Suzy Says

Now what?

For some reason, I’ve been cooking up a storm lately. I know they say “if you can’t stand the heat, get out of the kitchen”, and I can’t stand the heat, but I can’t seem to stay out of the kitchen, either. Maybe it’s because I’ve had writer’s block lately – my creativity, such as it is, must be seeking another outlet.

Yesterday’s menu of delicacies was prawn & artichoke salad, followed by crab cakes with cilantro-lime aioli. I made peach cobbler for dessert. I’m out of control!

You can find the crab cake recipe here, and the aioli here, but the salad is one of my Dad’s recipes. As he notes in it, “The recipe is one that Margaret [his wife] thought superb, even by my high standards.” Immodest, but true. Check it out:

Prawn & Artichoke Salad
2 cloves garlic
2 teaspoons Dijon mustard (I used the seedy type)
4 tablespoons red wine vinegar
1/2 cup olive oil
3 tablespoons shredded fresh basil
1/2 red onion, thinly sliced (I used a little less)
12 oz. peeled, cooked prawns (I used salad shrimp)
14 oz can of artichoke hearts (packed in water is best)
Iceberg lettuce

Chop the garlic and crush it to a pulp, mix the garlic and mustard together to form a paste, then beat in the vinegar and finally the oilve oil. Season with freshly ground pepper. Stir in the basil and onion. Let stand at room temperature for 30 minutes, then stir in the prawns and chill in the refrigerator for an hour or more. Drain the artichoke hearts and halve each one. Make a bed of lettuce, spread the artichoke hearts over it, then spoon the prawn mixture over the top.

Dad food is the best food.

Things are a little more traditional tonight (sage roasted turkey breast, garlic mashed potatoes, steamed broccoli), but tomorrow’s menu is more exotic: chicken satay with peanut sauce, coconut ginger rice, cucumber salad. A friend brought me a giant bouquet of basil, so I think there’s some pesto in my future.

Come on over – I’ve got leftovers!

Happy birthday to me

Is it just me, or does Charles II look a lot like Walter Matthau? My friend Charlie just came back from a trip to England and was showing me some pictures he took at the National Gallery (one of my favorite places in the world), including Charles II doing his Walter Matthau impersonation (or maybe it was the other way around). He also brought me a giant box of Maltesers, which doubles as an adorable piece of art.

The main purpose of the visit wasn’t the National Gallery or buying me presents (though that, of course, should be the main purpose of any trip, especially since it’s my birthday in a couple of weeks). He went to attend his cousin’s wedding and got some family dish: his great-grandfather was knighted! There were four generations of accountants (he bucked the trend finally by not being one)! At the reception, Charlie’s 94 year old grandfather, who had just lost his wife last year, took Charlie’s hands in his and said very seriously, “I hope you find your bride.”

I do, too.

A recent article in the San Francisco Chronicle listed some of their columnists’ favorite YouTube videos.

Chosen by Neva Chonin, who writes Live! Rude! Girl!, was the following:

“Spiders on Drugs,” 1:49: Some of you might remember that, back in the ’60s, when authorities blamed drugs for everything ailing modern youths (this was before video games), a certain Dr. Peter Witt conducted an enlightening experiment. After dosing hapless spiders with a variety of hallucinogens, he documented the impact of arachnid freak-outs on web building. The original results were entertaining enough in their own right, but now an entity calling itself the First Church of Christ, Filmmaker has updated Witt’s efforts. A seamless replication, this video looks and sounds like vintage reel-to-reel propaganda … and then … things begin getting strange. Is that a handgun by your eighth leg, Mr. Crack Spider, or are you just happy to see us? www.youtube.com/watch?v=sHzdsFiBbFc

Both Dr. Witt and the spider experiments are well known to me, because my father conducted them with Dr. Witt, who was a colleague and dear friend. The experiments were later gathered into a book co-written with a third scientist, Dr. Reed, called A Spider’s Web. The book is on my shelf, along with the rest of the Dad Collection, but I hadn’t thought about it in years. It was nice to be reminded, and nice to know that his work lives on. I know he would have loved that article!

I’m not usually a big fan of call waiting. Either it means you have yet one more person to deal with, in addition to the one you’re already talking to, or it means a contest: who’s more important, you or the other guy. In my experience, the other guy almost always wins out, so if I’m talking to someone and I hear the fatal beep or click, I know my time is running out, and fast.

Really, what’s wrong with getting a busy signal and calling back? First come, first served. So much more democratic, and less bruising for the ego.

However, yesterday I was glad I had it, because it allowed a wonderful coincidence: I was talking to one sister, when the other one called! Two sisters, two countries, what’s a girl to do? The decision was taken out of my hands by my older sis, who said she’d call me back in half an hour or so, when I would have finished talking with my younger sis.

Sometimes it’s good to be in the middle. And it’s always good to have sisters.

My father and stepmother

My beautiful stepmother turns 80 today. I wish I could be there to celebrate the great day with her. Eight decades of beauty, style, grace, courage, and generosity. That’s a lot to celebrate. She is an inspiration.

Wishing you many happy and healthy returns of this special day, dear friend. I love you.

I can personally recommend the lamb.

Before I unleash the puppy cuteness on you – and be warned, these pix are rated X for Xtreme Cuteness – I’d like to note that this is my 1,000th post. And it only took me nearly 6 years to achieve that milestone (the official blogiversary is the 21st, for those who are sending cards and gifts). I really am the slothiest of them all. And it doesn’t look like I’m planning to change my lazy ways any time soon, since this is only the third post of the month. To quote a recent New Yorker cartoon, “If we’re all just energy, then why don’t I have any?”

But enough about me. It’s puppy time!

K and I were greeted by the puppies’ breeder, which we expected, and by a month-old lamb, which we didn’t. The lamb is a special variety whose fleece doesn’t grow long and never needs shearing. Her mother didn’t have any milk, so the breeder was bottle-raising her. She’s quite a sassy little thing, as can be seen by her kissing a total stranger. She also kept nibbling K’s butt when she was on the floor taking the puppy pictures.

But enough about the lamb. It really is puppy time!

Here is the mother with her eight babies. They are three weeks old, and of truly breathtaking cuteness. See for yourself. Here they are sleeping and snuggling. And finally…can you tell which one isn’t a real puppy?

When I was an office drone, I hated those “While You Were Out” things. It seemed all I had to do was step away from my desk to provoke a flurry of phone calls, all of which had to be returned immediately upon my return. Actually, I hated pretty much everything about working in an office except leaving, especially on Friday.

There wasn’t a flurry of phone calls while I was away in Detroit – at least, there were no pink slips of any kind awaiting me – but there was some unusual activity.

Patricia, who knows everything there is to know about what goes on in our neighborhood, tells me that while I was in Detroit, a film company took advantage of my temporary absence to film in the courtyard all night, right outside my wondows. Apparently they had a noisy generator announcing their presence, along with the actors yelling and brandishing rubber crowbars. And then there were the bright lights. I don’t think I really missed out by missing it.

I wonder what will happen during the absence currently in progress. Instead of writing at my messy desk in my messy kitchen, I am writing at my fab friend K’s beautiful, tidy dining room table. I’m spending a couple of days with her, enjoying the peace and quiet of her lovely little house and lovely little town. Makes a nice change of pace from taking Rita for an amble-ette behind our building and discovering a fiesta of seven – yes, seven – previously-enjoyed condoms in a fiesta of colors, the way I did yesterday afternoon. No wonder I felt the need to get out of town, at least temporarily.

Still shuddering in horror and considering moving.

I will now replace that horrifying mental image with a charming one: tomorrow, I am reprising my popular role as K’s lovely assistant at a photo shoot…of 3 week old Australian Shepherd puppies!!! Guess who brought her digital camera? And I promise to share – I’m not all bad.

Dad and my brother Jonathan, circa 1965

While the rest of the world is celebrating St. Patrick’s death day, I am mourning my father’s birthday.

I wake up to the raucous clamor of birds in the tree outside my window, black against the white, still morning sky. They don?t do this every day, and my first thought is that they are singing for him. Dad loved birds, and kept track of all he saw from the age of five until he died, aged seventy. I slide my feet into my slippers and go to the kitchen to make coffee, wishing I had the luxury of calling him and saying ?Happy birthday? to him, instead of just in my heart.

Most of the people I know have fathers who are still living, but they don’t particularly want to call them, even though they can. Dads like Mike (and mine) are few and far between, it seems.

I realize how long he?s been gone: six years. I do this minor math problem with the same sense of slight shock and dismay as when I calculate my own age when asked (otherwise, I refuse to think about it and just feel like the permanent teenager I really am). I look back over the years that have passed away since he passed away, and am amazed we, his children, have all been able to weather the storm. At first, I thought I couldn?t survive the pain and loss. Now I think, Really? It?s been that long?

Sipping my coffee in the cold morning light, memories of Dad spin through my head:

When I was a child, waiting for him to come home from work, in his white lab coat smelling of mysterious and pungent chemicals. He’d sweep me into his arms and roll around on the floor, and end up with shaking me upside down, “to shake the nonsense out”, as he put it, though in this he never did quite succeed. Years later, there’s still plenty of nonsense left.

His mother telling me how Dad spent hours concocting exactly the correct proportion of cement dust to coal dust to make briquets that would last longer for heating and cooking during the dark, deprived days of WWII. Dad was about 10 at the time, and he and his family lived on the outskirts of London, where bombings were all too common. Indeed, the bombing once started when Dad was walking home from school one day. He was near the train station, and hid under bodies until it was over, finally walking home, blood-spattered, to his anxious mother.

The long, sunny days in Maine, those long ago summers when death hadn’t touched us and the world seemed a bright, safe place. We’d spend our days sailing, swimming, climbing mountains, having lobster for dinner (at that time, it was cheaper than hamburger, which was, as Dad put it, “the way it should be”).

The long, sunny days in England when death hadn’t just touched us, it had knocked us out, doing all the things everyone has to do when a family member dies, no matter how beloved or unbeloved. At the time, you don’t realize how lucky you are to be in shock and to have so many duties to perform, because once all that’s over and you go back to your newly altered life – the one you refer to as “normal”, though it isn’t anymore and never will be again – the realization hits you as hard as the Reaper’s scythe that it’s true, and this, my friend, is, as Trollope put it, The Way We Live Now.

The Toronto Maple Leafs, Nassau Coliseum

For some reason, some of us thought it would be a good idea to go to a hockey game the night before a day of meetings. This is what happens when all your co-workers are boys.

The game was in some distant, godforsaken place in Long Island. Before this, the only place I’d been to in Long Island was the Hamptons, and I’d recommend you keep it that way if you can. If you must venture to the dark side, be prepared, especially if you take the LIRR at about 5:30 in the afternoon.

Arriving at Penn Station after spending almost half an hour getting a cab (note: looking for a cab at 5:00 in midtown Manhattan is an exercise in both futility and frustration), I was horrified by the sight of all the people pouring into its narrow entrance, oddly located directly beneath Madison Square Garden. It looked like a giant anthill. I wanted to turn and flee, but braver hearts prevailed.

The worst was yet to come.

We shoehorned ourselves aboard the train. Trains are usually the most civilized way to travel, but not the LIRR*, and not at rush hour. It was standing room only in a manner that makes a sardine can look roomy. People stepped on my feet, hit me in the head with backpacks, hollered into their cellphones in unmellifluous accents. It was a long way to Westbury.

Took a cab to the Coliseum, which, as previously noted, is located in the middle of nowhere (or possibly the suburbs of nowhere). I still don’t know where it was. The Islanders defeated the Maple Leafs (no-one seems to know why it’s the Leafs and not the Leaves. It just is), but it took several hours, the game going to a shoot-out. For the uninitiated, that means they played all three regular periods, an overtime one, and had to resort to the shoot-out to decide who won, the scores being tied.

Leaving the stadium, I called the taxi company, and was told there’d be a taxi rank on the west side. Got directions to the west side. No taxi rank, but valet parking. The valet parkers said the taxis were on the other side of the building. Decided that it would be better to try the Marriott across the street, so we plodded across the vast concrete steppe in the cold rain and wind, only to discover that there were no cabs at the Marriott, only 30 or so disgruntled Leafs fans (the Islander aficionados all drove, of course).

It took 45 minutes to get a cab, and the trains only run once an hour at that late hour, so, yes, we missed it. For added fun, the station is locked at 6:00, so we had to stand out on the freezing platform and wait for the next train.

I searched my pockets for my gloves, and discovered one was missing. It was my favorite pair: buttery soft black leather, lined with cashmere, and adorned with two rows of tiny, pale pink suede bows. Italian, of course.

When I was a child, I was going somewhere by train with my father, somewhere in England. I don’t remember the details of the trip, but I vividly remember this: as the train pulled out of the station, the elegantly dressed woman sitting across from us looked out the train window and noticed her glove lying on the platform. She jumped to her feet, pulled open the window, and tossed the remaining glove to join its mate.

In the midnight dark and rain, 30 years and 3,000 miles later, I did the same thing.

*When I complained about this to my colleague who lives in civilized Irvington, on the civilized Hudson rail line, he sniffed and said very seriously of the LIRR riders, “They’re animals“.

I’ve been having a Beauty Blast this week. Contrary to Jane Austen’s assertion that “woman is fine for herself alone”, I only bother primping when the results will be seen and appreciated. Rita doesn’t care if I’m wearing make-up or whether my accessories match, so I rarely bother. In fact, the last time I dressed up was probably the last time I was in New York, where I am heading tomorrow.

So everything that can be dyed, shaped, or altered has been done, and I’m now fit for public viewing. And what a viewing it will be: I’m interviewing 6 money managers in one day, which will be something like a marathon of used car salesmen all trying to sell me a different make and model. Don’t you wish you were me?

In the midst of my preenery, I had an email from my sister Beth asking me how to apply eyeliner. Despite my current lack of cosmetic use, at one time I was a serious addict, doing it at least once a day. And I had learned from the best, since all my application skills came from my friend A’s modelling days, so perhaps it’s justified that my sis considers me to be something of an expert. It’s so hard to shake a rep, isn’t it?

The request reminded me of the last time my sis came to visit me, all the way from England, where the Queen’s the boss and they talk funny. Being the hostess with the leastest, the kind of girl whose guests bring not only dinner, but serving dishes, I was a little concerned about how to amuse her. Of course, the first thing I thought of was shopping.

Turned out that we are the real-life Shopaholic and Sister. I took her to worship at Sephora, and discovered that she was not only unmoved by its cosmetic splendor, but confused by it. She kept asking me what things were, and they were always lip gloss, except the one time it was an eyelash curler.

It made me realize that instead of, say, algebra, for which I and everyone I know has never had any real life use, there could (should!) be classes in the correct and fun way to apply make-up. They’d start in junior high, before a taste develops for blue eyeshadow and other bad habits that are so difficult to break. Lessons would include:

• Foundation: it should match your skin as closely as possible. You, only flawless. There should never be a demarcation line at the jaw.
• Lip liner: never obvious, despite the Pamela Anderson school of application. As in Foundation, above, it should match, not contrast.
• How to apply false eyelashes. They’re not just for evening anymore! Extra credit for eyelash extensions.
• How to fake a tan: from bronzers to airbrushing, without orange palms or sun-inducing wrinkles.
• How to perfect your eyebrows: shaping, coloring, maintaining.

Etc.

The world would be a much prettier and Suzier place.

In case you think I left my sis in the lurch, I sent her this link which pretty much explains all without visual aids. Enjoy!

If I were Tippi Hedren, I’d be a little nervous now.

Every day at around this time, the tree in the courtyard hosts a convocation of black birds. They fill the winter-empty branches with their nearly weightless, dark bodies and the air with their raucous conversation. It’s the bird equivalent of a trendy night spot out there, although apparently anyone with wings can get in.

This has been going on for about a week. The variation on the theme is to pack onto all the windowsills, side by side, and then talk as loudly as possible about how crowded it is, comparing it unfavorably to the Tokyo subway at rush hour.

The creepiest part of the proceedings is when someone walks through the courtyard. Then the birds fall silent, as if they had been plotting that person’s demise (or mocking their outfit) and didn’t want to be overheard and caught.

As darkness falls, there’s a whoosh as they all fly off together, calling out one last threat. Or promise.

I’m driving my car, my one and only car. It’s a 1966 Mustang convertible, silvery-blue, and looks a lot like this. The top’s down and the radio’s on – since it’s the original radio, it only gets AM, so it’s on an oldies station, to go with the car.

If you’ve never been lucky enough to drive a convertible, you may be under the impression that the driver’s long blonde hair blows romantically back from her face, in the manner of Grace Kelly in “To Catch a Thief”, in the well-known sequence presaging her untimely death as she careens around the Grande Corniche in a Sunbeam Alpine. Since life is seldom, if ever, like the movies, what actually happens is that your long blonde hair blows into your eyes, making your driving Grace Kelly hazardous. This was quite a disappointment to me, since having your hair in a ponytail or hidden under a baseball cap just doesn’t have the same allure.

There’s no traffic on the road, and it’s smooth, as if it had just been paved. The sky is that deep California blue. I’ve never seen that color anywhere else, just like I’ve never seen anywhere else like California. Does anywhere else have oceans, deserts, mountains, all in one place? Drive a couple of hours from San Francisco, and there’s snow. Drive a few hours south, and it’s warm enough to swim. And there’s nowhere like San Francisco. Or Hollywood.

After a while, I realize I’ve been driving more or less on auto pilot, not really noticing my surroundings. When I do, I realize that it’s dark – I’m deep in a forest – and the road is a lot rougher. It’s gotten cold, too. I’m chilled, but too nervous to stop and put the top up. I’ll stop soon.

But I don’t. I can’t. I just keep driving.

I’ve become frightened, feeling alone. I am alone. And I’m not out of the woods yet.

The road isn’t a freeway now. It’s not even a two lane highway. It’s a dirt road. Soon, the dirt road gives way to a track. I can’t drive down the track, so I get out and walk. It’s a long walk, especially in the dark. Eventually, the track ends, too. I stand in a clearing, looking around. I think, “Now what?”