Emergency Room Survival Kit

Water—one for each person taking the trip with you.

Food—concentrate on comfort. Personal favorites include fruit, cookies, and a whole bunch of chocolate.

Your phones, chargers, and earbuds.

Money—lots of money—and your medical insurance cards.

Optional: ancillary reading materials in case your phones dies and you can’t find a plug.

You are now ready for your emergency room adventure.

The nearest hospital is a level 1 trauma center. This means that unless you’re bleeding profusely or possibly expiring, you are directed to the uncomfortable plastic chairs in front of the reception desk. It is not unusual for it to be standing-room only, filled with obviously distressed people, some of whom are screaming babies. But it’s early Sunday morning and you luck out that there are only seven sufferers and one baby in relativity good humor. Your husband’s name is called before you settle in and you trail behind him into the intake room. A nurse records his vital signs while asking him questions, none of which he answers correctly. Your intervention raises a laugh from the nurse but she doesn’t share his blood pressure and heart rate scores when you ask. He is immediately wheeled down a long hallway, past several large nurses stations, patients in curtained cubicles, and more patients in beds lining both sides of the hall. Your husband is placed in the final cubicle where a young man lies motionless, his eyes closed. It must be his mother who sits in a chair at the foot of his bed, one hand resting across his legs. Neither seem to register that your husband will occupy the empty bed across from them. You help your husband into bed, then take your place opposite the young man’s mother.

And the waiting begins.

9:27 a.m. A cheerful child of God sits right outside your cubicle. He volunteers that he’s 305 pounds and has been here since the day before. The nurses know him from previous visits and come by to see how he’s doing. “May the father, son, and holy ghost protect you,” he calls to you. “Pray with me now!” Your husband has the excuse of feeling lousy. It’s been a long time since you’ve talked to God but his smile is the most beatific you’ve seen in a long time and you try your best.

10:04 a.m. (Approximately) Somewhere out beyond your curtain comes a string of inventive curses. A peek outside reveals a man in one of the beds parked in the hallway holding forth to a clearly irritated nurse. “I told you, no grandmother, no going home,” she says. This does nothing to calm her patient. After he rants for another minute, a male nurse sharply cries, “dude!” The grandmother’s grandson stops shouting and the nurse kindly says, “how would you like some Jell-O?”

10:18 a.m. A nurse comes in and introduces herself as your husband’s nurse. She gives him a gown then drains him of many tubes of blood. After she leaves, you hand him his phone and you open your book, settling in for the long haul.

11:45 a.m. Your husband’s roommate opens his eyes but still doesn’t move. His mother goes to him. A nurse comes by with a box lunch. The young man looks down at it: banana, apple juice, something in a styrofoam cup, possibly soup. “I don’t want it,” he says. His mother responds in Spanish and he replies back. The one word you understand is “pozole,” only because you’ve ordered it from the neighborhood’s food truck. “No,” she says softly and begins to massage his leg.

12:22 p.m. (or there about) You are returning from the bathroom when you glimpse into the neighboring cubical and see an old woman and two people who you guess are her son and daughter. There’s also a doctor:

The doctor hurries past, not noticing you at all.

12:33 p.m. The same doctor appears in your cubicle along with a nurse to talk to the young man. His mother stands up to be closer to them. “I know this sucks,” the doctor says. “You just have to deal with it for a little while longer. We want to get you back on the basketball court.” The nurse translates for his mother. The doctor smiles at the young man’s mother. “His numbers are up. Good sign.” The nurse rubs his mother’s arm while giving her the news. And then the doctor and the nurse leave. The young man closes his eyes once more and his mother returns to her seat, her hand returning to rest on his leg.

12:49 p.m. Your husband goes off for a CT scan. He wants something to eat when he returns but nothing in your kit appeals to him. You leave to wander through the halls until a guard shows you the way to the hospital’s cafe. It is a perfect facsimile of everyone’s favorite diner. There’s a long, curved lunch counter and comfortable booths upholstered in bright orange vinyle by the windows looking out across a low roof crowded with air conditioner units. There’s even a small revolving pie display case with slices of apple, coconut cream, and lemon merginge pies. You don’t want to take too much time and decide to buy two ready-made half sandwiches (tuna fish and a turkey), thinking you’ll come back for pie later.

1:20 p.m. Nothing has ever tasted as good as these sandwiches. “Go take a walk,” your husband says after you clean up the mess on his bed. You don’t want to—what if something goes wrong and you’re not here? “I’m not going anywhere,” he says. He is very certain about that. You are not. But you pull on your jacket because it’ll make him happy.

1:37 p.m. You walk out the emergency room doors and into the day’s cold gray drizzle. The area around the hospital was once a busy port. Now, decaying wooden piers slouch into the East River. Railroad tracks still cut through the cobblestone streets running before massive manufacturing warehouses. Over the last decade, the buildings have transformed into high-end design studios, architecture offices, furniture showrooms, and artisan lofts. Since it’s Sunday no one is around except three prostitutes in thigh-high leather or pony-hair boots, and impossibly short skirts. One wears a satin Knicks jacket (it’s the playoffs). Another’s long thin black coat flies away from her body in the wind. The third is your favorite—sheathed in a tight hip-length jacket made with what appears to be white duck down, the feathers increasingly matting in the mist. She is the one on the phone and when someone answers, she shouts, “WE’RE IN THE RAIN.” The Knick’s fan leans over her shoulder: “MY HAIR IS RUINED.” Their friend shelters in one of the warehouse’s open bays, taking selfies for her Instagram account.

2:06 p.m. In the short time yoou were away, occupied beds have created a traffic jam in the hallways. Some people are moaning. Some sit in wheelchairs connected to IV lines. Some, like one ranting, shirtless, muscular man, has had it with everything in his life. Even though he’s handcuffed to the bed rail, a policeman holds his arm down:

A nurse says to the policeman, “What did he do?”
“Stabbed his dad. Twin brother slugged him.”
“All kinds,” the nurse says and quickly inserts into his arm an IV needle.
The man rears up. “What the fuck!”  
“Give him ten minutes,” the nurse says to the policeman and walks away. 
The policeman continues to hold the man down.

2:11 p.m. When you return to your cubicle, you find a doctor explaining to your husband his options: surgery or a heavy course of antibiotics. The surgery comes with complication. The antibiotics might not work. What the hell, surgery it is! The doctor says if your husband hadn’t eaten his sandwich they could have done it right away. Now, he’ll probably see him tonight around 10—10:30 at the latest. Your ever optimistic husband exclaims, “we’ll be home by midnight,” right before his nurse comes in to relate that he will be admitted for the night.

2:30 p.m. From then on, all there is is the passing of time. The young man’s mother is relieved by his sister. They are astonishingly beautiful siblings: black hair, fine cheekbones, whispering to each other with lilting voices only they grasp. Occasionally, she speaks to friends or her mother on her phone, but she always keeps her gaze on her brother. You try not to listen, try not to even glance over at them. They do the same for you and your husband. There could be a wall between the beds, an illusion of having privacy to bear the weight of this sudden burden.

7 p.m. The evening’s nurses arrive and introduce themselves. The young man’s is a brisk woman who calls him sweetie while checking out all the tubes he’s connected to. Yours is a laid-back man who, from the heckling thrown by passing nurses, is well-liked. The first thing he tells you is that your surgery has now been pushed to midnight. “From one to ten, what would you say your pain level is?” he asks your husband. He replies eight. “What do you say to oxycodone?” Your husband brightens. The small pill quickly arrives.

7:15 p.m. Holy moly, does oxycodone release a tsunami surge of elation! Your husband babbles all kinds of wonderful ideas and life observations. There’s something about going on the road with Jerry Steinfeld. Several nonsensical ideas for Op-Ed pieces come to mind that he’s sure The New York Times will love: “I gotta write them down!” (You do not give him your notebook.) For a good two hours he is full of creative light and joy. No wonder this stuff drives people crazy. Thankfully, he mellows before he rips out your final nerve. Gratefully, he doesn’t want anymore.

10:30 p.m. The young man’s sister quietly says that her brother would like to sleep. Is it alright to turn out the lights? Of course it is, you say. The nurses station becomes a nightlight for your darkened room. The young man’s sister murmurs, “good luck,” in such a comforting way. “You, too,” you say, hopefully encouraging. You will watch over her brother now.

11:12 p.m. The surgery is called off until the morning and your husband is moved to a step-down unit on the first floor. It is dark, the nurses keep their voices low, several patients snore. You don’t care if this is forbidden but you crawl up into your husband’s bed and curl around him. The rail sticks into your back, the tubes he’s attached to don’t allow him to shift over to give you more room. But no matter how uncomfortable you are, you stay. Lying beside him is the one normal thing that has happened today and you’re not moving.

Sometime after 1 a.m. “You should go home,” a nurses quietly tells you. “His surgery won’t be until seven. You can’t do anything else right now.” “Go,” your husband says. He wants you to take a Lyft because you’re too tired to drive. No, you’ll drive. “Come back around six,” the nurse says. You kiss your husband and shuffle away to find the car and then drive four miles an hour through the deep fog. You’re pretty sure you won’t fall asleep but you set the alarm for five-thirty, anyway.

5:13 a.m. You awake to a confusing buzzing. Is it the alarm? Your phone? You try them both. “Hi,” says a chirpy woman on the other end of the line. “Your husband wanted us to call you. He’s in recovery.”

5:35 a.m. You speed to the hospital and wander about for a time before a guard directs you to the recovery room. You’re husband is in a bed in the back—why do they keep putting him in the back? He’s awake but you’re pretty sure he’s not seeing anything beyond his feet. He doesn’t know where he is. For a moment, he doesn’t recognize you. All he remembers is being wheeled into the operating room on a gurney and being shifted onto a table. After that—nothing. He wants to put on his boxer shorts. He wants water. He wants you to see his incisions. The first two he gets. The third can wait.

6:26 a.m. A nurse comes in and hands you sheaves of paper with directions on how to care for your husband. Dressing the rest of him is something of a fumbling comedy show. Finally, he’s gingerly situated in a wheelchair and an orderly arrives to make sure the two of you get to the elevator, down to the first floor, past the overflowing waiting room, and to the sheltered driveway where she helps him into the car.

6:53 a.m. He is home.

We moved into the house on a fiercely hot August day. The next morning found me crashed on a trash-picked lounge chair, befuddled as to why we now owned many dilapidated rooms and the dying apple tree I was sitting under. I could accept the rooms but the tree broke my heart. Its previous owner had peeled a wide circle of bark off it. Trees are no good, he said. Their roots burrow into foundation walls.

Beyond the tree was a mess of chest-high weeds and, in the back, a tangle of saplings that the neighbor on one side of the house claimed was the cause of her son’s asthma. I’d have to cut them down immediately, she said. Someone later told me they were called Tree of Heaven, the star of the book, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn.

I was clueless about what to do with my dying apple tree, the asthma-provoking saplings, and the weeds between them. My three-year-old son happily rolled around in the dirt and my husband, an expert at putting up bookshelves, had no interest in even talking about the garden. There was just me and all the possibilities I believed this unpromising landscape could hold as soon as I learned how to do it. I dreamed of having as lush a garden as Steve and Betty, the neighbors on the other side of the house.

Steve was from the Bronx. Betty was from Georgia. They had created a vegetable farm: nine neat rows in full bloom. Collard greens, spinach, peas, string beans, turnips, ramps, tomatoes—cherry and beefsteak—and eggplant The side borders were for herbs, marijuana, and marigolds. In the back was a thick stand of Rose of Sharon bushes that Steve pruned in March, about the time that Betty turned and fed her field.

Betty came over to the fence and introduced herself, then asked what I was going to do about the apple tree. It used to produce at least a bushel of tart apples, perfect for pies and putting up applesauce. I said I planned to give it a merciful burial and plant another in its stead. Betty was six feet tall, generous although given to occasional orneriest. If she liked you she liked you in full measure. If she didn’t it was better to back away from her. She decided after our apple tree conversation to like me. She offered up Steve to help cut it down. He was the opposite of her, short and good natured, able to handle Betty’s moods with jokes and a joint. He promised to come over sometime in October with a chain saw and make quick work of reducing the tree to a pile of logs. Betty counseled to keep the asthma saplings where they were, their bad reputation a complete myth, and their fluffy pink flowers a beauty to behold.

As the summer pressed on into fall, she advised a two step approach to my sliver of an acre. It was too late to plant anything but a new apple tree. I should, though, turn the dirt and feed it with manure. Betty happened to have a great store of aged manure that she composted herself and one day I came home from work to find that several sacks of it had been dropped over the fence. She was a demanding teacher, allowing no slacking just because I was tired after work or a weekend of chasing my son. She decided Saturday would fit us both, often at the hour when she could direct me from her second floor window as she hung her weekly wash on the line that stretch over her crops. My mom visited us in September and said she had never seen such beautifully hung laundry. I had no idea what she meant.

Betty was a lot like my mom—funny, didactic, encouraging, and at times harshly opinionated. The women met across the fence a few times, and it soon became apparent that they had different ideas about the garden. My mom paid for the new apple tree but argued for a bit of lawn where her grandson could play. She liked the idea of planting rose bushes on either side of the lawn just like her garden at home. If I insisted, there could be a few tomato plants in the back. A lawn to Betty was a waste of precious ground. My son could toughen up by playing out front in the street like every other kid on the block. Roses, she said, were futile, almost always defeated by diseases. Each woman was sure I intended to follow her plan. I hid from view the pile of garden magazines and books that I hoped would help me create a fair rendition of an English garden.

The secret to loving a garden is to adhere to your own designs. By late September, my yard showed the skeleton of my desires. An undulated path cut through the middle. On one side I planned a flower bed, on the opposite side, a herb garden. Perhaps I could create a tiny goldfish pond with a water fountain. Toward the back, in front of the sprawling Tree of Heavens would be a patio. The exact spot was identified by a pile of old bricks that my husband and I collected from the lots of demolished buildings around the neighborhood. I unearthed two old cement flower pots while excavating the pond, and rolled them toward the bricks. The outlines of my plan remained vague, even from Betty’s second floor laundry line perch.

Mid-October arrived, the time for Betty’s harvest. She and Steve were out every morning, even before work, picking their ripe crops. One Saturday she told me to come over and I walked through their house to the back door that opened out on their deck. “Here,” she said and shoved a large pile of peas across the table toward me.

I began to shell them, not as fast as Betty but fast enough. There was a big burlap bag of them on the table and a half a day left to shell them before their sweetness would begin to fade. Steve brought us beers. Betty began telling stories about growing up on a Georgia farm. She wasn’t sure her decision to move up north had been right until she met Steve and they bought the house that gave her a new farm.

Two beers later, followed by a joint, the pile of peas between us was somewhat reduced.

“You know how you can tell what kind of a person someone is?” she asked. “If you can shell peas together.”

Pea shelling kept me in Betty’s good graces for years until the spring I thoughtlessly put up a stockade fence between us. I wanted some privacy and a nice background to my blooming roses and herbs but it left no place for Betty and me to talk. Worse, in deep ignorance of neighbor protocol, the fence was constructed with its good side facing my yard instead of hers. Betty was more than ornery. My transgression killed our friendship. It didn’t matter at all how well I shelled peas.

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The 1st Amendment has not always been the sanctified principle in our country’s history as it is today. The stories in Christopher Finan’s new book leads readers throughout American history by telling stories of ordinary citizens who have strengthened our constitutional right to free speech. Through them, he demonstrates the importance of resisting efforts to ban books, suppress cultural and academic ideas, promote government misinformation, and spread hate speech and anti-democratic efforts that suppress the cultivation of a free and robust marketplace of ideas.

Find it today at bookstores everywhere!

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The blue box, soft with age, lived for a long time on the closet’s top shelf. Inside were tattered file folders, threatening to burst at any moment and flood my desk with letters. The earliest ones were on heavy stationary penned in elegant cursive handwriting that’s no longer taught in grade schools. Other letters were typed on onion skin paper in the Elite font of a manual Corona typewriter. They were dated from the 1940s to the early 1970s when penmanship disintegrated into scrawls on scrap paper. No one seemed to use a typewriter anymore. At some point I united them with the contents of my great-grandfather’s wooden cigar box that I keep on the bookcase behind my desk. Inside were my dad’s military medals, the tiny plastic bracelet the hospital placed on my first born son that identified him as ours. An envelope held a fine curl of strawberry blond hair from my second son’s first haircut. A bunch of funeral holy cards for my parents and relatives were scattered among them.

The folders remained on the corner of my desk for several weeks. I would read one every now and then, especially when I was looking for an excuse not to write. The first few were from a mixture of old friends I no longer see or can recall. There were a handful from my best friend in high school written to me when I was away at college. An artist, she painted watercolors on some of them that I hung on the walls of wherever I was living. They end abruptly when we were 22: she overdosed five years later. Some were from several lovers I continue to regret or mercifully can’t remember. My brother’s letter called me “Peaches.” My sister apologized for not writing more; her baby was a lousy sleeper. The one from my mom to my dad refusing to marry him really took me by surprise. He wanted her to accept taking care of his two younger orphaned sisters. She pointed out that, while she loved him and the girls, she had already spent her life as the primary care giver of her fragile mother and feckless brother. She wanted privacy for them as they settled into married life. Three letters from M.F.K. Fisher were sandwiched in. I have no idea now how our correspondence began but she was kind to a girl who was unsure of her talents, advising her to ignore ridiculous critics. My dad gave me similar advice when I complained about an editor at my first job. He believed that the best defense was fortitude and wit.

When my aunt was alive, we spent many hours talking about her past. She and my uncle were in the Foreign Service from 1945 to the early 1980s, stationed in Germany during the cold war and in unstable countries in the Middle and Far East. For a while, the family were sure they were really in the CIA. She wanted me to tell her story, but she was too reticent to reveal anything about their personal experiences. But she must have retained hope because she willed to me two folders of her personal papers. One contained a lifetime of household records and important documents, including their birth and marriage certificates, furniture receipts, and short notes and telegrams from friends.

The other folder was labeled VERY PRIVATE PAPERS. They dated from October to December, 1956, when they were stationed in Egypt. During the Suez Canal Crisis she was evacuated to Rome while my uncle remained in the embassy in Cairo. Among the mundane description of everyday life away from each other, they exchanged graphic intimate fantasies. They had names for every part of their bodies that could possibility be entangled together. Who knew anyone in my family could be so erotic! I read only four before I tied the folder closed.

If I was to write a book based on the letters it would be from a thick file folder that chronicles my dad’s family life when he was stationed in Belgium during World War II. They’re from his favorite sister who took his place holding the family together—their 80-year-old grandfather; a weary, often drunk, father; three high-spirited sisters; and two older brothers in troubled marriages. My aunt’s and uncle’s courtship showed up; it was the cause of many shouting matches with her dad, some that ended with him slapping her. Taken as a whole, her letters are a portrait of a family living through war.

The letters that my husband sent to me before we were married are in a large black box. (He didn’t keep mine.) They include a full-throated affirmation of love, the boredom of looking for his first job after graduation and the thrill of finally landing one; several apologetic responses to my complaints about how infrequently he wrote to me; confusions about details of our engagement and wedding. A haphazard collection of Valentine Day cards from him were a puzzle: why these and not others? Maybe because of his outrageously funny postscripts.

My children’s correspondences were collected in a legal-size envelope probably for additional security. Many were the kind of school art projects that all parents seem to keep: Hearts cut out of red construction paper; holiday wreaths and turkey tails made from their hand prints, crepe paper flowers and poems for Mother’s Day. There are three letters from my oldest son that continue to break my heart: one before his Marine hell week exercises at Fort Lejeune; one from Iraq asking us to write more; the final one from Afghanistan with a list of things he’d like us to send him. His most urgent request were for baby wipes to clean sand off his face and a fake Christmas tree.

I can’t remember the last time I composed or even received a letter on paper. Does anyone write in cursive anymore? Visceral texts, so important to a relationship’s story, are impossibly fleeting but what about emails? Are they safe in the folders I keep on my desktop? What would happen to them if my computer was hacked and crashed? Would I even remember receiving them?

The letters are still on my desk, these voices long silenced scattered about me.

What do I do with them?

Mom’s Recipe for Some Kind of Cake

My mom would occasionally send me recipes written on the back of her short letters. She was a very good cook and I knew her recipes would result in something fine but I couldn’t always decipher her handwriting.

Here is one such example. It seems to be for a cake or possibly a sweet lemony bread. I tried my best to translate it have failed. If you are luckier than me, could you send me your take on it?

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April is known among Civil War historians as the bookend month: It begins with the Confederates firing on Fort Sumter on April 12, 1861 and ends five years later with the decisive events in the final three weeks of 1865: April 9, General Robert E. Lee surrendered the Army of Northern Virigina to Uyslesse S. Grant; April 15, Abraham Lincoln was assassinated; April 26, General Joseph E. Johnston surrendered the Army of Tennessee to General William Tecumseh Sherman in North Carolina, effectively ending the last major organized fighting of the Civil War. I thought that this is something to be considered during these current days.

The danger of serendipitous reading is that you can find yourself entangled in a subject you never thought you needed to know about. Slowly, you begin to realize that you want to know more. If you are the slightest bit obsessive, the normal rhythm of your day pauses as you follow the subject’s threads, one right after the other. This is why I now know many new things about the Civil War, such as how to amputate a leg (or arm) and the recipe that helped to lower mortality rates among Union and Confederate soldiers.

It all began when I decided that it was high time to pay attention to my toes and nails. I don’t like sitting still for the time it takes so I went looking for something to read and picked up whatever magazine was near the top of the pile on the table. Once settled in the chair, feet submerged in scalding water, I opened the magazine to a review of a new edition of the Civil War diaries of George Templeton Strong. I knew nothing about him, but the first few paragraphs were a good start. Strong was a prominent, civic minded, well-connected Wall Street lawyer, and his diary is considered one of the most important personal chronicle of the Civil War. His is a behind-the-front line record as the review pointed out: He was drafted in 1863 at the age of 43. Like many wealthy men, he took advantage of a provision in the country’s first draft law that allowed him to find a man to take his place—in his case, a young Dutch immigrant who he paid $1,100, about $28,528.60 today. (There’s no news about how the young man fared.) Still, as the review underscored, he went on to make an important contribution to the war effort than he could ever have made as a soldier.

Strong helped to create and manage the United States Sanitary Commission, which built, staffed, and supplied hospitals and battlefield medical facilities. He served as the Commission’s Treasurer and, with his business contacts and vast monetary experience, he was able to accomplish one of his most pressing tasks of securing a continuous supply of fresh food. Soldiers can find shelter in the meagerness conditions, but they cannot fight if they are starving, ill, or wounded. Scurvy was among the most serious afflictions on both sides of the conflict and a remedy for the disease appears in several of Strong’s diary entries: Cabbage—cheap, easy to transport and source, and, most importantly, packed with vitamin C, fiber, and antioxidants—proved to be an effective treatment.

Half way into the review, the writer brings in Walt Whitman’s Specimen Days (1882), noting that the poet had first-hand experience with the Commission through his volunteer work as a nurse in hospitals in Washington and in surrounding battlefields. My knowledge of Whitman is limited to a sophomore college American poetry class. So I went on a new tangent and discovered his non-fiction work, which includes journalism, essays, and memoirs. Specimen Days is his major prose work, a collection of sketches of people, historical events, thoughts about nature, and reflections on his youth and old age. A large portion of the book is about his Civil War years. Back home from the salon, I asked my husband if he knew whether we had a copy of the book. At this point, the house’s bookcases are a living record of many of mine and his own serendipitous adventures in bookstores, thrift shops, and yard sales. He suggested it might be on the bottom shelf of a small bookcase in the back of the house.

The found book earned him a few nightly readings of passages especially while he was trying to fall asleep. My favorite is one in which Whitman takes an evening walk around the battlefield at Chancellorsville after the armies’ first engagement (April 30, 1863):

The night was very pleasant, at times the moon shining out full and clear, all Nature so calm in itself, the early summer grass so rich, and foliage of the trees—yet there the battle ranging, and many good fellows lying helpless, with new accessions to them, and every minute amid the rattle of muskets and crash of cannons, (for there was an artillery contest, too,) the red life-blood oozing out from head to trunks or limbs upon that green and dew-cool grass.—Walt Whitman, Specimen Days

Soon after, came this:

The war itself, with the temper of society preceding it, can indeed be best described by that very word convulsiveness.—Walt Whitman, Specimen Days

And I ended with Whitman’s thoughts, soon after President Lincoln’s assassination:

One falls, and another falls. The soldier drops, sinks like a wave–but the ranks of the ocean eternally press on. Death does its work, obliterates a hundred, a thousand–President, general, captain, private–but the Nation is immortal.—Walt Whitman, Specimen Days

To learn more of what Whitman experienced among the wounded, I turned to Samuel D. Gross, one of the country’s most prominent trauma surgeons. At the start of the war, the United States Surgeon Office asked him to write a small book to provide guidance and standardize medical practices among the army divisions, A Manual of Military Surgery or, Hints On The Emergencies of Field, Camp, and Hospital Practice (1861). The book proved so useful that a copy of it was filched by the south and reprinted for use by Confederate medical officers. (One of my brothers-in-laws had given me a copy as a Christmas present a few years ago. It was languishing on a shelf behind my desk.)

Gross’s book is all encompassing, detailing the correct personal characteristics of a good surgeon and nurse that included steadiness, fleetness in decision making, and firm ethical standards on and off the battlefield. He underscored correct surgical procedures, different methods of amputations, and the various treatments and prognoses for injuries to organs and the head. The medicines he insisted be on hand were mostly homeopathic—hellebore, juniper berries, agrimony, rhubarb, and the like. Some doled out mercy: opium, chloroform, ether, gin, brandy, wine, and aromatics spirits (smelling salts). Others were just plain dangerous but typical treatments for the time: arsenic, mercury, acid of nitrate, turpentine. Gross wasn’t convinced that the use of sterilization and antisepsis before and after surgery helped with recovery but he was adamant that food played a major role in the success or failure of a patient recovery.

Immense suffering and loss of life are often occasioned for the want of fresh vegetables and fruits in military operations as well as in the garrison and the hospital….The diet of the sick-room has slain its thousands and tens of thousands. Broths, and slops, and jellies, and custards, and ptisans are usually as disgusting as they are pernicious. Men worn out by disease and injury must have nutritious and concentrated food.—Samuel Gross, A Manual of Military Surgery or, Hints On The Emergencies of Field, Camp, and Hospital Practice

His notebook ends with 15 recipes common to invalid cooking, starting with a standard beef tea and moving on to chicken broths and jellies, vegetable soups, gruel and arrowroot pap fortified with Maderia, Port and Sherry, flavorful sargo jellies, and drinks such as lemonade and apple vinegar.

The life of a man is in his food.

And here I am, at last, deciding to lay the Civil War to rest, after multiple drafts, a desk full of books, and a medium-size pot of cabbage stew on the stove. I hope you’ve enjoyed the journey!

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Recipes

Civil War Curry Cabbage Stew

Note: I started to look further into the stew’s origin. Curry made me think it’s was influenced by West African slaves in the Caribbeans and could have been brought up to the country through the slave markets. But this new line of inquiry was leading this piece to be even more delayed and longer than it already is. I’ll come back to this question sometime later.

1/4 pound salt pork (fatback), chopped into cubes
I medium size head of cabbage, chopped
2 medium onions, chopped 
To taste: salt, pepper, ground red pepper (or curry powder), garlic salt.

Fry the cubes of salt pork in a large, hot cast-iron pot until well browned.

Lower the heat and add the chopped cabbage and onions.

Cook over low heat for about 1 hour or until the vegetables are wilted and soft.

Add your preferred amount of salt, pepper, and garlic salt.

Serve with more red pepper or hot sauce for individual taste.

The following two recipes are for 1 serving.

Beef Tea

Beef tea was the mainstay of an invalid’s daily meny, thought to contain much needed protein. Essentially a homemade bouillon, it fell out of favor when more convenient commerical products came on the market. It’s made a come back recently.

1/2 pound top of round steak
1/2 pint cold water
1/3 level teaspoon kosher salt (optional)

Cut the meat into small pieces (the smaller the pieces, the more easily the meat will will give off its juices, or you may scrape the meat from the fibers). Place the meat in a medium-size bowl and add the cold water. let stand for half an hour.

Pour the meat and the liquid into sa medium-size sauce pan and slowly bring to a low boil. lket it simmer for 1 hour. Add more water if needed.

Strain and season with salt if preferred.

Beef tea may be served hot or frozen which can be very pleasing to relieve sore throats. 

Store no more than for 1 day.

Oatmeal Gruel

This is the basic recipe for gruel. Consider at what stage of recovery your patient is and adjust ingredients accordingly. For instance, if the stomach is delicate, make the gruel with more water than milk. If the illness is in the recovery stage, consider adding flavoring. You may also want to bulk it up with fruit.

1 cup water or milk (or half of each combined)
1/4 teaspoon kosher salt
2 tablespoons Irish oatmeal (rolled oats will do but Irish oatmeal is more flavorful)

In the top of a double boiler, bring the water or milk (or both) and salt to a boil and stir in the oats. Cook for 15 minutes.

Place the pan over the bottom of the boiler and cook over gently simmer water for one hour.

You may strain the gruel through cheesecloth for a more smooth consistency or leave as is. Add a pinch of cinnamon or a little jelly to flavor.

Arrowroot Paps

2 or3 medium-sized Arrowroots, peeled and washed
1 to 2 cups milk, depending on desired thickness
Sugar, honey, or condensed milk to taste.

Peel, wash, and cut the arrowroots into small pieces to facilitate quick boiling.

Place the pieces in a pot with water and boil until soft and tender (a fork should pass through easily).

Allow the boiled arrowroots to cool in the pot then transfer them to a blender and add some milk. Blend until smooth and creamy.

Pour the mixture back into the pot over medium heat. Add the remaining milk to adjust the consistency.

Stir in your preferred sweetener and bring to a boil for a few minutes, stirring continuously to prevent sticking at the bottom.

Serve hot.

Sago Cream Jelly

This may be considered a dessert but it’s use in the sick room was to restore a patient’s desire to eat. It is light on the stomach and somewhat nutritious.

1 cup Sago pearls
1 quart water 
1 quart milk or heavy cream
8 egg yolks
1 cup sugar (or to taste)
1 grated lemon rind

Soak the sago in cold water for an hour, then strain.

In a medium pot, bring the quart of water to a boil, add the sago, and simmer slowly, stirring often, until the pearls are transparent and the mixture is thick.

Pour in the milk and add the lemon rind. Bring the mixture back to a gentle simmer, stirring to prevent burning.

Beat the egg yolks with the sugar in a medium size bowl. Remove the sago pot from heat and slowly stir in the egg mixture. Return the pot to the stove and heat briefly to thicken. Be careful not to boil or the eggs will curdle.

Pour the mixture into a mold or bowl and let it stand in a cool place to set completely before serving.

Serves 6.

Do you remember the final scene of Alfred Hitchcock’s movie, The Birds? The family walks out of their house and down the porch steps, navigating slowly to their car through a mass of squawks, shreiks, and fluttering wings. The landscape before them choaks with birds.

This is my backyard.

It all began one July morning while we were staying at our tiny cottage in the woods. The blossoms on the old Rose of Sharon outside the window began to tremble.

My husband, who was having breakfast at the table, whispered urgently, “hummingbirds!”

Sure enough, hummingbirds fluttered at the heart of almost every blossom, all blurry wings and tiny heads burrowed deep inside, enjoying its own breakfast. Even if their visits sometimes tores the blossoms loose, the hummingbirds were a miraculously dazzlingly sight to behold.

Later that afternoon, my sister and I were sitting out on the deck, enjoying our after-work martinis while dissecting the long list of our family’s foibles. The background noise of birds settling in the surrounding trees for the night was not particularly noticed or feared: we were in the woods, what did we expect? But as daylight dimmed, the chatter grew louder and the surrounding foliage seemed to darken and hang heavier with bird gatherings. A few big birds perched on the house’s peaked roof.

My sister pulled out her phone.

“What are you doing?” I asked.

She shushed me. A few minutes later she handed me her phone. “Here,” she said, showing me Merlin, the app she had opened. Developed by the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, Merlin helps identify birds the world over. Right then, it was busy recording all the birds that were swooping around us: Wrens, starlings, blue jays, thrusts, warblers, sparrows, blackbirds.

“Oooohhhh,” she said taking her phone back. “We got something called a ruby-crowned kinglet!”

The next morning, I found my sister sitting at the table with her breakfast and watching the hummingbirds. She had Merlin open and when I sat down, she slid her phone over to me.

“Our three a.m. caller,” she said.

This is when I thought about hanging a couple of bird feeders to bring on more visitors. But then my neighbor reminded me about the foxes, deers, squirrels and—most certainly—the assertive neighborhood bear. They would maul the feeders and devour everything in them before the birds even had a chance.

But when we got back from the woods to Brooklyn, I bought two feeders where I imagined the only interloper would be the neighbor’s pampered cat. A possum family may wander through but I hadn’t seen one all summer.

By the end of the week, the feeders were fixed to old metal poles once used to string laundry lines. They overflowed with a tasty variety of seeds from the 50 pound sack I bought at Home Depot.

For most of the afternoon, my indoor cat and I stood at the back door, waiting. Squirrels dangled upside down from the poles to snatch seeds. They eventually moved along when a group of starlings and sparrows appeared mid-morning. Later in the day, a pair of mourning doves joined forces with a great creasted flycatcher to peck through the dirt in the plant containers looking for hibernating bugs. There are many pigeons about but they’re not interested in my feeders. They’re too busy flying in swooping formations on practice runs over the park or the many neighborhood rooftop pigeon clubs. The squirrels returned around dinnertime, settling for the less arduous method of scavenging for the day’s discards on the ground. Word of the feeders got out over the next few days and birds of all sizes and depositions descended from the sky. The battles for access to one of the perches were pretty thrilling. Honors went to a blue jay, several titmice, and a pair of cardinals. My cat and I decided they were the neighborhood bullies.

There are about 350 native birds in New York City that swell to over 500 during the migration seasons of March through October mainly because of its envious landscape, starting with the Atlantic ocean, and moving on to marsh land, ponds, rivers, reservoirs, forests, and parks. Peregrine falcons have made a very remarkable come back, drawn to the vast number of tall buildings, especially the skyscrapers surrounding Central Park, where they nest. The park is their Whole Foods market stocked with wildlife. Then there are monk parakeets: Very colorful, huge in number, incorrigible builders of long, dense nests usually crammed behind sport fields light which provides the South American natives with much needed warmth. Unfortunately, the nests occasionally catch fire. They often use the protective crevices of quiet cemetery buildings and monuments, but the structures tend to slowly crumble because of their droppings and then the birds are kicked out and have to look for other real estate.

Early one Sunday morning, our cat sprinted off my stomach, ran to the window and, repeatedly threw himself against the glass with purpose: a small bird had crashed into my uncharacteristically clean window. A Google search instructed me to place the bird in a box with a lid and immediately find a bird rescuer. All the nearby ones I called were full and each directed me to the bird and wildlife sanctuary in Manhattan. My husband couldn’t believe he had to change out of his pajamas to drive to the Upper East Side on a beautiful Sunday morning with a bird in a shoe box that he considered almost dead. The woman in scrubs who met us at the sanctuary door came back a few minutes later. Our bird, a black-capped chickadee, was doing just fine.

As my visitors increase in number, so do their white and brown droppings, which speckle all the cars within a three house radius. This occasionally draws complaints from neighbors. I tried to cheer them up by telling them the Irish believe bird droppings bring good luck, especially when they land on you. This did not change their opinion on the situation.

In addition to droppings, birds are messy eaters. The squirrels appreciate the mounds of cracked sunflowers beneath the feeders, but I do not. I’m half expecting a bumper crop of sunflowers to uproot the garden’s brick path.

And then there is the tall stand of bamboo I planted along the back fence. It provides the birds with shelter from winter’s appalling weather and is an effective hiding spot from the neighbor’s cat whose stalking skills have improved since I hung the feeders. It is amusing, though, to observe how much it drives him crazy when the birds alight on the tallest bamboo stalks. They proceed to chatter among themselves at a decibel that might raise the dead while the cat fails one climbing attempt after another.

Mourning doves shun the bamboo and prefer our neighbor’s thick trumpet vines entwined along the top of our shared fence. They sit in distinct couples, two by two, by two, and wait for the time when other birds have momentarily assuaged their hunger. Then they float down off their perch and murmur among themselves as they leisurely stroll about picking at seeds that have fallen onto the brick path. Mourning doves are either exceptionally brave or brazenly stubborn because they are perfectly content to make you walk around them. Once, they even kept their ground when a red tail hawk descended from the sky and began to circle lower and lower above them. All the other birds took flight to their bamboo shelter. I decided I really didn’t want to see the threatened carnage and opened the door to put the hawk off his hunt. The mourning doves didn’t flinch at all.

[AI fun fact about mourning doves: “Their appearance is widely interpreted as a spiritual message of peace, love, hope, and comfort. It is commonly seen as a visit from a departed loved one, a sign of encouragement during difficult times, or a reminder of divine presence, offering a moment to find stillness.”]

All of my visitors are beautiful and majestic, their command of the garden spellbinding. But if I’m being truthful, it’s unnerving how the birds have so quickly taken over the small garden. We are reluctant to walk down into it. We allow them to command the tree and begin to spoil the new garden table. Our small house in the woods, surrounded as it is in a vast forest, allows the birds to happily cohabit with us. In the city we are crammed together, each surrounded by all kinds of dangers.

Sometimes the cat and I stand at the back door together and watch in silence. Merlin has recently tallied 126 different species–including one owl that kept me company during one long sleepless night.

I would be remiss if this story did not include the most famous bird recipe, the Medieval, Four and Twenty Blackbirds Pie. Much of the period’s cooking is short on flavor except if you were of noble blood. Then you had access to all the spices and herbs coming back from the Crusades. At the very least you probably had household servants dedicated to amusing you. Blackbirds pie is one such amusing effort. It would be nothing but a hard, bland casing if not for the presence of live birds released after the crust was cracked.

I found a delightfully easy recipe on Emily Hilliard’s terrific blog, Nothing in the House. (The range of pie recipes she offers is worth book marking her site for future baking.) The blackbirds recipe is originally from Epulario or The Italian Banquet by Giovanni de Roselli, (1549).

An added joy is the recipe’s very charming illustration by Elizabeth Graeber. I am deeply indebted to both women for their permissions to reprint their work!

Four and Twenty Blackbirds Pie on The Hairpin!

TO MAKE PIE THAT THE BIRDS MAY BE ALIVE IN THEM, AND FLIE OUT WHEN IT IS CUT UP

Make the coffin of a great Pie or pastry, in the bottome thereof make a hole as big as your fist, or bigger if you will, let the sides of the coffin bee somewhat higher then ordinary pies, which done put it full of flower and bake it, and being baked, open the hole in the bottome, and take out the flower. Then having a pie of the bigness of the hole in the bottome of the coffin aforesaid, you shal put it into the coffin, withall put into the said coffin round about the aforesaid pie as many small live birds as the empty coffin will hold, besides the pie aforesaid. And this is to be done at such time as you send the pie to the table, and set before the guests: where uncovering or cutting up the lid of the great pie, all the birds will flie out, which is to delight and pleasure shew to the company. And because they shall not bee altogether mocked, you shall cut open the small pie, and in this sort you may make many others, the like you may do with a tart.

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As always—thank you from your grateful writer! ~ Pat

I don’t recall much about the reception. There was an open bar, a good band getting everyone dancing, and a crew of my husband’s newspaper colleagues deeply versed in shenanigans. All I remember is that it was an extremely long time until my husband and I washed up in the Benjamin Franklin Hotel, and a pure miracle that we made our honeymoon flight to Ireland the next morning.

It was his decision to go there because we had met in Dublin at a writing program. If you are ever sequestered for a whole summer with a dozen earnest college kids trying to prove themselves to be future literary stars, you’ll find yourself desperate for the company of someone who does not take himself too seriously. He also made me laugh. He liked wandering around Dublin and stopping at bookstores. We went to clubs to hear music and twice to the theater. In short, he was the boy for me. But that didn’t mean I wanted him then and there: I squirmed out of every attempt he made to kiss me. It made sense, then, that he would want to go back to Ireland and kiss me at all the places I refused him.

We had very little money. Except for the first night in a stately, long faded, hotel off St. Stephen’s Green, we stayed in bed and breakfasts. The families seemed delighted to hear we were newlyweds but our rooms, often decorated with crosses or pictures of the Virgin Mary, were always too close to their own bedrooms. The quietest sex was too loud for comfort.

The last place we stayed in was an extravagant gift from his father. He booked us a room at the extremely expensive Dromoland Castle, a grand sprawling hunk of gray stone surrounded by vast gardens, lawns, and a very pretty lake. I told my mom about Dromoland. She said it sounded like a place for people putting on airs, pretending they’d risen above their ancestors’ thatched roofs. The kind of place that pipes ‘Danny Boy’ into every room, she added, a song she found mawkish, especially since it was written by an Englishman.

“I swear to God, if I hear ‘Danny Boy’ I’m out of here,” I whispered to my husband as we waited at the front desk.

People were coming and going through the lobby, their American accents floating about everywhere. They all appeared to have at least thirty years over us. We left our bags at the desk and followed a sprightly gentleman up the regal central staircase and down a thickly carpeted hallway overseen by portraits of the castle’s owners over the centuries. He stopped at a room at the far end of the corridor and unlocked the door. It was on the small side (my father-in-law wasn’t that wealthy), only a little bigger than its narrow bed but still grand enough for us.

“Oh, no,” the gentleman smiled. “This won’t do for a honeymoon couple.” He winked at my husband and told us to enjoy the grounds while he fixed the room’s deficiencies.

And that’s what we did, cavorting over the extensive lawns and pausing for a long spell within the lush walled garden. Forget my mom. Like everyone else we pretended we owned all we saw. How amorous this was! To be young interlopers in such an extravagant place so obviously beyond our means.

It was getting on time for cocktails by the time we returned to our room. Sure enough, there was a solid double bed covered in a splendid pale blue silk quilt puffed inches high. We dressed hurriedly. Me in my Yves St. Laurent getup of a green homespun corset and the full skirt I had sewn from a pattern the month before. He in a brown turtleneck sweater and the corduroy jacket he wore through college. The mirror showed us to be a captivating couple, giddy at the thrill of sashaying down the grand staircase to the sumptuous dining room, sparkling under rows of crystal chandeliers and cosseted in gold and red velvet curtains, its walls covered in embossed silk.

Martinis—our first correctly made ones since we left home. Pâté and snails. Rare lamb, parsley potatoes, and out-of-season asparagus. A bottle of Chateau Talbot Bordeaux. Dessert, probably. Coffee, certainly, to remain steady for the rest of the night. I slipped the wine bottle’s cork into my pocket as a souvenir of a lavish meal we wouldn’t be able to have for a long time.

The Castle’s pub was in another wing. It took a great deal of wobbly wandering through sitting rooms and libraries to find the snug, polished oak paneled space, dark wood furnishings with chairs upholstered in a red and green plaid. Musicians were setting up on a stage in the front. A waiter appeared as soon as we settled into a back corner table and my husband ordered us whiskies.

Five reels and several rebel songs into their set, the musicians launched into ‘Danny Boy’ and most everyone in the room joined in.

I shot up, out the door, through the lobby, and into the night, flying like a loon across the plush lawn. My heels spiking into the grass barely slowed me down.

“Where you going?” my new husband cried, chasing far behind me.

He didn’t know his wife had such a temper and wondered for the first time whether he had made a mistake.

We turned back to the castle, to our small room with the double bed that proved of little use.

The Castle arranged for a car to take us to Shannon Airport early the next morning. We dragged our hungover selves to the Aer Lingus check-in counter where the woman politely told us we had missed our flight by a day. I had been given charge of the tickets and misread the date. My husband was finally angry.

The woman called the airport manager who quickly arrived. He listened to our story then said in the most warmhearted brogue, “we have to get these two honeymooners back home” and then led us through the airport to the airline’s waiting area. He’d be back with a solution to find our way home.

Near the waiting area was a café where we found we had nothing to say to one another. We ordered multiple cups of coffee with sides of toast. A long while later, the airport manager appeared beside our table. He held out two tickets for the next flight.

“Safe travels,” he amiably said. “Come back to us soon!”

Three hours later we were sitting in the airplane’s cramped back row, me wedged between him and a good-sized man who instantly fell asleep. We did, too, right after the plane was safely in the sky.

Somewhere over the Atlantic, my husband straightened up and took my hand.

“We’re okay,” he said.

I wondered if we would be.

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The subway is the world’s greatest communal reading room. There we all are, 4.5 million riders each day, with little to do except hope we get to our destination on time and in one piece. So much time to fill offers so many possibilities. Reading is one of the best.

There are drawbacks, though. Books add considerable weight to everything else you have to carry. They are even more of a burden when you don’t snag a seat and have to balance the load at eye-level while swaying and being bumped about. All the years of doing this may have contributed to my now ravished shoulders, wrists, and elbows. Eventually, we smartly hit on the obvious solution of switching from books to magazines.

Before we left home for the dinner party, we burrowed through the piles of magazines sliding haphazardly across and under tables. There are several different monthly titles but the majority are weekly The New Yorker and the semi-monthly The New York Review of Books. The current pile consists of 18 issues of The New Yorker that were published between March 3, 2025 and January 7, 2026. Underneath them were 24 issues of The Review from February 26, 2025 to February 12, 2026. You may be wondering why we continue to subscribe to these magazines when we are obviously unable, or even desire, to keep up with their schedules. We wonder this, too. Every time a renewal notice arrives, we debate canceling them but return to the fact that we always find something really interesting to read, even if the articles are a year old.

You may also ask why don’t we find something on our phones or tablets? We sometimes do. But there is nothing like the sense of accomplishment you get in turning a physical page. And it cannot be denied that half the pleasure of magazines is in their illustrations, especially cartoons.

For the birthday trip, my husband chose a long article about Trump’s Venezuela adventure from the Review’s February 12 issue. I was intrigued by a profile of Ruth Stout that appeared in the New Yorker’s March 24, 2025 edition. I hadn’t heard of her or her gardening philosophy, which forswears digging, weeding, even watering your plants. How can any lazy gardener pass up learning about her? In the hour it took the subway to reach our stop near the restaurant, we were well along in our articles and looking forward to finishing them on the way home.

The party was a warm gathering of our friend’s family and a few friends. The food was exceptional and abundant. During dessert, there were toasts and fond reminiscence from his children and grandchildren. By 9:22 my battery was running low, at which point I whispered to my husband that it was time to take our leave. He agreed but wanted to devour another slice of cheesecake and a cookie. It was close to 10 by the time we made our way around the table to hug our friend and then walk the eight blocks back to the subway. The train soon pulled in with all its cars solidly packed. With our magazines folded in half to fit the tight space around us, we happily read until we reached the station where we would transfer to a different line that would take us the rest of the way home.

The new train was just as crowded when it arrived. A man offered us his seat. We thanked him profusely, then took out our magazines and picked up reading where we had left off. The car was surprisingly quiet—no pleas for assistance; no mariachi bands; no boisterous exchanges; no kids releasing pent-up energy. Then again, it was late on a Thursday night. Everyone looked as tired as we were. Except for the young women seated across from us who were taking turns playing a video game on their phones, the passengers seemed folded in upon themselves. At one point, I laid my head on my husband’s shoulder and closed my eyes but quickly revived and straightened up to settle once more into my article.

We finally reached the station where we would again transfer for our final leg home. We passed before a very tall man just as we reached the door. He was perhaps in his mid-thirties and, by the look of his green striped wool cap with a jaunty little green pompon on the top, he appeared to have a sense of humor.

He bent over us to say, “you two are so cute.”

My husband laughed. I was confused: these were not words often uttered to strangers on the New York City subway unless there was a baby present or someone was clumsily flirting.

“You are!” he said and laughed with my husband, even waving a little as we stepped off the train.

“What the hell?” I said to my husband who was not paying any attention to me.

The two women who had been playing video games across from us on the train were standing before us on the platform.

One of them exclaimed, “we were going to say the same thing to you!”

“You’re really so cute together,” the other whooped.

Very slowly, enunciating each word, I replied, “I. HATE. HIM,” astonishing the gleeful women. I added, “I’m divorcing him right after we get home.”

This delighted the shocked women even more. My husband found everything about the encounters amusing but experience had taught him not to cajole his wife late at night. He hooked my arm and walked us toward a bench far down the platform.

“We’re NOT cute,” I grumbled as my husband opened his Review.

And then it came to me. At some point, we have morphed into two endearing old people, worthy of giving up your seat for on a crowded train, and delightfully archaic as the world whirls around us.

“Read,” my husband said as he settled into his article.

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My first museum was the Philadelphia Art Museum. It would have been on a Sunday and it would have been with my dad, brother, and sister. Sunday was the day we had our dad all to ourselves. Every other day he was busy helping people in our neighborhood: he’d come home for dinner but often left soon after to attend a community board meeting or to bail someone’s son out of jail. Most of his Saturdays were taken up supervising the neighborhood’s youth sports leagues. But on Sundays he kept the world outside and that almost always meant taking his young children out so our mom could have a peaceful afternoon to herself. He took us to many landmarks and historical sites that were so obscure we always seemed to have them to ourselves. But museums were a speciality, the University of Pennsylvania Museum, Rodin Museum, the Barnes Museum, Franklin Institute, Elfreth’s Alley Museum, and the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts. These were the places his mother would send her kids in order to show them there was more beyond their poor neighborhood. Sometimes there were specific exhibits my dad wanted us to see. Usually we roamed unsupervised through the rooms and halls jammed with art and archeological relics. Our dad would often tell us about the artist or talk about the history of what we were seeing, but mostly we discovered things for ourselves. He didn’t mind us examining depictions of nudes or violence. I’m not even sure he thought about the effect they might have on impressionable children and teenagers. I do think he firmly believed that museums were places where his children would absorb the great and fearsome beauty of life.

My love of museums solidified in high school when I became friends with Clare. Her artistic talents were recognized as early as the third grade. By the tenth grade, art imbued every aspect of her life, including her sophisticated fashion sense and extensive sexual experiences. Her boldness and desire to be exceptional pushed a shy girl toward an intoxicating world beyond my Catholic upbringing. All our spare time was spent going to museum or gallery exhibits, and then wandering downtown far beyond the time our parents insisted we’d be home. Our favorite place was a small run-down French café where we could afford the onion soup and the waiter never denied a couple of teenage girls’ request for a carafe of red wine. Even after Clare started fading with heroin, she insisted we should spend our time together in one of the city’s museums, maybe two if she was up to it. Afterwards, I would walk her to the French café where she would sit across from me and explain what interested her about what we saw.

I left Clare to transfer to a college in Connecticut and immediately picked up a boyfriend who soon dumped me because he said I was lousy in bed. I drank for two straight days and then took the train to Manhattan and consoled myself with a long walk around the Metropolitan Museum of Art. After I graduated and moved to Atlanta, the High Museum of Art was a haven where I escaped from a dead end job that left me little time to write. Years later, as an exhausted mother of rambunctious toddlers and preschoolers, I discovered that neither the Guggenheim nor the Modern Museum of Art were good places to pretend to be an exemplary mother by setting my children free in them. Much better was the Brooklyn Museum, especially during the week when its large galleries were often empty and the Egyptian mummies enchanted children.

In the last years of my aunt’s life, when we became especially close, it was a special treat for us to spend an afternoon at one or the other Philadelphia museums. Our last excursion was to the Barnes Museum. We followed the crowd from one small room to another, as gobsmacked as everyone else by the museum’s vast collection. But, soon exhausted, she began to use her charm and walker to forge a path to the restaurant in time for lunch or afternoon cocktails. Museum restaurants are a species all to themselves, simply designed, with understated menus that provide a calming reprieve from visual overload. Our order never varied, a charcuterie board, cheese plate, and glasses of white wine. The afternoon drifted along in her telling stories about her life—such as the time a Russian spy taught her how to drink Guinness.

I went to the Brooklyn Museum last Thursday. The day was brilliantly cold, the kind of day where some people, even hardened introverts, lose their minds if they stay in doors any longer. There were just enough people wandering about to quell any restlessness. Aside from the museum’s astonishing permanent collection, there were two new exhibits, Toward Joy: New Frameworks for American Art and Christian Marclay: Doors, which turned out to be a good place to rest for awhile.

Hours later, I looked for the restaurant where my aunt was once thrilled to find that they served a Sauvignon Blanc from her favorite California vineyard. It was closed for renovations. I crossed the vestibule to the café, situated in a triangular space before tall windows. The wind rattled the glass and whipped about the tall trees in the museum’s plaza, but the winter sunlight warmed the café’s scattered tables. The offerings were minimal, pared down to different varieties of croissants, coffees and tea. I ordered a spinach croissant and coffee and found a seat at a small corner table. All around were young mothers and their racing toddlers; teenagers who were probably cutting school; couples, some rumpled as if they had just fallen out of bed; and women, most like me past their prime, who with their companions energetically discussed life’s burning issues that only they had the wisdom to solve.

I sat eating my cold croissant and creamy coffee, taking pleasure in eavesdropping and affectionately watching the children’s havoc. Hopefully, their bellies were as full of the great and fearsome beauty around them as mine was when I was their age.

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The following poem was composed by Nellie Catherine Stabbert in time to be published in the February 12, 1960 edition of the Sullivan County Democrat, my community newspaper. Nellie, a prize-winning Sullivan County poet and the wife of the newspaper’s publisher, wrote it for her weekly column, While the Kettle Boils. Republished in this weekend’s edition, it led me to recall something my fifth grade teacher, Sister Magdalena, said to her class, “America is blessed by always having the president it deserves in troubled times.”

Stabbert wrote her poem a few weeks after John F. Kennedy was sworn into office with a promise to steer our country toward an energetic future. If Stabbert revised the poem today, she may have trouble rectifying her vision of our nation just as much as Sister Magdalena might have trouble making her case for the country’s godly exceptionalism. I reprint the poem for this President Day because it harkens back to times when we were led by presidents the nation could be proud of and there was faith that they would almost always steer us toward the right side of history.

Freedom’s Call

   Now Washington can rest in peace
   His fight for freedom won,
   And Lincoln sleep upon the hill,
   The shame of slavery done; While Roosevelt 
takes up the fight
   Those noble men have begun.
   Washington, rest well. The tyrant bold,
   Who stalks the earth today
   Will feel the might of free men's steel
   And for his horrors pay.
   While we for peace o'er all the world
   A strong foundation lay.
   And Lincoln, sleep. We'll fight again
   To set those nation's free Now held in bondage
by the foe.
   And once again we'll see
   Men lift their heads and walk again.
   Thus we'll write History!

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(Above, Spring Will Come, a video by the author.)

Note: It’s extremely important to read the note at the end of this story before attempting the pie recipe!

It’s snowing, just as promised. No one expects anything of you on such a blizzardly, freezing day. The heavenly silence of a battened world. The luxury of not having to fall out of bed. Nothing to do but plump up the pillows and invite in memories of your childhood’s cold attic bedroom and the disappointment in your mom’s voice bellowing up from the second floor that school is cancelled. “Now what am I going to do with you,” she says, since it’s no snow day for her. But you already know what you will do: first, burrowing down under the many blankets and reading your book all morning, then going down to the kitchen to boil up a bowl of Danish Dessert. There’s no one to yell at you when you eat it all of it straight out of the pan for lunch.

Nor will anyone laugh when you moon over the glamourous actresses in the old movies shown on TV in the afternoon and determined that your future self will flounce about as they do in liquity silk gowns and hoop skirts. As the sky begins to gray, you layer on clothes and meet your friends on the golf course’s most perilous hill where you cheat death at least 11 times. Daredevil boys barrel down the hill around you, a breathless, tingling sight for you and your girlfriends, all hopeless at flirting. Finally, it is time to drag your sled home, drink a cup of hot chocolate, and remember to put the evening meal’s baked potatoes into the oven before your mom comes home from work.

This latest snow day presents similar delights and you devise a list of what you will do:

1. Luxuriate in the world’s silence.

2. Swear you won’t look at the news.

3. Make a huge pot of your mom’s famous meatball and sausage sauce for you and your sons.

4. Race outside to fill the bird feeder and check on your stray cat shelter.

5. Rearrange the muddled spice shelf.

6. Make a bowl of Danish pudding and bake a Hoosier pie.

7. Read.

8. Take a nap.

9. Don’t fret over the many story drafts on your computer.

10. Remind your husband not to strain his back as he trudges out the door to break in his shiny new yellow shovel.

11. Find the bottle of Motrin when he returns with an aching back.

12. Put together a stew from odd pieces of meat unearthed in the freezer.

13. Believe there’s a strong possibility you may pull it together to bake a batch of buttermilk biscuits for the stew.

14. Cocoon under blankets with a snoring cat stretched across your stomach while watching an old movie until it’s time for bed.

15. Pull back the bedroom’s curtains and watch the last of the snow filter through the street lights as you fall asleep.

By the day’s end, you have accomplished almost everything. You didn’t bake biscuits and you didn’t stop fretting. It is impossible to ignore the news. You have to watch to see if the government’s troops will be sent to your immigrant neighborhood.

The snow is turning to ice by the time you pull the bedroom quilt up to your chin. Lying on your side, with your snoring husband at your back, you watch the final snow flakes filter through the street lights as you fall asleep.

A Hoosier Cream Pie Recipe

My favorite pie recipe bible is the Farm Journal’s Complete Pie Cookbook (Doubleday & Company, 1965). Nine tenth of what I know about pies comes from the Farm Journal. It was founded in 1877 and continues to be our farmers’ main source for information about crops and husbandry. Recipes now appear on their website, AgWeb. One of my favorite sections is called Take it to the Field, which harkens back to a time when the women got up early and prepared a lunch for all the farm hands to carry into the fields. This would include a hefty slice of the kind of sturdy pie that stays together when wrapped up in a piece of wax paper. A recent Take It to the Field recipe goes like this:

“Roll pulled apart roast, a few pieces of pineapple and a few slices of bell pepper in a tortilla. Wrap with foil and place in a tin warming dish. Serve with potato chips.”

Hoosier pie is the first one listed in the section, “Heirloom American Pie.” The introduction bears reprinting in its entirty here:

Most people today prefer updated cream pies, in which cooked filling is put in already baked pie shells—pies certain to have a crisp, flaky crusts. Here’s a pioneer pie, however, created in farm kitchens along the Wabash River during covered-wagon days. This baked cream pie enjoyed great prestige in the prairie states.

It’s an heirloom recipe used today almost entirely by homemakers who learned to like it at their grandmothers’ table. We include the recipe primarily for its historic interest, a reminder of what pies were like a century ago. . . .Also for women who’ve searched for the recipe for a rich, cream pie their grandmothers use to make by mixing the filling in an unbaked pastry shell. (Their way of cutting down on dishwashing!)

Hoosier Cream Pie
(Please be certain to read the note at the end of the recipe.)

Unbaked 8" pie shell
1/2 cup brown sugar
1/2 cup granulated sugar
1 tablespoon flour
2 cups light cream 
1/2 teaspoon vanilla

Preheat over at 400 degrees.

Combine sugars and flour, mixing well. Stir in cream and vanilla. Pour into thoroughly chilled pie shell.

Bake until silver knife inserted halfway between center and edge of pie comes out clean, about 25 to 30 minutes. Cool on rack and refrigerate until serving.

IMPORTAND NOTE BEFORE ATTEMPTING TO BAKE A HOOSIER PIE

The pie filling is very liquity which makes carrying the pie into the oven treacherous. Many a Hoosier pie baker has spilled the filling when placing it in the oven. Consider my attempt. I walked very carefully and braced myself when slowly lowering it into the oven. Still at least a quarter of the filling sloshed over the side, onto the oven’s bottom, and down into the slots over the gas pipes.

And it’s not just me. I watched several YouTube videos before attempting the pie and a few cautioned that it may burn down your kitchen.

So two remedies: The best—put the empty crust into the oven on a baking sheet then pour the filling into it. Or use a deep dish crust. It won’t be filled to the top but that’s okay. It’ll still be a damn good pie.

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I remember my son’s voice reciting this to me a lot these days. For the last four, going on five, months it’s been an almost impossible struggle to write. No, not write—at this moment I have 17 stories in the draft pile. It’s not that they’re particularly bad, they’re just not good. Some almost made it but in the end proved rudderless. No matter how many hours and days I put in, they crashed without purpose or endings.

Our best friend died. I tell myself this is a time of grief, abiding and deep. But that thought in itself is sorrowful for it leads me to believe that if I was a real writer, a skilled and intelligent writer, I would be able to take this grief and honor him by doing my best work. He was a terrific writer himself and the most skilled editor I ever had. Most of all he was, next to my husband, my most dedicated booster and fearless dining companion.

His wife is my best friend. She once sent me a swell gift basket of spa stuff when I broke my foot and she signed the card “love, Ethel.” I didn’t know it was her so I sent the package back. Then I found out it was from her, playing on our tendency to engage in silly nonsense that would make Lucy and Ethel proud. So now I send her Lucy and Ethel videos and GIFs, hoping she will have a nanosecond of relief from her heartache.

What I’m trying to say is that it has been a hard swim lately—and I’m not even going to get into the world at large. In my own world, all of that is gnats’ whining.

This is not meant as an excuse. Everyday I show up for work. I sit down, put in the hours, get up and do it again. Drafts and drafts and drafts, days and days and days.

Something will break. Give it time.

“Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more.”

As a reminder to myself and those who have stopped here today to see if there’s anything worth reading, I give you this. Written when my newsletter was called America Eats!., the story has the virtue of being funny.

Celebrate the first 2026 story from Stories by pressing the little heart button above.

I can’t remember the last time I polished the silver plates. They come out of the china closet only on holidays and for special family gatherings, then I put them right back after a brief wipe. It’s enough that you can see your distorted reflection shimmering on their surface.

My husband’s parents purchased 16 plates and wine goblets in Acapulco in the early 1950s. They had been married for only a few years and left my husband behind in the care of his aunt. They may have seen the trip as a second honeymoon and buying the silver plates and goblets as a wedding present to themselves. My husband was around two at the time. This would make the plates close to seventy years old.

Each plate is engraved with a fancy F for my husband’s family name. You would be completely off base if you thought the engraving was a signature of generational wealth. His dad was born in the small industrial town of Butler, PA, into a family who never owned plated silverware let alone fine Mexican silver. But by the time of their Acapulco trip, my father-in-law had become a very successful disk jockey at a major Cleveland rock and roll station. His job brought him money, prestige, and a taste for life’s fineries. My mother-in-law’s family was upper-middle class and she might have seen the plates and goblets as lending sophistication to their frequent entertaining. When my father-in-law was caught up in the era’s payola scandal a few years later, the plates and the goblets became a reminder of past glory.

This is where the silver’s history begins to morph: My husband’s parents divorced sixteen years after the silver was purchased. His mom happily relinquished the plates engraved with her ex-husband’s initial. She kept the goblets. His dad went on to marry two more times, and it’s likely the plates graced his wives tables. But he was the one who polished the plates each time they were used. Even after his final divorce when the plates remained in a china closet, he often polished them while watching Sunday football games. He tried every polish brand on the market until he settled on the superior effectiveness of Goddard’s silver polish dip.

Two decades later, my husband’s mom died and her possessions were divided between my husband and his unmarried brothers. The youngest brother claimed the goblets. His brothers guessed that his request was a way to hold on to their mom and remember the happy years. When their dad died, my husband and he split the silver plates evenly between them. I wasn’t keen to have even the eight plates, having come from a family that would consider them too showy. I eventually grew to appreciate their beauty whenever I set them out for dinner parties and the family’s special meals.

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The history of the silver took another turn at Christmas dinner this year. My husband’s brothers had traveled far to join us so the table required eight place settings. First came the silver plates and then the dishes my mother-in-law bought for our wedding. They were not the fine porcelain she assumed I would pick and was appalled at the sturdy dishes with a charming design I ordered. Their main flaw, though, was their large size that hid the silver plate underneath. I came to understand her complaint several years ago when I purchased five porcelain dinner plates in a thrift store. They nestle in the middle of the silver plates, their dainty size offset by a polished ring of metal. I don’t use them often because their fragile petiteness won’t hold enough food for the family’s robust men.

Christmas dinner was announced. We took our seats at the table and the meal proceeded very boisterously with many overlapping conversations. Somehow I picked up what my two sons were discussing at the far end of the table.

The oldest said to his brother, “We’ll each take four.”

“Four what?” I asked.

“These,” he said, holding up his silver plate.

Everyone else stopped talking.

“Why would you split them up like that?” I said, a little alarmed. What would they do about the people at their tables without a silver plate!

“They’re one of the few things that make us look fancy!”

His grandfather would be proud.

“You want the ones I have?” my husband’s youngest brother asked me across the table. “They’re just sitting in the box. Also the goblets.”

I looked at my husband for input. The damn silver is his family’s complicated history, for God’s sakes. I have my own family’s history to wrestle with and I often lose. All my husband offered was a bemused head shake at his youngest brother’s sudden change of heart.

“Sure,” I said.

And with that the table moved on to more pressing matters of the heart, namely dessert.

Late at night, I started wiping the plates and began to notice small black marks across their surfaces, along with dirt and wax drips in their rims. The F could barely be seen in the middle.

The next morning, my husband’s other brother came into the kitchen and found me rubbing one of the plates with silver cream from the half-filled pot I discovered beneath the sink.

He stood beside the coffee maker watching for awhile, then said. “Guess he’s finally moved on.”

“Do you want them?”

“Hell no. Don’t you want them?”

My husband and I have been married now longer than his parents. Our sons consider the plates with their F flourish to be part of their history. The members of their families will see their faces shining on the plates.

“Yeah, sure, we’ll take them,” I said, hoping the plates won’t need polishing.

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And, one more thing, please

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I’ll leave you with this portrait of Suzanne Valadon, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec’s lover. I feel quite a kinship with her as we start 2026. I don’t know about you but I’ve begun to mull over increasing my wine order to steady my nerves over what is already a very perturbing year!

Dear Readers, we wish you all joy and fellowship for the coming week. We are grateful for your presence and good cheer!

We’ll be back the first week in January to begin another wonderful year with each other. Until then, be safe and take comfort wherever you may find it.

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Ebenezer Scrooge embraced it all!

NO! NOT THIS CURRENT ONE!

THIS OLD SOD!

Scrooge was lucky to have a friend, Jacob Marley, who cared enough to try to save him. With his help and assistance of three ghosts, Scrooge mended his ways, finding joy by embracing everyone around him.

Have joy and hope in your hearts, dear reader. There is much to do in the coming year, especially when forces are massing to steal the meaning of 1776 from us. But we will abide.

Now join in Tiny Tim’s blessing as you raise your cup of punch, “God Bless us everyone.”

Ebenezer Scrooge’s Redemptive Smoking Bishop Punch

(Reserve two full days to make the punch. It will benefit, as well, from an additional day to be sure the flavors blend together. However, taking sips along the way are encouraged.)

Ingredients
5 oranges (Dickens would have used Seville oranges which are very bitter)
1 etrog. If you can't find an etrog, then a grapefruit or lemon will do
35 whole cloves
1/2 cup brown sugar
2 cinnamon sticks
2 star anise
1 bottle (750 ml) red wine, such as Cabernet Sauvignon
1 bottle (750 ml) ruby port 

Day 1:
Preheat over to 350 degrees.

Stick the oranges with 5 whole cloves each, then slice in half. Slice the etrog (or grapefruit or lemon) in half as well. Place fruit on a sheet pan and roast for 35-45 minutes until the bottom is blackened and the fruit bulges open.

Using tongs, nestle the hot fruit in a non-reactive container (glass or ceramic works well). Add the brown sugar, cinnamon sticks, and star anise.

Pour in a bottle of red wine. Cover and set in a sunny window for 24 hours. This will give time for the fruit to release some of its essential oils.

Day 2:
The next day, remove the fruit and pour the juice through a strainer set over a large pot. Wipe the inside of the pot clean.  Press the pulp through the strainer as best you can to get every last drop. Discard the fruit skins. Now strain the wine mixture back into the same pot. Add the cinnamon sticks and star anise into the pot. Heat until it begins to simmer (the "smoking" of the title).  Add the port and return to a simmer.

Right before serving, remove the cinnamon sticks and star anise. Serve hot in festive cups and give a rousing HOORAY for Christmas and for better times to come.

From us, to you…..merry silly Christmas everyone!

And don’t forget! Stories is an easy and fun last minute present for anyone on your list who likes a good read! I’ll be sure to send them a gift message from you, as well!

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The problem begins with having no interest in venturing outside in the wind and snow and ice. It’s complicated by not having much food in the house. The people living with me would counter that there is actually nothing. I cleaned out the refrigerator over the weekend in anticipation of making holiday dishes ahead of time (I haven’t). The cupboards are filled with things I thought the family would like to eat (they don’t), such as tins of sardines for a pasta sauce I love. Crowded around the sardines are various condiments, almost empty peanut butter jars and various cans of ingredients left over from long forgotten dishes I made years ago. There’s a surprising number of different vinegars and honey, and bags of different Red Mill flours purchased last year for experiments in gluten-free baking. The lack of provisions is made more fraught by my husband’s two brothers driving in for the holidays. They are very hardy eaters.

The freezer is a last resort, stuffed as it is with many mysterious aluminum and plastic wrapped objects. I dig and dig and dig until I reach the bottom and find a bag marked “bones.” They’re white with frost, evidence of how long they have been buried. It looks like a mass grave inside. After a long wash the bones are identified as joints harvested over the years from past Christmas hams.

My mom was justly praised for the bean soup she made from a couple of ham hocks. I hated being forced to slurp a big bowl of it for Saturday dinners. I am a little more sophisticated now and appreciate her recipe scrawled on a stained piece of notepaper. A big pot of ham and bean soup would hold us over and be welcoming to the visiting brothers.

Change of plans: there is only a bag of lentils and a can of chickpeas in the cupboard. However, and as contrary as this may sound, I do have a small head of red cabbage in the vegetable bin, although I can’t remember why. Cabbage instead of beans, one of the vinegars in the cupboard instead of ketchup. The rest of my mom’s recipe remains the same. Into the big soup pot go onions, garlic, carrots and celery. The ham bones are laid on top. All is covered with water and the pot placed on the back burner, brought to a simmer. The rising fat is skimmed throughout the day. In the evening, the family sits down to large bowls of cabbage soup and buttered bread. It’s red color is holiday festive. The little hill of sour cream in the center of each bowl reminds us of the prettiest aspect of the snow covering the garden and trees outside. Our spirits are raised, stomachs pleased. Problem solved for now.

From the cookbook shelf:

Three books of note for these economically challenging times. They offer readers helpful guidance and recipes that allow them to dine well without breaking the bank.

The American Frugal Housewife. Dedicated to those who are not ashamed of economy, by Mrs. Lydia Maria Child, published in1832. Mrs. Child is not a very warm personality but she is good company. She has a lot to say about every aspect of life and says it quite forthright. She doesn’t approve of idleness in anyone above the age of six years old. She doesn’t care for show. Self-denial leads to happiness and respectability. She is adamant about avoiding the waste of time and household provisions. One example of Mrs. Child’s edict is the command to use every part of an animal. Although I will confess to never making it, my favorite recipe is for baked cod head:

First make some stuffing with one pound of bruised crumbs of butter, mixed with six ounces of chopped suet, two eggs, chopped parsley, onions, and thyme, and seasoned with pepper and salt. Put this stuffing inside the cod’s head, and place it in a baking-dish with two ounces of butter, a gill of vinegar, and a pint and a half of water. Spread a little of the butter all over the cod’s head and then a thick coating of bread-raspings (fine bread crumbs) all over it; bake for an hour in the oven. A few oysters would be an improvement.

A Plain Cookery Book for the Working Class by Charles Elmé Francatelli (1861). Francatelli’s resume includes being head chef to several Lords and Queen Victoria who, for still contested reasons, abruptly left her service. He is more sympathetic to the plight of the less fortunate who need to stretch their pittance wages. Like Child, he champions the delights of eating every part of an animal: intestines, kidneys, heart, liver, feet, and, of course, heads. Given his background as a fine chef, his recipes differ by being a little more refine. Most will feed a family of six or more but the one below produces a great quantity for distribution among the poor.

It is customary with most large families, while living in the country, to kill at least some portion of the meat consumed in their household; and without supposing for a moment that any portion of this is ever wasted, I may be allowed to suggest that certain parts, such as sheep’s heads, plucks, shanks, and scrag-ends, might very well be spared toward making a good mess of soup for the poor. The bones left from cooked joints, first baked in a brisk oven for a quarter of an hour, and afterwards boiled in a large copper of water for six hours, would readily prepare a gelantinized foundation broth for the soup; the bones, when sufficiently boiled, to be taken out. And thus, supposing that your copper is already part filled with the broth made from bones (all the grease having been removed from the surface), add any meat you may have, cut up in pieces of about four ounces weight, garnished plentifully with carrots, celery, onions, some thyme, and ground allspice, well-soaked split peas, barley, or rice; and as the soup boils up, skim it well occasionally, season moderately with salt, and after about four hours’ gentle and continuous boiling, the soup will be ready for distribution. It was the custom in families where I have lived as cook, to allow a pint of this soup, served out with pieces of meat in it, to as many as the recipients’ families numbered; and the soup was made for distribution twice every week during the winter.

How to Eat Better for Less Money by James Beard and Sam Aaron (1954, revised 1970). I found my copy in an antique store while on the great pie expedition. Beard wrote the first edition to fill what he considered to be a gap in cookbooks. His would “give readers realistic, down-to-earth approach to the subject of eating well without straining the food budget.” He renewed the book in 1970 because, “the subject has become even more timely, as the cost of living continues to climb.” Aaron, a renown expert on wine and spirits, was brought in to guide readers in the art of making good cocktails and buying wines at a reasonable price. There is much to learn and admire in the book. It is often found in second hand bookstores.

1 1/2 cups lentils or green split peas
8 cups stock made with ham bones
1 large onion stuck with 2 cloves
1 bay leaf
2 cloves garlic
Scraps of ham from the bones
Salt, freshly ground pepper, to taste 
Crisp fried croutons
Cornbread (optional)

Soak the lentils or split peas overnight, unless they are the quick-cooking variety. Wash them and add to the stock with the onion, bay leaf and garlic. Bring to a boil, skim off any scum, reduce the heat and simmer until the peas or lentils are thoroughly cooked. Add the ham scraps and cook a little more until the meat is heated through. Remove the bay leaf and onions and season to taste. Top with the crouton and serve with hot corn bread. This with a salad and hot apple pie is a big meal.

Happy holidays, my friends! How about spreading the joy of reading by sending today’s story to your near and dear?

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* The Story of the First Rockefeller Christmas Tree
Courtesy of Untapped New York

In December 1931 most New Yorkers were suffering from the economic devastation caused by the Great Depression. On December 24 the New York Times reported a surplus of unsold Christmas trees since people weren’t able to afford them: “Christmas trees were a glut on the market yesterday…. More than 120 carloads of trees remain unsold.” In contrast, the Rockefeller Center project employed close to 40,000 people desperate for work. So that Christmas Eve, the construction workers, grateful to have jobs, decided to pool their money and purchase one of those surplus trees.

They took a twenty-foot balsam fir and put it up in the center of the newly cleared work site. The men decorated the tree with various items including tin cans, cranberries, and paper garlands made by some of their families. The tree was not lit, but the foreman placed a small table under it where he handed out the worker’s paychecks before they went home to their families for the holiday.

The neighborhood is beginning to gussy itself up for the holidays. It hasn’t gotten to the point where carols are blasting from every store and restaurant. It’s coming soon, though, providing good cheer and fellowship, even when you can’t stand to hear The Ronettes one more time.

The street banners were strung the first week in November and the lights have turned on. They seem to embrace everyone—from the main shopping area on 86th Street to the Middle Eastern shops at 65th Street.

All the 99-cent stores outdo one another’s offerings of trimmings and lights. You wouldn’t believe how great plastic decorations look from afar. I can vouch for the fact that they remain unruffled and beautiful for years.

Beginning the day after Thanksgiving, my corner bar, Skinflints, begins to festoon itself inside and out. Two tall nutcrackers flank the front door. Inside is a wonderland of tinsel; green, silver, and red bunting; paper lanterns; and the famous toy train chooing-chooing around the chandelier above the bar. Like every great corner bar, it’s dark even on a brilliant sunny day, making it a companionable place for all kinds of neighborhood gatherings, especially funerals. (You can practically hear “A Parting Glass” even when no one is singing it.) But this time of year it is a den of conviviality. Some days it seems like everyone in the place is seeing one another for the first time in years. Lots of hugging and slapping backs. Lots of best wishes to “youse” and yours. Lots of memories shared.

And then there is Denis. He wasn’t around when I went about gathering photographs. It was 26 degrees this morning and I hoped he agreed to nestle in the local warming center. He left his worldly possessions tucked into his small slice of real estate and put up a special sign for the season.

Tomorrow is the feast of Our Lady of Guadalupe, the patron saint of Mexico. In 1531, ten years after the native empire was destroyed by Hernán Cortés, she appeared before a peasant, Juan Diego. Our Lady’s beauty took the form of an Aztec princess. With her brown skin, dark hair, and a black ribbon around her waist signifying she was soon to give birth, she became the country’s mother, a symbol of resilience in defeat, the defender of justice, the guardian of children, and protector of immigrants.

Every year, the neighborhood churches with large Mexican and Latino congregations celebrate Our Lady with a parade that starts at Our Lady of Perpetual Help and ends at the Co-Church of St. Joseph and St. Tersea of Avila, some four miles away. The priests lead the way, followed by alter boys holding candles and parishioners bearing small floats and banners with the image of Our Lady. Some wear Aztec head dresses and cloaks like the one Juan Diego wore. Many Mexican and American flags are waved around. It is late in the afternoon by the time the procession arrives at St. Joseph. A mass is said and, afterwards, there is a party in the church hall, featuring traditional dancing and dishes: tamales, enchiladas, tacos, pozole, and a very complicated mole poblano. A friend prides herself on being the best tamale cook in her parish. It takes her three full days of preparation and cooking to fill many deep aluminum pans.

(The video is somewhat long but don’t miss the food and dancing toward the end.)

Our Lady of Guadalupe has become even more important this year. ICE agents began to appear this summer and are a growing presence in the last few weeks. There is concern that the parade will attract their attention. My friend’s brother was picked up last month. She and her friends have plans for what to do if ICE comes for them, especially for how to care for the children they’ll have to leave behind. Most parishioners have similar plans.

But nothing will stop them from honoring Our Lady. More volunteers will walk alongside to shield the marchers. The priest will recite the evening mass and the feasting and dancing will fill the Co-Church of St. Joseph’s community hall.

Tamales for the Feast of Our Lady of Guadalupe

I wanted to find the most authentic recipe for tamales so I turned to The Art of Mexican Cooking, by Diana Kennedy, the hard-nose authority on Mexican cooking. The book’s index lists 29 versions. Instructions for the whole complicated process rakes in six pages. In Kennedy’s opinion, the best tamales come from Yucatán but she doesn’t offer a straightforward recipe for them since it would vary from cook to cook, and town to town.

The best way around this pickle, is to pass you over to YucatánToday, a reliable source of information about the state. The recipe I found there is very comprehensive.

Full disclosure—I never made them. I’ve eaten a ton of homemade ones and that was enough to tell me I could never do them.

Before you go….I’d truly appreciate it if you would show Stories some love by pressing the little heart button above and below. It’s a vote of much needed confidence and a way to show Substack they should support me work.

First off, remember that this is not just simply a Christian month. Other beliefs have their special holidays, too!

December 8: Bodhi Day, commemorating the enlightenment of Siddhartha Gautama
December 12: Our Lady of Guadalupe, revered by Mexicans and Mexican Americans as the day the Virgin Mary appeared to a peasant in Mexico City and helped to overthrow foreign interests.
December 14-22: Hanukkah, the festival of lights signifying the victory of Judah the Maccabee over Antiochus IV Epiphanes, the king of the invading Syrian Greeks
December 21: Yalda, the Zoroastrian Persian religion’s celebration of the winter solstice
December 21: Yule or Yule Log, the day pagans mark as the end of the dark times and a return to the light
December 26: Kwanzaa, honoring the heritage, culture, and contributions of African Americans to our history
December 31: Ōmisoka or Jo-Ya night, Japans observance of the year’s last day with feasts and lighting the sky with paper lanters

Six events of national importance take place in the coming weeks, the first of which is the most momentous and the second is of special current interest. The third would never happen today, although it should:

December 15, 1791: The Bill of Rights added ten amendents to our Constitution, affirming the fundamental rights of all American citizens.

December 10, 1931: Jane Addams becames the first American woman to win the Nobel Peace Prize for her work in promoting world peace. Take THAT, Mr. President!

December 5: Ulysses S. Grant used his final message to Congress in part to apologize for any mistakes his administration visited upon the American people.

December 17, 1903: The Wright Brother flew their first airplane for 12 full seconds!

December 21, 1891: The first basketball game was played in a YMCA gym in Springfield, MA. It was played with a scoccor ball and using two peach bushell baskets as hoops.

December 22: National Forefathers’ Day in observence of the day the Pilgrams landed on Plymouth Rock. Plymouth, Massachutte is about the only place that commomeroates it.

The whole month of December is given over to admitting our affection for:

Root Vegetables and Exotic Fruits 
Egg Nog 
Fruit Cake 
Worldwide Food Service Safety 

Some dates have obvious connection to Christmas:

December 4: National Cookie Day, which seems ridiculous because any cookie baked on this day will be eaten by December 25
December 12: Gingerbread Decorating Day. This makes sense since it usually takes the rest of the month to construct a decent gingerbread house
December 13: National Cocoa Day (perfect recipe below)

Three animals are given their own consecutive special days. This year they occur over a weekend so go hog wild!

December 13: National Day of the Horse
December 14: National Monkey Day (this is particularly fun as it encourages monkeying around and baking monkey shaped cookies and cakes)
December 15: National Cat Herders Day

If I was still a parent of young children I would give undying thanks for:

December 16: National Barbie and Barney Backlash Day. It was created to give parents permission to kick Barbie, her dream house, and extensive shopping habits out of the living room and into a closet. Parents can also forbid their children from playing and singing any one of Barney’s stupendiously annoying songs.

I personally have four favorite days, coming as they do toward the end of the month when I’m exhausted and want nothing more than for it to be over.

December 19: Underdog Day
December 21:  Humbug Day
December 23: Festivus!
December 26: National Whiners Day

So now December 25 has come and gone and there are two more days before New Year’s. I don’t know why anyone would pay attention to them. They’re worse than a hangover.

December 29:  Tick Tock Day
December 31: Make Up Your Mind Day

1747 recipe for Spiced Hot Chocolate
Courtesy of Tasting History

The great thing about this recipe is that it begins by forming a hard cake of spiced chocolate. You will have enough left over for the rest of the cold winter days ahead. It keeps very nicely in an airtight container.  

2/3 cup (135 g) sugar
2 teaspoons ground cinnamon
1/2 teaspoon ground cardamom
1/2 vanilla bean or 1 teaspoon vanilla extract, more or less to your taste
2 cups (200 g) cocoa nibs
2 cups milk

Whisk together the sugar, spices, and vanilla bean to combine. If you’re using vanilla extract, add it in the next step. Whisk in the cocoa nibs.

Put the cocoa nib mixture and the vanilla extract if you’re using it in a blender or food processor and blend it up. This will crush the cocoa nibs and melt the cocoa butter in them, eventually turning it into a liquid or paste. Give your blender breaks if it starts to overheat. It may take 15 to 20 minutes of blending. You could do this in a mortar and pestle, but it would take forever. I ground just a small amount of cocoa nibs for about 20 minutes and it wasn’t anywhere near where it needed to be.

If you’re not using it right away, form it into a cake, wrap it well, and set it in the fridge to harden. If your cocoa nibs have formed a liquid, pour it into a plastic wrap or parchment-lined bowl to harden.

Take the hardened chocolate out of the container. Chop the desired amount into small pieces. How much you use will depend on how chocolatey you want your hot chocolate.

Heat the milk in a pot until it simmers. When the milk simmers, add the chopped chocolate and whisk vigorously. You want to mix in the chocolate, but also create some froth. You could also use a molinillo to create froth if you have one.

Pour the hot chocolate into fancy cups (small ones are best because it’s so rich), and serve it forth.

Help the world out today by chipping in to GivingTuesday! In the meantime, consider looking for a way to help your friends, neighbors, and community through these trying times!

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Since it was Thanksgiving, I was hoping he’d at least go to one of the neighborhood churches for warmth and a good turkey dinner. I thought there might be a chance when he told me how much he loved Thanksgiving.

“It’s my favorite holiday!” he said with one of his great big smiles I haven’t seen since last year.

“Oh good! Which one are you going to?”

It was clear he thought this was a slightly insane question. The people who watch over him think about him and come around. “They bring me plates of food all day!”

How horrible was this? To have never even thought about him as I cooked my big meal that was meant to share with family and friends? But not Denis. All these years I could have been making him so happy—a man in paradise—not with the measly dollars I give him but with a heaping plate of Thanksgiving turkey with all the trimmings?

“I’m blessed,” he said.

Denis hates to be touched or I would have hugged him. Instead, I gave him ten dollars and planned to carry to him a huge amount of my family’s dinner. I’ll put it in a cooler so it could last for the days afterwards when he may be running out of Thanksgiving dinners.

What I am grateful for:

My funny odd sons
My  funny odd husband
The strong, equally funny, women who married my sons
Hugs
Mary Chris
My sister and brother
My friends
Writing
Writing Stories
Force Multiplier efforts to save democracy
Crisp scrabble
Poached eggs
Gin martinis 
Ripe cantaloupe
Camembert cheese
A glass of Côtes du Rhône paired with Camembert cheese
Olives
Making stews
Making soups
My 1936 Corona typewriter that still works
Emily Brontë’s poetry 
The woods
The ocean
The little house
Lamictal 
Old family photographs
My aunt introducing me to Revlon’s “Cherries in the Snow” lipstick
Brooklyn
A working knee
The Tiny Chef makes an apple pie episode
Dinner with friends around the table
Dinner in a French restaurant late at night
Diners
My waitress resume
My few, my happy few, my band of loyal subscribers 
Snow
Christmas
Dessert

P.S Addition to my list:

Vicki Smith for her always kind supportive words and her beautiful newsletter, Easel to Table!

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Two weeks earlier, Tom had shattered his foot. His doctor and girlfriend had ordered house arrest for at least the next month and a half. He was miserable and needed to break out. There was also the matter of the drone he had recently purchased and was anxious to launch.

“Of course,” I replied. “Where to?”

“The Colony ruins,” he said.

I picked him up the following afternoon.

Tom’s directions took us to the New York City Farm Colony. Launched in 1829, it was the city’s response to the miserable conditions of the city’s poorhouses. The most notorious was on Blackwell’s Island in the middle of the East River. Destitute men and women, widows unable to secure work to support their children, and the elderly with nobody to care for them were housed in large overcrowded buildings. Husbands and wives lived in separate dormitories, their children often taken away to the orphanages on the grounds. Nearby buildings held prisoners and the physically and mentally disabled. A hospital at the tip of the island treated people with incurable and infectious diseases. Food was scarce and hygiene questionable. No one was allowed to leave the island.

The Colony would be different, a utopian experiment located on rural Staten Island. People would live in houses surrounded by fertile farm land where they would grow different grains, fruits and vegetables for their own consumption. The surplus would be sold back to the city to cover the expense of operating the community and to feed the poor in the city. The city took control of the Colony in 1898. By the early 1900s, it housed 2,000 people.

Every inmate who comes to the Farm Colony, except those who are completely disabled, does something, the different occupations being:

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published

Routine cleaning and keeping up of the Plant. 
Outside work on the farm and grounds. 
Mechanics laborers employed in construction. 
Mechanics employed in the shops as follows: 
Carpenter Shop 
 Paint Shop 
 Tinsmith Shop 
 Blacksmith Shops 
  Plastering 
  Tailor Shop 
  Seamstress 
  Broom Shop Print Shop 
  Map and Rug Making
—from the Colony’s 1914 Annual Report

Tom directed me to a side street where there was a secluded break in the tall fencing surrounding the abandoned Colony. He hobbled out of the car toward a spot where the fence had been pulled up. A depression in the dirt underneath it marked where others had shimmy in before us. I pulled up the fence as far as I could—maybe two feet—for Tom to fit through. The boot he was wearing on his broken foot caught on the bottom links and I dropped the fence on his rump to free him. He laughed through his pain. A woman my age shouldn’t have attempted to follow him but I did. Nor should a man with a broken foot laboriously climb up a small hill overgrown with bushes and bramble. But we did. At the top we found a vestige of a road.

Some believe the urban legend that the Colony is haunted by the ghosts of small children murdered by serial killers. The body of a young girl was, indeed, found on the grounds and a man was convicted of kidnaping but not of murdering her.

(Has a 93 Rotten Tomatoes rating!)

Tom and I didn’t believe in ghosts, but we were frightened by dirt bike riding teenagers. Otherwise, we wandered alone. He had a lot of fun flying his drone and testing out different ways to photograph the grounds. I went into some buildings that I should not have.

A few times I emerged to discover Tom was nowhere to be found. I roamed around the grounds, which are beautiful, especially on an autumn day. The Colony was eventually supplanted by other public welfare initiatives. The first settlement house in New York City was founded in 1886 to serve people without moving them from their neighborhoods. There were increasing educational, manufacturing, and office opportunities in the city that offered more support and advancement, especially for unmarried women.

The Colony increasingly served as a rest home for the elderly and frail who were unable to work until 1975. Slowly, the buildings were claimed by vegetation, vandalism, and the weather. Eleven of the original 16 buildings that remain standing are collapsed upon themselves.

I continued to wander through the wilderness calling for Tom and getting no response. The structures I passed looked more and more in the growing dusk like tombstones.

At last, I found Tom. He was sitting on the sill of a vacant window, looking through the photographs he had taken. His broken foot in its now dusty boot was propped up on his other leg. He’d never admit to me how much it was throbbing.

“Anything good?” I asked.

“A few,” he replied.

“Ready to go?”

“Just about.”

I helped him up and he took one last photograph. Then we turned around and began the arduous task of finding our way out of the Colony.

Postscript:

Plans to redevelope the Colony have been put forth for years. So far, nothing has come of them.

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Introduction
The Unexpected Guest

I was probably home for three minutes from a bad workday when my youngest son emerged from the basement. His friends were down there doing what they usually do, namely laughing and talking trash over gaming skills.

He was very excited. “Wait until you see what’s in the basement!”

Parents practiced in teenage behavior know this can go either way. The ruckus coming from below was not promising.

There, surrounded by five of my son’s equally excited friends, stood a duck. They were so proud of their adventure together: My son and a friend were driving about from somewhere to somewhere else when they got the brilliant idea to save a an animal from one of the neighborhood’s live animal markets. The store’s owner pointed to a wall of cages stuffed with ducks and chickens. The boys decided on a duck because they didn’t know much about ducks and a lamb would be hard to manuver into the car. They picked the duck that looked the most distressed. The owner jerked it out of the cage and was about to chop off its head when my son intervene and told him they wanted it alive. The owner didn’t seem happy about this but the boys handed over the duck’s price of $35, and then he packed it into a box. My son cradled the box on his lap as they drove over pot-holed streets to home. It didn’t squawk, it didn’t move, and when they set the box down in its new living quarters it refused to leave the box. One of the boys gingerly reached in, lifted it up, and planted it on the cold cement floor. It hadn’t moved since.

By this time the sun had set and it was absolutely wrong to shove the poor duck out into the dark to waddle alone around Brooklyn. I retrieved a large galvanized bucket used for keeping beer cold at parties and instructed the boys to fill it with water. Upon being placed in the water, the duck lowered its head beneath the surface where it stayed for the longest time, probably parched and unhappy about this latest turn in its life—from a dank cage to a semi-dark basement surrounded by crazy looking creatures who were calling him Professor Quackers.

I retreated upstairs and collapsed on my bed, head face down into a pillow, matching Professor Quackers’s instinct to shut out the world.

An Unexpected Desire

My neighborhood probably has more live animal markets per capital than any other in New York City. This is due to the various nationalities that call it home. Over the last several decades, because of wars, social upheaval, and economic distress, the area’s earlier populations of Italians, Irish, Norwegians, and Puerto Ricans have been joined by people from China, most Middle Eastern countries and the Caribbean islands, and many Ashkenazi Jews from Russia’s increasing oppression starting in the 1970s. Hipsters have made inroads over the last decade.

Live animal markets play central roles in each of these cultures. For Chinese, Caribbeans, and hipsters, it’s the freshness of the meat. For Muslims and Jews, it’s their religious requirements in how the animals are slaughtered. Chickens, ducks, rabbits, goats, lambs, and some game animals are offered in most of the markets. Turkeys are in demand by everyone when Thanksgiving and the holidays come around. All the markets advertise that their livestock is raised free of antibiotics on small farms in nearby states, many by Amish farmers. Most of the animals are allowed to spend their days happily roaming around open fields. Prominently displayed on signs is the promise that their workers were once farmers in their countries and experts in husbandry and humane slaughtering. Halal and kosher markets guarantee that strict Muslim and Jewish rules are followed.

(This video is a good introduction to how the markets serve the different communities. You’ll meet your teacher, Carlo Formisano, later in the story.)

My husband continues to have PTSD from the overcooked oval-shaped blocks of turkey his mother served every Thanksgiving. Ever since we married, I’ve tried to heal him with organic, natural, free-range, pastured, and heritage breeds. I thought a turkey who specifically died for us might cure him.

The Search

The huge red rooster perched on the roof of Utica Poultry in Crown Heights is visible for blocks. It’s head is turned defiantly away from the human activity below.

Utica is one of the fanciest of the live animal markets. Its entrance is framed by engraved black marble. Inside it is lit by brass chandeliers with frosted glass shades. A long line stretched from the cashier’s window to the door. Half the people turned around as I took my place at the end. Others straightened their backs. Besides being the only white person in the store, I was also the only one without a large bag or shopping cart.

After awhile, when the line didn’t budge, I asked the woman in front of me what might be going on. She said the man at the counter had forgotten his ticket.

“What ticket?” I asked.

“Reservation ticket,” she said.

I didn’t have a reservation ticket.

“Maybe you could buy a big chicken,” she said helpfully.

I thanked her and left to test my luck at a market in Bensonhurst.

La Pera Brothers Poultry is about 70 years old and Carlo Formisano has been managing the store for half of them. No one knows where the La Pera Brothers are now but the market has always been on 61st Street across from the subway tracks. When this was an Italian neighborhood, all the live animal markets were here. But Puerto Ricans gradually moved in and the Italians moved south. All the markets, except La Pera, moved with them or closed. It is now sandwiched between a lumber yard and an auto body shop. La Pera is popular with the Chinese who have settled in the area and who depend on the market to supply their nearby restaurants.

The market’s procedures were similar to those at the Utica Poultry—another long line, everyone with a large bag or shopping cart. A sign inside recommended calling ahead with your order. I returned home and called. No one picked up. I tried again a little later. Nothing. The first thing I did when I awoke on Sunday was call La Pera and a man answered.

“Is it too late to order a turkey?” I asked.

“Come tomorrow. Or Tuesday,” he said.

I told him I would be there the next day when they opened at seven a.m.

“I found a fresh turkey,” I told my husband with a little too much enthusiasm.

“I hate turkey,” he said then escaped to his room.

“You’ll love this one,” I called as he closed the door behind him. How could he not love the freshest, most healthy, well-raised turkey in Brooklyn?

We talked about it later in the day. He did not give his blessing to killing a turkey just for us.

You may think this means we had a vegetarian Thanksgiving dinner. But this would not be acceptable to my carnivor family. The men settled on a small loin of pork without a vote from me. They were lucky that anything arrived on the table.

Epilogue
Professor Quackers Finds a Home

I returned to the basement. My son was alone, reading in bed. Professor Quackers had left his bucket and was eating bread from one of my mixing bowls.

“The duck has got to go,” I said.

“Okay,” he said, not looking up from his book.

“I mean it.”

“It will be.”

Its times like this when you have to trust your child to do the right thing. And he did. The next day he and his friend carried Professor Quackers over to the fancy prep school near our house. On the bucolic campus is a commodious pond that attracts many ducks and geese. They snuck the Professor through an open gate and watched it toddle off to join its new family. We would stop and visit every now and then and the Professor seemed very happy, fat and free.

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