Hooky Beach

It's all over

2009-06-06T23:22:00.000-05:00

...here

Feral carts 2

2009-05-08T05:18:00.029-05:00

Fascinated by traffic, feral carts have been observed loitering at bus stops for days at a time.

Some carts have been kidnapped and pressed into a life of servitude.

Dereliction, a junk food diet, and intoxication are all too common among the feral cart population.

Separation from their former community and feelings of isolation lead shame-based ferals to withdraw.

Some adjust to feral life with exuberance. Having lost their taste for supermarket fare, many have been seen stalking small game.

After having been returned to their former stores, some ferals self-ostracize.

Bonding among feral carts can be intense. Many remain by their fallen until they are rounded up by supermarket recovery teams.

Siesta Key

2009-02-03T10:06:00.009-05:00

Chilled loops spiral through dappled air.
Out there, beyond the shops, the trees,
the surf's ceaseless rush keeps ragged time.
In the pool dry posture thaws into atavistic coils.

The customary channels have dried up. We transfer want
routed through firewalls and Berne.
You called me by a moody name.
In the dunes memory declines to a sense of heat.

"They're in-house," he said, the parsley fries. Menu, magazine.
A muted blare keeps pace, assuming a ground state of desire.
In the cove the anhingas listen only
to the fatalistic saga of the leaves.

Out riding

2008-12-06T20:20:00.004-05:00

Be a blessing.

Around here 2

2008-11-19T11:08:00.005-05:00

I traded in my Mustang for a Ranger. The pony was pushing 10 and starting to manifest intimations of mortality. There were just a few Rangers for sale at the dealer, I was surprised to find. Seems the little 4-cylinder classic is moving, albeit slower than in years past, so I got a pretty good deal. There were rows and rows of F150s and their bigger siblings. My first fuel-efficiency calibration on the new truck revealed an mpg score of 22 in mixed driving. About the same or a little better than the Mustang. The scooter gets close to 100.

Inspired by one of Uncle Zoloft's comments, I sprang for the pickup as a companion for Firefly, my main wheels now, which I can load on the Ranger, as a means of extending the scooter's range... and other truckin' tasks. Then it's on to some nearby town for a little leisurely and aimless exploring. I wouldn't be surprised if this agreeable pair of internal combustion companions were my last.

I generally have only a secondary interest, on these outings, in a place's claims to fame... its Opera House or Big Bridge. What I like most is cruising around the neighborhoods, the back streets, local parks and beaches, habituations of commerce, soaking up everyday life, taking in novel variations of the mundane. Living near affluence makes for a nice ride, the endless tree lined streets and waterfront enclaves. At first it posed a challenge to me as a photographer. What can one say about the pleasant? Eventually I got over it. They have their moments, really, these gulf coast suburbs, no less ravishing than a canyon's, as quirky as a cat's.

Along the way, I'll stop at a fast-food place for a burger and coke, a pizza stand for a slice and a beer... quietly reveling in the joy of the readily available. It's an off-the-shelf life for me. On these treks the spirit, and my monkish temperament, join to appreciate, and sometimes bless, the world they see. I don't linger, indulge entanglement. Though in practice the meaning of those terms for me is more intuitive than not. You play it by ear, by heart, play it as it lays...

slide show here

Sandcastles 2008

2008-11-16T12:01:00.016-05:00

I stopped by the Fort Myers Beach 22nd annual sand sculpting competition last Monday, the day after the event, and after everyone had gone home. I didn't do the big shoot I did last year, but a few of the entries caught my eye. A classic iteration of the theme was nicely rendered in the sculpture above.

A modernist spiral... reminiscent of the deco mood that swept Florida in the 1920s and is still prominent in places like Miami.

A topical piece on the recent federal bailout of the credit sector... a gruesome touch was achieved with the wire 'hairs' sticking out of the banker's shoulders and bald head. I deeply suspect that crusty old villains all have at least one extra-long errant hair growing out of a shoulder.

First place went to Paris Vacation by Thomas Koet. Wonderfully articulated, the punchy piece reminds me of a retro travel poster or a pop-up.

Fort Myers sand is said to be exceptionally suited to sculpting - fine textured, dense, "like buttah." It's amazing what some of these international masters can coax from the sand with just a few tools, skill, and a lot of imagination.

Mosquito control

2008-11-13T07:43:00.011-05:00

Almost a decade ago, I worked for one of the beach newspapers. The pub was between cartoonists, so I volunteered to come up with a few while the paper sought applications for the gig. My sense of humor didn't always go over that well. Here's one I called 'mosquito control.'

What friends are for

2008-11-10T09:03:00.013-05:00

The boy got spooked... after scaling a limb too far. He was quickly helped to safety by his friends. No questions asked.

That was the night that was

2008-11-06T20:03:00.014-05:00

I watched the returns come in on election night with campaign volunteers, first at Paula's house, with my canvassing partner Cathy. Paula was nervous and depressed, after I'd told her earlier in the day about Rachel Maddow's pessimism. She was tired, having canvassed the neighborhoods every day for weeks. By nightfall there was something about the finality of the polls closing in Florida that suddenly lifted my spirits. I had the strongest feeling, that I couldn't explain, that Obama had bagged the elephant. Exhausted, we had collectively skipped a final assignment to "keep voters in line" at one of the precincts, but speculated, punch-drunk, from our couches in front of the TV about how that was expected to be accomplished. Money and candy were discussed. I suggested tasers.

After Pennsylvania went blue, I left Paula and Cathy, in considerably better spirits, and headed for a local sports bar to meet up with my friend Stu. We go way back. Stu and I had goaded each other into volunteering, but it was really Stu who got the ball rolling. Cathy was worried that the scene at the bar might turn into a brawl. But it turned out that the local democratic club had booked the second floor, so it was an Obamalama party. I joined Stu and his wife and son at a booth which, like all the other booths, had its own flat-screen TV. Stu and Nancy were drinking tequila, I ordered a beer.

It was wildly fun to flame the republicans, loudly and in public, and root for Barack as each new flip, Florida, Ohio, Indiana, splashed across the big screens and people cheered and hugged. The sense of moment was palpable, and seemed to concentrate and heighten everything. Then suddenly the dominoes were falling all over the map, including those big blue ones right up the west coast. The rest, as they say, was history.

Today I went for a "long long ride on my motorbike." I was ready.

A sweet park on a small basin where blue crab and yellow-fin can be netted and hooked. There's a charcoal grill, as in most parks. I've had lunch here with visiting family. Or I'll drop in with a coffee and a New Yorker, or nothing at all, and just watch the water for a while.

Yes we did

2008-11-05T00:00:00.008-05:00

I don't underestimate for a moment the challenge of the road ahead. But for tonight and tomorrow...

Around here 1

2008-11-02T10:04:00.002-05:00

Life goes on, bra. Time to take a break, look around. God is in the details. And the Buddha, I've been told, is just as happy in the transmission of my motor scooter as he is in the sea and sky, the sun in your eyes, and the smile that gives my soul wings.

slide show here

Give change a chance

2008-10-28T15:17:00.013-05:00

In the last days now before the election, the race in Florida is tightening as predicted. We've been seeing more Obama lawn signs - those, that is, that have escaped the epidemic of sign theft. One couple that we talked to on Saturday had lost their Obama sign to theives the night before. They were livid, of course, and we were all left to wonder about the motive behind it: by stealing the signs, the vandals think... what? That they're making the candidate himself disappear?

The evangelical-controlled republican party has been rife with superstition for some time now. Ballot initiative 2 in Florida for instance, would not only constitutionally prohibit same-sex marriage, but also "the substantial equivalent thereof..." No government-recognized domestic partnerships. This over-kill initiative is so mean-spirited that none other than Jeb Bush lambasted it when its petition fell short four years ago. The goal of this measure, it seems, apart from the usual ploy of baiting conservatives into the voting booth, is to deter divine displeasure, and somehow save heterosexual marriage. The 50% divorce rate, like the 9/11 attack, can be traced directly to the nation's growing acceptance of homosexuality, you see. But as one unmarried straight couple we met, who had voted against the measure, pointed out, it puts them and their family in jeopardy too. One sign I saw in Naples said "Vote No on 2. Save our families." But in the fundamentalist-imagined universe, health care benefits, pensions, civil rights in general, are extended only to those who are permitted to submit to the proper state-sanctioned religious ritual.

One crusty duplex we visited turned out to be a "bad address." The former tenant had moved out. The old lady who greeted us at the door, surely a woman with little more than social security to sustain her, upon seeing our Obama buttons snapped "Get off my property!" Superstition, apparently, or "the substantial equivalent thereof" trumps everything in the minds of some... including their own self-interest. Thomas Frank's "What's The Matter With Kansas?", though already a little dated, is a good primer on the phenomenon.

The quirkiest encounter was toward the end of the day on Saturday. One of our last calls was on somebody named "Ono." Imagine our surprise when we pulled up to the house and there, stretched between two trees, was a huge home-made Obama sign saying "Give Peace A Chance." The guy who answered the door, who turned out to be a volunteer, had made the sign. But he wasn't Ms. Ono. He didn't know Ms. Ono. Turns out she was at another address that we'd already logged as "moved."

The thing that surprised me the most on these treks into the neighborhoods I thought I knew, were the number of contacts on our list that were "bad addresses." Apartments, condos, and houses which, once approached, turned out to be empty, abandoned, foreclosed. Houses I thought were neighbors. And that, as I look around the city, is the legacy of the last eight years made sadly tangible. Empty houses, uprooted families, properties gone to weed. From modest apartments to solemn McMansions. Not even a dog to welcome or warn. Nobody. Nothing.

In normal times, I'd favor a somewhat divided government but not this year. The old guard has to go. I'd like to see Obama and Biden, should they win the White House, get the support in congress they need to take the country in a new direction. Give change a chance.

Boo who

2008-10-17T16:40:00.059-05:00

I've been busy canvasing for the campaign. It's been a good, if exhausting, experience. I'm glad I finally connected with the local democratic organization.

Amid neighborhoods sprouting Halloween lights and apparitions, the door-to-door has been a hoot. At this hour the mood of the McCain camp is generally withdrawn and grimly hunkered-down. The Obamans are hopeful and quietly exultant. What remains of the undecideds seem to have qualms they can't quite articulate.

The Halloween demographic is varied too, and oddly reflects its human counterpart...

Joe Biden in Fort Myers

2008-10-09T06:55:00.037-05:00

As some of you know, I volunteer for the local Obama campaign. Last night vice presidential nominee Senator Joe Biden came to Republican stronghold Fort Myers for a standing room only rally at Alico Arena on the FGCU campus. I've always liked senator Biden... bright, articulate, a really decent guy with a refreshing and comprehensive grasp of the issues. "Depth" was the word that kept coming up to describe Biden's performance in the v.p. debate.

The crowd at the rally was diverse. Seniors, boomers, families... but young folks and students seemed to be the dominant presence.

In a striking contrast to republican v.p. hopeful Sarah Palin's marching band/cheerleader-laden show at Germain Arena on Monday, the democratic candidate's appearance at the university was an issue-driven, no-frills, informative event, and evoked enthusiasm with ideas rather than with the hype and smears that have come to characterize the republican candidates' campaigns in the final weeks of the race.

Florida Senator Bill Nelson warmed up the crowd...

Senator Biden takes the stage to a rapturous standing o.

Biden is always at ease, though passionate, a seasoned statesman. You get the feeling that he can't be thrown off balance... he speaks from his heart and mind. They're connected. He has a good voice. The senator's talk was characteristically issue-oriented and addressed the economic crisis, health care, education, and foreign policy, among other things. Citing McCain's benefit-taxing healthcare plan, Biden repeated his debate zinger that McCain's plan is "the ultimate bridge to nowhere." Somewhere in the crowd an infant yelped. "I don't blame that baby for crying," Biden quipped.

Citing presidential candidate John McCain's much-vaunted image as a maverick, Biden pointed out McCain's record of unflagging support for the Bush administration. "That's not a maverick, that's a sidekick."

In a swipe at a McCain strategist's recent statement that if the campaigns "keep talking about the economy, we lose", Biden said that the American people, and the Obama campaign, are not about to "turn the page" on the crisis, as the McCain camp had hoped, until they elect a leader who can "write an end to the story" that we can live with.

Noting the recent downturn in tone coming from the McCain camp, Biden said that the republican candidate was trying to "take the low road to the highest office in America, and we can't let that happen."

A standing ovation erupted when Biden talked about ending the misbegotten war in Iraq and bringing the troops home.

Recent polls indicate that swing-state Florida has edged into the Obama column.

Suburbiana 3

2008-10-04T08:49:00.008-05:00

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Untitled 2

2008-09-29T20:11:00.011-05:00

the last of the lobsters
have fewer aspirations
asleep until the day after
my ultramarine dream
yoga is avoided on principle

the voluptuous tourists
coughing awake
an intangible dawn

ashes
Pepsi
all fall down

Two shoe

2008-09-27T07:22:00.009-05:00

This little sonata of red white and black reminds me of the colors in a checkers game. I've noticed that close friends, especially the ladies, often somehow manage to color-coordinate.

Leapin' lizard 2

2008-09-24T20:51:00.010-05:00

Liz tagged along to the post office yesterday. On the way back, she jumped off at Brew Babies, which reopens for the season next week. Maybe she's doing some pre-season reconnaissance.

Swing times

2008-09-23T09:07:00.020-05:00

This home made little red swing has seen better days, but perhaps it's happy to be retired. I came across it on my ride. Its delicate construction suggests that it was made for a small child. But rather than being used up and broken, it seems to have been simply abandoned instead.

My favorite swing as a kid was a rope that someone had hung from a massive old tree on the bank of a creek in the woods. "The Rope" as it was know by the neighborhood kids was a favorite hang out, no pun intended, a touchstone of local kid society. Trysts took place there, and fights, first cigarettes were smoked, first kisses stolen or given, and many a tale was told in the dappled shade around its totemic knots. And many a thrill-ride, launched from the bank, ended in the creek.

I came across this variation of the theme a few years ago on one of the canals in an undeveloped precinct of the city. The trunk of the gracious old tree from which it hung was ribbed, far up into its leafy depths, with a stairway of nailed-on boards. I stumbled across the place again a while back, I don't know how I found it. The path was weedy and the clearing obscured. The rope was gone. The stairs were gone. Only a few broken remnants of the little dock remained. And the tree... silent now, reclaimed, forgotten.

Four Mile Cove

2008-09-19T11:49:00.014-05:00

click image to biggen

Eco Preserve, an old favorite on the Caloosahatchee River, is where I go to unwind and taste the four flavors of meditation: sweet, sour, salty, and bitter. The boardwalk threads through a 365 acre state wetland preserve. There's a bit of wildlife, but what I like is its densely detailed, yet unchanging
walking-in-space walk. It's a good foil for rambling along in one's thoughts.

A leaf pierced by a reed when it fell to earth, or was driven by a fateful gust... so too our hearts, driven and felled.

Click image to biggen

Floating pavilions in the cove await kayak and canoe

Flowers drift in the wake of a memorial. "There are heroes in the seaweed, there are children in the morning; they're leaning out for love, and they will lean that way forever, while Suzanne holds the mirror..."

Firefly

2008-09-10T07:37:00.026-05:00

I was hanging out with my friend Ted not long ago and he asked if I still rode my motorcycle. I told him I did. He mentioned that his son was looking for a bike to get around the city with. I told him to have Michael call me. Two days later, Dragonfly was hitched to a flatbed trailer, and I was waving goodbye.

A couple of days after that, I was driving home in a rented van with a spanking new Honda Ruckus. I named my little bad boy Firefly.

I found the matching shades at Walgreen. My new torque wrench at Sears. My adolescence right where I left it. I may be a tad scarce around the virtual beach for a while. :o)

Passerine

2008-09-05T07:24:00.016-05:00

I hadn’t seen my old friend Martin in several years, not since his lover Fred died of a heart attack, at thirty-nine, in the parking lot of Ford’s shopping center in Northville. I had flown in on that cold March day, two months after Fred’s death, to celebrate with Martin, and the remnants of our old tribe, Martin’s spare and lovely memorial to our dead friend. There was snow on the ground. The dozen spring iris, sapphire blue, which I had sent ahead, Martin had stuck in the snow on the blank open lawn under the massive old willow, where we had gathered to reminisce and pray. Later, after the last of the guests had waved and retreated behind smoothly rising car windows, Martin and I were to enjoy a few days of indolence in rooms heated with fragrantly burning cherry behind March-frosted glass.

A country gentleman, whose lifestyle the momentum of heritage, and a slowly dwindling family portfolio, managed to barely sustain, Martin wove the deeply frayed edges of his circumstances, on the loom of almost spooky good taste, into gracious living.

After the Vietnam war he had stayed abroad, haunting Asian capitals for a decade. He taught English at university in Laos, studied ikegami in Japan, and brought treasures home to the “farm” in Pennsylvania. His grasp of shibui, the guiding principle of Japanese aesthetics, was firmer than that of most natives. He had a knack for transforming the most humble space into an elegant environment by the placement of an object or two, frequently an object which itself had been found at a junkyard or yard sale. This talent had to do with Martin’s frame of mind, and his ability to make that outlook fill the room—and stick. He projected an aesthetic benevolence into the space around him. And there was more than a little fairy dust involved in it all. You either tuned in or you didn’t.

“The farm,” hadn’t been a working farm in decades, although there had always been livestock around. Pets, really. In the years that I knew Martin, the animal life consisted of a number of dogs and cats, a couple of sheep, a few chickens, a burrow, and a fair collection of ornamental fowl—Martin’s passion.

Now Fred had been gone for six years. It was a brisk and multicolored afternoon in October. We were sitting in faded butterfly chairs on the “silo base” off the barn, the circular concrete floor of a silo long vanished, now a patio. A pair of guinea fowl, in their hounds tooth tweeds, were pecking amongst the feverfew.

“There’s a golden pheasant at the Staten Island Zoo,” I was saying. “I thought peacocks were something. . . macaws. But this bird tops them all. The kind of creature I never expected to encounter outside a fairy tale.”

“Gaudy as hell,” said Martin. “Lady Amherst’s pheasant is much prettier, I think.” An unmusical tinkle, the beaten-copper shards of a mobile hanging from a cedar branch nearby and nudged by a breeze, came and went like windblown leaves.

“Lady Amherst’s?”

“We’ll delve into Pringle’s Pheasant Guide after dinner. You’ll be mesmerized. Of course, your universal red rooster is a pheasant. Gallus gallus. Descended from the jungle fowl of Burma and Indo-China. Look at the plumage.”

I looked. And had to agree.

“Pea fowl are pheasants. There’s a breeder in town who sells incubatable eggs for five dollars. Fantastically hardy birds - most pheasant are. The most annoying voice you can imagine.”

“It’s the showgirl syndrome.”

“Except, of course, that the showgirl in this case is a male.”

“Exactly.”

Martin’s laugh was worldly, limber, agreeable. Years of wine and tobacco had given his already polished élan a deep and lustrous varnish. A starling alighted on the white gate, Martin took the opportunity to describe the origin of starlings in America. The United States population of the feisty grackle was descended from one hundred pair of birds released in Central Park in 1890. “That much,” Martin explained, “is undisputed.” The rest of the legend, that the anonymous ornithologist responsible for the deed had had a notion to bless the new world with at least a pair of every bird mentioned in Shakespeare, is not as certain.

One day, back in the city, I happened to recount the starling story to my friends Evan and Jane while we were walking in Central Park. We were crossing Sheep Meadow, a large open lawn that was the city’s celebration central in those days. Barbara Streisand, Diana Ross, the New York Philharmonic, all had regaled the city with free concerts there. We’d seen Elton John, in the biggest concert ever, and revisiting the site quickly ignited our shared penchant for reminiscing.

“The irony is,” Evan said, “he was way more flamboyant before he actually came out.”

“I counted four costume changes,” I said. “I think it was a record.”

“The satin duck outfit!” said Jane.

“I was watching the video tape the next day. He was singing Lennon’s Imagine. ‘You may call me a screamer,’ he said, ‘but I’m not the only one.”

“The crowd down front cracked up.”

“You had to see it. This was years before he came out.”

“Did you know,” I said, “that in this exact location the starling was introduced into North American one hundred years ago?”

“Starlings?” said Evan, “I thought they’d always been here.”

We climbed up a low outcropping of granite on the periphery of the meadow. A flat plateau, the size of a small living room, tucked under a sycamore’s grandiose canopy, awaited us at the top. From there we could gaze out over the vast lawn surrounded, from our vantage point, by the city’s immense skyline, sliced by the avenues bordering the park into sheer walls of brownstone, glass and steel.

“Nobody is certain of his name. But it was right down there, a hundred years ago, that he set loose flocks and flocks, at least a pair of each bird mentioned by Shakespeare. Among them were one hundred starlings.”

This caught Jane, a high-strung lass, off-guard. She was known to “weep at card tricks,” as the saying goes, and was sensitive to poetic imagery. She released a deep sigh, the crest of a wave that the image of all those ascending birds, I knew, some powerful elegiac moon of her own had called forth.

“Say a prayer for the starlings,” she quietly sang, the Randy Stonehill tune. “There’s no welcome for them anywhere. . .”

The sky had turned bronze.

A couple of months later, on my birthday, Jane came over for breakfast with a present in her hands, obviously a book, wrapped in the Sunday comics and a mass of curly gold ribbon. All The World’s Songbirds was its title.

Over the next weeks, I entered the world of the passerine. The book was lushly photographed, specialized, and like all such books had the captivating power, upon a reader inclined toward its subject, of a hard-core substance. The term “pore over,” is an apt one. The attention toward it that the book evoked from me had the uncritical dilation of a pore.

A Painted bunting, the color of a marbleized Easter egg, was photographed crouched among blades of fresh spring grass. Wood warblers, rust-flecked gold and aerodynamic as darts, hung from branches and fed gaping mouths with tissue-winged anthropoids. And there were the starlings. Gregarious, iridescent, pesky, voracious for insects, its worldwide population in the hundreds of millions. “The most dramatic example of the species’ success, however,” the author wrote, “comes from its introduction to North America: about 100 individuals were released in New York in 1890. It is now one of the most numerous birds in North America.”

I began haunting pet stores and aviaries. There were a number of them in New York, a city of eight million which supports an ongoing cultural critical mass. As little as one percent of New Yorkers devoted to any particular interest produces a viable market for that interest, and that reality reverberates through the city’s cultural circuits in a self-sustaining current and pulse. My bird browsing took me on an odyssey to unfamiliar places, and to unexpected pockets of regular haunts. The bird house at the Bronx Zoo was an early destination. There, in a multistoried landscaped setting, a peaceable kingdom of feathered creatures preened and socialized. The Ramble in Central Park was a whole new world when studied in the intimate gazing-pool of binoculars. Thrushes and tits hobnobbed in the gingkoes. Blackbirds and pigeons squabbled. But often a bare human haunch or furtive glance gaped out among the shrubs in this notorious region of the park and I felt, binoculars trembling under wincing brows, like a voyeur. Had I been indifferent to such chance visual encounters, I probably could have simply glanced elsewhere and moved on. But I wasn’t, and the alarmed or resentful glares in the glass banged too loudly on the drum which my incipient lust had stretched taut. Besides, my bird quest was moving into a final stage. I was now focusing on bird shops where the possibility of purchase, ownership, possession, was a drumbeat to which I knew I could dance. Then at a second-hand store on Staten Island, where Jane and I sometimes shopped after a day at the zoo, she saw a bird cage.

There was nothing quaint about it. A wire-barred cube with a removable black plastic tray at the bottom, it had three sliding doors, and two feed cups. One for seed and one for water.

“I’m buying it for you,” said Jane.

“Oh my God.”

The fate of my feathered fling was fixed. By week’s end I’d bought a Zebra Finch at a local shop.

Colorful as a guppy, the tiny creature was inexpensive enough to be... well, disposable, should my skills or temperament for avian husbandry prove illusive. He fluttered out of the pet shop’s cardboard box and landed on the small piece of branch, a long twig, that I had suspended between two walls of his cage. So diminutive was he that his movements lacked all interstice; he looked left, he looked right; he hopped around on the perch, east, west, with no discernible movement in between. His voice had a timbre remarkably like a squeeze-doll’s cry, curtailed into a brief four-note statement, repeated: da DA da da—da DA da da. The call emptied out of his open beak with a force that made his whole body shudder. This was sometimes followed by odd quiet afterthoughts of chatter and chirps, all in the squeeze-doll mode. Feisty, he was an avian Pomeranian, hardly bigger than a plump hibiscus bud, sporting black and white feathers and orange cheek spots. His cage hung suspended near the vast windows in a corner of the empty dining room, a space that I was saving for the baby grand piano that existed only as an archetypal contour in my imagination, but which I vaguely assumed would sire a concrete counterpart in due course. In the meantime, Oscar’s toy-like call echoed across a plain of varnished oak parquet. The home he was to establish in the empty room’s crystal chandelier was, as yet, but a gleam in Oscar’s beady little eye.

One night Jane called, asking if I would like to go to a Labor Day barbecue at a friend’s house on Staten Island. The house was a classic of its type: a sprawling country Queen Ann, cosseted to the point of near-assimilation in gardens both lush and neglected. It was full of people and music. The windows of every room, it seemed, were open; the afternoon was all breezes and beer.

Jane drifted off. I was temporarily pinned, by the music, the social currents, by Jane’s absence, to a comfortable blocky foam chair near a tray of cheese puffs. My attention at first half-consciously diddled, then began to consume, a young man flopped on a couch across the room. Amidst a small group of friends, Doug was descending steadily into an attractive drunk. But he had a drunk’s crafty awareness of the interest he was attracting. He was playfully incoherent. Two of his friends were wrangling over who should drive him home. Meanwhile, he’d caught me watching and began directing a little choreography in my direction.

And then the guests were drifting off and our little bunch had become a private party in a house filled with retreating voices. Jane was off somewhere. His friends, Gene and Gunther, were trying to get Doug out of the couch. He was passive-aggressively toying with their wheedling and coaxing. Doug swerved and landed dramatically in my lap, and was cheerfully abandoned by Gene and Gunther. When we got home, neither of us was quite as drunk as it had seemed…

to be continued

Pier at the end of August

2008-08-30T21:11:00.009-05:00

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Champignon de Fay

2008-08-25T15:08:00.037-05:00

The three-hundred mile wide oscillating sprinkler that was tropical storm Fay left mushroom tracks on local lawns. Most of these are probably edible macrolepiota americana, but maybe not.

We used to gather wild mushrooms as youngsters, relying on the unreliable folklore that the good ones had gills of tan to brown. The lighter the underbelly, the more dangerous the mushroom, all the way out to the chalk white Destroying Angel which, it was said, allowed victims who had ingested one to delightfully recover from acute gastrointestinal agony just before killing them.

But we knew slippery jack, and knew in exactly which pineywood understory the yummy fungi could be found. They found their way into many a stir fry, spaghetti sauce, or omelet. I brought my German boyfriend, a professional chef, with me on a Michigan outing one October. My old friend Walter, at whose house we were staying, suggested we gather some slippery jack for a roast. Off we went, and there they were: little drifted bunches, nestled among the carpet of pine needles in the white pine stand a short hike from the house. We brought home a goodly basket. Kurt was so taken with them that he went straight out the next day and picked a bunch more. And found several ways to cook and eat them all. He spent all next day in the bathroom. You never know with wild mushrooms. They're not tame. They can leave a native untouched and a visitor quite... touched. Kurt never held it against the slippery jack, which he still admired and even sampled again, though more prudently, in the weeks to come.

Today, my enjoyment of mushrooms is guided by the more reliable aphorism "There are old mushroom hunters, and bold mushroom hunters, but there are no old bold mushroom hunters." The only boldness I indulge these days, is in choosing between whole or sliced ones in the produce section.

I've been making duxelles since my twenties. It's a near-paste of minced mushrooms and shallots, saute'ed in butter. Traditionally, it is used in small dollops to flavor dishes. It can be kept, refrigerated, for a few days. I sometimes like it as a spread, on buttered toast.

8 oz. finely chopped mushrooms
1 shallot, finely chopped
Butter as needed
Parsley, chopped to taste
Salt and pepper to taste

Sauté the mushrooms and shallot in butter until the mushrooms are browned. Season with the parsley, salt and pepper.

Good morning sunshine

2008-08-25T08:19:00.008-05:00