this is my body

Our small apartment grows bigger in the three months of summer....

Wed, 12 Jun 2013 15:21:43 -0400

Our small apartment grows bigger in the three months of summer. There’s an alley out back, small, nothing you’d call a yard, but a space, outside, in the air. For many years it was a mess, a place only for garbage cans, where big fat buzzy dung flies bounced around and squirrels and mean, shiny-eyed city raccoons would raid, leaving trails of avocado rinds and wrappers.

I ripped out a rusting chain-link fence on the hottest day of a bad summer. I found a chair and a table. I raked up all the years and years of fallen, papery leaves and took ownership of a Weber charcoal grill that a long-gone neighbor had abandoned. Nina hung some lights along the back of someone else’s wooden fence. It gets sunshine before ten in the morning and again after three in the afternoon. I drink beer and cook food out here. I read and feel the sunshine. Nina builds tables, using the space as an outdoor workshop. We’ve met interesting neighbors here, and it helped our world grow in increments.

One night, someone took a shit here, right on the concrete walkway I sweep every morning, right under our bedroom window. The heat of the morning melted the excrement and flattened it out like a wet pancake. There were a few coins around the scene, an Au Bon Pain napkin. It’s dark at night and I imagined a man, down on his luck, running from the street with no options. I wondered about people I’ve wronged, too. If maybe this was a message, intentionally sent.

There’s no hose like in normal yards, so I poured water from a jug and cleaned up the mess with a plastic snow shovel and shopping bags, rolls and rolls of paper towels. It was a horrible ordeal, but I had become protective of the space and it needed cleaning. The smell lingered. Last weekend, I got up from my chair for no reason at all in the middle of the afternoon. A few steps away I heard a cracking and tearing, a heavy wind. I looked up. A huge branch, hundreds and hundreds of pounds of wood and green leaves, fell from a great height. It slammed the table, smashing it to bits. My legs were just there. When I look up from my chair, I see a scarred edge, an amputation showing fresh, moist flesh.

"I thought of home, of spaghetti swimming in rich tomato sauce, smothered in Parmesan cheese, of..."

Mon, 10 Jun 2013 10:39:01 -0400

“I thought of home, of spaghetti swimming in rich tomato sauce, smothered in Parmesan cheese, of Mamma’s lemon pies, of lamb roasts and hot bread, and I was so miserable that I deliberately sank my fingernails into the flesh of my arm until a spot of blood appeared.”

- From John Fante’s Ask the Dust (1939), part three of the four-novel collection The Saga of Arturo Bandini. A young man wanders the streets of Los Angeles, dreams of becoming a writer. He is hungry. He has only two dollars in his pocket – he wasted the other eight of the ten his Mamma sent him on a hooker he hadn’t the nerve to sleep with. He plays the big shot and tells countless, thin lies, has fantasies of fame and vengeful glory, but he knows what he his and how little he has. He has the anger of his father, the shame and weight of his church, and the bags of oranges, five cents a dozen, to fill his stomach. “It was so sad down there in my stomach,” he tells us.

The shells of New England lobsters are softest in summer. When I...

Thu, 06 Jun 2013 16:24:00 -0400

The shells of New England lobsters are softest in summer. When I was young, my father did the killing and cooking of lobsters. It was the only thing my mother, the worst kind of kitchen tyrant, allowed him to do. I poked my head in the fridge, watching the brown paper bag wriggle just so, bulge a bit to one side or the other. “They’re alive,” my mother reminded me. Nothing else ever moved on its own in the fridge. It was all dead, or had never been alive. My father took a heavy knife from the drawer of lesser-used things. He lined up the point of the blade on the underside of the wet, wriggling creature and plunged, fast and hard. He brought the edge of the blade down in one motion and split the lobster clean in half with his free hand on the flat side of the blade. Claws, legs and tail reached out all at once, and froze. They weren’t alive anymore. He salted and peppered the exposed, clear flesh, poured on a little oil, and went out to the grill. I followed through the screen door, distracting him as he looked at his watch and counted the seconds.

There is a small calendar in our apartment that we got in Japan, with colorful drawings and confusing characters. Yesterday I flipped the furry page to June to find an image of a spiny, claw-less lobster, the ones they eat all over Asia. i don’t like those. I prefer mine in Maine, which begins about an hour’s drive north of here. Boiled and bright red, my favorite piece of meat comes from just below the claw, where the lobster’s wrists would be were it a human being.

I come from New Haven, Connecticut, where pizza is important....

Tue, 04 Jun 2013 16:27:00 -0400

I come from New Haven, Connecticut, where pizza is important. There’s a running war there on Wooster Street between Pepe’s Pizza and Sally’s Apizza. Pepe’s is the best I’ve ever had and I’ve never had Sally’s. If you love one, you don’t need the other. There doesn’t need to be better.

About 13 years ago, I moved to Boston. Pizza in Boston is terrible. First I was in the North End, the city’s Little Italy with narrow streets and cobblestones, Old North Church. I shared a ridiculous studio apartment on the ground floor with a boyhood friend. It had one window, the heat came from a vent in the side of the oven, and whatever privacy it offered was purely imagined. It was on North Margin Street, half a block from Pizzeria Regina. People said this was the best pizza in Boston. Long lines of hungry folks spread down the block. People were waiting to get in, just like at Pepe’s. When I finally tasted Regina’s pizza, it was bad. It wasn’t OK, and it wasn’t that it didn’t measure up. It was just bad in my mouth. I’ve since updated my opinion and I think it’s fine, just fine.

I moved to Cambridge a few years later and pizza was even worse on this side of the Charles River. Santarpio’s in East Boston, near the airport, is very good and gruff and full of weirdo neighborhood charm. I think it’s Boston’s best. There are good fancy pizzas now too, like at Area Four in Cambridge’s Kendall Square. This pizza is delicious and I eat it often, but it’s new and expensive so I think of it as a different category.

Now I make my own pizzas. Nina, who grew up in Boston but was born at Yale New Haven Hospital just like me, makes the dough. It lives in the freezer in plastic bags and she defrosts them into oily little balls. We assemble our toppings very carefully. There is much trial-and-error involved in making pizza, the margins so thin. If you change one small thing, you can end up down a bad road and become demoralized. Balance is very important, adjustments need to be carefully weighed and reviewed after the fact.

We’ve made some important strides. Since the oven in our tiny apartment can only reach about 450 degrees safely without smoking like hell, we try to eliminate as much moisture as we can so the pizza won’t be soggy and limp. I smear on my tomato sauce in a very thin layer with a spoon and sprinkle on some Parmigiano cheese from a giant wheel that my mother gets in North Haven and brings up on visits. Using no mozzarella – eliminating all its moisture and very little flavor – is the big secret to keeping the crust crisp. This was a recent revelation.

I take Longhini sausage, from New Haven, out of the casing and cook it in a hot pan, crumbling it with a wooden spoon. I cook sliced mushrooms in the sausage fat with a lot of black pepper until their liquid comes out. I spread the sausage and mushroom – incidentally, my favorite combo order at Pepe’s – and then put another light layer of Parmigiano, a splash of good olive oil, a little salt. Then it goes in the oven on the stone, turning one time, 180 degrees, until brown and crisp and full of burnt bubbles. Finally, I cover the pizza with fresh baby arugula, which will wilt over the heat of the pie. This last step would get you chased out of Pepe’s and right down the road, but it’s delicious and I’ve come a long way.

I have a big Bialetti stovetop espresso machine that makes eight...

Thu, 30 May 2013 14:41:00 -0400

I have a big Bialetti stovetop espresso machine that makes eight cups, and a smaller one that makes four. They’re not cheap, but they are simple and will outlive you with an occasional rubber gasket change. You can pass them on to your children, or your sister’s children, or bequeath them to someone special in your last will and testament. My Nonna passed hers on to my mother when she died and it still comes out, tarnished and heavy, from its dark home in a high cabinet over the stove.

Like most great things, the machine is heavy. It consists of three parts: a decanter at the bottom, a basket, which fits into the decanter, where the grinds go, and a top that screws on, where the coffee collects after being pushed up through the grinds by some magic science I don’t fully comprehend.

Make sure to leave all three parts of the machine outside your dish rack the night before, because fishing them out from under plates and forks makes an apocalyptic racket that will cause anyone sleeping in the house to want to murder you. Also, make sure you wash out the machine the night before. There is no truer way to prove you’re not yet an adult than to make banging out yesterday’s grinds the first task of a day. It took me a long time to figure this out. I’ve heard it said that you shouldn’t wash the machine with soap, only rinse with warm water, but I don’t buy that and it would horrify my mother.

Fill the decanter with cold water, just below the little hole in the side. Some people will tell you to fill it up with hot water, but I’ve never really seen anyone do this and I don’t care for it as a concept because I live in an old house with pipes made of poison. Next, fill the basket with finely ground espresso coffee. It should be smooth between your fingers like flour. Medaglia d’Oro was the brand my mother and grandmother used, but that was back when options were limited in the States. I find it bitter. I use Café Bustelo, because I like the yellow can and Market Basket, the finest shopping place on the East Coast, sells them for three bucks a can. You can grind your own. You can splurge on expensive scams like Illy, which are delicious, but cost sixteen dollars a can. If you use the Bustelo, fill the basket up three-quarters of the way. Filling it to the top makes the coffee too strong.

Screw on the top and put it on the stovetop, over the fire, high heat. When you hear a rumbling, a low-pitched bubbling, and steam shoots out of the spout, turn off the heat. Your espresso is ready. It will stay hot in the top part of the machine for a good long while if you leave the lid closed. Re-heating is a tricky subject, but sometimes I turn the heat on very low to bring the temperature of any leftover coffee back up. This is bullshit advice and for use only in emergencies.

In the morning I have my espresso with milk. Half coffee, half milk, in a mug. Sometimes, half coffee, a little splash of hot water, and the rest milk. That’s that. In the afternoons, I have the espresso by itself. And on those rare occasions when people are over and special meals are shared, I will make the coffee, lay a trivet in the middle of the table, and bring out the bottle of Sambuca. Small cups go around the table with tiny spoons. People will protest, they always protest. It’s too late; I don’t want it. But you ignore them. This was the ritual of my childhood. Fill the cup two-thirds up with coffee and then in goes the syrupy Sambuca. The next one, half coffee, half Sambuca. Arguments, noisy and usually bizarre, will follow. Laughter will bubble up through hurt feelings. Bullshit will fill the air. The next one, yes, one-third coffee and the rest Sambuca. If you’re still going after that, you’re on your own, but please, don’t forget to wash the machine before you go to bed. It’s important.

This post is for Alaina, a follower with a very cool Tumblr who asked about how I make my coffee.

I remember awful meals. The food on the table was the same, but...

Tue, 21 May 2013 13:46:45 -0400

I remember awful meals. The food on the table was the same, but anger had spoiled it. There was a rot, something seething deep in my father’s eyes. My mother went silent and mean. I sat on my knees in my chair wondering why everything had changed, why there was no laughter or complaining about the stupid administration at the school where they taught kids who needed better than they got. The reasons were usually unclear, especially to a little kid like I was. But one time I remember, specifically, the reasons for a rotten dinner. My father would stay at his desk a few more minutes than my mother liked after she called dinnertime from the kitchen upstairs. The food got cold. This time, rather than sit there and roll our eyes about my father’s quirk, my mother told me to start eating without him. I was in high school; I wasn’t a little kid anymore. I didn’t like it and I knew something was wrong. I knew it in my stomach. I tried to tell her, but she didn’t care. She is full of love, but so ferocious when pissed off beyond repair. Some minutes later, I imagine after hearing our forks clink against the plates, my father emerged from around the corner. He raged. “I wouldn’t treat a dog like this!” He shouted and stormed back down to his desk. He hadn’t heard her call, and I could see in his eyes that he was hurt. Maybe he was ashamed about his hearing loss, his aging. I heard objects slammed in anger downstairs. I looked at my mother and shook my head. Her face was strong and her expression didn’t change. I learned then, as my mother and I ate in silence, that dinners aren’t always about the food.

[Painting: Peasant Family Gathered Around the Kitchen Table by Ferdinand de Braekeleer, date unknown]

Fear, joy, sadness, hunger, desire – they were all there on my...

Mon, 20 May 2013 10:55:00 -0400

Fear, joy, sadness, hunger, desire – they were all there on my trip to Japan. A thick broth made of pork bones, with noodles, balancing flavors that made me question the foods I’ve loved all my life. There was the horror of the earth shaking under my feet, the walls of the hotel cracking 50 stories over the denseness of Tokyo, the dread fear of it happening again. Then there was the fish market, a truly amazing place, a seam in the universe where you know you are in the center of something. Blood and fish and pieces of monsters and the chaos of zooming motorized carts. You can be killed by a crate of sea urchins, crushed under the weight of squid. We ate raw fish before eight in the morning and we saw things we’ve never seen before and never will again.

Last night I dreamed a dream of Tokyo, a creation of my sleeping, troubled brain. I walked down long hallways in the dark. Sirens blared. I stood before a large wooden desk where I was forced to take a terrible oath. A giant black wave rose in a boiling ocean. The real thing was far more troubling, and far more moving, than the dream.

Things I love in my kitchen Funnel: A sturdy plastic object....

Fri, 17 May 2013 11:04:00 -0400

Things I love in my kitchen

Funnel: A sturdy plastic object. It’s basic, but try moving liquid from one bottle to another without one. Wine, oil, water. It brings me to my grandfather’s garage that I remember only through smells and the sounds of a clacking old cash register and calculator. I played in the black Buick from the 30s with running boards and shades you pulled down to cover the windows. There was a musty smell in the decades of dust in the floor and motor oil on my grandfather’s hands.

Pan: I have many pans. Some are deep with high walls, good for stewing and braising. Others are slick and non-stick. I have three cast-iron skillets for meats of all kinds and ways, saucepans too. They all hang in a clutter from a bowed metal bar on the wall. The whole thing once came crashing to the ground, pulled from the dusty plaster with such force and fury that I thought it was the sound of my own death. Among all those pans is one that I love. The perfect size, not for a family, but for two people. The cooking surface gleams metal, but its base is covered with the blackness of years and use, charred on and hard to remove. Once I managed to scrape a small patch of the dark away with steel wool, but Nina marched into the kitchen and protested. Her love for the pan surprised me.

Stove-top coffee pot: Thick, heavy metal. Fired by the flames of the stove. It meant parties when I was boy, the ends of huge and noisy meals when I catapulted wine corks and tiny espresso spoons up in the air. My mother and father would have ‘American coffee’ most days, from the percolator machine you plugged into the wall. The espresso was only for mixing with Sambuca and cognac on special holidays. I use mine every morning.

Mezzaluna: I hardly ever use this, a curved blade with handles on both ends. The name means ‘half-moon’ and it looks like one. It was in my Nonno’s house near Pisa when he died in his bed and my mother gave it to me. I hung it on the wall. It’s a simpler, softer way to chop garlic and parsley, the bend in its edge and tiny teeth don’t make the rat-tat-tat chop of a long knife, the terse sounds of a professional kitchen and TV chefs. Labor for exchange. I should use it more. It glides.

Pasta machine: Very heavy, heavier even than the espresso pot. It has a vice to anchor it to the counter-top, and a crank. My mother, when she wants to really brag about her son, tells our cousins and uncles in Italy that I make my own pasta. It sends chills through them, and they glare at their own children, in their fancy jeans and sunglasses, accusingly.

Rolling pin: The handles were painted red years and years ago and flake off little ceramic bits. I bought it at a junk shop near my first apartment in Boston. It stuck out of my back pocket when I hauled home a high-top table and two stools, the first pieces of furniture I ever bought with my own money. 40 dollars. When I use the rolling pin, I have to pick out little flecks of red, probably poison, paint from the dough.

Big cutting board: Nina brought a large cutting board with her when she moved in. The day begins when it is hauled up from the propping place against the wall by the window and banged down on the wooden island. There is a gutter carved all around the edge, like the pencil holder in your grade school desk, that collects the running liquid and blood of a roasted chicken or a hunk of meat. All meals pass over this wood.

Three yellow bowls: Bright yellow, Pyrex, one small, one medium, one large. They all fit together and I use them mostly in the summers for lunches of green beans and salads with anchovies, hard-boiled eggs and tomatoes and red onion. I found them on the street last year, all nested together, and they remind me of meals in the summer on my Nonno’s screened-in porch, the floor tiles cool as ice under your bare feet.

The food came and I clasped my hands together in front of my...

Wed, 15 May 2013 09:43:46 -0400

The food came and I clasped my hands together in front of my face, bowing my head. When I looked up, my friend, my closest and oldest friend, wore a puzzled look. He thought I’d taken to saying grace, to praying before meals. I hadn’t. I opened my hands to show him the little plastic packet of butter. I was warming the butter, to soften it, to spread on my cornbread.

[Painting: A Family Saying Grace before a Meal by Anthuenis Claessens, 1585]

I lit the coals. The small alley between the houses filled with...

Thu, 09 May 2013 11:59:37 -0400

I lit the coals. The small alley between the houses filled with heavy smoke that spilled out over the sidewalk and into the window cracks of the rush hour cars. I grilled a mackerel, a fish I know little about, for the first time. After making something new and enjoying it, I write down what I did and keep a file. These are the only recipes I have. My mother passed on no written recipes; my grandmothers left none. My recipes are unusual and fanciful. This is what I wrote last night after eating a whole charred fish with small grilled potatoes in a pouch with butter and green onions and a little too much bubbly wine:

Serve also with boiled green beans. sprinkle everything with course rock salt before eating! Eat with much prosecco and two schizzatos while waiting for the coals to burn in the chimney and the fish to cook. Look up at the leaves of the norwegian elm trees against the sharp blue of the sky with jet lines cutting through it. Eat outside with a dishtowel across your knees. Eat slowly.

The Russians were drunk. They sat drinking beer in gray t-shirts...

Wed, 08 May 2013 08:57:00 -0400

The Russians were drunk. They sat drinking beer in gray t-shirts and thick painter’s pants, their faces that rough red of sun and wind. It was the first warm day of spring, the air still, and they slipped in and out of consciousness on their faded wooden chairs. “Chernobyl” one of them barked, the one who spoke English better. “What work do we do?” he puffed smoke, lifting his shoulders, looking at a polite local. “Building. What else?”

This is my favorite place in the world to drink beer on a warm afternoon. The island meant nothing to me before I met my Nina. It means much to her. She introduced me to its sunsets, the hidden tips of its shores and the salty smells in its winds. She showed me the contrasts and contradictions, the massive influx of rude wealthy beasts that crowd the little island from June to August, the foreign-born workers - Jamaicans, Bulgarians, Irish, Russians - who keep them happy, keep them fed and barefoot on the manicured lawns of their perfect clapboard cottages.

We spend our time there when the island is nervous and anticipating its summer influx, in the spring, or when it slouches, relieved, in September. September is best. The warmth of the sun and water, the empty beaches with their rounded stones shaped by the sea. Swimming in the dying light of late afternoon.

The Russians made me nervous. They were beginning to turn the corner from light to dark. I could see it. “Dmitri, let’s drink wodka,” the one said to the other, an eye closed. The bartender, with the timing of a boxing referee saving a man from certain doom, emerged and put an arm around Dmitri. “There’s a cab waiting for you two crazy Russians,” she smiled honestly. They seemed happy about it. They went back to the bar, made some more noise and finally, with their arms around each other like young brothers in summertime, they stumbled out. Dmitri cradled a long brown paper bag in his arm. It might have been a baguette, but it wasn’t, it was a bottle of vodka. I felt fine thoughts for them at that moment, so far from home on this island.

Dado is the secret ingredient in much of the food my grandfather...

Tue, 07 May 2013 11:59:00 -0400

Dado is the secret ingredient in much of the food my grandfather made. A bullion cube. He used it in quick sauces with vegetables to toss with pasta, many soups, and about a million other things. It’s the Italian word for dice. My mother told me this not long ago, a passing remark. But it’s a secret uncovered, an answer to a question. It brings me closer to knowing, and my Nonno back from his grave.

When my mother was a girl, the woman who lived in the apartment...

Fri, 03 May 2013 11:16:19 -0400

When my mother was a girl, the woman who lived in the apartment above was called putana, whore, by the other women in the neighborhood. Her husband was American, and she made fried chicken. My mother’s mother fried only little hunks of rabbit in her oily black cast-iron skillet. When the smell of the fried chicken wafted through the air of the stairwell, my mother would sit near the door, waiting, hoping the call would come from the putana upstairs, who knew how much the little girl downstairs loved her chicken, so crispy and golden on the outside and so moist and sticky inside, some magical transformation of a dumb bird.

The call always came. “Laila!” the woman shouted through the halls and stairs and shared spaces of the house on Howard Avenue. “Come up for dinner. I fried the chicken!” I see my mother as a tiny kid, same smile as now in her eyes, climbing steps two at a time for a favorite, unfamiliar food.

My grandmother never objected. To her the woman upstairs, who she rented an apartment to when no one else in the neighborhood would, was no whore. She was pushed around and strapped with a hard time in her life and judged by people who mistook religion and Jesus for scorn and judgment. My grandmother loved those people most, the ones on the outside, and they were always welcome in her home.

I made fried chicken for the first time last week. Like my mother, I love it. I cut a small chicken apart into pieces, hacking the drumsticks in half and the breasts into threes, leaving all the skin on. I dried the meat with paper towels and tossed it in flour mixed with black pepper and salt and left the pieces in the fridge overnight. The flour and liquid from the chicken skin made a thick paste and I fried it in a heavy skillet in a shallow mix of canola and olive oils.

The meat was moist; the crust was crisp. The breasts cooked faster than the legs. It was a perfect and simple thing with mashed potatoes and green beans. I told my mother about it, about how easy and understandable it was, how she should make it. How it would be simple for her. Then she told me the story about the putana upstairs and I knew she would never make it for herself.

Henry Hargreaves Photographs Death Row's Final Meals | VICE

Fri, 26 Apr 2013 22:09:00 -0400

Henry Hargreaves Photographs Death Row's Final Meals | VICE:

I wonder about last meals. What do they mean? Do they get eaten? What would mine be? Bread and butter? maybe.

The part of Cambridge where I live is very quiet. Even when...

Fri, 19 Apr 2013 10:03:00 -0400

The part of Cambridge where I live is very quiet. Even when blizzards hit and shut down the world, there’s still the sound of the plows dragging their metal across the rough of the road. This is a different quiet, an emptiness waiting to be filled with chaos and violence. I awoke from a dead sleep after midnight. A sound? Something terrible? My heart pounded in my chest. I was afraid and I couldn’t breathe. I sipped from a glass of water on the nightstand, rolled over and lay awake. Sirens filled the air, the rise-and-fall of the usual cop cars mixed with quicker, frantic sounds. A panic noise. Helicopters beat at the air above the house.

The birds are chirping this morning – some loud and bossy, some soft and unsure. There are no other sounds. No buses, no taxis, no students on cell phones, no coughing or busted mufflers. Just the radio whispering and the television showing me pictures of the Home Depot in Watertown where I bought all the paint on these walls.

I woke up crazy for orange juice, ready for its sweetness and...

Thu, 18 Apr 2013 13:51:01 -0400

I woke up crazy for orange juice, ready for its sweetness and its thickness in my throat. I kicked off the heavy blanket and rushed to the kitchen, grabbed a small glass from the drying rack near the window and clunked it down on the wood of the counter-top. There was the suction sound and resistance of the refrigerator door when I pulled it open, but there was no orange juice.

There was a Tupperware filled with old tomato sauce that had icicles of mold around the edges. There were two sausages in a plastic bag and halves of onions and little jars of hardened bacon grease, milk and old beans, but there was no carton of juice.

It was a dream. I had dreamt in the night that I was in the local grocery, that I stopped at the section near the milk and bought a clear plastic container of orange juice. I have been alone for a few weeks, my partner away working, and my sleep has been irregular. By irregular, I mean bad, very bad. My body is confused by all the extra space in the bed, and my brain by the extra drink I sometimes take in the night.

This orange juice dream was a trick. There was nothing to tell me it wasn’t real. The faces were real, actual, and I know them. The drowsy weed-head behind the register with his puffy eyes, the friendly bagger who cut her hair very short, the throngs of yuppies pushing strollers in yoga pants. The store was as it is, no swooping bats or unrealness of the dreamworld. I was disappointed about the juice. I made a noise, standing in the dull light of the fridge’s bulb.

I awoke last night at 2am, after two hours of sleep. I was coughing violently and there was a dryness in my throat. I rolled and bounced in the bed, pushed the blanket between my sweaty legs and then threw it off. I went to the bathroom and took a leak. I went back to bed. I turned on the radio to hear the soft talking voices that might confuse me and send me back to sleep. I read a magazine. My head pounded. I got up and watched television on the couch. I finally drifted off for an hour or so, the sky through the window the steel blue of earliest day. Birds squawked in the distance and the sound of the city busses, up from their slumber, rose and fell between the stoplights.

Today I am a zombie, anxious and wobbly, desperate for the day to move quickly and without incident. Maybe last night’s struggles with sleep were only a dream, like the orange juice, I think to myself. Maybe I slept perfectly for eight hours. Looking in the mirror, at the deep, pulled lines spreading out from my eyes, and the irregular pounding of my heart, I know it’s no dream. It’s real.

[Photo: Dream Sequence by Rocky Schenck, 2003]

I jumped on my bike – before breakfast, before coffee, before...

Tue, 16 Apr 2013 12:55:00 -0400

Boston from the BU Bridge.

Precious little boats on the Charles.

View of Downtown Boston from the Cambridge side, and little flowers.

I jumped on my bike – before breakfast, before coffee, before brushing my teeth – to look at the Boston skyline from the BU Bridge. It’s only a few blocks from my house, and it’s my favorite view of the city. The sun was warm and the haze of early morning in early spring had yet to burn off the sky over the Charles. I spent all day yesterday watching the city explode on a loop, with CNN on mute and WBUR providing the words. There was smoke in the air and helicopters rattled the wind over my house. The sirens sounded vicious, no longer the normal background noise of a city.

The flowers are pushing up from the ground now, spring is coming and soon summer will be here. I complain about the city of Boston more than most, how people don’t say hello to each other, how it’s a little stiff and a little prissy, how I don’t give a shit about the Red Sox, but let me tell you a little secret: there is no place better than Boston or Cambridge in summer. The students flow out like a breaking wave and there’s a quiet and a calm that surprises me each year.

I rode on. Breakfast and tooth brushing and work and everything else could wait. I looped around the river, along its edges on both sides. I saw trees with purple flowers beginning their bloom above empty benches on the water’s edge. Cops barked and car horns honked in this city where I’ve spent the last 13 years of my life. I saw buildings I worked in when I was still a scared kid and didn’t know shit, bars where I drank, places where I made mistakes. I saw the sun and rippling water, a pregnant woman jogging, rowers rowing silently under the Mass Ave Bridge. I said hello to everyone I passed, the walkers, the runners, the mothers, the fathers, the homeless, the old couples holding hands, the tourists – a seagull. This morning I saw things I’ve never seen before.

The ice cracked all around us. It sounded muffled like fireworks...

Mon, 15 Apr 2013 11:58:00 -0400

The ice cracked all around us. It sounded muffled like fireworks in the distance, or a rumbling deep in your stomach. We tried to hide our fear that the ten inches of ice would split and plunge us into freezing water and certain doom.

It was Jack’s hut, Jack’s fishing gear, Jack’s giant hand-crank auger that we used to cut holes in the ice all around us, and Jack’s wooden traps that sent up red flags when we got a bite. But even Jack, a life-long fisherman and a long-time Vermonter, jumped up and laughed with panic, his eyes blazing, when a crack sizzled through the ice under our feet.

We arrived before sunrise with a bucket of live bait. We walked hundreds of yards out into the middle of a frozen bay on Lake Champlain. A layer of ice had melted and refrozen, so the surface was bumpy, static waves that made balancing difficult. Jack cooked on a small stove - bacon and eggs and my favorite sausages that I brought up from New Haven, where we three all grew up. We drank beer from 10 in the morning through the whole of the day. We forgot to bring water. The sun rose over our heads and the ice shifted and broke more often, bubbling sounds rising, bringing shockwaves of dread.

Conversations took over, and laughter. A surrender to the possibility that I could end up silently screaming, pounding on a ceiling of ice as my pulse grew fainter in my temples. I fell asleep in my folding chair. When a little flag went up, one of us would walk out alone to check if a bigger fish had taken one of our smaller ones. Mostly it was only the wind. I caught one fish, a very long pike. I pulled it through the hole and it flipped and flapped on the ice. We jumped up and down like fools in celebration. The fish froze solid outside in only a few minutes.

There were more bites, but the fish, these monsters of our imaginings, all got away. I was out checking one of our holes when the sun began to dip behind the trees over near the shore where we parked our car. Jack didn’t say a word, he just started packing up his sled, breaking down the hut. We walked quietly toward that sun, each carrying something.

It’s springtime now, the desperation of long winter washed away, leaving no trace. The days are longer, the sun a different color, and flowering things are climbing up through the ground. There is no more ice, but that fish is still frozen in my freezer, in three giant hunks. And I’m going to eat it.

He was almost across the street when his legs gave out. This man...

Thu, 11 Apr 2013 19:00:02 -0400

He was almost across the street when his legs gave out. This man wasn’t going any farther. His friend held him under the armpits, but the man was just meat, his coat riding up and his underwear showing, when he sunk to his knees, to the ground. Another friend appeared from the bar on the corner, the one with a sign that advertises foo and bee. He smiled and waved an apology to the drivers in their cars, on the way home from work and one left turn away from the highway. They couldn’t get around the man who had become so suddenly a pile of wreckage in the road. He was only a few feet from the curb, but his friends didn’t have a chance of bridging the distance. The sun was almost down and all was wind and gray. The line of cars grew longer and someone, finally, beeped the horn.

[Drawing: Traffic jam by Diane Watson, 2008]

Soup is good food. This is good blog.

Tue, 09 Apr 2013 15:39:00 -0400

ayearofsoup:

…Breathe in the smell of the garlic and let the world pull you back to your body and toward the earth from which you and the strange onion both came…

I had a plan to write some words today, but they wouldn’t be better than these. so, enjoy, a year of soup.