About Last Night’s Receipt

Over the last 36 hours I’ve mentioned Dunkin Donuts (DD) several times, from Facebook to office talk, and I have been there once. Three things became immediately clear:

1. Dunkin Donuts is off-the-wall crazy the first Friday of summer vacation

2. Their new lemonade donut looks intriguing and I like the concept, but if it’s not a vodka-lemonade donut then forget it. Infused custard in a donut is marketing genius!

3. Not everyone has watched the heinous, head-scratching “Dunkin Donuts Rant Goes Viral” video, proving that Internet memes do not reach every person within breathing distance of you. Context remains useful even in the Internet age.

If I had been there…

Well, I did watch that awful Taylor Chapman video. Her ripped-from-a-racist-reality-TV-show style proved her worthy of the harshest criticism leveled at her since she posted her eight-minute consumer rights manifesto last weekend. I was appalled by a couple things: her overall personality; her comfort level in wielding compound slurs that were both racist and misogynistic; AND, the cashier’s unfailingly polite demeanor as he tried to make amends for the night Neethi did not give Taylor a receipt. 

After the second f-bomb, I would have asked Taylor to leave until she cleaned out her mouth and dropped the “being under cellphone surveillance” business. At least I think I would. Our best imagined idealized versions of ourselves often are inspired in response to the injustices others face. “If I had been there…” I’m aware that such portrayals are not always accurate.

Don’t get mad, get donuts

Instead of getting more mad or getting even, I got a 25-count box of donut holes at my nearby DD the next morning. Though trademarked under the name “Munchkins,” I’m a little put off by that word and avoid it even in consumer conversation.

Like the DD in Taylor Chapman’s internet-meme-turned-nightmare, my local DD is owned by folks who are from India. Besides the grocery store I frequent to buy my “Chutney Challenged” groceries and my living room, the airport-area DD is the only place on the south side where I’ve met other Indians and Desis. For this reason and because my skinniest child inhales DD’s bacon-egg-cheese wraps and mini potatoes, I often bring the kids there after sleepovers and such.

Most folks have to read my kids’ names, first and last, to get any sense that they are multicultural. I don’t think my kids much care. I don’t think they need to. Multiculturalism need not have a “look,” nor must it be worn on any person’s sleeve. But when I visit their schools, classmates will ask me “Is your son really Indian?” “Is Child’s Name Here’s grandma really from India?” Both answers are yes, and my husband is not the step-dad. Nothing against step-dads. So, anyway, their background must be a topic of class conversation on some level.

Fleeting cultural connection?

But one time, at the DD, the owner noticed two thin, patterned gold bracelets on my right arm as I handed her a $20. These are modest but unique bracelets my husband’s grandmother brought to me after our daughter was born. They’re so small that once I put them on, they rarely come off. “I like your gold,” the woman told me. She gently held my wrist and asked another woman to come and take a look (good thing this was not the first Friday of summer vacation). They conversed. Like a monolingual American, I can’t tell you if it was in Hindi or Urdu. She asked me where I got them. “My grandmother.” I am sure that within that transaction there was another moment of connection. But there were also other customers. We agreed to have a good day.

This was two years ago. Two weeks ago I saw her for the first time not at the DD, but at the Indian grocery store. I tried to catch her eye, but I am not sure that she saw me. I’m not sure it matters either, but that doesn’t mean I won’t be dragging my kids to the the DD again soon, or to the neighborhood taqueria where they can flex their Spanish-language skills. I don’t know exactly how those kids of mine will turn out. Who can know this? But Internet-Video-Race-Baiters I’m sure they’ll never be.

Hopefully this post makes folks hungry for equality and respect, not donuts! But if you are craving carbs, I always get great service and a receipt at the DD by the airport. Cinnamon is my favorite.

Sorry, There’s Been a Lot of Soccer.

Is this the part where I tell you that I’m sorry I’ve not been blogging at all, because I am busy finishing my momoir: “Allergeeze! How to Raise Kids with Emotionally Crippling Food Allergies and a Sense of Humor.”

Because that statement would be only half true.

What is true is that lapses of progress and achievement happen. In fitness and in fiction, I’m experiencing a major slowdown. I have put my Cross Fit membership on “hiatus,” I have eased my aching back into a ten-minute mile, I am mastering the technique to washing one’s hair only four times/week and have bought a new pair of American-made (!) denim to wear four times/week (on the days I wash my hair) to replace the other jeans that I wore into the ground with such devotion that their knees are white and the hems drag behind me by several inches.

But there’s context to all the above, sort of (“I’m a riddle in nine syllables,” kind of thing and this fourth syllable is exhausting), and anyway I am still here. Making chutney and bhel puri, but not much else. 

What I mostly want to say here, however, is a sincere “thanks” to folks who have reached out to read, like, follow and forward this little blog of mine. Several people even said they have read some of my professional, promotional journalism as of late and found it “fun.” Now that is a true compliment. Promotional journalism can be painful sometimes. It’s this creative half-life where you get paid and get benefits to actually write. Paying the bills with one’s talent feels good, after all, and it’s a privilege. But when you write and draw connections and make people sound fabulous in print/online from 9-5, this can compromise the stamina and creativity one needs to turn into a bedtime Baudelaire. Can I write a kid-lit novel between when my kids go to bed and my husband starts to snore? Not sure… 

And yet, enough! Thank you for reading and remarking. Like the very best of small gestures, those few words straight from you or the “like” of a Facebook button can mean a lot. I hope I’ve done something like that for you, recently. If you’re anything like all the other wonderful people I know, you deserve it. 

Doors Opened, Records Revealed

In friendly conversation the other day, someone asked me: “So how do you like your Charles Ramsey now?”

I was like “huh?”

Then he told me one of the Seymour St. heroes has a drug and domestic abuse record.  He had served time, repeated offenses, gradually got back to “okay” terms with his ex-wife, and helped save four people from a domestic abuser/abductor whose depravity is another category of torture that prosecutors, media, moms all struggle to label. Anyway, the details of those earlier years are not Hallmark Hall-of-Fame film material. At all.

I mumbled something about, how, well, you know, nothing he did before devalues the five to ten minutes of neighborliness he and Angel Cordero displayed on Seymour Street Monday night. My convo partner couldn’t disagree, but I nonetheless felt caught in this “gotcha” game where people who rush in to praise – especially to praise the heroes who don’t look like the heroes we think we’ve been waiting for – are punished as the dust settles and background checks come back. Messy.

I still think the guy is a hero, just as I still think the police work left boulder-sized stones unturned, no matter how badly many law-enforcement officials wanted to find Gina De Jesus and Amanda Berry. No matter how hard they worked, no matter how hard police work is. Allegations that neighbors called – cops say they didn’t – will be fully reviewed, I hope.  One story noted that someone close to the abductor’s battered ex-wife, now deceased, encouraged police to investigate Ariel Castro in the girls’ disappearance. It’s another chapter in this tangled and sad and stunning case that begs the question “how?” I really hope that’s not true. And if it is…

…none of it undoes the nice things that anyone writes this week about Mr. Charles Ramsey. I am a mom with a blog, and my credentials begin and end here.

I, for one, will soon get back to writing more about Indian food. And I will test (aka background check) all my recipes. But when I don’t write about cooking, I won’t make it a standard practice to background check someone who clearly did something good before I praise them for doing that good thing. Folks who want to read from the experts, maintain some emotional distance, think more deeply and more critically than me — they have lots of other reading outlets to choose from.

We Don’t Need Another (guy) Hero?

Yet some things about my writing of this last week have troubled me.  Among them, why am I so into this male-hero angle? What about the three women in that house? Delivering and reviving a baby in the dead of night, seeing no sun for years, having the courage to continue to test their captor and his aluminum front door at great, gruesome risk to their lives?

I write less about them, I think, because I want to know as little of their ordeal as possible. After telling her family members not to ask about her captivity, Gina De Jesus must see some of the darkest details of her life splashed on every front page. We still have not seen a photo of Michele Knight, whose physical and emotional losses sound the most devastating, and that’s fine with me. Not being an expert, I nonetheless speculate that healing is easier when people are on a need-to-know basis about your medical, psychological, reproductive trauma.

The mayor of Cleveland has asked the media not to “leak info.” Agreed.

Let’s keep some things between the women and girl who are finding their way home, and their families and counselors. Let’s agree they are heroes, and contribute to the Cleveland Courage Fund if we want to and if we can.

Thanks, Mom

Life happens at the corner mailbox.

Those who can’t send money, or choose not to, well keeping your eyes and ears open is free and it can really work. Here I think of mom, who stopped a domestic abduction at the mailbox on my sleepy suburban corner decades ago. She heard it, she saw it, she asked me to watch the car from the safety of our yard while she dialed 911. The authorities came, the child was separated from the parent, another relative was called in.

Until Tuesday, I had forgotten all about that. Happy Mother’s Day, mom, and thanks.

Open the Door

Monday night I read about Elizabeth Smart’s latest talk at Johns Hopkins University. Just a few hours later news reports were filed from a west Cleveland neighborhood about three girls. They had been missing for 9+ years and found Monday night just miles from their homes and their mint-condition childhood bedrooms. How?

I think “how” is a better question than “why.” But I’m asking optimists and realists and fellow feminists to disagree. Whether it’s a sleepy southside suburb with German, Irish, Polish names or a rundown urban neighborhood where last names rarely start with “Mc” or end in “ski,” girlhood is a risky business. As long as there are girls they will be looked at, yelled to, talked about, boundary-tested and propositioned. “Luck” is being able to walk away with a girlfriend, to ask your mom what that guy was talking about, to have your high school expel the star athlete who was saying things to you that made you feel awful but you didn’t even know why.

But how do things get worse, so very much completely worse, 10 years worse, never-coming-home worse for some women and girls? As much as anyone is thinking about that trio of women and one girl in Cleveland tonight, we’re also talking about Charles Ramsey. The neighbor who likes his McDonald’s and thought he knew his salsa-playing neighbor and is so damned astonished by the story he jumped into as one of the only people in the right place at the right time since that first girl, Michele Knight, was kidnapped.

‘So I opened the door’

America is in love with Mr. Ramsey’s heroism and his urban musings. The McDonald’s, the ribs, calling the reporter “bro.” That hair! But by far the most remarkable thing he said in his first interview is this: “You know, I figured it was a domestic violence dispute. So I opened the door.”

How often do we read about and hear about domestic violence as the very last kind of violence to attract third-party intervention? Anyone who has read about the tragic, tell-tale domestic-violence case of Zenia Haughton knows not even a rifle, a police file, a kicked-in door, slashed tires and a restraining order are enough to convince some folks – experts included – that a domestic violence situation is happening. And needs to be stopped.

So who the hell is this Mr. Ramsey? Just walking into what he thinks is some man-woman kind of dispute and busting down a door?

He’s a hero, he and Angel Cordero. Nosy neighbors. Ramsey heard something, but didn’t put down his lunch. He just took it with him, walked out of his house and onto the porch of 2207 Seymour Ave.

I think it’s been about 48 hours since the stories of Amanda Berry, Michele Knight and Gina De Jesus broke. Mr. Ramsey, a dishwasher, has been famous for a couple days.

What we’ve learned about these women in the last 24 hours is, blessedly, very little. I hope that the news comes slowly. Very. Their families will hear it first, when their daughters and sisters are ready to tell them. The trained investigators will interrogate with caution and compassion.

The most important news, I think, we already know. Four or five times a crack in the secrecy surrounding 2207 Seymour Ave. drew in suspicious neighbors. It brought cops to the side of the house and onto its porch. It got the home’s owner and alleged captor fired from his job. It showed us a little girl standing alone at an attic window. It convinced a neighbor or two that Ariel Castro was “not right.”

Mr. Ramsey says he feels bad that he lived there for a year, knew Ariel Castro and sensed nothing unusual. He shouldn’t. He caught on a lot faster than the professionals who were seeking out Amanda Berry and Gina De Jesus for more than ten years. But not Michele Knight.

Yelling and banging from inside the house, lunchtime fast-food deliveries, rumors of women in the backyard – these are red-flag reminders that we don’t need to be experts or psychics or mad geniuses to know when something is very wrong. Would the Charles Ramseys in our neighborhoods please stand up, take a bow, and promise to never move away?

Two Girls Remembered

Their stories probably could not be more different – the two girls I knew in Cudahy and the three women I don’t know in Cleveland. Different in circumstances, outcome, time and place. But every time I read about girls who come home I think about the two I barely knew who didn’t: Jessica and Anna. I remember stick-straight hair and brown curls, badminton and jump rope. That we shared teachers and a zip code. I’ll never stop wishing I’d been a little kinder. Asked a few more questions. Paid better attention.

I Remember Two Girls

I know two dead girls. I remember them now, as an adult, out of proportion to how I knew them then – one I knew in grade school, one I knew in high school. Neither were girls I knew very well, or for very long.

One talked to me in gym class. Maybe we were badminton partners. She left our school about as quickly as she arrived. I remember an incident with a lacrosse stick, some of her more colorful stories. Feeling nervous every time I talked to her, but in an electric way. Her fast-talking storytelling drew me in in disbelief and fascination. Would she ask me to hang out someday? What would I say? Was she alright? Who did she live with?

I never got any of those answers, and within about one year she was found murdered in Milwaukee. Her death is linked to those of seven other women. She was a runaway, the only minor, the only non-professional whose death is connected to a serial killer who targeted sex workers. He is locked up for beyond-life. Exactly who killed Jessica, maybe it wasn’t him, remains unresolved.

What I remember is that there were pictures of the other women, six or seven of them, in the newspaper some 15 years later. But there was no picture of Jessica. I can tell you she was thin, very thin. Her eyes were maybe not quite as brown as her very straight brown hair. Eyeliner was involved. That’s all I remember. We were not friends. Others from my hometown would have other stories, real stories, about Jessica – including the handful who wore blue tee-shirts in her remembrance. The girl had her own tee-shirt, but the newspaper of record could not even find her photo.

The other girl, a childhood neighbor, had her final hours recounted by the man who murdered her. He is in prison again, too. This time he will stay there, and how he killed this other girl – aged 19 – is something that can be looked up easily elsewhere but not here. This girl left behind a daughter, brothers, a sister and a mom. I remember not seeing her for ten years, then seeing her picture in the paper and reading this story and regretting, immediately, the summer I spent barely acknowledging her as my friend of convenience.

She was killed in Milwaukee the very same week that Elizabeth Smart was found in Utah.

Secrets and Slurs: When kid lit ain’t child’s play

“Mrs. Lennox,” says the young officer in a trembling voice, “you ought to have gone to the hills two weeks ago.”

 “Oh I know I ought,” she cried. “I only stayed to go to that silly dinner party. What a fool I was!”

This passage is one of countless times “The Secret Garden” reminds us that Mary Lennox’s mom was a fun, frivolous, gorgeous, pitiful excuse of a parent. About Daddy Lennox we learn nothing. Being a colonial officer in India seems to get one off the hook for child neglect – which is what was happening to Mary all her life up to that cholera epidemic that left her orphaned. In the nursery. With a snake.

“This is sad,” my daughter interrupts. I promise her that the saddest bits of the book would soon be over. If she was too sad or too bored, I say, we can stop.

She appears to be the opposite. Take the aforementioned exchange between Mrs. Lenox and the young officer.

“What do they mean ‘go to the hills?’” daughter asks.

I explain to her that the hills are “hill stations,” where the climate cools as the elevation soars, and where mosquitoes and attendant diseases fear to tread. I remind her of our own trip to the hills, 28 hours in Kodaikanal in Tamil Nadu State, elevation 2,200+ meters.

A brush with Kodaikanal wild life.

Family Tourism & Colonialism

Turns out, Mrs. Lennox really did miss out. Kodaikanal is overrun with tourists and natural beauty, verdant commercialism and glorious displays of green (the forests) and grey (the mists). Monkeys, too. The streets are narrow and steep, rows of veg restaurants and chocolatiers and ice cream counters and craftspeople making some of the most beautiful things I saw that entire trip. Life there is cooler. Saris are topped with knit caps, shawls and sweaters.

Nature’s bounty served up roadside in Kodaikanal.

Scenery that day included the Kodaikanal International School – and here is where reading “The Secret Garden” became this unexpected hybrid of history lesson and trivia showdown. Not far from Kodai’s Tibetan Market are the grounds of the International School. Just walking past the iron gate and peering into the brick buildings and emerald grounds of the school leaves the impression that you’re brushing up against academic opulence and exellence, crossed with the visual appeal of Hogwarts.

A photo from the Kodaikanal International School website.

I asked my uncle about the school. “Is it expensive? Is it good?” He answers promptly and positively to both. Back in the States, I looked up more information on the school. It was built in the early 20th century to accommodate the children of missionaries who could not weather the heat and illness of lower-elevation India. Later, in the 1970s, the Kodaikanal International School became India’s first International Baccalaureate-certified school.

So it was a great way to connect Mrs. Lennox’s vague comment “Oh the hills!” to our sight-seeing in Kodai.

But any reader understands that Colonial literature – even the children’s variety – can’t keep its worst secrets for long.

Soon my daughter is asking more questions.

“Why didn’t Mary live with her ayah’s family in India?”

“Why didn’t Mary stay in India because she already spoke Hindi, probably, so she would do okay in school there?”

“Why didn’t an Indian family adopt her?”

All of the above were harder to explain – even to a well-traveled bilingual kid. I tried it briefly and vaguely, getting across the notion that countries don’t colonize in order to learn and to cultivate the cultures of another. We talked about “the sun never sets on the British Empire,” about why English schoolchildren in India were educated in English – not Hindi, about how this explains the prevalence of the English language in India today. About why an ayah could never adopt an English girl in 1910. About why ayahs and servants did not have names in books like “The Secret Garden.”

Frances Hodgson Burnett: Not a Little Princess

Then I dug around a bit about Frances Hodgson Burnett – doing some unofficial, hodge-podgey research across a few sites. What was she like, writing about English girls rescued from cholera, despondent but debonair uncles and Sara Crewe, the poor little rich girl of “The Little Princess?” If I remember right, there were ties to Indian diamond mines and colonial opulence in that novel, too. And I had loved it.

Well, Frances Hodgson Burnett struck it rich herself, born into privilege in Manchester as she was. She lost some of the family wealth as a very young child with a suddenly widowed mother and many siblings. As a teenager she and the family emigrate to the U.S. on the invitation of a brother who owns a dry goods store in Knoxville. But they arrive in Knoxville in 1865 – the end of the Civil War. From Manchester to Knoxville, anyone who made any money on American cotton economy isn’t making it any more.

Frances Hodgson Burnett in another photo I didn’t take.

A teenager still, Burnett starts writing more than she ever had before. In a cabin she shares with family she churns out stories and novels so prodigiously that within a few years the 19-year-old is supporting her family. American dreaming, indeed.

Lots of other things happen to her. Suitors, marriages, stage adaptations, best sellers, two years in Paris with her doctor husband, the loss of her teenaged son to tuberculosis. A divorce and disastrous remarriage to an actor who is ten years younger.

None of these things are things I tell my daughter. She seems unperturbed after my first bumbling attempt at “Colonialism 101 for First Graders.” By chapter three it is all about the moors. What do they look like? What is heather? Are they still there?

I think about switching to a much-abridged version of “Wuthering Heights” by way of explanation. I don’t. Heathcliff is such an asshole sometimes. Maybe in middle school we can talk about the dangers of falling in love on the English moors. For now, we look up pictures of them on the Internet.

 From Frances to Francine Nolan

But wait! There’s more. Six months ago I bought my third copy of “A Tree Grows in Brooklyn.” My mom bought me my first when I was 11 or so. Maybe ten. I read it every summer after that. Francie! If you know her, you love her. The way she studied and odd-jobbed herself across Williamsburg and adored her drunk of a dad and completely understood her mom loved her, but not nearly as much as she loved Francie’s younger brother. She took it all in and wondered and worried and wrote. She boards the Wolverine train and goes to college.

But the book is gritty. It’s about being poor and Irish and Catholic and being welcomed or pitied or hated for all of it, while holding on/shaking off  the perverse privilege of judging others who are more poor than you, or Jewish or Italian. Remember the unwed Italian girl and her steady diet of non-Italian food? Out pops a positively German-Irish-looking baby and the whole family is relieved.

I thought about not giving that book and its turn of the century biases and slurs to my 11-year-old. Or not reading, ever, “The Little Princess” to my daughter. Maybe they won’t ever want to read either. This seems highly likely.

Secrets in Books: Share Them

But secrets belong in gardens, slurs belong on bookshelves, and of course they need to be explored and weeded out and put in their proper place. America just celebrated Jackie Robinson Day. We took the kids to see a play and movie based on 42’s life. In both instances, words were not minced. A boy in the row behind us whispers: “Is it okay to say the n-word like that?”

Jackie Robinson, no. 42.

At intermission of the play “Jackie and Me,” playgoers got to meet and to talk with a man who played for the Negro League Chicago American Giants and nearly made it to the MLB Chicago Cubs in 1955, before injury ended his pitching career when he was still a teenager. My eldest could not believe this. He was stunned, his cheeks deepened red, when he asked Dennis Bose Biddle: “Did you know Jackie Robinson?”

“Yes, he opened the door for me. I asked him if he ever felt like quitting. ‘Every Day,’ is what he told me. But he stayed on.”

So stay the books. And I’ve added to the collection between my childhood and my kids.’ Certainly, important titles remain missing. Suggestions are welcome.

“A Young People’s History of the United States.” “A Tree Grows in Brooklyn.” “Living Up the Street.” “The Little Princess.” “The Little Prince.” “Jackie and Me.” “The Diary of Anne Frank.” “To Kill a Mockingbird.” “Going to Meet the Man.”

Some are for now and some are for later. Some entertain and some inform. Most do both. Some make you feel like you’d be a hero in the French Resistance, certain you’d be an abolitionist among southerners, a Freedom Rider among fear-mongerers. The best books, I think, make you really uncomfortable when they make you ask of yourself: “But really, would I really be any of those things? Living then with the raw material I am today, would I have had the courage?”

All these books should be shared. I can’t tell my kids they have to read them. But the books will be there. Just in case. In the meantime, at bedtime, my daughter trades in “The Secret Garden” for “The Diary of  Wimpy Kid.” This will take time.

Don’t Judge a Book by its Title

Two nights ago my daughter asked: “Mom, what did you like to read when you were a kid?”

“’A Tree Grows in Brooklyn,’ ‘The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe,’ ‘To Kill a Mockingbird,’ ‘The Diary of Anne Frank,’ ‘Whitley Strieber’s Communion,’ ‘The Secret Garden,’” I spat out the titles so fast, like I had been waiting all my long and lonely mom years for just such a question.

And I have been!

My daughter tsk’d and shook her short-sheared head at that last title: “The Secret Garden.” It’s her auto-reply to everything I say or suggest that reinforces stereotypes of 21^st-century American girlhood. But I say these things by accident or misunderstanding, I tell you.

‘Girl Talk’ 

Review these examples from recent conversation.

Me: “Want to wear your sweat pants with a draw-string waist for Easter Service?”

Daughter: Tsk.

Me: “What about a black scoop-neck tee-shirt for the spring-theme recital at school?” Daughter: Tsk.

Me: “Want me to pack your lunch in a white paper bag with glitter on it, or a brown paper bag that has been through three lunches and was squished into your backpack’s moldy micro-compartment for three weeks?”

Daughter: “White is for girls! Brown-bag it!”

Gardens? Secrets? Gross!

So it was with my list of go-to books, especially that last one. “The Secret Garden.” Gardens and secrets? Please, you might as well have called it “Tea Time & Glitter Tampons: An Afternoon at the Mall with Barbie.” That’s how appealing a book about gardens and secrets is to my daughter.

But if you have read “The Secret Garden,” you know there’s more to it than this Edwardian manor-moored child Mary Lenox, rose bushes and colonial gossip.

Don’t mind the glare. My kids are my photography staff.

“Don’t judge a book by it’s title,” I tell my daughter. “It’s about forgotten children, a boy who talks to animals, snakes in the nursery. And it all starts in India!”

“Snakes in the nursery” did pique her interest, as did the lost child and my assurance that the boy who talks to animals has no unicorns in his care. A unicorn on the moors would have been a true credibility blow for this book, in my daughter’s eyes.

Our last bookshelf. Each of the kids has one, too.

By the time we wrap this literary pep-talk it’s time for stories and bed. I walk to the dining-room bookshelf that has been painstakingly culled and downsized from two large shelves of books into one shelf containing only our “best of” volumes. Something that never happens to me happens right then: I find the book exactly where I thought I had placed it one year or two ago. It’s a showy blue and gold hardcover with gold-edged pages and a satin-ribbon bookmark that was gifted to me by my godmother when I was eight or nine. I think she bought it at Gimbel’s in Packard Plaza – talk about a flashback. I plan to always keep it.

This night, I planned to read it.

“When Mary Lennox was sent to Misselthwaite Manor to live with her uncle…”

 

Chutney for Children

The day after Code Red, I co-presented with my daughter on the subject of “India.” I had hoped for one hour twice weekly until the end of the school year to address the country fully and properly. I know about .00018 percent of the total story behind India, and hours would be needed to extract all that info for the younger generation. The teacher gave me 45 minutes.

I prepped a special batch of chutney for the children, using 1.5 chilies instead of the usual 3-4. I brought some chips. I brought “Tinkle,” which my kids devoured when they were abroad. Many copies came home in their carry-on.

The presentation began immediately after lunch, so one can imagine things were a little crazy. I quickly realized my Powerpoint “India: A small report on a giant culture,” would have to be shelved in favor of a Q&A-style format. NO, I would not be comparing literacy rates of boys and girls in India and reminding my daughter’s class how lucky they were to be receiving a free, high-quality public education that is mandatory and does not discriminate.

Despite a major improvement in literacy rates in India over the past decade, the number of children who are not in school remains high.  Gender disparities in education persist with far more girls than boys failing to complete primary school.

The national literacy rate of girls over seven years is 54% against 75% for boys.  In the Northern Hindi-speaking states of India, girls literacy rates are particularly low, ranging between 33 – 50%.

–UNICEF, Girl Star Project

Instead, my daughter and I began to share anecdotes about our time in India – sprinkled with a few random facts. The best question came in response to a story about monkey aggression on Elephanta Island. Within our first few moments there, just where you set off to mount the dozens of wide shallow steps to the caves, a monkey jumped down in my front of my astonished second son. She grazed his chest lightly with her paw as she landed in front of him. We all were stunned, him especially. He dropped his defenses. His muscles slackened. The monkey struck again, grabbing his lemonade and jumping back into her green canopy. She took greedy pulls of lemonade in the trees. She did not even look at us. This was strictly a business decision on her part.

After our classroom presentation was over, a little girl came up to me. She looked worried. “How did your son get his lemonade back?”

Since there’s no fooling smart young kids, especially the day after a Code Red, I took the honest approach: “When a monkey takes your lemonade, you don’t get it back. She drank it all.”

After that we began a taste test. Small steel dishes were places at every table. The teachers scooped out banana and pita chips onto sheets of paper towel. The kids looked wary of the pulpy emerald mixture. I heard some “what is that?” But they got down to business ASAP.

At a couple tables, the chutney went fast. Refills were requested. I was surprised. Then I wasn’t. “This is nasty!” pronounced one girl. I appreciated that she was able to tell me to my face, with a smile. No backstabbing about it.

“Mom-lecture mode” was activated.

“I can understand that you might not like how chutney tastes. It’s a very different taste, and some of my kids don’t like it, either. But a word like ‘nasty’ is not the nicest way to tell someone you don’t like their cooking. What’s another way to let me know what you think of the chutney?”

The student was unperturbed. This was a friendly conversation. We were all learners in that room.

“Um. I don’t like this?”

“Yes, that sounds a lot nicer than ‘nasty.'”

We parted as friends. She liked the pita chips and gave me a parting “thank you” hug.

I hoped to swipe a few calories of chutney myself, but by the end of our 45-minute whirlwind tour of India … the chips were gone. I vowed to make myself a grilled-cheese and chutney sandwich with Granny Smith apples just as soon as I could. I packed up the Tinkles and the chutney, stashed our roll-up map of India back in the brown paper bag. I walked out of the school, handing in my visitor’s badge on the way out. The door thudded shut behind me.

Code Red, she said

Nope, I don’t think it’s any coincidence whatsoever that the same week we learn the details of Adam Lanza’s bedroom arsenal, teachers organized a practice “Code Red” drill in my children’s K-5 school.

It’s a damned reminder – we needed more? – that even as the U.S. Congress backs away, quickly and quietly, from bans on assault-weapons and high-capacity magazines, we can’t let them.

My daughter talked about the Code Red casually, at first.

“Mom, we had one at school today.”

“One what?” I ask.

“One Code Red Drill.”

I know what this is, but I play it off like I don’t. I want to hear her most authentic description of what this means, how a Code Red unfolds.

“It’s where we practice being safe if a robber or another kind of bad person comes into our school.”

How sweet and age-appropriate that she thinks one of the worst things that could happen to her school is a “robber.” How very Brothers Grimm of her. How wrong.

I ask her what they do, how they do it. She says they hide in the classroom and lock the door. Teachers remind the kids – in two languages – to be quiet. Then they wait. I think, for my daughter, this is the hardest part.

“Mom, me and my teachers were scared because upstairs,” she pauses here for a moment; she is a verbal child: “We heard people moving.”

I don’t think her teachers were scared. They knew this was practice. But the need to identify must be strong in these situations, especially when you’re young and you’re not with your family and somewhere in the back of your mind you know, as my daughter does, that robbers are not a child’s worst nightmare. She continues to relay the events in her own words.

“Yeah, and somebody, they tried our doorknob. They were checking. But they shouldn’t have done that. Nobody should be walking around during a Code Red.”

“Probably,” I say, “they were just making sure everybody followed all the Code Red safety rules. In a practice Code Red, you have to walk around and make sure all those important safety rules are being followed.”

“But what if it was real, mom?”

I glance in the rear-view window. The boys are in their usual bookworm pose, bent over paperbacks. But her eyes are round and brown, focused on me, waiting for an answer.

“It wasn’t real, Child. These things barely happen. Once every 20 years, maybe. And people, like your teachers, work very hard to keep things as safe as possible.”

I tell her that we practiced fire drills and tornado drills every year of my K-12 life. I never saw either one of them. I do not tell her there have been 31 school shootings in America since 1999.

Things get quiet in the middle row of my minivan. I’m lost in my head. I’ve said too much, she knows too much, I’m terrified, I blew this, my heart’s beating faster, I’m confused. Mostly I’m sad. A second later, it’s clear that my daughter, at least, remains thoughtful and on topic.

“Well mom, I don’t think anyone would do that to our school, because I think people know public schools are very important.”

You know that I did not tell her Sandy Hook Elementary was a public school. That in our home state of Wisconsin, public schools have been defunded to the point of poverty. I would never tell her the nasty, racist, grossly ignorant and inaccurate things people write about me – or anyone in my town – when we write a pro-public school op-ed.

“Right,” and this time my smile is real. “Lots of people know how important all our schools are. But you know that public schools are my favorite.”

In Sandy Hook there was an art teacher, a music room, a gym teacher, classroom teachers and, we know, an incredibly brave, bold and brilliant, fast thinking principal in the building that day. I do not know know what the child to teacher ratio in their school was that day. But it’s clear to us that every adult in that school was an absolute hero, that they all came together to save every single life they could. That they paid with their own lives – six of them.

Sandy Hook sounds like a well-funded public school. Thank God. Every adult in the building was needed that day. Every day. But especially on Dec. 14, 2012.

My kids’ school is not a well-funded school. But it’s vibrant and multicultural and successful. My three kids have never received formal music instruction there. The full-time art teacher was budget-cutted out two years ago. Language, math and writing emphases, and a reputation for one of the strongest and most stable teacher corps in our area are enough to keep us there. Maybe we can find room for music elsewhere in their lives.

My kids’ public school is very important to me. So is gun control. So are the Second Amendment and all the other amendments – some more than others. But 1,000+ rounds in a boy’s bedroom, an arsenal in his Honda Civic, 20 children and six teachers dead, armed guards in every school when states like mine tell us we can’t afford to keep our teachers? That math is not fuzzy, it is devastating.

What we do in the 512: Reunion weekend winds down

Things I’ve learned in the last 48 hours:

• I can still handle hill repeats.
• I still need my girlfriends.
• Eating chaat and Gujarati has changed how I eat all food, forever, everywhere.
• Making ragda pattice once does not make me any kind of expert on Indian cooking.
• I might be able to convince 3-4 of my vacation ladies to order up a tiny pre-brunch tattoo early-Sunday morning.
• I wear my grandma’s clothes. I look incredible.

Ragda pattice panic!

We’ve enjoyed a whirlwind weekend in Austin. Freezing and sweating and slipping off mossy rocks in Barton Springs. Eating fried pickles at the Lodge on Lamar Ave., dancing at nite clubs on Sixth St. and pretending we’re only just old enough to have been the other dancers’ former nannies — not their current moms. It helps. So does dim lighting. And dancing in front of neon, wall-sized American flags.

We exchanged clothes and confidences. I made ragda pattice; they made huevos rancheros. I need these women in my life: strong relationships, strong minds, strong bodies. These sustain me.

I did not just meet them, but this is crazy. These women saw me through three kids, marriage and undergrad. And they still want to hang out with me.

As for the ragda pattice that I made on Friday night, they were proof it takes a village to feed a village and that an “Indian cooking” blog does not a chaat chef make. After packing and prepping in painstaking fashion for a ragda pattice throwdown, I committed some major tactical errors.

1. Shopping for provisions at a store that carries eight kinds of chutney but not tamarind chutney. Trying to buy ginger-garlic paste at that same store. Central Market, I love you but I’m talking to you. “Thanks” to the Central Market clerks who directed us to Taj Grocer’s.

Nervous about Friday’s cooking commitment, I spent the day in sweat pants and, briefly, in Taj Grocer’s on Lamar Blvd.

Even with the right groceries, errors persisted. These included too much wine during food prep; getting scared of the pressure cooker; not enough chilies; renting a vacation home with knives duller than “American Idol: Season 2013”; forgetting to add the tamarind paste that had been in my carry-on through two flights. Thank gawdness I made fresh mint-coriander chutney and raita. Nobody at the table knew the paste was missing but me. Right, Sharifah?

Edit massages the kale. I compress the cucumber.

Chaat meets BBQ: A Night at Salt Lick

Night two we took things in a totally different direction. After considerable controversy and debate we made the 45-minute drive to Driftwood, Texas for dinner at Salt Lick Barbecue. Not even the hostess’ warning of a two-hour wait could keep us serious-minded carnivores in Austin for local BBQ. The two-hour wait was more like one, the entire UCLA track & field team filed out of the restaurant — laughing and clutching leftovers — as we approached the Driftwood Vineyards that neighbor Salt Lick BBQ. Good sign, non? We had a magical time talking about college, our next college reunion, sampling local wine. 

Sitting, finally, at the picnic-style tables, we were treated to brisket, chicken and ribs. Plates of pickles and onions, a simple and slightly orange potato salad — like mashed potatoes served lukewarm and prepped with a seasoning that’s too subtle to identify but too delicious to be denied — and mayonnaise-free cole slaw whose starring ingredient is sautéed sesame seeds, and fluffy, sesame studded loaves of white bread accented the meal.

We stopped talking, but it’s not like we were gross about it. Napkins were used. A couple gals tried forks and knives. Someone said “please” before I passed them the spicy BBQ sauce.

Me, I made open-faced sandwiches: smearing the bread with spicy BBQ sauce, layering a slice of charred chicken and snappy garlic pickle atop the bread, then completing my edible creation with a sprinkling of cole slaw. Sometimes I used the doughy bread to swipe a lump of potato salad or sop up BBQ sauce. It was like Texas-style poori, and the entire experience reminded me of how fourteen years of Indian food has changed the way I eat. Not just what I eat, but the ways in which I take perfectly American ingredients and layer, alternate, sauce and sprinkle them together in ways that replicate the rich, fresh bursts of garnish that make chaat cuisine so beautiful to look at and so memorable to eat.

Texas-style poori.

I prefer my food richly textured, and I blame the crispy, salty, golden crunch of sev noodles for this. I marveled at how beautiful they looked on a salad Friday night, their delicate golden curls flecked atop green, citrus-rubbed kale leaves. Who knew sev and kale could be so good together? Who knew a food that I can barely make has nonetheless fundamentally changed how I eat? Christmas Eve 2012 was the first time I tried a jalapeno in my pho, and I hold our November sojourn to India mostly responsible, and I’m grateful.

 Tattoo time?

I can’t promise any group ink tomorrow. But I’m certain that if the Sola neighborhood tattoo parlor had been open at 1:30 Sunday morning, a few of the college-reunion ladies would be dabbing fresh <<414>> ink with antibiotic ointment right now. As things stand at 4:08 a.m. local time, not one of us has a calf tattoo and Mikey the guy with the Depeche Mode sleeve says we should try a place on First St. at 10 a.m. tomorrow.

I wear my grandma’s clothes; I look incredible.

“Incredible” might be overstating it. Plus my new dress originated at Dallas’ Orchid Shop so, really, it could not have belonged to my late, never-met-her grandmother. Still, the dress is a 1962 vintage, was cheap and tailored nicely for a short person with narrow shoulders and is an excellent green — not as seafoamy as a shamrock shake, nor as forest-hued as kale. I like it. Macklemore ain’t the only one poppin’ tags with swagger.

Thanks to Austin, Edit, Jennifer, Jessica, Nicole, Sharifah and Megan-from-England for making this a wonderful, not-quite-over weekend. Shout out to my MIL for watching kids and my husband for finishing the weekend with them and helping me through a flight snafu. To Connie, me and Edit say “thanks.” Couldn’t have done the 5-1-2 without you!

America the beautiful & tasteless.