goodbye aunt ruth

my aunt ruth died last week. she was the eldest of my father's sisters. she made it to 91. there are only four of dad's siblings left now and six are gone (including dad).  i guess we've reached that point. aunt ruth looked more and more like our grandmother as the years went by. her voice came to match the same pitch, her weekly coiffed beauty shop hair increasingly white like grandma kate's. the same impatience if you were slow to play your card or made a dumb move in scrabble. her thrift - apparently no amount of leftovers was too little to save.  she had other parallels with grandma - losing her husband early and having to cope with a whole flock of children on her own.

she had five children, five cousins who i don't know as well as i know many of my other cousins. only two of them were in my age range. the others were quite a lot older than me and we never lived close to them. my impression is that only one of them has really stayed in touch with the family. i remember "brother bruce" calling my dad on occasion.

i have warm memories of the oldest of those cousins. the summer when i was 18, i lived with my horse trainer in rapid city and i went to visit aunt ruth frequently. barbara, her eldest, and her husband were there. in my memory, they were there that whole summer, but it may have been just a couple of weeks. memory is like that. it stretches out at times. especially in the long, hot days of summer.

i'd go over and have dinner with them and after dinner, we'd play cards. barbara and her husband would mix each of us up a white russian - kahlua, vodka, plenty of ice and a dash of cream. i was only 18, so it was deliciously illicit to me. it was legal in those days for 18-year-old in south dakota to drink "low point" beer, but white russians were a forbidden luxury until 21. and when it's slightly forbidden, it's that much better. and even aunt ruth drank them with us (that was decidedly un-grandma kate of her). i felt like i had joined the club. the club of adults. i don't remember ever getting tipsy from them and i don't remember if we ever had more than one. but i remember those card games very fondly. and to this day, when i drink a white russian (which is all too seldom) i think of those long luxurious summer nights when i was 18.

thank you aunt ruth. you will be missed.

memorable meals

i woke up thinking about food. not because i was hungry, but because i go in streaks like that...where i feel inspired in the kitchen and the clock's turning to 5 doesn't fill me with dread because i have no idea what i'll make for dinner. i'm in one of those periods where that doesn't scare me, because i know i'll just open the fridge and make something yummy, even if i approach it without knowing what that something might be.


what i awoke thinking about was a fantastic salad i had at a spa restaurant in thailand. it was served in a beautifully-carved papaya and it had crunchy shreds of carrot and green mango, chili, cilantro, crab and peanuts.

it was tossed in a spicy dressing of chili, fish sauce and plenty of tangy lime. just writing about it makes my mouth water right now. it was actually on the edge of too spicy, even for me, who loves a bit of heat, but it felt right at that moment, like the heat of the dish caused me to sweat out the last toxins, not coaxed out by the massage i'd just had. it was the perfect end to my spa visit.

you have to forgive my utterly crap photo of it, it was before my photo obsession began, in addition to being taken at night with the dreaded flash - but it gives you a good idea of how beautifully presented it was. i can still remember scooping out the delicious, cooling, ripe papaya flesh after the salad was gone. it was truly a memorable meal.

memorable meals often occur when you're traveling and we remember less of the everyday meals we eat at home. i can still remember pulling into a little town called larissa in greece, late at night after a long day of driving. my traveling companions and i checked into a hotel and then wandered out to find something to eat. there was a big square lined with restaurants. old greek men sitting out on the warm summer night, having lively conversations over sweating bottles of ouzo at tables covered in actual red-checked tablecloths. we approached such a restaurant and found no one spoke much english, but with gestures and a visit to the kitchen where a lovely elderly lady, all clad in black, down to the scarf on her head, showed us what she could make. it was a simple meal of fish, but imprinted on my memory forever because of the experience and the feeling that we'd stepped onto a 1950s greek movie set.

i remember a meal of walnut-encrusted shark at the linn street café in iowa city in the early 90s. it was so good it actually brought tears to my eyes. i may have to try to duplicate that, tho' i don't think it's so politically (or environmentally) correct to eat shark anymore these days. maybe another fish would do. or perhaps even a steak, as shark has that dark, steak-like quality.

i remember wandering the streets of tokyo with a colleague, looking for a place to eat dinner. we saw some signs and went up to the 8th floor to a restaurant where you checked your shoes at the door (quite normal in tokyo, actually). we were seated in the window, looking down over shinjuku, teeming with shoppers and lit up with neon. however, it soon became apparent that our utter lack of japanese, coupled with a menu with few pictures and a waiter that lacked english meant that we had to reclaim our shoes and go. we ended up back at our hotel, where, tho' it was late, they served us up a fantastic meal. a series of delicious little dishes of all kinds of things - most memorable of which was the gorgeous, tender slices of real wagyu beef. i remember thinking that now i understood what the fuss was about.

and then, there was the wasabi bistro in seattle, where another colleague and i ate night after night during the ten days or so we were there. we couldn't stay away after sampling the white salmon sashimi. it's still the best i've ever had, even including tokyo.

what food do you remember?

last visits

"we own time, but time also owns us."

i will miss the poetry on the streets of oslo.

sometimes when you leave a place, you know it's your last visit, at least for the foreseeable future. when i left oslo a week or so ago, it was with a light heart for that fact. i'd enjoyed the city for nearly two years, but commuting via plane will wear you down. especially if you don't get what you need from those around you when you're there - intellectual stimulation, exciting tasks, being included, being consulted on areas of your expertise, drawing on your knowledge and network, positivity towards your ideas (for which they claimed to hire you), managerial support, belief that you are capable of your job despite your gender, i could go on, but i think you get the idea. so leaving oslo, i felt happy that it would be the last time i would be there, at least for the foreseeable future. sometimes life is like that.

but other places, you don't realize that you won't be back anytime soon. like the philippines. i've been there 16 times since december 2004. so it feels really strange that i didn't go there at all in 2009. and i find myself really longing for it. it feels like something has been missing in this year (singapore was NOT close enough and is definitely NOT the same) because i haven't been there. it makes me wonder whether i enjoyed it enough when i was there last november. did i realize that it might be the only time i ever buy a fresh coconut from a young boy who paddled up on his coconut-laden surfboard? did i fully appreciate the uniqueness of that experience at the moment i had it?

and although i returned to manila many times after my visit there in september 2005 with husband and sabin, did i appreciate how great it was to be there together with them? and did i realize it might not happen again? i don't think so. tho' i loved the experience, i didn't place anything extra in it, thinking it might be a once-in-a-lifetime thing. i took for granted that we'd go again. and probably we will, so maybe this angsty feeling is for nothing. and maybe i just have this overwhelming sense of nostalgia  because i keep thinking of that house we looked at on sunday and how sadly frozen in time was.

i know one place that i didn't appreciate enough because i definitely didn't think it would be my last visit and that's Cape Town. of course, there's still a chance that i will go back there at some point, but when i was last there, i didn't realize it would be later rather than sooner.  i didn't realize how very long it would be before i was lounging at moyo at the spiers winery, chatting away on the phone and enjoying a fabulous glass of wine. sigh.

i worry a little bit that the world is changing so much with all of this talk of climate change and that long haul flights (except perhaps to the US), are largely behind me. and i'm changing too. i no longer want to have a job where i travel 150-200 days a year, where i'm away from my home and my family. i want something different from life now. i had great experiences, but maybe now they are just memories. memories of times i wonder if i appreciated enough.

of course, there are places that you hope you don't visit again, despite how colorful and amazing certain aspects of them were. like chennai. honestly, it's quite possibly the most uncharming place on the planet and if i never go back there, i'll be quite ok with that. phuket is another one of those for me. they can keep phuket. tho' i had a fantastic afternoon there, playing in the waves that had so cruelly killed so many less than a year before. it's one of those memories where i was conscious at the time that it was a wholly unique experience that could never be duplicated.

when we left singapore this past summer, husband was quite clear-eyed about it not bothering him at all if he never went back. i feel a bit that way too, since singapore is disneyland with nationhood. tho' if remain in shipping (which i wouldn't rule out), i will likely go there again. but i guess the whole point of these musings is that we never really know what the future holds and where it will take us.

a dying breed?

i traipsed out to the mailbox this morning in sweatpants and rubber boots, through several inches of fluffy white snow. i had to get my newspapers. it's what i do every morning. we get two daily newspapers--berlingske tidende (denmark's answer to the nytimes) and information (an extremely independent, critical of all political parties newspaper). and on fridays, we get weekend avisen, which is packed full of in-depth articles, book reviews and art/culture-related stuff. it takes me the whole week to read it properly. and i love that.

growing up, my dad had a weekly newspaper, so i guess i grew up knowing the importance of being informed and of getting your information through the medium of the newspaper. today, we have so many other ways of getting our news--television primarily, but radio and of course, the internet. during the election, i was a daily reader of sites like the huffington post and andrew sullivan's daily dish. but now i stop by only sporatically. i'm back to my daily newspapers, which are delivered to my door, as my primary news source. most days, i also flip on BBC world and/or CNN when i'm making lunch, but i'm a newspaper reader, first and foremost.

i like the freedom it gives me to skim articles that don't interest me that much and to sit and really read the ones that do. i like that there's usually more there than the soundbite that's been played and replayed on CNN. there's something special about having the physical newspaper in my hands or on the table before me. the smell of the ink, the way pictures print on the newsprint. i just love it.

and now i hear that it may be disappearing. newspapers, even the big ones, are in trouble these days. with pressure from internet advertising, they're having trouble finding their place in today's wired world. people get their news on the go, through their handheld devices. tho' honestly, i find a newspaper to be one of the greatest handheld devices ever invented.  it's compact, you can tuck it in your bag, you can read it on the train, you don't have to wait for it to load over a slow connection and it doesn't suddenly go away when you enter a tunnel.

i can see that the newspapers i read have put a lot into their websites. their best reporters are all blogging now too. the news is more interactive. they're more actively seeking photos from their readers and you can easily go to the web and upload your photos or letters to the editor these days. these, are, as i see it, improvements--we should take a more active role in how we interact with the news. but it's clear that print media has struggled with this transition and been slow to change.

but i feel romantic towards newspapers. i have a picture in my head of reporters hot on the trail of a story, bursting into the newsroom, clacking it out on a keyboard and rushing it in just ahead of deadline. a real, full story. not like today's cameras trained on stories that might not really be stories, as they're happening. in the "old days," stories were really stories and they were sniffed out and researched by reporters before they came to press. editors were tough on their reporters, making them check and double check their sources and get the story right before printing it. in other words, being sure there was a story before they went with it. and that's something that's being lost in today's information flow.

but it still has a place, doesn't it? we still have a need for deeper stories, for more of the details than fit into a 20- or 30-second soundbite. that's why i love my weekend avisen, they're still looking upon stories that way. where will the world be if the only access to news stories we get is from the ticker on the bottom of the screen? i think the world will be a poorer place indeed.

when i lived in chicago, i would always go down to 53rd st. and get a sunday new york times from a sweet old black man who may very well have been homeless. he always had a stack of NYT outside the dunkin' donuts on a sunday morning. i would go in, buy him a coffee and get my NYT from him. he knew i was coming and he would even save me one if i was running a bit later than normal. i'm not sure where he was getting those papers, as they had people's names and addresses on them, but i tried not to think about that, because it was part of my sunday morning ritual. it will be such a tragedy for us all if those fat, packed-with-stories sunday papers go away. not to mention the lack of interaction with other people than sitting at home, staring at your computer to get your news. my life was richer for my sunday morning exchange with old mr. jackson (yes, i even remember his name), even if he probably was stealing those papers, you had to admire his entrepreneurial spirit and his persistence (he was there every sunday without fail).

so, get out there and buy a newspaper, sit down with a cup of steaming coffee or tea and really read it. you'll be amazed where it takes you.