Category Archives: Jean Zimmerman

May 24, 2013 · 7:02 pm

The Danger of Self Discovery

The black iron fence that surrounded the white-folks graveyard was typical of New York City parks – almost.

I don’t know what the danger was, except of self discovery.

I had driven down to the Bronx because I heard tell of a group of elementary school kids there who had stumbled upon a centuries-old, unkempt slave burial ground next to the well-preserved graveyard of the privileged families who owned them. They were trying to reinvest the slave cemetery with the gravitas it deserved. I wanted to see the place, old and mysterious and deep in the Bronx. So Gil and I set off.

The Bronx once had a swellegant reputation, home as it was to distinguished families and verdant farms. It was actually settled by a Swedish sea captain named Jonas Bronck. General Washington marched his troops through on their way to Westchester in October 1776, when no one knew how long the war was going to last.

The cemetery in question, now the center of Drake Park, was originally laid out by the Hunt family – the clan for which Hunts Point was named. The Hunts and the Leggetts ran the local show, along with a few other families and all of them were laid to rest there.

It had been raining for days. Gil and I had the park absolutely to ourselves. We saw an allee of trees running alongside the cemetary.

Weeds had overtaken the park – only three acres – in the middle of the busy commercial neighborhood. Above our heads, a mature black oak, circa 1848.

When the park was landscaped in 1915 the slave graveyard disappeared in the shuffle. Once, in some obscure text, its location was referred to as across a lane — was that the allee we saw? If so, the plot has no marking today but a wire fence.

Teacher Justin Czarka of PS 48 leads the effort to bring recognition to the site — which includes local historians, community organizations, museums, city agencies. To document the final resting place of the slaves of these prominent New York families.

I’m reminded of the fight to commemorate the African Burial Ground in Manhattan, after remains were discovered during the construction of a Federal office building in 1991. In 2003 I stood and watched the processional that led to the reinterrment of 419 sets of remains at the site where they had been discovered. Women and men in brightly colored African garb came through accompanying wood coffins built in Ghana and carved with adinkra symbols.

The ceremony was heady, the effort fraught with tensions, but I find this history in the Bronx unsettling in a more intimate way, the white graves groomed and protected and the black graves lost to time. The students found a photo in the city archives documenting the site at the turn of the century.

A 1913 brochure about the Bronx noted that the remains of colonial soldiers were interred in the Hunt graveyard, along with, nearby, slaves of earlier residents, and also “Bill,” the negro pilot of the wrecked British frigate Hussar.

The kids of PS 48 examined census data, early maps, coastal surveys, wills and early histories and found some surprising details about how whites and blacks lived in early New York. These wealthy coastal families owned quite a few slaves. John Leggett stipulated in his 1777 will that his son Cornelius would inherit “My Negro Man Tite and my Negro boy Ben” as well as “four Milk Cows.” His daughter Eleanor would receive his “Negro Wench Bett” and a silver cup. Laws were passed to prevent slaves’ sedition. They were forbidden to be in the streets an hour after sunset, by an ordinance passed in 1712.

Blacks and whites would not be buried together, at the Hunt and Legett cemetery, but within an interesting proximity.

The park itself was named not after Hunts or Legetts but after Joseph Rodman Drake, who grew up in the Hunt mansion, became a writer-physician and died of tuberculosis when he was 25, in 1820. His most famous poem, “The American Flag” spoke of freedom:

She tore the azure robe of night,

And set the stars of glory there.

She mingled with its gorgeous dyes

The milky baldric of the skies,

And striped its pure celestial white,

With streakings of the morning light…

I wonder what Drake would have made of the Hunts Point neighborhood now, chockablock with auto glass shops and cheap eateries. We left the antique mysteries of the graveyard and re-entered loud, mechanical contemporary New York. I love the signage along Hunts Point Boulevard, much of it a gaudy yellow and red and fancily hand lettered.

Mo Gridder’s is probably the only barbeque joint, at least in New York, with its dining lounge in an auto parts store.

As we approached an intersection a woman actually ran into the street, beckoning us loudly to come get our car repaired at her place. People stood in the gutters, waiting, sentries for their businesses.

Other, more faded signs spoke of years of dreams deferred.

The Hunts Point Market is alive and well, though it was sleeping when we visited – suppliers of meat, seafood and produce open all night long and shut down by day. The air when we passed the fish buildings had the scent of the sea.

It used to be that sex was for sale too, in abundance, at Hunts Point, but that’s changed. A vestige lives on in the unfortunately titled Mr. Wedge. The last of the Mohicans for adult entertainment in this part of the Bronx.

A strip joint you can visit while getting your car’s windshield replaced.

Randall Restaurant is a good place to hear Anthony Santos singing a melodious Como Te Voy a Dejar while chewing on garlicky deep fried porkchops or to just chat with a friend. About the liveliest cafe I’ve ever been in. Everyone is welcome, even turistos like us.

The pernil is supposed to be formidable but they were all sold out by the time we got there for lunch – for the rest of the clientele, lunch comes in the morning, after a shift at Hunts Point. The pineapple cake, though, and cafe con leche sustained us for our trip home in the rain.

Color everywhere.

Yes, indeed, the show that never ends. I’m glad we got there before anyone could scrub off the paint.

I like to think of the surprise — the shock — of our forefathers and mothers in the Bronx had they seen the mixing of colors and cultures we saw today. Yes, it can feel dangerous at times. Gertrude Stein once said, Considering how dangerous everything is, nothing is really very frightening.

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Filed under Cooking, History, Jean Zimmerman

May 23, 2013 · 1:47 pm

Enough to Feed an Army

An army marches on its stomach, said Napoleon, who knew a little something about food as well as armies, if his portrait is to be trusted.

I recently read a profile of a man seemingly born to fill that marching stomach, Derrick Davenport, a culinary specialist who has just triumphed over 17 other gastronomic overachievers to become the Armed Forces Chef of the Year. Parade reports that the competition has taken place for two decades at the Joint Culinary Center of Excellence in Fort Lee, Virginia. It’s judged cooking-show style, after contestants prepare four courses in four hours, taking in hand some challenging ingredients they didn’t count on ahead of time.

Quinoa and arugula salad. Roasted lamb loin in mushroom sauce with butternut squash puree. Edam cheese fritters? These are no ordinary MREs. But the military takes its food more seriously than ever now that troops’ palates have grown more sophisticated. Plus, says an army evacuation medic named Corrie Blackshear, “It’s more than nourishment. It’s spiritual nourishment.”

Nourishment to the tune of 5,250,000 gallons of milk, 448,000 pounds of Thanksgiving turkey and 214,000 gallons of ketchup a year. Fully 24,884,000 pounds of cooked chicken.

This is just part of the 2012 breakdown for all of the U.S. Armed Forces.

I began thinking about gargantuan military food quanities a long time ago when I served as the head of a soup kitchen in Manhattan. I had picked up a copy of the West Point Officers Wives’ Club Cookbook at the Naval Academy bookstore when I was at Annapolis doing interviews for Tailspin, Women at War in the Wake of Tailhook.

It was a spiral-bound community-style softcover of the type I still collect (I have over a hundred) and it had a subtitle I found enticing: Enough to Feed an Army.

I was new to the soup kitchen, which took place once a week at All Souls Unitarian Church on Lexington Avenue, and was known as Monday Night Hospitality. Wandering down to the kitchen one afternoon, just thinking to check out the volunteer options, I encountered a tall, blonde woman with her coat on. I told her I wanted to help. Fine, she said, you’ll cook tonight. I looked around – I was the only one there.

I had cooked for dinner parties before, but the customary crowd at Monday Night Hospitality reached 100 hungry mouths, sometimes more. Don’t worry, said the woman, we have meatballs. And she pointed to the walk-in pantry.

The soup kitchen had always served government-issued meatballs in tomato sauce. Mystery meat. Bad enough to smell, let alone put in your mouth.

That was the only time I served a meal that was not home cooked. I remember trucking in crates of kale from my favorite market Fairway up in Harlem at 134^th Street. The produce manager Jaime saw me coming and would break into a smile.

How much ground beef to make meat loaf for 100? How many eggs? I figured it out. I learned to fry chicken in industrial-size skillets. Not 24,884,000 pounds, but close.

I consulted the West Point Officers Wives’ Club spiral bound. It featured recipes from teachers and parents, officers and their wives (and some husbands). It also contained items like reminiscences of graduations past, and the cadet’s prayer. Finally, and here is where I got some guidance, the mess hall weighed in.

Forty-five hundred servings? Making sloppy joes for 100 was obviously something a person like me could do. I would bring my favorite 8-inch chef’s knife from home, wrapped in cardboard and duct tape. And my well-used apron. Sometimes a pan I wanted to employ. I would put those entrees on the table, whatever it took.

And it was worth it. Often, our dinner was the first time our guests had tasted a home-cooked meal in a long while.

I remember an elderly man who used to grab me by the arm and recall his late wife, the loving meals she used to fix him. A man mountain with a tiny rearview mirror attached to his glasses, dressed head to toe in fatigues, how he chowed down. And an Eastern European woman named Margo, and how she pampered my five-year-old daughter while stuffing buttered bread in her handbag.

I learned that for all the differences, these people were more like me than I had known. The aroma of many was more pungent than I could imagine. A shower at home was a foreign concept. But they ate with the same relish I did. As did the volunteers, who devoured our food and brought home leftovers. The perfect sous chef from the West Indies. The mother who occasionally brought her helpful daughter (at 19, she seemed so old!). The high schooler with the handsome face and a bottomless capacity for doing dishes over the capacious sink.

At the end of four years, I had a personal crisis that made it impossible for me to cook at the kitchen anymore. I had a book on deadline that I couldn’t write. Financial woes I couldn’t solve. And finally a meltdown from which I needed time to recover.

I approached a fellow volunteer, a writer named Alex who had spent many dinners at Monday Night Hospitality slinging meatloaf with me. Could he possibly take over as head of the kitchen? Immediately?

Surprised but gracious, he said yes.

He comes highly praised, does novelist Alexander Chee.

His debut novel The New York Times called “haunting,” and gifted, poetic and elegant are also words that have been offered on Alex’s behalf. His new book The Queen of the Night comes out in February of next year from Houghton Mifflin Harcourt – in it, Alex tells the story of an opera singer in 1882 Paris and a secret past she had sought to keep hidden.

All this time later, the soup kitchen behind me, I realize something important. I wasn’t the only one who could do this thing of feeding folks with dignity. I was just a writer, cooking for an army of 100 people with no place else to go. The “spiritual nourishment” was mine as much as theirs.

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Filed under Cooking, Fiction, History, Home, Jean Zimmerman, Publishing

May 21, 2013 · 8:34 pm

Meatpacking Amble

We started and ended our Manhattan amble in the Meatpacking District, that venerable neighborhood from around 14^th down to Gansevoort Street that has been totally gentrified in recent years. This is a place that in 1900 had 250 slaughterhouses and packing plants lining its streets. The paving stones under the butchers’ awnings used to actually lie slick with lard and blood when I first came to New York in the late ’70s. Now Diane von Furstenberg has a building of refurbished brick with lavender windows and a penthouse that looks like a geodesic glass bubble on top, and there are eateries like Bubby’s opening that pride themselves on their farm-to-table cuisine.

The sign announcing the imminent arrival of the joint puts across it’s down home, wry message: Defending the American Table (also, we steal recipes from grandmas.)

With illustrations around the side that already seem faded as a pair of farmer’s Levi’s.

It reminded me of a sign we saw up in also gentrifying Morningside Heights recently, on Broadway near 125th Street.

There was a man on scaffolding outside and we weren’t sure whether he was taking down an old sign or putting up a new one with an exquisitely vintage look. The sign down below left us equally confused.

Maybe you can figure it out.

Anyway, on from the Meatpacking District to see a movie on Houston Street, at the northern lip of Soho. “What Maisie Knew” is based on a novella written by Henry James in 1897 about a classic dysfunctional family. Sad, sad, film.

It features Julianne Moore as a self-absorbed rock vocalist married to a self-absorbed art dealer played by Steve Koogan. At the heart of the story is their seven-year-old daughter, Maisie, who is being torn apart by the breakup of her parents’ marriage. The two adults literally abandon her places – the story takes place in contemporary Manhattan — when they tire of her. I wondered what James would have made of the profane adaptation.

The novelist was a theater aficionado and aspiring playwright. Couldn’t he be satisfied with being the most brilliant prose stylist of his day? He never got the reception on the boards that he so very much wanted. Movies might really have rocked his world. We think of him as fusty now, but Edith Wharton writes in her memoir A Backward Glance about how much James loved to “motor.” Yes, driving in the new, perpetually breaking-down automobiles, feeling the wind in his pate, was just about his favorite thing.

Making our way north, we grabbed a schnitzel and a wurst at a little German joint. En route, we passed the phenomenon that has been around longer than anything else I know in New York: the basketball game at West 4^th Street and Sixth Avenue, also known as the Cage.

Anybody can play and there are fierce tournaments. The supports for the baskets are actually padded with duct tape to mitigate injury to players who stuff.

Under the High Line, where we had earlier found parking (who said it’s tough to get along in New York? Come with me, I have the best parking karma in the city) night had fallen.

A park so beautiful that even Manhattanites are impressed, the High Line was once quite different. An old elevated freight line for meat packers, built under the aegis of Robert Moses, it ran through the buildings of the district, raised up above the streets underneath. The rail bed had long since fallen on hard times when I first saw it decades ago. It was basically a long, winding, dispiriting field of syringes, condoms and weeds. Some brilliant dreamers fought to bring it back to life as a park planted throughout with native plants, meticulously cared for, ingeniously designed. The first section of the park opened in 2009. Now people throng to it day and night, both to walk and to lounge on the massive wooden chaise lounges found along its length.

Gil climbed the stairs and waved down from the dark trees above. I was content looking up past the old, weathered, still-extant butcher’s awning at the winking moon.

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Filed under Cooking, Fashion, Fiction, Film, History, Jean Zimmerman, Nature, Writers

May 20, 2013 · 2:16 pm

A College Vesuvius

What would be the college student’s Pompeii?

I like an Australian photographer who runs a very nice blog out of Melbourne, focusing on landscapes and historic architecture. Leanne Cole finds the magic in places. Sometimes she writes about her inspirations, as in a post today about the photos of Pompeii she saw that hit her hard when she was around ten.

“Buildings that are falling apart and ravaged by time are incredibly appealing,” she writes in her bio. I’d agree with her. So are the images of people from that ancient city, their shapes formed in ash that was then filled with plaster so that we can miraculously see them as they were at the instant the lava came down.

I am thinking about what life would look like in a split second of time because I have a college student home with her bundles and boxes, which we are sorting through to see what goes into storage for the summer. Looking at her things (and things, and more things) as a historian, I’m thinking about about this moment, her belongings, and what they would depict unearthed from their ash and pumice 2,000 years from now.

Where would they find you, who would you be curled around, 2,000 years hence? Possibly Maud and Oliver would be together as a pair. (I know, grisly. Bear with me.)

Would feathers be preserved? For a college student, a duvet is a home, a world. “It makes an uncomfortable dorm bed comfortable,” says Maud. Comfort, as important now as to the Pompeiins.

“You’re not going to get anything interesting out of this,” Maud informs me as I ask her to explain her world of things, as any circumspect college student would say. She brought home her plain old ottoman, the one that’s hollow, “useful for keeping my socks or other secret things,” she says.

Were the ancient Romans sentimental? Would you find a picture of a girl’s parents the day before their wedding, or a vintage picture of her pretty grandmother?

A fuzzy doodad from her boyfriend?

She preserves the soul of a friend who died, in a smooth stone she has kept since she was 14.

History in general counts for a lot.

“Got it at the Brooklyn Flea Market,” she says. “Jimi, a cultural icon who remains a cultural icon 50 years later.”

I know the Romans were consumed with their physical appearance.

As are we all.

Bracelet from a fond teenage boy, made from a bike chain, and pendant of dichroic glass, a material made for the aerospace industry with multiple micro-layes of metals or oxides. In 4,000 when we are discovered under the ash, probably everything will be made of dichroic glass.

The Romans were literate.

“These are my favorites,” says Maud: “The Dead, by James Joyce, Blake’s Marriage of Heaven and Hell, and A Room of One’s Own.” I didn’t know she read Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own, a favorite of mine, but I’m so glad she did.

Minerva’s wisdom ruled, then and now.

So did Bacchus. Maud got an advanced degree from the Columbia School of Mixology, and can make you a Manhattan whenever you please.

Tea calms the storms that come with being 21.

Everyone had their personal totem back in Roman times. Maud’s is the elephant. It will surely protect her, come what may.

It’s some hard traveling being a college woman in those final sleepless nights of the term and finally, in summer, you get to take off your boots and rest your dogs.

Let the lava flow as it will.

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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 18, 2013 · 11:55 am

Lettuce F*****g Entertain You

Thug politely pledged to test out my biscuit recipe when I contacted him/her/them, that is as soon as the dust settled. (His actual words: I love biscuits and will try your shit out.) Thug Kitchen has after all experienced a viral explosion since the novel cooking site launched in October. Critics call it profane, and profane blended with strawberries and avocados seems to produce a bit of gastric discomfort. Is this some kind of trick? Are we being had?

I call the combination real.

What is it with men and cooking? Top chefs are almost uniformly male. Backyard barbeque-meisters, natch. Boys learn from their fathers.

But those who are not chefs of reality TV or summer parties, the men who man the stove day in, day out, making family meals, making solitary meals, prepping the onions and boiling the rice – still sadly a minority. Even Brooklyn foodies cook less than their wives.

Thug cooks for dogs. Sweet potato jerky treats that Oliver would relish.

The press will tell you different, that hordes of men are cooking now. After all, the men of the fourth estate are different, and they write what they know. Men have of course increased their kitchen activity since, say, the 50s and 60s, since women gave them a shove with the spatula and said, Do it. Make me proud in here. A wee bit. (And truth be told, younger men are stepping up. A 25-year study of Gen Xers found that men were making two-thirds of the meals married women were. Not too shabby.)

Some men today deliver.

Gil, for example, makes a mean green chili. Okay, that’s a typical boy preserve. He can also deliver a whole wheat pizza topped by homemade tomato sauce, fresh mozzarella, baby spinach, bacon and olives. With aplomb. Delicious, I had three slices yesterday.

Both my brothers have achieved local fame over the years for their culinary expertise. I still remember the roast goose Andy put on the Christmas table a couple of years back, crisp and done to perfection, but he also puts his kindergartener’s dinner on family table every day. Peter assembles a crazy raw kale salad. Don’t know where they got the gene, as the sum total of our father’s skill is a perfect hard-cooked egg.

Thug Kitchen unites macho and grilled-romaine-with-a-touch-of-seasalt as easily as a stroll in some vegan park. Saveur called it the number one food blog around.

“ANYBODY CAN GRILL A FUCKING BURGER OR HOTDOG. Elevate your grilling game with something that simpleminded motherfuckers wouldn’t even consider. Grilling veggies is some classy shit and it only takes a few minutes. I am not talking about some played out portabella burger that tastes like a dirty sponge. Eggplant, artichokes, okra, lettuce: all that shit can be thrown on the grill and are in peak form during the spring and summer. People are guaranteed to come correct next time you invite them over. Raise the fucking bar and grill to impress.”

It doesn’t need to be Oscar Mayer any more.

Thug actually is vegan, if you scroll down the site to take a better look, past the blast of biting admonitory locution. No fathers in man-aprons grilling steaks here. Instead, dishes a lady would love: lavender lemonade: “Calm Your Bitch Ass down like a Boss-Drink Some Fucking Flowers” runs the heading, and the recipe advises, “This is some good shit to make when you are feeling bougie as fuck.” Roasted strawberry and coconut salad inspires this heading: “Eat a Goddamn Salad. Fuck it-Eat Ten Then Brag about it.” But TK told the NY Daily News, “You don’t have to be fancy to give a f— about what you eat.”

Thug Kitchen loves moms.

Thug appears to be a collective. I got a note framed in the royal we. (They’re going out with a book, as soon as they get a proposal together. A book we ladies can share with the gentlemen in our lives.) If so, they must be having a blast, sucking down their strawberry-grapefruit margaritas and talking trash.

Can I come out to L.A. for dinner? I clean up nice and I bet you do too.

Grapefruit Guacamole – recipe courtesy of Thug Kitchen

GRAPEFRUIT GUACAMOLE

5 ripe avocados

2 medium grapefruits or 1 big son of a bitch

¼ cup chopped cilantro

¼ cup chopped red onion

juice of 1 lime (about 2 tablespoons)

¼ teaspoon salt

Take the pit out of the avocados and scoop out all the green flesh into a large bowl. Mash it up with fork. I like my guacamole chunky but do what you gotta do. Cut the grapefruit up into segments like you would cut an orange. Remove the peel and cut the segments into pieces about the size of a nickel. Put all the grapefruit into the bowl with the avocado. Add the cilantro, red onion, lime juice, and salt and mix it all up. Taste it and add more shit until you like it. Serve immediately or chill it for a bit. I’m not gonna tell you how to eat guacamole, just follow your fucking heart.

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Filed under Cooking, Dogs, Home, Jean Zimmerman, Publishing, Writers, Writing

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 15, 2013 · 6:28 pm

Eagles Nesting 24/7

You may have a lot you think you have to do. Laundry. Work after hours. Dinner dishes. Pushing a cart down the fluorescent aisles of Shop Rite.

And there are a lot of crucial things to think about these days, from Benghazi to preventive breast removal. You have money concerns, I have money concerns. Someone is in the hospital. Someone else is terribly sad.

There is only one thing for it. Tune in to nesting bald eagles, a majestic pair with their big, wobbly grey babies, eaglets to be precise. Their names: Peace and Harmony. The webcam captures the birds in gorgeous detail.

This family has made its perch 75 feet in the air in a cottonwood tree in central Minnesota, at the edge of a river, and is available for viewing 24/7, any time you’d like to leave your real life behind.

One parent carries a turkey wing back to the mattress-sized nest. The other picks it apart, shoves bits into the chicks’ eager beaks. The mature birds are dashing to look at, as clean as if they bathed with soap and water every day of the week. You know that when they leave they’ll be riding the thermals, jumping on one for altitude then surfing to another, searching ceaselessly for choice prey to bring back to the nest.

The Minnesota chicks are almost a month old now, their primary feathers coming in.

You never know what you’ll get. Sometimes those babies just sleep the sleep of the dead, a couple of heavy-breathing feather balls, and you wonder why you’re paying attention. Then, suddenly, one raises its head, holding itself upright, improbably, the way a bean seedling seems to stretch three inches taller after a rain.

And after watching for minutes… hours… days… you suddenly feel better.

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Filed under Jean Zimmerman, Nature, Photography

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.

4 Comments

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

May 13, 2013 · 4:25 pm

Suzanne Takes You Down to Her Place by the River

Allow me to introduce a photographer whose work needs to be better known.

Suzanne Levine. For decades she has gone nowhere without a camera in her hand.

She happens to be family to me, my sister-in-law, and lives with her husband and son in Hastings-on-Hudson, New York, where I grew up and lived for years.

People in-the-know know that she is one of the most talented photographers around.

Thank goodness, the explosion of social media means for one thing that fantastic photographers don’t have to labor in obscurity. Much less likely, the possibility of overlooking a Vivien Maier, the recently discovered shutterbug who worked for years in the 1950s as a nanny while walking the streets with her Rollieflex, photographing everyone from well-dressed shoppers to street bums, producing gorgeous images that no body ever saw.

Street photography isn’t Suzanne Levine’s chosen discipline – though she is great with the human form.

More her bent is landscape, and particularly, I think, articulating a vision of the Hudson River.

Her living room window overlooks the tracks headed south along the shore and the Palisades beyond, so it’s got to be a lot on her mind.

Her usual interpretations of the Palisades are fluid and soulful, soft yet strong.

Rothko-esque.

Suzanne is sensitive to the venerable Palisades-depicting tradition in Hastings, beginning with Jasper Cropsey, who painted this canvas in 1887.

“It’s hard to do it in a meaningful way,” she says. “Particularly with photography, a landscape may be technically skillful, but empty. The detail and the majesty can be overbearing; too much of a hard sell. When I see an image like that I think, that’s not how you make a picture of the Palisades.”

You can see a series of Suzanne’s Palisades images here.

She is also an intuitive mom-photographer, with a knack for “getting” what’s going on with her son. Jasper’s now six, a gabby, literate, lego obsessed energy bundle, and she captures the bright light of his personality.

One recent body of work Suzanne called postcards.

Works that threw two images together, shook em up, poured em out as the perfect visual cocktail. She started to make them as portraits of Facebook friends, both those she knew personally and those she had met on line. “Are you a psychic?” asked a friend she hadn’t seen since high school.

She must have done a hundred of these.

Each one more interesting than the next.

Suzanne has recently begun using an Olympus OM-D E-M5, a Micro Four Thirds interchangable lens camera, a step-up from the compact digital cameras she’d been using the past few years. Once in a while she still employs a one-megapixel camera, when she wants to go lo-fi. She still keeps a 35mm Nikon F and a Rolleiflex TLR, as well as a collection of vintage cameras. Her favorite: a Newman & Guardia view camera, which was the camera of choice for polar explorers because of its innovative spring-powered pneumatic shutter.

You can see more of these photos. You can share work with Suzanne or to talk about getting a print made. Leave a comment for me here and I’ll make sure she gets your information.

Just don’t distract her too much from the sweet, moody, serene, soulful river that runs through her world.

16 Comments

Filed under Art, Home, Jean Zimmerman, Nature, Photography

May 11, 2013 · 2:02 pm

About To

Cloudy and damp, good planting weather. And just the right climate for the annual plant sale at Teatown, the nature preserve down the road from the Cabin.

Teatown has 875 miles of trails, a large lake, hemlock forests and laurel groves, a wildflower island and, dear to my heart, a collection of wounded raptors, lost souls that have here been given a safe haven and a purpose: educating visitors about how wonderful they are.

I like the owls, some of them one blinded in one eye, most paired in their environments in a perfect, companionable matched set.

I collected my little starts at the herb table, dill and chamomile. Thought I’d try some eucalyptus. Wished I had to space for the native plants for sale all around.

Then I noticed a stalky bearded iris obviously about to burst.

I realize that they more I go along, the more I like things that are about to…

Like the iris. You can just see a fringe of furled purple petal above the green.

Like a novel about to be published.

Rolls about to come out of the oven.

A cardinal about to skitter up into the air.

Oliver about to enter his snoring slumberland.

Water about to boil – test it for salt with one hardy finger.

About to speak at an engagement, that shivery feeling in your stomach.

About to buy something exquisite, but expensive. Then deciding not to.

About to start to knit, a chunky skein and needles in hand.

My 21-year-old Maud about to have the most glorious adventure, working in a school for Teach For America, living in New York City, the whole shebang laid out ahead of her.

Rolls about to come out of the oven.

Water about to boil.

The iris about to pop.

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Filed under Dogs, Home, Jean Zimmerman, Knitting, Nature, Writing

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 9, 2013 · 5:59 pm

Parsing the Copyedit

My copyeditor got the manuscript for Savage Girl back to me and I’ve been hustling to get it done by the deadline. Did you know that it’s typical for authors to be given two weeks to get a copyedited manuscript back to the publisher? Did you know that copyeditors go way beyond the Chicago Manual of Style, making themselves experts on every subject your book concerns. When copyeditors do their job, the pages are covered with pencil — at least they used to be. Now everyone uses the track changes function on Word, so editors do their work on the computer and so do you.

Yes, it is nerdy, and yes, as an author you must do it.

Fortunately, there are great copyeditors who make the job easy, using every tool at their disposal. Often they just add or subtract commas, other times they throw queries at you and the judgment is your call. By the way, that previous sentence features a comma splice, which means two standalone phrases on either side of a comma, and my current copyeditor would not let it occur on her watch. But this is a copyeditor-free zone. So sue me.

I like my copyeditor a lot. Her name is Maureen. She left me a note attached (electronically) to my manuscript telling me that she hoped the rest of the world would love Savage Girl as much as she did. Isn’t that grand? Twice over, that she thought it, and that she went out of her way to tell me. It’s a weird intimacy you have, writer and copyeditor joined for a brief but intense period of time over this thing that you care about so much, before virtually anyone else has seen it.

This afternoon I’ve been addressing concerns such as whether there would actually be a gibbous moon in May of 1776, and the proper Latin translation for “the door has a floor,” a saying in the family portrayed in Savage Girl, the Delegates. Maureen went to great lengths to nail the correct form of the expression, and even consulted with a friend who was a Latin scholar at Columbia University to get it right.

She also wanted to determine precisely when the word was first coined for a tigon, the African cat that has a tiger for a father and a lioness for a mother.

As opposed to the ligon, for which the reverse parentage is true.

Something that makes the copyedit go better is if you bake at the same time. Well, most things go better if you bake simultaneously. Which I will definitely do next time around, perhaps creating some rice crispy treats in the shape of my favorite punctuation mark.

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Filed under Fiction, Jean Zimmerman, Publishing, Savage Girl, 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.

4 Comments

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.