Mad Men is back! And so is Mad Men blogging. Yay!
As I did last year, I will be blogging the food and drink of Mad Men. (In a departure from last year, I do not plan to be so overwhelmed by all the themed cooking and cocktails that I completely miss the last post of [...]
It was unseasonably hot.
That must have been the reason my grandmother walked down the aging basement stairs and out of the open garage door and traveled a block to the corner store, holding my three-year-old hand in hers. The giddy excitement of the moment still stays with me; the black night sky, like a stage [...]
I love buying yarn “with a story,” whether that means a percentage of the proceeds go towards helping refugees in Darfur or the yarn is handspun by at-risk youth thirty miles from my house. The story makes me feel good about buying yet another skein of yarn, and, when I knit a project out of [...]
Passover is almost over.
For the first time since 2001 or thereabouts, I did not host a Passover Seder. (I attended two seders, both of which were lovely.) I did not cook an unforgivably unpalatable kosher-for-passover dessert, nor did I set a glass of water beside Elijah’s cup for Miriam, nor did [...]
This is how to make collard greens. First, my grandfather drives his truck to the Alemany Farmer’s Market. My grandfather chooses a bunch of taut, bitter leaves, and he puts money in the dirt-caked, stubby-fingered hand of the farmer who planted the seeds, and he brings home the collards to my grandmother to cook.
But where [...]
I was raised to believe I could keep bad things from happening to me, as a woman, if I just followed certain rules.
The women in my life, trying, no doubt, to protect me, taught me these rules. When a woman was abducted and killed while leaving a nighttime party in a miniskirt, I was taught [...]
The large questions are supposed to be the ones that sustain us, that keep us turning the metaphorical page, swinging our feet out of bed and onto the cold floor every morning. We are supposed to hang around on Earth because we want to see our children grow up, or want to work towards world [...]
Tuesday, February 9, 2010
Every few weeks, we gather round our kitchen table on a Friday evening, light candles, do a little davening, eat a little challah, and usher in the Sabbath. It doesn’t happen every week, but, when we do it, we are always happier for it. Our Shabbat ritual has settled into a routine, now. We don’t [...]
I was one of the first generations to grow up with rap music. When I was a child (in the good old days of Reaganomics) rap fell into two categories: message rap (Public Enemy) and party rap (Run D.M.C.). Message rap discussed politics and institutional racism and other important things. (Sometimes, but not always, Flavor [...]
Wednesday, January 27, 2010
Did you have a baby doll, once?
I had lots of baby dolls. Orange Blossom I received the Christmas my little sister turned one; when you squeezed her stomach she “blew” orange-scented kisses. And Martha Jean (renamed after my grandmother), my first treasured Cabbage Patch Kid.
Eventually, these dolls were lost to history, so to speak. I [...]