Category Archives: History

May 19, 2013 · 9:32 am

Bluebirds Dancing in the Rain

I always wondered about the Danish Home. I’d passed the faded sign on Cedar Lane a hundred times, and never followed it down.

I always pictured Keebler elves performing pirouhettes atop a barrel in the woods.

Saturday I had a chance to check it out, because the troupe of Morris Dancers known as the Bouwerie Boys were set to perform at the site. It was, of course, a home for seniors. Nonresidents were welcome.

A light drizzle from the still-cool sky only enhanced the lush perfection of the setting. May flowers.

A venerable orchard.

An imposing building of dark stone. A castle.

Maud and I learned about the Danish Home. Founded in Brooklyn in 1906 for those of Scandinavian descent, it moved in 1954 to Croton-on-Hudson, New York. Eighteen or so seniors inhabit the former stable–the castle–built by financier JM Kaplan earlier in the century as part of a 40-acre estate. It felt like a different country.

A harbinger of good fortune greeted us when we stepped across the wet grass behind the building while waiting for the dancers to arrive. Atop a cockeyed birdhouse tethered to a hydrant sat a bluebird.

Well–with a flash of sapphire and a touch of rust it fluttered away, not allowing a picture. Thank goodness it didn’t fly up my nose. We learned from Eric Anderson, who runs the place, that bluebirds and barn swallows squabble over the dozen birdhouses on the property, each camp currently claiming half.

Morris dancing also is supposed to bring prosperity, fertility and good luck after the long winter. Each village of the Cotswolds, in England, where the tradition originates, has its own style and costume, and all the moves are passed down from father to son.

No elves, but something elfin about these husky grown men and their skips and hops, their bells and ribbons and flashes of “whites.”

The Bouwerie Boys dance all over the New York area (you can find their schedule on Facebook) and a little drizzle seemed to bother them not a whit.

Nor did it trouble the elderly ladies in attendance, though umbrellas were in short supply. One kept up a steady gab throughout the performance. “I want to know what this is all about!” she said at one point and, later, with authority, “Goes back to Shakespeare’s day.” Which was not, in point of fact, correct. The year 1452 was the earliest recorded show of Morris dancing, so by Shakespeare’s day the steps were ancient.

The fiddle player in his “reel” life is the violist for the Manhattan String Quartet. By the end of the performance he’d popped a string.

Then the dancers sang a jolly tune: I like to hear those small birds singing early in the morning – hurrah for the life of a country boy.

Finally, shots of a clear liquid were passed among the dancers. Well earned, after valiant leaps in the light, ancient rain.

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Filed under Dance, History, Jean Zimmerman, Music

May 17, 2013 · 2:55 pm

Maud to Malawi

Lovely 21-year-old Maud has come home from school, needing a few trillion hours sleep and all her sheets cleaned but no worse for the wear after her third year of college.

Right away, she has to go to a barbecue with her boyfriend. She has to go to a friend’s 21st birthday party at a club in New York. She has to entertain a college friend, and have dinner with a high school friend. She has to help her mother weed the garden. The baby carrots need thinning.

The potatoes need de-Phragmite-ing. The reeds rear up through the loamy soil no matter how we pull them or attack them with shears. They don’t get it. Go back to your marsh! We don’t want you among the tomatoes!

So Maud is going to help me eradicate them. Then off she has to go again…

To Malawi. In just a few days she will go to help build a school in a little town neither you nor I has ever heard of.

I’m trying to remember what I was doing the summer I was 21. Sleeping on someone’s floor on 112th Street. Reading Anais Nin. Putting poetic scrawls in a notebook. A stupid job in a busy bakery (Zaro’s, in Grand Central Station, still exists), barely going to bed before I had to get up in the dark to go to work. Juggling boyfriends. Nothing really of note.

Maud’s going to Malawi with an organization she runs at Columbia called buildOn, whose mission is to build schools all over the world in underresourced communities. Eight other students will go too. Girls, she says, especially benefit from the work they’ll accomplish, because one mandate of buildOn is that female students must have equal access to the educational resources it makes available.

That’s really unusual in a traditional culture like that of Malawi. (Funds are still being raised for the trip.)

Last year, when Maud came back from a similar school-building trip to La Cruz, Nicaragua, she had dirt under her nails and mud ingrained in her clothes from pouring a concrete foundation. She loved the beans and rice for every meal and the friends she made in the village, especially this little sprite.

When Maud’s my age, she’ll remember more about her 21-year-old summer than serving up bagels.

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Filed under History, Home, Jean Zimmerman, Nature

May 14, 2013 · 1:57 pm

A Quiche That Stands Up and Salutes

Does anyone besides me bake quiche anymore? Or has this delicious standby been totally ruined? By familiarity, by bad versions, by a laugh line that will never be forgotten?

Real Men Don’t Eat Quiche was a long time ago – 1982, actually. Funny guy Bruce Fierstein popularized the notion that consuming eggs and cream in a crust was unmasculine. Chopping onions, properly women’s work. Ha ha. Or should it be?

It was a time when the idea of men’s and women’s intertwining roles was particularly fraught. Women had, it seemed, gone on the warpath, demanding equal pay, control over their reproductive lives, a break once in a while in their household routines. I worked as an editor at a think tank called Catalyst, where we encountered business male executives’ overheated fears over the inroads of female executives. Scaling the corporate ladder or any other was in the pop cultural air.

There were men who alligned themselves with women. I love this example of how some men came together in 1979 to share the good fight.

Slate’s Rebecca Onion writes that the newsletter’s authors were “group of men based in Berkeley, Calif., who were working for the ratification of the Equal Rights Amendment. The sheet was sent to interested activists throughout the late 1970s, as the feminist movement worked to secure the support of enough states to win the amendment’s permanent attachment to the Constitution.”

The group’s acronym stood for Men Allied Nationally for the Equal Rights Amendment. It’s goal, evidently, was “summed up in a motto that mixed arguments based on morality, feasibility, and ego: ‘Stake, Place, Chance, and Strokes.'”

Quiche eaters all, natch. Some were probably even quiche bakers. Quel horreur!

The B-52’s do a mean Quiche Lorraine. It’s about a little dog

dyed dark green.

About two inches tall, with a strawberry blonde fall;

Sunglasses and a bonnet

and designer jeans with appliques on it?

My point, and I do have one… as Ellen Degeneres used to say. In my house, the quiches happen to be my domain, while Gil does the donuts, the paninis and the best molasses cookies ever.

I haven’t given up on quiche. It’s a historic entree, having originated once upon a time not in France, actually, but in Germany, and English versions of custard in pastry go back to the 15^th century. The original rustic Quiche Lorraine was dished up in a cast iron pan. So ours is a connection to a simpler time. I actually impressed myself by making it for the first time in high school, in home ec class.

And it meets my leftovers standard. The egg in a crust you heat up in the microwave the day after (or the day after that) is almost as good as you had it hot from the oven that first night. Crucial in a household of writers who might not want to pause mid-sentence to create a meal from scratch.

Julia Child has been my guide in developing a great recipe, but I don’t have patience with her doorstop tomes.

I think the 107-page Julia’s Kitchen Wisdom: Essential Techniques and Recipes From a Lifetime of Cooking has just about all the information and recipes that are needed to square you away with your pots and pans. I especially like one of the tenets of her quiche recipe: you measure out the proper amount of eggs to cream by cracking the egg in a half-cup measure and filling it with the dairy, continuing in the same way until you get the amount of liquid required.

This reminds me of another egg trick I thought was great when I saw it in a movie. When a recipe calls for a whole egg, you sklurp your finger around the inside of the shell after breaking it to make sure you don’t waste any bit of precious white.

I make what historically has been called a Quiche Lorraine, with eggs, bacon and cream, except I always use cheese, and usually add some kind of leafy greens or broccoli – to make it healthy (!). My crust recipe is tried and true, and I always use leaf lard if I have some in the house.

The recipe may be mustily retro, but let’s call it classic cool. The quiche. A recipe for men and women equally.

A Noble Quiche

Crust:

1 ½ c flour (half and half white and whole wheat)

¼ c butter

1 ½ T crisco (or lard)

½ c cold water

pinch salt

Cut together butter, shortening and flour and salt, then mix in water with a fork; chill an hour.

Filling:

4 eggs

Half and half to fill up a half cup for every egg (you can use heavy cream for a more custard-like or milk for a more omelette-like consistency)

(plus extra eggs/cream as needed to fill your pie plate)

1 large onion, sliced thin

6 slices crisp bacon, crumbled

1 ½-2 c gruyere, shredded

greens or broccolli to taste, steamed

Fry bacon, remove. Fry onion til golden in same pan.

Whisk eggs and cream together.

Lay onions then bacon then cheese in pie shell. Pour in egg/cream mixture. Grind some pepper on top.

Bake at 375 for 45 minutes.

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Filed under Cooking, History, Home, Jean Zimmerman, Writing

May 11, 2013 · 10:54 pm

It Makes Perfect Sense

About to be Mother’s Day. The night before, Saturday night, we go into Manhattan just as the thunder starts to roll. Fissures of lightning streak the sky.

As is my mother’s prerogative, I let Gil do the driving.

We check out a movie not for the weak of stomach.

Then take dinner at Katz’s, founded in 1888 on Houston Street, its threshold long worn-out.

There is really no reason to go anywhere in New York for dinner except Katz’s.

You wait on line for your carver to finish your sandwich and he pushes a hot little slice of pastrami across the counter at you. It makes perfect sense. A morsel to whet your appetite.

David has worked his station since ’02.

The pickles are luscious. Green tomato, sour dill and new.

But they can’t match the pastrami. As Sinead O’Connor sang, Nothing compares to you.

Anyone can sit at the Where Harry Met Sally table. We did. It makes sense to do it if you can.

Outside I was surprised to see a sign on the side of the building that read WURST FABRIC.

Was Katz once in the textile business?  Michael Stern, the road food genius, schooled me.  Fabric is an Americanization of the Yiddish term meaning home-made.

Our pre-mom’s day Gastro-crawl continued on 23rd St. right next door to the Chelsea Hotel, scene of so much poetry and debauch over the years.

Now we have the Donut Plant. Gourmet donuts done right.  Proctology cushions covered with fabric (home-made in yiddish) covered the wall.

Perfect coffee, Mother’s Day specials.

Rose petals in donuts. Could it be a joke?  Yes, but it made a weird kind of sense.

There were in fact petals baked into the dough. I was transported to the Middle Ages. Or the middle of India and its rosewater delicacies.  I don’t know if biting into one made me feel more maternal or just trendy. Anyway, I liked it.

Right across the street, the historic home of the Communist Party in America, 235 west 23 street, was hosting a musical extravaganza.  A group called Legacy Women performed Afro Dominican palo and Afro Puerto Rican bomba for a rapt, folky audience that shushed us numerous times.

These women rocked. One song they announced was for mothers, and they belted out the chorus, mama-ah.  Another sounded like they were singing put your pants on in some native dialect.

Hitting the street again, the rain had all cleared away, leaving things new.

I looked across the street to the Chelsea Hotel,  now sadly being modernized, made into condos, its art collection all sold off.  I thought of Alejandro Escovedo’s song about the Chelsea, Chelsea Hotel ’78.

It makes no sense, he sings, it makes perfect sense.

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Filed under Art, Cooking, History, Home, Music, Poetry, Writers

May 10, 2013 · 7:54 pm

A Washington Irving Award, Thank You

Back to Cabinworld after an afternoon at the Washington Irving Awards, presented at a local Hilton.

Compared with hotel air, the azaleas, violets and weeds seem to bloom a bit more riotously.

The smell of rain in the air. The first angry-sounding, toothpick-billed hummingbird of the year dive-bombed me near the feeder with its red sugar-water.

My weathered old three-legged stool (note pegs that join the top, no nails) is ready for duty as a summer-porch-time computer stand.

At the conference to get one of the awards, I spent time with librarians (hundreds, representing the Westchester Library Association) and authors (20 or so, all Westchester residents). Funny, sometimes, inspiring, always. I saw some friends, nonfiction, fiction and librarian. I always feel a little sleepy after a rubber-chicken luncheon, but I pepped up for the remarks of keynote speaker Barbara Stripling, current head of the American Library Association.

Barbara’s remarks, passed along with both bubbly mannerisms and erudition, talked among other things about finding a “gorgeous balance” between digital and paper resources. She spoke about libraries changing lives. But first she told a story about when she was in college, craving an A on a paper and seeing only a lot of plus signs in the margins. She stuck up her hand and demanded to know the meaning of the notations. Those were actually t’s, she was told – they stood for trite.

Ouch.

Does the use of primary sources encourage empathy? That’s the question she asked in her Ph.d. studies, going into high school classrooms that were studying slave narratives. It’s a fascinating line of inquiry.

It’s hard for people to use primaries, she found, without some sort of context. I get that, I suppose. Although as a historian I generally find the original sources when they are embedded in some author’s history to be the most exciting part of the work. They themselves give the context. That’s where you find the BITADs, the bite in the ass details that really give the flavor of a time or place or person.

I liked another story Barbara told, too, about a knitting club that refused to be shut into one of the back rooms at a public library for their weekly stitch n’ bitch, but instead colonized a table in the center of the building. Well, a technology club soon discovered the knitters and found what they were doing interesting, and the two groups ended up knit-bombing the library – the mouse, the circulation desk, etc.

Everything covered in knit and purl by tech geeks and old ladies.

A library “provides the thinking spaces for civilization,” said Jaron Lanier – he’s the computer geek who popularized the term virtual reality.

He has a new book just out, Who Owns the Future? Certainly worth a look.

The feeling that you are just another mouth in a chorus of songsters is a welcome one when you spend a lot of your time on your own at your desk. That is what I brought home from talking to my fellow writers and hearing them deliver brief remarks at the podium. Being one of the crowd, one of a club.

Allison Gilbert won a Washington Irving Award for her book Parentless Parents: How the Loss of Our Mothers and Fathers Impacts the Way We Raise Our Children. Allison lost her own parents at a tender age, but the book is much more than a memoir or advice manual.

It’s not her first book on the subject, and support groups of parentless parents have sprung up around the country to deal with the difficult subject. Allison announced some news, that some these groups have banded together to make a trip to Peru to help orphans there.

It gave me goosebumps to hear about another project she’s got lined up, because the excitement in her demeanor was just so visceral. There’s a real life journalist she wants to write about who went from panning for gold in the early 1900s to penning regular columns for Hearst in one dramatic lifetime. Apparently this person was a rabblerouser, a women’s rights advocate and is now – but perhaps not forever – all but forgotten. What a great topic, a great kernel of history to unearth.

Writers were honored today from all over the literary map.

My colleague Karen Engelmann was there for her novel The Stockholm Octavo, a magical work set in 18^th century Sweden. Delicious, witty and swooping are some of the buzzwords used around her book.

Doesn’t everyone look happy today? If a bit blurry? Karen’s next novel is well underway, and she promises to jump forward a few centuries and incorporate greeting cards rather than fortune-telling into the mix.

I stood up to say a few words about The Orphanmaster. How The Orphanmaster is a love story wrapped around a murder mystery that takes place in a tiny settlement in the middle of a vast wilderness. And about libraries. That over the years I’ve not only dug into books and mususcripts, taken thousands of pages of notes and written many chapters in libraries, but eaten and drank within their hallowed halls. My hometown library growing up, in Hastings-on-Hudson, where I read Tristram Shandy for the first time:

I’ve also taken some great naps, with fantastic dreams.

Some of what I was saying felt as if it were in the rearview – I’m working on the Savage Girl copyedit, and just took a first peek at the proposed cover for the novel. The art is beautiful and chilling and only needs a little fine tuning to make it perfect. I am obsessed with Savage Girl at the moment, though I have to wait until January 2014 for the book to be published.

Still, The Orphanmaster has just come out in paperback, well in time for another season of beach reading. And to be given an award for The Orphanmaster by librarians, for librarians to appreciate it, was a very special thrill.

Without librarians, said Maggie Barbieri, one of the fiction writers getting an award, we’re “a bunch of noisy trees echoing in an empty forest.”

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Filed under Fiction, History, Jean Zimmerman, Knitting, Nature, Publishing, Savage Girl, The Orphanmaster, Writers, Writing

May 8, 2013 · 8:05 pm

Reading a Golden Book

I must have been pretty young, because it was Golden Books we were after.

Me and Auntie, stopping in at Brasfield’s drug store in Greenfield, Tennessee on a muggy summer afternoon. Auntie, my great aunt, was an important lady, a home economics teacher whose house stood in a field of green beans. I had her all to myself when she took me to buy a book.

Auntie’s father, J.P. White, another important person, owned the drugstore, smack in the middle of Front Street, just across from the sober-faced local bank. J.P. had long been the town’s pharmacist, as life-saving as anyone with a doctor’s degree in this doctor-less town.

Brasfield’s had fancy floors of black-and-white half-dollar tiles, a grand soda fountain where my grandmother, Auntie’s sister, had jerked sodas as a teenager, tables topped with marble, coca-cola chairs. Body powder and lotion and perfume lined the shelves, making Brasfield’s the place to go when you needed a present for somebody special.

And most important, right up at the front, a wooden rack with magazines and books. Golden Books.

I’d get to choose one, take it back to hunker down with in the little living room Auntie shared with Uncle Bob or on the vast wraparound porch of my grandmother’s house, on the creaky glider.

Picking a Golden Book was my first experience of picking a book, choosing for myself what book to bring home from the cluttered selection in a store. My idea of what I wanted to read. No one else’s.

I thought of a hot summer day with Auntie and The Poky Little Puppy when I read a lovely essay by Rebecca Makkai in Ploughshares Literary Magazine. She writes in How to Shop at a Bookstore: An Easy 20-Step Guide for Authors

about what happens when an author enters a shop, the jitters and the excitement that go with knowing that your name actually appears on one of the thousands of volumes there. One thing that happens is thinking back to bookstore of yesteryear. She writes:

“First, smell it. Look at the new arrivals, lined up like candy. See if, for just one second, you can remember what it was like to walk into a bookstore as a reader. Just a reader, a happy, curious reader. With no agenda, no insecurities, no history of bookstores as scenes of personal failure and triumph. Wish for a time machine.”

I recall patronizing the great Strand Bookstore on 12th Street and Broadway back thirty years ago, the smell of the paper, the sense that I could find absolutely anything there. Having known and loved the store so long made it thrilling when I found my own book there.

I was delighted to read Makkai’s fresh and honest perspective.

She talks about other parts of the experience authors have in temples of literature, commercial as they are. Such as turning your book around so that shoppers see the cover rather than the spine. (Spine, by the way, is one of the simpler terms that come into play when discussing a book. For more on attributes such as wire lines, chain lines and head-pieces, take a look at 10 Terms to Describe the Anatomy of a Book.

Makkai, whose authorial experience includes the novel The Borrower (Viking, 2011) and numerous short stories, writes about the decision that’s in store for you once you get over the shock of finding yourself on the shelf.

“There are two copies. If there were only one, you could walk away right now. Because, you’d tell yourself, it might be sad to offer to sign their one and only paperback copy of your book, a copy they were probably planning to return to the publisher tomorrow. A copy they probably ordered by mistake. If there were five, with a lovely staff pick card right below, you could waltz confidently to the counter. But you have to do this. Because it helps the store, and it doesn’t hurt you either. And everyone knows that this is how you build relationships with booksellers.”

And she’s funny talking about approaching the checkout to sign those copies: “Thank god there’s a cat on the counter. Stroke the cat manically when you approach. The fact that you hate cats is irrelevant.”

But the thing that had me thinking about Auntie and The Poky Puppy is number 18:

“As you cross the street with your bag of new books, remember the first time your mother took you to a bookstore and told you to pick something out. To keep, not borrow. You were overwhelmed by choice and wonder. Remember how you pulled things off the shelf at random because every book was equally unknown and fresh and promising.”

Today, the first discovery of books is usually glitzier than Brasfield’s drug store. You’re as likely to get your stories on a screen as you are on a page. But that’s not all bad. Check out these animated pop up books and see if they don’t give your imagination wings.

The important thing is to have an Auntie there with you to hold your hand.

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Filed under Fiction, History, Jean Zimmerman, Publishing, Writers, Writing

May 7, 2013 · 6:04 pm

Wizard Sticks and Tree Guards

Some magic has come into my life. I am not a person who favors yard ornaments in the vein of gnomes, glass spheres or plywood ladies with polkadotted underpants. And I’ve never even read The Hobbit.

But I have fallen in love with a Wizard Stick.

It owes part of its charm to the fact that it was a gift from old friends. Part, also, to the chunky blue-green “crystal” grasped in its iron claw. The Wizard Stick will bring the rains to my vegetable garden, I am sure, when planted facing in the proper direction and with the ceremony that behooves its installation. Gil’s going to jump around minus his undershorts while I chant for precipitation.

But there is something else. The company that created the Wizard Stick, Tringalli Iron Works, fabricates the totems only as a sidelight to its regular business. A business to which street tree guards are central, and have been since Liborio Tringalli started the enterprise in Tribeca in the 1920s.

Yes, tree guards do matter. Here is one you probably have overlooked every time you ambled down a New York City sidewalk. Eighteen-inch iron hoops all around. Shielding a little root-friendly plot that is blessedly feces-free.

Edith Wharton showed Lily Bart roaming around near Grand Central Station in the humid heat of a Manhattan summer afternoon, desperate to find some cool relief.

“‘Oh dear, I’m so hot and thirsty—and what a hideous place New York is!’ She looked despairingly up and down the dreary thoroughfare. ‘Other cities put on their best clothes in summer, but New York seems to sit in its shirtsleeves.’ Her eyes wandered down one of the side-streets. ‘Some one has had the humanity to plant a few trees over there. Let us go into the shade.’

“’I am glad my street meets with your approval,’ said Selden as they turned the corner.”

In 1905, when House of Mirth was published, a battle was underway over New York’s street trees. The island was still nostalgically remembered as a haven, a bower of oak, chestnut, pine and cedar, but now the trees had been almost all torn down for new construction. They were inconvenient to development.

Madison and 55th Street in 1870.

I wrote about the transformation in my book Love, Fiercely, that took place during that period. I.N. Phelps Stokes despaired over the change:

Old, bucolic Manhattan was vanishing, buried in the smooth cement of the new. By the turn of the century, the leafy streets of lower New York had lost their shade.

In an incisive history called The Creative Destruction of Manhattan 1900-1940 author Max Page charts the demise of the New York street tree. At a certain point the trees could be counted on one hand. I love this 1913 photo of a woman he included in his book, walking by the sole remaining tree at Fifth Avenue and 37^th Strteet.

And the pear tree planted by Peter Stuyvesant at 1o^th Street and Third Avenue. The city mourned when it was killed after being mowed into by a dray in 1867; it had stood for 200 years.

Yes, there was a love of trees, and 317,166 were planted in New York State on Arbor Day between 1889 and 1909. But in 1909 only one in five of those trees still stood. A Tree Planting Association sprang up to organize around replenishing the city’s streets, with a classic Progressive fervor, augmenting the efforts of New York’s Parks Department. The fact that we have any street trees at all today is probably due to their efforts.

And to those tree guards. Tringalli has made 125,000 of them since 1923.

Today, the city’s plan is to plant more than 200,000 new street trees over a decade (street trees area subset of city trees in general, which include parks, yards, etc). There are upwards of half a million street trees now. MillionTreesNYC is playing an important part. Saplings come from three different nurseries in Maryland, Buffalo and long Island. These are Maples.

People who care about trees can even become Citizen Pruners, taking a five-session course and getting a license that lasts for five years. A friend of mine has become an arborist, a new profession, who advises construction companies on the health of trees.

The New York Parks Department keeps count of species, and has identified 168, with the top specimens the London Plane Tree, the Littleleaf Linden, the Norway maple, the Green Ash and the Callery Pear. And there is always the ubiquitous, sometimes stinky ginkgo biloba, with its pretty fan-shaped leaves. Long thought to be extinct, the ginkgo was rediscovered during Victorian times in hidden groves in China.

All of them need a tree guard.

A Wizard Stick might be nice, too. Some magic, to keep a tree alive when the chips are down.

I’m not parting with mine.

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Filed under History, Home, Jean Zimmerman, Love, Fiercely, Nature, Photography

May 3, 2013 · 4:14 pm

Bringing Home the Bacon

O happy day… on Arthur Avenue, the Little Italy of the Bronx. Where a gentleman at a piano entertained us with Danny Boy, asking only a dollar (we gave him two).

And where an Italian Mickey outside a grocery store had a few hours of peace and quiet, since all the children were still in school.

Everyone is a connoisseur on Arthur Avenue. In the butcher shop, where they also stock some cheese, the main man walked around to the display with me to explain that the Pecorino the store had was made from sheep’s milk, yes, but the peppercorns with which it was studded made it unacceptable for use in a salad of fava beans. In other words, he dissuaded me from buying something at his store.

I didn’t ask him about the heads in the window.

Whether they belonged to sheep or goats. He will put the sheep on his right and the goats on his left, will the Son of the Lord — at least so it says in Matthew. But here, it didn’t matter. We were there for a pig. Gil explained exactly how he planned to roast it.

And the butcher acceded to our request to buy it.

Hey, you like bacon, don’t you? Say hello.

Down the street, at Teitel Bros., in business since 1915, where the butcher recommended we go for cheese, we found a Star of David in mosaic at the entrance. Austrian, Yiddish-speaking immigrants Jacob and Morris Teitel opened the place, which is now an institution.

The latest generation of Teitels wanted every detail about the pig roast. On the Weber grill? No kidding. Just turn it over, said Gil. Hmn, you don’t say. He took out the Pecorina Toscano. No problem. He knew everything about everything already.

In the nearby arcade, many of the businesses have been around forever, and they too know exactly what they’re doing. Fantastic, Old-World vegetable vendors.

Everything larger than life. The Romano cheese. The picture can’t do justice to its girth.

The pepperonis.

Extra, extra long pasta. Really, only Gargantua could wind these around a fork.

Especially the bulbous fennel.

All the guys, the uniformed guys, the ones with badges, pick up their food there. They’ve got our backs. But here I’ve got at least one of theirs.

At Mike’s Deli, which sounds like the ordinary place on the corner but is anything but, we got a sandwich of aged provolone, soppressatta, sweet and hot peppers. A little bit of olive oil and balsamic vinegar. An angel made it for us. An angel connoisseur. Sicilian olive oil, the best for salads, he said, with certainty.

We took our paper plate to a wooden table nearby where we had a good view of people buying lamb shanks and two-inch thick steaks.

Good, I said, my mouth full.

I don’t think that quite describes it, said Gil. Thirty seconds and the sandwich was gone.

Time to go roast a pig.

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Filed under Cooking, History, Home, Jean Zimmerman

April 29, 2013 · 5:26 pm

Writing From the Nitty Gritty

Reading The New York Times today, I came across a story about archivists in the city, what a rare breed they are and what their jobs are like, and I envied them. “Specialists who snatch objects from oblivion,” as Alison Leigh Cowan, the author of the piece, describes them, these men and women get to immerse themselves in the nitty gritty of life in a different time and place, continually. It’s an activity that as a history-obsessed writer I only get to spend part of my time doing. The archivists profiled preserve everything from teacups, to Meyer Lansky’s marriage license, to the see-through panties of Gypsy Rose Lee.

I have favorites among archival collections.

The Henry R. Luce Center for the Study of American Art at the Metropolitan Museum has on view those myriad fine art and decorative art objects that are not currently displayed in the more conventional Museum galleries. It’s a funny sort of place, an open secret, accessible to the public yet off the beaten track. Objects have been arranged in huge glass vitrines according to material (e.g. furniture and woodwork, glass, ceramics, and metalwork).

It’s a fine place to find a dozen nearly identical andirons, if you’re in the mood to see andirons, or a hundred sterling silver tumblers, or any number of porringers of yesteryear. Oh, and paintings. Any item the museum can’t find a place for at the moment gets tucked away here, in plain sight, and that includes some wonderful canvases. Even such crowd pleasers as John Singer Sargent’s Madame X sometimes cool their heels here. One day I turned a corner and came across one of my favorite paintings that I’d never seen in person, the portait of nine-year-old Daniel Verplanck by John Singleton Copley, painted in 1771.

It’s not the only boy/squirrel portrait Copley painted – there’s one in Boston, too, at the Museum of Fine Arts, a fine one, of Henry Pelham, painted in 1765.

But here I had what amounted to a private viewing, just me and the boy and his pet. It seems funny now, but keeping squirrels as pets was commonplace through to the twentieth century. Before the family dog, the family squirrel. Here we have the Ridgely brothers in 1862, Howard and his younger brother Otho, the children of a wealthy landowning family in Maryland.

I like to visit another kind of archive when I’m at the Met, as well. Next door to the imposing Temple of Dendur is a tiny warren of display cases that contain long rolls of linen 2000 years old, mummy linen. Here is a scrap.

I don’t know whether the fabric has been unrolled from the embalmed corpses or is waiting to enfold them, but it is incredible to be inches away from these archivally preserved Middle Kingdom textiles. Only slightly frayed and browned by time. Magic.

Another archival highlight. I once ventured up to the attic of the Union Church of Pocantico Hills, with the well-known rose window designed by Henri Matisse – his last work of art, dedicated on Mother’s Day 1956.

There under the eaves lay the physical archives of Historic Hudson Valley, the nonprofit organization that runs the church and other properties in Westchester County. I was there to view a painting of an elite young Mary Philipse by John Wollaston, for my book The Women of the House.

I was, luckily, sanctioned to browse around the other objects displayed on the shelves while the archivist inspected various historical maps. Some intricately decorated colonial pottery, some other paintings, including one, provenance unknown, of waves crashing against the shore at the southern tip of Manhattan around 300 years ago. And what really got me, a collection of pastel silk slippers in pristine condition, perfect for the fancy parties of the eighteenth century. All these things just breathing there, largely ignored by the world, protected in their secret little alcove atop a church.

The Manuscripts and Archives Division at the New York Public Library, when I went there to do research on I.N. Phelps Stokes for Love, Fiercely: A Gilded Age Romance, always seemed like it existed underwater, dim and calm, holding tight to its treasures. It contains over 29,000 linear feet of archival material in over 3,000 collections, of which I was accessing 36 boxes of yellowed paper.

There is something gratifying about examining letters that have not been paid attention to in a hundred years. Being the first to take them out and handle them. The papers that interested me concerned the architect/philanthropist/collector’s epic Iconography of Manhattan Island. I had already done research at the library of the New-York Historical society, where I discovered a note from Stokes imploring an influential friend for contacts to help publicize his book.

Also something of a gas was his 1913 campaign, revealed in a fundraising letter, to get an educational farm installed in Central Park. His sister Ethel had the idea of equipping “a diminutive group of buildings, consisting of a tiny cottage of four rooms, a cow-shed and dairy for two cows, and a chicken house for twenty-five chickens.” Everything could be “inspected through glazed openings without entering the buildings,” wrote Stokes. A negative editorial in The New York Times helped shoot down the plan.

Petting squirrels was still popular in Central Park at that time, I have found.

I recall the day at the NYPL Manuscripts room when I found a small envelope containing two thumb-sized black-and-white photographs depicting the very first street plan of New York, drawn in 1660.

They were snapped by Stokes’ researcher behind a guard’s back at the Florence villa where the map was housed, and sent back over the sea to his boss in New York City. Stokes must have leapt out of his chair (also in the New York Public Library, where he had a private second-floor office) when he saw those first pics in 1916.

A friend of mine, the curator Thomas Mellins, produced Celebrating 100 Years, an exhibit for the New York Public Library that brought some of its best archival artifacts out of mothballs. Did you know that this book-and-paper institution in in the possession of the walking stick Virginia Woolf had with her when she waded into the water on her last day? It floated to the surface. The Library also has such objets as Jack Kerouac’s typewriter, yes, the one on which he wrote On the Road. And my personal favorite, perhaps because I had just been reading David Copperfield when I saw it — Dickens’ personal copy of David Copperfield, the one he used when touring for the book, pocket-sized, complete with his penciled-in notations for emphasis. There is also the genius’ letter opener, topped with the taxidermied paw belonging to Dickens’ cat, Bob.

The pleasure of handling archival materials is an emotion that you can’t experience second-hand, unfortunately. You have to be there, deep amid the tarnished porringers and the satin slippers. But there is a website I like a lot that gives you snippets of historical artifacts. Slate features a department called The Vault: Historical Treasures, Oddities, and Delights. You can see, if not touch, pieces of history like a hand-written dance instructional from 1817, an 1893 letter promising compensation to former slaveowners, or Bram Stoker’s literary plans for Dracula. You don’t get to sit underwater at the Manuscripts Collection, true, but you can turn the virtual pages in the comfort of your living room, in your stocking feet.

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Filed under Art, Fiction, History, Jean Zimmerman, Love, Fiercely, Photography, Publishing, Writers, Writing

April 27, 2013 · 10:44 am

Book Award to The Orphanmaster

I’m proud to say that The Orphanmaster has been selected as a 2013 Washington Irving Award Winner by the Westchester Library Association.

Since 1987 the Association has gone about choosing “books of quality” written by Westchester residents, encouraging librarians in the county to encourage patrons to check them out and read them.

The Orphanmaster shares the spotlight with some great books, both fiction and non. This year the group of authors includes Don deLillo, Karen Engelmann, Esmerelda Santiago, Robert K. Massie and Dan Zevin.

Why Washington Irving, you ask. It makes perfect sense. He’s Westchester County’s foremost literary light, historically. Though he’s pretty much known today mainly for “Rip Van Winkle,” in his day, the early 1800s, he achieved rock star status, producing at least a dozen and a half popular histories, biographies and collections of essays as well as novels and stories.

Irving’s first major book, A History of New-York from the Beginning of the World to the End of the Dutch Dynasty, by Diedrich Knickerbocker (1809), published when he was 28, was a satire on local history and contemporary politics that ignited the public imagination. A later work, The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent., out in 1819, which contained Van Winkle (written in one night, it is said) and The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, shot to international bestsellerdom. He’d been writing voraciously since he was a teenager submitting clever letters to the editor of Manhattan’s Morning Chronicle.

Irving invented the tag “Gotham” for New York City. Here is Wall Street in 1850, Irving’s home town.

Some of his books lampooned early Manhattan’s manners and mores. They set up a lasting stereotype of the stalwart Dutch burgher and his stolid hausfrau partner, influencing me when I researched The Orphanmaster. Rip Van Winkle figured in this ilk, telling the tale of a man who nodded off in the Catskill Mountains for 20 years, sleeping through the American Revolution, with the world having changed irrevocably during his slumber. Another more modern rock star, Johnny Depp, appropriately brought Washington Irving out of the nineteenth century with his portrayal of Ichabod Crane in 1999 in the film Sleepy Hollow.

Irving traveled extensively on The Continent – he served as an ambassador to Spain — as a true man of the world, feted everywhere, dazzling literati and royals alike with his intellect. When he spent time in the U.S., he lived with his nieces in a picturesque cottage called Sunnyside on the river bank in Sleepy Hollow, New York, a “snuggery” of yellowish stucco with climbing wisteria on rootstocks imported from England, a fainting couch in the parlor, and a west-facing veranda from which he could watch the sun set over the Palisades.

Irving hosted Dickens there, yet another rock star – fans grabbed tufts of Dickens’ fur coat as souvenirs — when the novelist did his American tour in 1842. When the train came through in 1851, cutting between Irving’s cottage and the Hudson River, he fumed. It ruined his bucolic view, and he never forgave it.

You can visit Sunnyside today and check out the tiny study where he sometimes nodded off, though not to wake a century later.

Today the library is carefully curated by a staffer from Historic Hudson Valley, the nonprofit preservation outfit which owns the restoration. I know the librarian in charge. She is cognizant of the honor of handling the great man’s volumes.

As I am of receiving an award in his name.

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April 26, 2013 · 12:46 pm

How to Be a Couple of Writers

Today is our wedding anniversary. Gil and I have been married 26 years. It’s a lot of time since our engagement party, at a Russian bar in Brighton Beach, New York!

People always ask, How can you possibly stay married to another writer? It’s not something everyone does, and in fact the matrimonial union of two inkstained wretches is almost as rare as the Javan rhino, of whom less than 60 now exist.

Some other writer-couples make it work. Novelists Paul Auster and Siri Hustvedt are a famous example. Well, they live in Brooklyn, and perhaps that artsy atmosphere gives them sustenance. Also consider the Beat poets Allen Ginsberg and Peter Orlovsky, together from 1954 until Ginsberg’s death in 1977. They chanted. They stayed loose. They were happily hip.

Once upon a time there was Mary Shelley (Frankenstein) and Percy Bysshe Shelley (Heaven smiles, and faiths and empires gleam,/like wrecks of a dissolving dream). It was wildly romantic, she running off with him when he was married to another woman and she was 16. Anais Nin and Henry Miller also managed to have both a torrid love affair and a meeting of the literary minds.

Yes, there were couples that were cursed, like Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes. One dead by her own hand, one forever tortured by her demise. A similar dark story in Zelda and F. Scott Fitzgerald. He stole well-turned phrases from her journals, and things turned out badly (him dying of drink, her in a mental hospital fire).

So what makes a writerly marriage work? Gil and I have been writing our own stuff and collaborating with each other ever since we got together. We actually met in a poetry writing workshop in New York City, led by the wonderful Sharon Olds (she won the Pulitzer for poetry this year). In the early days we didn’t have much space. I remember a tiny studio in Los Angeles with a single surface, a kitchen counter, where we set up our computers across from each other. And we produced books there. Today in the Cabin we have a bit more room, two separate offices (mine in the living room!), but we seem to often end up working side by side. Somehow our literary life together succeeds.

So I will offer you my suggestions about sharing your life as a writer with another writer.

Accept debate. Disagree, argue, even fight over language. Just don’t come to blows. Try not to be hardheaded over a word or phrase or plot point. Be willing to kill your darlings, as they say, if your partner advises it. (Also praise each other’s work to the skies).

Celebrate the milestones. Little as well as large – the nice, toss-off comments of an acquaintance or the brilliant review. The copyedit as well as the first pristine hardback book copy. Raise a toast together, no matter which of you got the kudo, the contract, even the mot juste.

Ride the ups and downs. And there will be downs.Publishing is a fickle business and you can’t let the market ruin your mood or your relationship.

Embrace change. When we were married, I was an aspiring poet and Gil wrote plays that were produced off-off-Broadway. We made ends meet with editorial jobs. We grew, we branched out. We were the same people, but we became different sorts of writers. Between us, articles, screenplays, nonfiction, memoirs, fiction, even this blog…

We don’t know what will happen in the future. What writer does? Just be prepared to be perpetually surprised by your writerly mate, as you are surprised by yourself. Said Andre Maurois: In literature as in love, we are astonished at what is chosen by others.

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April 25, 2013 · 3:49 pm

A Swirl of Indies

Still on the trail of indies – indigenous landscape elements – in the Binghamton area of New York, we came to this classic diner for a classic diner breakfast.

With its fetching signage. The eggs not-so-bad, not-so-good, but a totally intact red leatherette interior, chrome that wouldn’t quit, and self-knowledge in the form of that Norman Rockwell Saturday Evening Post image “Runaway” pasted up on the wall.

A cop and a little boy on the run trade secrets while sitting atop a diner’s spinning stools, as if it was painted from life in this very diner.

It’s spring, didn’t you know? Time to get your lawn in gear.

Crappy motels have the best signs.

Endwell is actually the name of a town, not just the end of a famous saying, and not just how you hope it’s gonna go when you check in. Endwell, along with Endicott and Johnson City, were three communities renamed by shoe-leather magnate George F. Johnson when he took the area over in the 1920s. Endwell was a brand of shoes. Universally known as George F., the irrepressible mogul came up through the ranks of local shoe workers and, when he made it to the top, did things like build churches and schools in his effort to provide what he called the “square deal” for his workers. He installed five elaborate carousels within a 20-mile radius.

This one’s not open until Memorial Day and they keep it locked up tight.

We wanted so badly to get in, we pressed our noses up against the windows like a couple of Norman Rockwell kids.

The carousel was built in C. Fred Johnson Park in 1923 (the Johnson name proliferated with his success) and has 72 figures four abreast, with all the carving, bevelled mirrors and scenic panels intact. We’ll have to return some time for a ride. There’s no admission, but you’re supposed to contribute a piece of litter.

George F. wanted to keep his workers happy so they wouldn’t think of unionizing, and it seems he was successful.

“Gateway to the Square Deal Towns” reads the welcome to Johnson City.

We stopped at this bold and blocky indie sign.

Could this actually be the name of a small town library or was it more in the line of an exhortation? A bit of both, it turns out. Inside, there was more about the George F. era and legacy in a series of glass cabinets.

An original shoebox, from the glory days long gone.

Your Home Library was originally built as a residence by Elijah Bridgham in 1885 with bricks from his own brickyard. Harry L., the younger brother of George F., made it an institution in 1917. Soon there were dining rooms, children’s rooms, sewing rooms. “Your Home Library was his conception of a home atmosphere and home freedom for the community,” said Rev. William MacAlpine at the dedication of the Harry L. monument in 1922. Home freedom?

All kinds of indies, everywhere you looked.

Perhaps a building endowed by the Klondike Bar magnate? You never known in these parts.

We passed several examples of the ice cream school of signage, which often presents a tasty homemade effort.

Fortunately, this was one of the soft ice cream joints that has survived intact beneath its sign. It even offers a peanut butter dip.

Vanilla shake in hand (no yellow cake or panda tracks for me) it was time to head for home. We have indigenous creations there too.

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April 24, 2013 · 10:40 pm

Mob-fest at Apalachin

There were so many people who wanted to attend Gil’s talk on his book Mafia Summit: J.Edgar Hoover, the Kennedy Brothers, and the Meeting That Unmasked the Mob that the location had to change. From the Apalachin Library, it would now take place in the cavernous party room at a local landmark, the Blue Dolphin diner.

The book had strong local interest. Gil tells the rollicking story of the 1957 mobster meeting in Tioga county, New York, the assembly parodied in the Billy Crystal/Robert de Niro movie Analyze This, where the bad guys skulk off into the muddy woods. The book’s also about the mob wars that led up to the meeting, and the drama that followed between Hoover and the Kennedy boys. People here knew the Barbara’s, the family whose paterfamilias hosted the meeting, they socialized with them, worked for them. For them, it’s not only a national saga but an intensely personal story.

We got to Binghamton – Apalachin’s big-city neighbor – and hungrily headed for a spiedie joint.

Spiedies are a kind of marinated pork kebab that you squeeze between pieces of cheap, soft white bread. For some reason Sharkey’s also specializes in clams “available to go by the dozens, hundreds and bags,” boasting on its menu that, “The clams you eat today slept in the bay last night.” Since the only water nearby is the muddy, meandering Susquenna River, that gave us pause.

But didn’t stop us from ingesting a dozen coarse, prehistoric-seeming steamed clams.

Just as we got ready to go, I noticed a button to the side of our old, scarred booth, a relic of another time.

Some kind of a magic button, maybe capable of summoning a mobster’s ghost. The place dates back to 1947, and it was probably old Joe Barbara’s cigarette smoke that stained its walls a coffee brown.

We stayed at a highway motel. Not just any highway motel, but the one where Detective Ed Croswell, the hero of Gil’s book, first intuited that something was rotten in the state of Apalachin.

Croswell, there on another police matter, saw a guy in a sharkskin suit making reservations for a group attending a “convention” and hung back observing the situation until he got the information he needed.

The motel needs a bit of a spitshine but it definitely gets you in the mood for a mob-fest, like the one at the Blue Dolphin tonight that packed the room with people who drove an hour to get there.

Gil has some serious hand cramps in its wake.

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April 23, 2013 · 9:15 pm

Witika or Wendigo, I’m Scary

I am the voice of the Witika. Sometimes I am called the Wendigo, sometimes the Weetigo or Wetiko or other variants. It all depends on the region you’re from and the belief system you share. I roam the frozen north especially, northern Minnesota, the wastes of Canada, and New York State in the snowy winters.

The Wendigo, the Wendigo

I saw it just a friend ago

Last night it lurked in Canada

Tonight on your veranada!

So wrote none other than Ogden Nash.

I make an appearance in The Orphanmaster as the vicious monster the European settlers find themselves terrorized by when children start to go missing from the colony.

As everyone in New Amsterdam knows, I stand around nine feet tall, with greenish, putrid skin, long fangs, and a voracious appetite for human flesh. The Algonquins made me part of their belief system. The name is thought to mean “the evil spirit that devours mankind.”

I’ve been the subject of fantasy in literature, movies, video games, anime and comic books. Artists have had a field day with me.

In Marvel comics, I have faced off against the Hulk and other superheros.

The Dark Horse Comic Series has a different portrayal.

In Stephen King’s Pet Sematary, I haunt the path leading to the Indian burial ground.

I had a whole movie to myself in the 2001 Wendigo.

Even literati Louise Erdrich wrote a poem, “Windigo,” about melting my frozen heart.

I star in the fantasies of countless gamers.

Read your newspapers after reading The Orphanmaster, and you’ll see more cannibal stories than you’d expect.

I’m not the only monster. “Wendigo psychosis” is a mental disorder which has actually been observed among several Algonquian peoples. It describes cases where people kill and eat humans (often relatives) indiscriminately, when there’s no famine whatsoever. They do it because my spirit infests them.

These people take on the characteristics of the monster Witika. Me.

Like a Big Foot or a Loch Ness monster, I may be what mythologists call a cryptid. Or I may be real.

Biologists think the urge to cannibalize has roots in Kuru, Kreuzfeldt-Jakob or other brain diseases, which can show themselves as a form of psychosis.

But really, it’s all about the power of suggestion.

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April 22, 2013 · 2:08 pm

Gil’s Best French Fry Recipe

Today I planted my potatoes.

Their eyes are all sprouted, ready to go.

Unearthing them at the end of the season – and here in the northeast, it’s a long season – is one of my favorite things. You get to reach into the dark, crumbly loam and pull out the hard little orbs, detaching them delicately from the stem. You get dirt under your nails.

You get to say loam.

It’s of a kin to reaching under a hen, feeling around through the softest feathers imaginable to pull out her just laid, still-warm, golden eggs.

Once, around thirty years ago, I wrote a play called One Potato. The things I recall about it: there was a protagonist named Esmerelda, it took place in Europe during the Middle Ages, and it was actually about the invention of the dinner fork. I loved the fact that it was hard to find information on my subject (pre-web!), I had to dig (like digging potatoes) and even embroider on what I found to create a story. Barbara Tuchman, the great historian of the middle ages in A Distant Mirror, once said, “The unrecorded past is none other than our old friend, the tree in the primeval forest which fell without being heard.”

This was when I was young and poetical.

The pic was taken about that time, on a downtown rooftop in the meatpacking district, when Manhattan still had a thriving meat market that left a slick of blood across the cobblestones every morning. My photographer friend Jonathan Pite produced my likeness for the American Poetry Review.

I always thought he captured the yearning inside me and the grit of 1980s Manhattan in the air. It was a strange place, but great.

You are lucky to be invited to our house nowadays if Gil is making french fries – he takes the potato to a new level.

Gil’s Best French Fry Recipe

Take a bunch of spuds. No need to peel. “I like russet potatoes, myself.”

Wash thoroughly.

Cut in half the long way. Cut into thin strips. Cut crosswise three times. Should yield long thin french fries.

Soak in a big bowl of water with 3 T salt and ¼ tsp sugar. Make sure salt and sugar dissolve.

“Soak for as long as you have…5 minutes, 10…”

What to listen to as you work? “Always the blues, all the Slim blues players, Magic Slim…”

Spin potatoes dry in a salad spinner.

Heat a large pot of canola oil to smoking, enough to cover the potatoes. Fry until brown. Lift out with a wok ladle or slotted spoon.

Drain fries on brown paper bags.

Dust with salt, and/or cumin, chili powder, whatever you like.

Serve with malt vinegar, aeoli or tomato ketchup.

Says Gil: “There are five levels of how to judge the fanciness of a restaurant.

Level One: They give you ketchup in packets.

Level Two: The ketchup is in a bottle on the table.

Level Three: You ask for ketchup and they bring it in a bottle.

Level Four: You ask for ketchup and they bring in in a little silver bowl.

Level Five: You ask and they come to the tableside and make the ketchup for you.”

We generally do the Heinz. Oh, and if you’re on a diet, this year we’ll be offering spinach, too.

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