Category Archives: food, literature, travel

Several years ago, while eating dinner with a friend at Guillermo’s Mexican Restaurant in Tucson, Arizona, I overheard someone say, “Damn! Those are some sexy tacos!” I could barely repress my laughter and almost choked on a portion of carne asada, but I quickly recovered and raised my margarita glass towards the enraptured soul and together we cheered, “Ole!”

Jenny and I were regulars at Guillermo’s, or the Double L as many know it. We liked the music, we liked the vinyl booths, and we even liked the waiter who we referred to in private as El Nez (the nose – he wore heavy cologne). Most of all we liked the moonlight margaritas, and, as we sat there sipping the rhapsodic blue nectar, we gossiped about any number of wacky ideas that came into our heads.

Jenny, a Tucson native fluent in Spanish, taught me Spanish curse words and told me the Spanish names of flowers and fruits, explaining their etymology as well as their slang adaptations. I fondly remember when she told me about the Mexican petunia, which she personally referred to as Espanta Muchachos (scares the children), because the plants grow so tall and thick that children can easily hide in them and scare one another. Mexican petunia blossoms are a rich purple, with long reedy stalks and bamboo-like green leaves; the flowers proliferate all around the University of Arizona campus, where we both worked. I grew to love the sight of them.

During our meals, we salted the hot tortilla chips and asked for seconds on salsa; the wait staff, who quickly grew accustomed to our cackles and chortles, graciously obliged. A dedicated vegetarian, Jenny ordered dishes rich with mixed vegetables, fragrant spicy rice, refried beans, and guacamole. I usually ordered the restaurant’s generously portioned cheese quesadilla, and I slathered it in salsa fresca and sour cream. Mainly, we laughed and laughed, casting off the pressures of the day. Jenny was, in my mind, a true desert spirit. She loved her hometown fiercely and, moreover, she respected that she was a member of its ecosystem, living her out her days in ways that were minimally invasive to her environment. She built a native-species garden oasis in her backyard and rescued animals as if she was a direct descendent of Saint Francis of Assisi. She emanated profound kindness, which made it very easy to laugh with her. She was like a mother to me.

We occasionally varied the Thursday night routine by dining at the unbelievably lavish and beautiful Arizona Inn. Their food was far more refined and artfully presented. The wait staff wore starched black and white uniforms and they answered nearly every inquiry and request with a well-practiced “Certainly,” making guests feel unquestionably important and to-do. (At least, that’s how I felt. I always wanted to ask the waiters some nonsensical question, just to see if they’d break the façade. “Have you ever seen a gila monster wearing a pinafore?” “Certainly.” Perhaps one day I’ll ask anyway… just for funsies.) But eating there simply cost more, so we usually only dined at the Arizona Inn when we felt puckish and our bank accounts weren’t hovering around zero. Then we returned to the Double L. (We never stopped saying “certainly,” though.)

* * *
Tucson was my culinary awakening. In Tucson, the diverse flavors – bright, earthy, and verdant – astounded me. I discovered moles – not on my skin, not in holes in the ground, but in cast iron pots, fragrant with Mexican chocolate and cinnamon. I developed a near-fanatical obsession with Mexican food in general and piquant green salsa in particular.

It took no time at all before I was hooked. Thankfully I have empiric scientific evidence to support my addiction. Alex Shoumatoff notes, “The principal compound [of chiles], capsaicin, triggers the release in your body of something called Substance P, which causes pain, then, by a negative feedback process, activates opioids that turn the Substance P off, and endorphins that produce a state akin to runner’s high, a rush similar to jumping into an icy pool after taking a sauna. The second process becomes stronger with each does of capsaicin, so chiles are mildly addictive: you can become dependent on them for the secondary effect.” Oh, I became addicted to that secondary effect, all right – just ask the folks at Nico’s Mexican Food on Campbell Avenue. For a while, a meal just wasn’t satisfying unless I was crying a little bit.

Need additional quantification? Enter Harold McGee, author of On Food and Cooking: the Science and Lore of the Kitchen. “Research has found that, at least in the case of the pepper and chilli [sic] irritants, there’s a lot more to pungency than a simple burn,” writes McGee. “These compounds induce temporary inflammation in the mouth, transforming it into an organ that is more ‘tender,’ more sensitive to other sensations. A few mouthfuls and we become conscious of simply breathing: our mouth becomes so sensitive that exhaling body-temperature air feels like a textured hot bath, inhaling room-temperature air like a refreshingly cool breeze.”

In Shoumatoff’s collection of essays, Legends of the American Desert, the author refers to the unique process through which people of a certain bent find themselves in love with the desert. Georgia O’Keefe was one who fell hard and fast; DH Lawrence tried, but ultimately he couldn’t hack the virulent health problems that the desert afflicted upon him. When you visit the desert, you either get it – the chiles, the saguaros, the blistering heat and summer monsoons – or you don’t. I had no idea when I moved to Tucson for graduate school how much I would come to love the Sonoran desert. Reading Shoumatoff’s essays reminded me of passion for the place – its culture and, of course, its amazing food.

Mexican food especially lends itself to lust: enchilada, quesadilla, tamale, the wickedly addictive carne asada. One’s tongue rolls languidly around the words; there are no harsh consonants, no awkward guttural stops to obstruct their near debauchery. Say it like a song: chile relleno, the sleeping bag that encloses Hatch chilies in a warm cover of egg and batter. As a word person, the pleasure comes as much from the utterance and understanding of the words as it does from the consumption of that sexy, luscious food.

* * *
One evening, after Jenny and I left Guillermo’s, we hadn’t yet left south Tucson and were stopped in her car at a stoplight. We had the windows down, loving the cool breeze. Two young men on motorcycles pulled up alongside Jenny’s car. The guys bantered back and forth in Spanish for a moment, peering into the car. When the light changed, they rode away. Jenny chuckled. “What?” I said. Never taking her eyes from the road, she said, “They said you have a face like a doll.”

When I left Tucson six years later, I closed the door on a chapter of my life that is forever done: I had my MFA, a 4-month-old son, and business prospects in Florida. I’m sorry to say Jenny and I didn’t keep up with each other like we should have. But some things – some people – can’t be forgotten. Through everything she did and said, Jenny taught me how to become an unforgettable person: how to be respectful, unerringly polite, compassionate, intelligent, articulate, and funny as hell. I can’t think of Tucson without automatically remembering dinners with Jenny and Jenny herself.

On those cool evenings when Tucson spread out before Jenny and me – our appetites sated, our spirits soaring – it felt just fine to sit with a friend and listen to the sounds of the desert breeze. Even now I think back and can feel that comfortable silent desert wind blowing past, imprinting my life with its indelible lessons of strength and beauty.

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I liked to watch my mother in her kitchen. I preferred most to watch her silver hair, standing defiantly in place, unmoving against the wafts of steam rising from the pots boiling in front of her. I liked the way the steam fogged up her glasses and made them slip down her nose. She pushed them up again and again with the perseverance of a marine, then wiped away the steam from her lenses with the back of her hand. I can’t remember what we talked about – I’m sure it had something with her ceaseless nagging me to do better and change the things I thought I was already doing fine: asking why I’d gotten an A minus instead of an A, telling me my boyfriend was a stupid hoodlum, beseeching me to grow my hair long and stop coloring it red, prodding me to lose twenty pounds and wear more lace. She ended each conversation, sighing, “Oyayoi… Shto ti zdeliesh?” What are you doing?

She had a solid collection of recipes that she prepared for us girls, although my sister and I rarely ate together or did anything together for that matter. Borscht placed foremost on my mother’s list, followed by various soups and stocks, boiled chicken, fried pork chops, endless salads, and an unsavory liver gelatin concoction that my mother found irresistible and I could barely stomach without gagging. She eschewed complex recipes, which required too much of the energy she didn’t have after long days at work, and she preferred her foods plain and unadorned: unsalted butter spread on a slice of pumpernickel, a tangy pickled fish, half a salted tomato. She used to say that the things she had were ‘the best,’ though often they were so far from it that one felt cruelly disrespectful to contradict her.

I don’t think my mother ever had the luxury of free time or being able to purchase the special things she deeply coveted. She used the same bottles of cinnamon and salt until they were empty and dry. She scrimped and saved every penny to enrich my life, and with great success; I went off for college and rarely looked back, convinced that I could have the life I wanted. But my success was fruitless for her, and I was never able to send her the trinkets, gifts, and money to pay back the privileges and wealth that she gave me. My own spice drawers clank in a cacophony of good fortune. I never lack for spices as basic as cinnamon and salt.

On one of my last visits to mom – already several years ago – our old Manhattan apartment seemed to have folded itself inwards in dimension. The furniture seemed too old, the kitchen much smaller than I remembered. Even my mom had shrunk down to a 4’5” babushka. Yellow glaze warped the walls, and the windows, blackened by years of New York soot, obfuscated the view outside. A waxy film coated her pots, their bottoms cracked and chipped. And yet mom soldiered on.

She’d done all the cooking before I arrived, so she only had to heat our meals and could sit with me, talking. During one of those meals, she announced her plans to return home to the Ukraine. Something in the way my mother looked as she told me of her plans to leave New York, the particular way her eyes glistened, made me wish I could cook up a different ending for her life. I wished I could cook her a perfect potato soup, thick and chunky, rich with cream and seasoned with just the right amount of dill to ease her restless spirit. I wished I could cook up some long lost great uncle Pyotor to save her from living out her retirement in a place that was so much less than she deserved; who, after over half a century of a WWII-induced separation, finally managed to locate his only living niece and, in his last dying breath, bequeath to her his minor empire along the Crimea, a place that my mother often daydreamed about. I wished I could have stayed in the kitchen a little longer before it became another place in my mind, its memories tainted with cinnamon and stiff with salt.
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Loosely translated, ptichi moloko means bird’s milk, which does not sound as appetizing as the Ukrainian dessert it represents: a pastel-colored, gelatin-enhanced creamy puff, molded into a curlicue and sprinkled with powdered sugar. My mother bought ptichi moloko from a store in Brighton Beach, a southern neighborhood in Brooklyn famous for its Russian population and sometimes not-so-kindly referred to as Little Odessa. While in Brighton, my mother also bought pieroshkies (ground meat, cabbage, mashed tubers, or fruit, wrapped in savory dough and deep-fried), farmer’s cheese, pickled cucumbers and tomatoes, smoked herring and salmon, and tiny pouches of cheap caviar. When we brought these groceries back to our Coney Island apartment – a substantial walk, but one we completed almost weekly – my mother set the items on the counter like an exploded cornucopia and I went downstairs to my bedroom to rest as she put things to the order she preferred.

In our peculiar apartment building, half of the apartments went upstairs and the other half went downstairs, a crazy zigzag of architecture. Upstairs, our dining area faced a perfect sliver of air between two adjacent buildings, through which we could gaze at one of the Twin Towers. I remember how the tower glittered at sunset. To the left, we faced the Verrazano Bridge, to the right the Empire State Building. My mother’s downstairs bedroom also faced this direction, but my room faced the Atlantic Ocean, which was literally across the street from our building. Through studious mapping, I deduced that my bedroom shared walls with apartment 715, whose inhabitants spent a good deal of time screaming and throwing things at one another. My room shared a fire escape with the screaming neighbors and I dreaded ever facing an emergency that would require me to climb out there with them, convinced they might start yelling at me too.

The screamers and I shared the fire escape with one more party: a pair of nesting pigeons. The pigeons cooed outside my window at night, sometimes tapping the glass with an overextended wing. They built a tiny nest on my corner of the fire escape. The nest grew large with twigs and straw, and I wondered where the pigeons found straw in Brooklyn. The fire escape slowly turned from gray steel to white from the unique whitewash that only birds can provide. I loved to watch the pigeons: their downy breast plumage, the soft wispy feathers around their shriveled orange legs, their weary yellow eyes and irregular beaks, which tapped and pecked for food on the fire escape. When the pigeon eggs hatched, the little birds, ugly in their newness, cheeped and chirped for their crop milk, which the parents dribbled into their maws. The little ones were pink, with haphazard patches of tiny feathers and purple circles for eyes. Soon, though, they grew beautiful and lithe. The little ones learned to fly.

One year the babies did not hatch. My mother handed me an old broom handle and told me to smash the eggs, so they wouldn’t hatch and wouldn’t produce any more generations to whitewash the fire escape. They were filthy, she said, and had too many babies and made a mess of our beautiful fire escape. I was still young enough that my obedience overrode critical thinking. I stupidly smashed the nest. I regretted it instantly.

The pigeons didn’t come back for many years. When they did, I flatly refused to smash any more eggs and I told my mother that she should do it, which, of course, she couldn’t. So the pigeons started a new nest, dirtying the fire escape once again, and I watched them, rapt and thankful that they had returned, whispering apologies through the glass: Forgive me. Please, forgive me.

Some years later, in college, I was eating lunch outdoors with a friend, and an old, fat pigeon perched one foot away, ruffled, its head pulled tightly to its breast. One orange eye gazed at me lazily, with none of the caution that the fire escape pigeons practiced. Since it was so close to us, my friend and I observed the pigeon for some time, and slowly it shuffled its weight around to better face us. Another pigeon flew to it, perching on the rim of a garbage can about two feet away. How odd, I thought, for them to be so perfectly at ease.

I decided to smash up my remaining potato chips and feed them the pieces. As I strew the chips on the sidewalk, the memory of the smashed nest clattered back into my mind. “Give me your bread,” I told my friend. When he did, I crumbled the bread over the bench where I’d been sitting. We left our lunch spot, and the two pigeons eagerly flew to peck at what we’d put out for them. As we watched the birds eating, I imagined the pigeon post of Paris, those birds that flew so many miles to relay important messages. I wondered if perhaps those pigeons were sent to relay the memory of the smashed nest, to remind me that my good and bad actions will come back to me in many times the measure, that the life I live now will affect the outcome of my future. As a child, I did not yet understand the awful metaphysical ramifications of being a murderer of small, defenseless things.

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Aunt Pat had a sunny, cantaloupe-colored room at the VA hospital. From her automated bed, she viewed a large expanse of green: a manicured lawn, oak trees, and the green benches by the paved walkway that encircled hospital grounds. Her private room came replete with a bathroom, sparing her the embarrassment of walking down the green linoleum floors in a flimsy, pink standard issue gown to the communal restroom.

In college, they called her Tiger. She appeared the poster child for 1950s America: pert, upturned nose; bright blue eyes; well-defined heart-shaped lips, dyed valentine red in her yearbook photo. She might have been the archetypal daughter of the era, except that her mother died of tuberculosis before she turned three. Except that she lived on three continents before she graduated from high school. Except that she turned down two marriage proposals before the age of 25. She aspired to be a nurse, and retired from the Navy in the late 1980s as a nurse and a decorated captain. She broke some rules.

Pat harbored a deep passion for mischief. She watched sports programs hungrily, yelling back at the television when a certain play annoyed her. Sometimes she got a fire about her and she sparkled dazzlingly, swearing in Swahili and smacking her hands together like cymbals.

The cancer started in her breasts, and she had mastectomies on both sides, though she withheld this from the family to prevent our worrying. She did not see us often, so it was easy to keep this secret. Gradually, however, the cancer spread, and when she could keep the secret no longer (largely because her health had fully deteriorated), she moved to the town where most of the family lived. She bought a beautiful, two-story house in a wealthy neighborhood, but slept on a foldout sofa on the main level because she lacked the strength to ascend the steps. She wore a body brace around her torso, basically, she said with a half-hearted smile, “to keep everything in.” She loved life and her two small dogs, and she kept her bright spirit up even as she found herself in the hospital.

As her health worsened, she focused increasingly on the view outside her window, watching the trees move in the wind. She asked for her dogs. When they arrived, they ignored her and peed all over the floor. They didn’t seem to remember her – not her freckled hands and squared nails, not her mild Chanel scent. Concealing her disappointment, she watched the trees some more.

Long in the past, she taught me to fish at a pool below the embankment, into which, on an August day, one could throw a stone and scatter a luminescent red prism of kokanee trout. I was a slow learner and succeeded more often in almost gouging Pat with my fish hook than I did in catching. Pat stood by patiently as the morning sun rose over the hills. We cast and reeled, over and over. I remember her there: knee-deep in the pool, her khaki shorts splattered; how her tan, freckled arms worked smoothly against her plaid shirt. She wore her father’s fisherman’s hat, decorated with tackle and feathers. Her skin shone as she stood alone in the deep, green pool.

Years later, at the hospital, she spent her days looking at a different green, her shining skin gone ashen and her blue eyes dark and dull. Her teeth hung against chapped lips.

“Bring me some Pandemums,” she said to those of us holding vigil by her bed, her brain filled with inoperable tumors. When we didn’t understand, she reiterated. “Pandemums,” she said, gesturing with her hands. Pandemum: I envisioned red blossoms, with petals made of kokanee, with stems of rosemary and spruce, and poppy seeds for a heart; some spicy, red opiate to ease her pain; a hot fire swirling above the green pool of a forgotten river. We asked what pandemums were, but she no longer understood the words.

“Pandemums! Pandemums!” she shrieked. It was not long after when we lost her. The cancer ravaged her body, one fire battling another until only ashes remained.

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Some grandmother’s houses smell like medicine and Bengay, that stale smell that is sometimes attributed to the elderly. Other grandmother’s houses smell like cookies, soft and freshly baked, wafting out the door and down the street. My grandmother’s house smelled of cinnamon, which she imparted through loaves of banana, pumpkin, and zucchini bread. Her breads were oily, yet crumbly and spongy, shaped into rough rectangles with sloping, ridged tops. She baked the edges brown, crisp but not impenetrable. Breaking off a piece – never profaning the pointillist masterpiece with such precise implements as knives – presented a gift to the recipient, who found inside an explosion of elements and colors: orange, yellow, brown, green. What clever inventor had ever thought to mix zucchini with nutmeg and cinnamon!
Because I liked her bread so much, my grandmother made extra loaves for me to take back to college – loaves and loaves, stuffed into my knapsack, wedged into the legs of snow boots, buried under sweaters. When I returned home and unpacked, I often discovered that my bounty had multiplied. I found curious items rolled into pairs of socks and underwear: old picture frames, candelabras, envelope openers. Or, conversely, I found vases and pitchers stuffed full with underthings. My grandmother hadn’t put these items into my suitcase, of course. I had.

There is little pride in stealing and petty thievery, and even less so in stealing from trusting elderly relatives. My grandmother often encouraged me to indicate which of her possessions I liked, so that she could bequeath certain treasured objects to those who most admired them. In college, the scales of need and want tipped, and I pilfered objects from my grandmother’s home because I felt I had more use for the items than she did. I cared for them, clearing away the dust and polishing the metal; I touched them and felt the electricity of other worlds. I attributed these trinkets with immense value, not because they were worth any money, but simply because they belonged to my grandmother. These objects held the power of an entire lifetime: they accompanied her to Africa where she managed and taught at a boarding school near Kiomboy. She gripped the ebony letter opener with her sculpted hands, slicing into letters that had crossed an ocean to meet her. She once displayed a picture of a friend from her native Nebraska in a certain bronze picture frame that was now covered in dust, buried deep at the far end of a box in the attic. These items no longer held importance for her; she tucked them away, pushed them to the corners of her shelves, and stopped using them. When I no longer derived pleasure or power from these items, I returned them to the boxes whence they originally came. My spirit had been strengthened by the totem power of the objects of her life: I gained, if only fleetingly, a power that no money could by at a time when I felt particularly vulnerable and powerless.

A friend of mine used to steal books from the university bookstore in an appallingly simple, nonchalant manner. He stacked up a pile of books that he needed, then walked right through a crowded checkstand – not stopping to pay – and then out the door. No alarms rang, and he never once got caught. I used to tell him, fighting a sly smile, that he would go to hell for stealing, but never thought myself that I might.

One Sunday, many years ago, my mother and I walked home from church, as was our habit on most Sundays after service. It was a fine spring day, with soft sun and a gentle breeze blowing off the Atlantic Ocean. On that particular day, my mother also carried our passports and a large sum of cash, which she had withdrawn the day before and forgotten to remove from her purse. It was her entire year’s worth of savings for a trip abroad – her hard-earned annual pilgrimage back to eastern Europe, her homeland.

We lived in Coney Island, an impoverished neighborhood by any standard. As we walked, we grew aware of a group of teenage boys behind us. If my mother was scared, she didn’t say. We walked slowly, thinking they might pass us. But they didn’t, just talked and laughed boisterously, keeping time with their boombox. About two blocks from our apartment, the boys scattered in a flash, and then there was only one boy, heaving the purse from my mother’s clutching hands. She had wound her purse strap around her hand, and she fell to the sidewalk when he yanked at it, dragging her along the cement for a few feet before she let go. I stood by, completely dumbfounded, until my mother started screaming, at which point I sprinted after the boy, yelling like it was the end of the world. I suppose, in my ten-year-old mind, it was.

My memory made me believe that, in the course of chasing him, I’d gotten him to drop the purse. My mother’s journals confirm that he did not. When I got back to my mom, she sat on the sidewalk, staring at her lap. She had wet herself. I helped her up, alarmed by the patches of gravel and blood on her knees. A police car drove by and, seeing us, slowed to ask if we needed help. They gave us a ride to the station, where we stared at books full of snapshots, recognizing no one. My mother filed a report, useless as it was, and I noticed a box of cinnamon rolls on a desk across the room. When we finally returned home, my mother lit a candle in the dining room and prayed for three hours, smelling of cinnamon as she wept.

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He passed before I got a good look at him. I only saw the uneven rise of his stride, the overshot ups and fluid, lolling downs. He wore a black fedora tied with a white ribbon. Black t-shirt, tucked in, and dyed shorts, whitewashed and thick-seamed down to his knees, where he’d rolled up the hem. Thin, bare legs tapered to thin, sock-clad ankles and yellowing canvas shoes that seemed too small, tapping out an irregular beat against the long, brown-tiled hallway. I listened as he walked out of sight: bum—ba-bum—bum—ba-bum.

I can only imagine the stranger’s face: large brown eyes, looking sad beneath thick lenses; Roman nose, a long aquiline lambda, two flared and symmetrical nostrils; thin, purplish lips pursed as if to catch the little beads of sweat forming on his upper lip and moistening his hairline. I imagine a half-hearted mustachio, sallow cheeks, and olive skin.

He must have been a golden skinned baby. He must have come from some Aegean country, some salt-crusted, reefed beach along the Mediterranean, where figs grow and olive trees blossom yellow in the spring. People from that region recognize the poetic sensuality of the olive, how it pleases all the senses: round and firm to the touch, its texture decadent on one’s tongue, its aroma and unmistakable flavor. The olive begins life sour and puckered; brine cultivates it, making the fruit lovely and invitingly plump. This stranger must have come from some scorching place where the heavy roots of olive trees intertwine with the soul.

I have only seen the Mediterranean in pictures: huge red nets spread over weather-beaten fishing boats; colonies of cats waiting at the docks for fishermen who return with buckets of small, oily fish; long blue stairways descending the hills, dividing rows of white houses. 

My brother once visited Greece for some months. He fell in love with the starkness of the land, the white of its beaches, the cool pale water. He drank a lot of ouzo. While in Greece, he sent me pictures of Santorini and Mikonos: huge expanses of white, and sudden portals of unabashed color: cobalt, crimson, marigold, violet. His skin shone, dark and tan, and the sun bleached the tips of his hair white gold. In photos, my brother stands proud, some new god in front of the white walls, smiling with abandon at the call of distant drums: bum—ba-bum—bum—ba-bum.

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