Monthly Archives: October 2010

Because Daniel needed to visit five (yes, 5!) doctors to fill out various medical forms for his Peace Corps application, and I’m the one with the flexible hours, I’ve been working for two days in various doctors’ waiting rooms. Add to this Forest’s broken arm and lost retainer, and you know where I’ve been. Here’s what is most wrong about these rooms as best I can tell:

1. Television: Why, oh, why, is there a television blasting anorexic blonde woman chatting with over-animation or soap operas playing?
2. Golf Magazines: No surprise who brings these in from home, but seriously, why not something exotic and mind-expanding like Chinese fashion magazines in Mandarin or magazines devoted to the French Alps, how to make the perfect Baked Alaska, woodworking for babies, or Inuit dwellings?
3. Hotel-Like Furniture and Watery Pastel Landscapes That Aren’t Nearly As Good As Looking At the Window: More and more offices are looking at more and more hotels: the same. I sat in the same chair, only slightly different texture in the beige or earth-tone strip cushion and stared at the same kind of art everywhere (why all this dampened down turquoise?). Why not black velvet paintings of great saints in one office, photographs of beetles in another, and sculptures of body parts in yet another? Turn each office over to a local artist — like the Carlton Arms Hotel in New York — and let him/her go to town!
4. The sign that said, “Please no eating and drinking” in the endoscopy/colonoscopy office. The fresh cookies and sugary coffee in the orthodonist office.
5. The wait.

Walking with Kris downtown, we realized how cool it would be to time travel back to great meals of our lives. Here are five meals I would journey through the time-space vortex to experience again:

1. On a small island off Mombassa after a morning of riding out on the boat (and throwing up over the side as Ken distracted everyone by pointing the other way and yelling, “Dolphin!”), Ken, his sister and brother-in-law and I walked down a path to a clearing where there were tables and people sitting there banging something hard. As we got closer, I saw huge platters of fresh (just picked) tropic fruit — mango, banana, oranges, papaya — and other platters piled high with freshly cooked king crab. Ah!!!
2. At the old Paradise (how do I miss thee!) in downtown Lawrence, I was a fool for Champagne chicken with mashed potatoes, salad and chocolate late….or the chicken-fried chicken.
3. Speaking of the gone-but-not-forgotten downtown, I miss St. Thomas enchiladas (all manner of seafood in a delicate and zingy white sauce) from Tin Pan Alley. Oh. My. God!
4. After walking from my dad’s old store in the subway arcade at Nassau and Fulton Street in New York City uptown for three or four hours, Ken and I — long before we started pumping out those babies — found the most exquisite Greek restaurant on the planet where we shared a huge platter of outrageously phenomenal things from Mousaka to gryo to falafel to many things I can’t remember the names for anymore (but still crave in the middle of the night).
5. Somewhere in Brooklyn, sometime in my childhood, the perfect eggcream (made with no eggs and no cream), and later on, the perfect Napoleon.

Now that I’m all beside myself and need a quick distraction, what are the five great meals of your life?

Growing up more than a little quirky and in a home that went through an outrageously dramatic divorce (known to everyone in my extended family as “THE divorce”), I could never have imagined that one day I would nearing my 25th wedding anniversary. How do I even account for it? Of course, there are the standard answers: we “work” at our marriage, lots of long talks, some therapy and many good dinners along the way, and then just dumb luck. Here’s some of what we’ve traveled through:

• 17 or more (I’ve lost count) cars, starting with a Dodge Dart and going through a parade of very used Toyotas.
• One half-mile-wide tornado that lifted and turned north before it hit our house, other little tornados, one microburst, lows in the -20s and highs over 112, and the best lightning storms on the planet.
• Several home renovation projects that propelled us to marriage counseling.
• Thousands of films watched, critiqued, taken apart and put back together, including the very bad (Sheena, Queen of the Jungle) and very good (Wings of Desire).
• Three refrigerators, two dishwashers, four washers and dryers, three stoves, three microwaves, two waffle irons, and multiple toasters.
• A bout with cancer, a bad car accident, and lots of little scares and scars along the way.
• Twelve books, including Wild Douglas County, Animals in the House, Seasons and Cycles of the Kaw Valley Watershed, The Sky Begins at Your Feet.
• Six or seven desktops and four laptops. Many hours freaking out over viruses, trojan horses, and most of all, glitches in various word processing programs.
• The Grand Canyon, the Rift Valley (Kenya), the Rockies, the Appalachians, White Sands, Asbury Park, the Ish Valley (B.C.), the Black Hills and Badlands, the Sonoran Desert, the Hill Country (Texas), the Green Mountains (Vermont), the White Mountains (N.H.), the Ozarks, and mainly, the Flint Hills, Smoky Hills and Tallgrass Prairies.
• Two houses, three or four mortgages, including designing our own house and helping with the finishing work without seriously hurting ourselves or each other.
• Three children, and three natural childbirths during which time I used many curse words and vowed, each delivery, never to have sex again.
• Multiple camping trips that involved at least four of the following: mirgraines, getting lost, violent thunder storms, one or all the kids throwing up, flat tires or blown transmissions, truly bad food at a quaint little restaurant, speeding tickets, creepy motels, all five of us screaming at once in the car.
• The loss of our dads and my step-dad, both our maternal grandfathers and grandmothers and our paternal grandmothers, some beloved cousins, and dear, dear friends,
• Kaw, Oacc, Lou, Saul, Nelly Boy, Pinky Velvet, Judy A. Hunter, Akio, Miyako, Hideki, Sookie (cats), and Shelby Chocolate Pudding and Mariah Lily Karumba Lassman (dogs). Also everything imaginable from the herpotology family, and one bunny. Along with this, dozens of amphibian funerals.
• Bioregional congresses in Missouri, British Columbia, Maine, Texas, Kentucky, Kansas, North Carolina and Tennessee, plus hundreds of bioregional meetings and pages written for various publications.
• Too-many-to-count fights, including some big ones, and even more long talks to work it out again.
• Hundreds of yard sales, dates through the alleys to see what new delights were placed near dumpsters, and visits to thrift stores, plus a long-tended hatred of big box stores (often called Mordor).
• Family development phases through Harry Potter, Monty Python, Mad Magazine (how Forest learned to read), David Sedaris, Chronicles of Narnia, and all things related to The Onion.
• Countless coyotes and owls calling at night, turkeys meandering nearby in the day, and two sightings of bobcats out the front door.
• About 109,500 interesting conversations (at least one each day).