“…it is the nature of the poet to become tender and imaginative in the loneliness of confinement.” - Washington Irving Confinement I know that we are luckier than most. We are confined to a large hotel with a terrace and courtyard, a laundry room, and the hotel stock of supplies, if need be. March 16, we sent our ...
The Perfect Summer Jellyroll
Deep summer is when laziness finds respectability. - Sam Keen Sunday, August 2011. Summer has finally swept over us like a warm blanket. Waking earlier than usual, our sleep disturbed by a tumult of angst, a jumble of confusion, we felt the sun squeeze through the slats of the shutters and reach towards the bed, chasing ...
Moroccan-Spiced Orange Slices in Orange Blossom Water
New Year’s eve is like every other night; there is no pause in the march of the universe, no breathless moment of silence among created things that the passage of another twelve months may be noted; and yet no man has quite the same thoughts this evening that come with the coming of darkness on ...
Feeding Michael and a Conversation about Food
Autumn arrives, and I quietly say goodbye to another summer as I use up the last of the strawberries and raspberries that I had judiciously bagged and frozen in July to make fragrant batches of jam. We collect the last of the sweet tomatoes from our garden, along with crisp cucumbers and a couple of ...
Pablo’s Real Spanish Gaspacho
Organizing is what you do before you do something, so that when you do it, it is not all mixed up. - A. A. Milne Our apartment takes up about a third of the hotel's first floor (one flight up, overlooking the courtyard garden on one side of the building, street level on the other). Our ...
Clams in White Wine
Where liberty dwells, there is my country. - Benjamin Franklin The rattle of cars across the gravel of the courtyard below floats through the windows on the breeze like the distant roar of ocean waves. The shade washes over me, soothing, cooling, the shutters pulled closed against the searing heat. Voices on the street, the distant ...
Father’s Day
I believe that what we become depends on what our fathers teach us at odd moments, when they aren't trying to teach us. We are formed by little scraps of wisdom. ― Umberto Eco, Foucault's Pendulum My father taught me to use a slide rule. My father taught me the patience, the passion, the precision, the pleasure that goes ...
Vanilla Custard Berry Tart for Mother’s Day
My mother told me to be a lady. And for her, that meant be your own person, be independent. - Ruth Bader Ginsburg It was just 3 or 4 days shy of my ninth birthday. I had dreamed of owning a big bike, begged to change my little kid’s small bicycle for an adult-sized beauty, just ...
Loss
It's so much darker when a light goes out than it would have been if it had never shone. - John Steinbeck, The Winter of Our Discontent I met Stephen in Nigeria in 1986. He was a Fulbright professor lecturing in English and creative writing at the University of Ife, in Ile-Ife. I was visiting a ...
This Just Happened
De toutes les passions, la seule vraiment respectable me paraît être la gourmandise. - Guy de Maupassant “Okay, your turn,” they said, and a dozen pair of eyes slid in my direction. “Tell us about yourself.” I have never been comfortable talking about myself, but here I was, the center of attention, albeit for just a ...
