with a dust rag and snapped it back into place.

The rest of the project took a bit longer. It required cleaning fly bodies off of the table, the counter, and the window sill, sweeping the floor, and combing several corpses out of my mother’s hair. I’d never had occasion to practice that particular form of primate grooming before.

Among the pleasures of visiting my parents is hearing them tell and retell family stories. One of the things we talked about during this visit was how accurate some of those stories are, especially the older ones. Different family members remember things differently, and memories fade over the years. Maybe, sometimes, what we remember is more about what the “official version” of the story says happened than it is about what actually happened.

The incident of the falling flies is one very small family story that will probably only be told a couple of times. But just in case it grows or changes in the telling, here is my version. In writing. Spread all over the Internet.

When it comes to getting there first with the spin on a story, there are no flies on me.

Categories: Family | 1 Comment

The Curious Case of the Sorted M&M’s

Posted on February 1, 2013 by Kathleen Fox

Is sorting M&M’s by color before you eat them an endearing little quirk, a sign of artistic awareness, or just a teeny bit compulsive?

I don’t know. It’s just the way I eat my M&M’s. I never stopped to think about it until recently, when we were traveling and listened to the audio version of Mark Haddon’s novel The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time.

The narrator of the story is 15-year-old Christopher Boone, who has what is presumably a form of autism. His favorite author is Sherlock Holmes, so when he finds the body of his neighbor’s murdered dog, he decides to investigate. His detective work uncovers much more about his own life than it does about the dog.

The book was a fascinating glimpse of life from the perspective of someone who thinks very differently from what most of us probably consider “normal.” One of the side effects of it, though, was to make me start wondering about some of my own behavior.

Like taking eggs out of the carton so as to leave a symmetrical pattern, rather than just grabbing a couple. I might start, for example, by taking the eggs out of the top left and bottom right corners. Then maybe I’ll take the next two from the right side of the second row and the left side of the next to the last row. This, by the way, is much easier to do with a carton of 18 than a carton of 12. I prefer to think of it as artistic rather than autistic. You may have your own opinion.

Or sorting M&M’s by color. Of course it’s silly. They all taste the same. But I don’t care for green, so I always eat the green ones first in order to get rid of them. Next to go is usually orange, followed in order by blue and brown. I save either yellow or red for last, depending on which color most appeals to me that day and also the assortment of colors in a particular handful. (Not every bag of M&M’s has the same number of each color. People who don’t sort their M&M’s by color may not know this.)

Then there is that thing I sometimes do when I’m walking on a sidewalk, counting steps and noticing the pattern of how often I step on a crack with my right foot and then my left. One might think of it as obsessive, I suppose. Or one might think of it as a way of exercising one’s brain as well as one’s body. Or maybe it’s merely marching to the beat of a different drummer.

I also keep the stuff in my purse in specific places—my cell phone is this pocket, my wallet in that section, my keys in that little pocket with the zipper. This, I maintain, is simple utility. It’s much easier to find my keys or my sunglasses when I know which pocket to reach for. And, in my defense, I have never lost a set of keys or my wallet. Though I do occasionally misplace my purse.

Worrying about whether your behaviors are compulsive is probably a bit, well, compulsive. Thinking about the different ways our brains work, on the other hand, is merely fascinating.

But I dare you to tell me that, the next time you get eggs out of the carton, you don’t at least think about the pattern you’ve just made. And the next time you have a handful of M&M’s, I bet you’ll pay more attention to the colors.

Categories: Living Consciously, Odds and Ends | Tags: M&M's | 6 Comments