Small

Apple picking with my wife on a brilliant fall day, christening my neighbor’s wood burning oven with pizza one week and a full Sunday dinner the next, clamming on the mud flats of midcoast Maine as temperatures continue to fall, and cobbling leftovers together to make meals at other times. And a trip across a swath of southeast Asia, eating from food stalls in Singapore and private dining rooms in Jakarta. And all of this amid kind, welcoming people who defy our poisonous president’s attempts to vilify people and divide us from our neighbors.

I will continue to defy his pathology of greed and deceit, especially as I witness some of the extraordinary work done by inventors and scientists, doctors and policy makers, poets and musicians, all motivated to make the world, or just our community, a better place. And it's necessary to keep in mind that so many of these efforts, gestures, are small. A non-profit board meeting yesterday and someone brings cookies which he makes every time we get together. The hosts of our regular poker party make snacks that meet the mood of the times, ghoulish Halloween treats included.

We need presidents and prime ministers who make treaties that improve the lives of people, recalibrate our energy consumption habits, and promote peace. Equally important are the steps you and I make to comfort a friend, help a neighbor, share with our family. Our being, our strength, is nourished by this. Always

Trauma and taxes

But for the massive brain trauma my father suffered due to land mine shrapnel removing a piece of his brain and paralyzing half of his body back in November 1951, he would have been ninety-seven this week. He was barely a statistic, a blip on the documentation of an already-forgotten war, but the injuries he received as a young twenty-four year old who had just graduated from college and was hoping to go to medical school reframed the structure and trajectory of his remaining fifty-four years when, after decades of anti-convulsant drugs and a row of pills he took daily, and a weakened body wracked by atrophy and compensation, he succumbed to sepsis, which quickly moved through his body and ended his remarkable and tragic life, in which he met and married my mom, had their first two boys – honeymoon babies – Francis and Howard, who died after a premature birth, went on to have eight more children, all of whom are alive and well, went to law school and became a lawyer for the marginalized and disenfranchised, all the while living with a debilitating war injury to which many others would have succumbed, either physically or mentally.

And I share this personal information because, as wars rage around the world and our tax dollars support various sides and causes, one of the first things we do is forget that every single person involved in a war, whether on your side or not, carries with them generational trauma that affects an enormous number of people. Here we are, seventy-five years after one land mine exploded and injured my father, and I and my siblings still live with his scarred legacy of volatile mood swings, erratic emotions, and very little mental capacity for reflection and contemplation. And remember, he was just one young officer on patrol in Yanggu Province. What happens to the people of this current war in Gaza whose whole world is destroyed in front of them? When we care about people, empathize as fellow humans who live and grow in a community of friends and family, we remember their smiles, their passions and dreams, the things that make them human. But, when foreign policy decisions and irreparable differences between governments and states turn these people, who probably celebrate their children’s birthdays just as we do, into enemies, none of those human attributes and frailties matter. Instead, filtered through language and images that dehumanize the side that is on the receiving end of America’s bombs and bullets and logistics and supplies, we call an entire people fundamentalists, extremists or terrorists, forgetting that until bombs dropped on them, they were boys and girls who played with imaginary friends and laughed and played together.

Every victim of Hamas’s attacks on Israel last year has been remembered for what they brought to this life – the joy and hope of a generation. They were school kids and grandparents, fathers and university students, young lovers and doctors, and all of them are dead. The loss of each person should be mourned and their lives remembered. But how is it that in these United States it is hard to find a story of a child in Gaza who was killed by a bomb or the weight of a concrete building collapsing on her, and learn of her humanity, her dreams, her hopes? And why is it that if I, as a US taxpayer, disagree with how my government is allocating its resources and which states it supports, I run the risk of being labeled antisemitic? Is it not possible to disagree with a state’s actions and policies and activities and not hate, demonize, or dehumanize the citizens and civilians of that state? Throughout my life I have protested and criticized my government, and still I call myself a deeply patriotic American who loves his country. I should be able to criticize what our government is doing in Israel in the same way – argue about what our tax dollars are supporting, and not be labeled a lover of terrorists, or an anti-Semite. And I am not passing myself off as a Middle East expert, but I have a right and obligation as a concerned US citizen to engage in discussion about what we support with our taxes. And it feels like the lobby that argues on behalf of US support for sending weapons to Israel is as focused as the NRA – it brooks no dissent and has an influence that goes well beyond what it should.

I support Israel’s right to defend itself, and if the US continues to support Israel’s Iron Dome defense network, I will gladly see my tax dollars flowing in that direction. But Israel is no longer merely defending itself, and its continuous bombardment and destruction of Gaza in the past year has now spread to Lebanon and beyond. In one year, Israel has killed nearly fifty thousand Palestinians – which is as many deaths as the US suffered during the entire Vietnam War, and if I raise my voice in opposition to this, someone may very well reduce it to a pat slogan and say that I hate Jews. No, I resist that label because I don’t hate Jews or want to see the destruction of Israel, but I also do not want my tax dollars paying for weapons that kill civilians, and the overwhelming majority of people killed in Palestine are civilians – the very moms and dads and kids and grandparents who are the hope of the next generation. I wrote about my father because I wanted to point out how much trauma one person suffers over the life of an injury. What happens to the Palestinian people, who are facing a relentless orchestrated effort to destroy them? What will happen to their trauma and how will it ever heal?

For the past year, the US has paid for and provided an endless supply of bombs and bullets being used by Israel to annihilate the Palestinians living in Gaza, and one small thing Americans can do is allow for a space where we can discuss this, and be able to criticize our government – or Israel’s – and not be accused of hating Israelis or Jews. We have a right and obligation to argue about our taxes and foreign policy – it’s about as American as buying a bagel in New York or dipping a warm piece of torn bread into an olive oil-and-garlic-laden hummus. Peace.

Home life

I walked with my daughter after dinner earlier this evening and we turned back because the rain started falling hard and we didn’t feel like getting wet, even though it was an April shower rather than cold March sleet. Yesterday we celebrated Easter, and with everyone home for the past month it was nice to break out the good china for dinner. A few weeks ago I decided to get a lot of starts going for my garden, including herbs like parsley and holy basil, which are slow to germinate and sometimes forgotten until it’s too late to plant them. Being home all the time, it’s easy to make sure they stay sufficiently moist and warm and it’s nice to see that everything is coming along fine. Because the ground is still quite soggy I also started beets and mustard greens in flats, which I usually direct seed. One of the reasons I like starting spring plants like beets indoors is that when I transplant them I can ensure that there’s some regularity to the spacing, which doesn’t always happen when I start them in the ground. It often rains while the seeds are still germinating, and half the seeds end up pooling in a six inch square space while the rest of the row is staggered with one plant every foot or two.
I’ve been happy to read that yeast is in such demand these days that it is selling out in stores around the country, and when I look at our own kitchen I’m not surprised. My youngest daughter loves to bake and it seems like she’s in the kitchen most nights after dinner, wondering what she can make. Sourdough breads are experiencing a home renaissance, too, and as a dedicated sourdough baker I am so happy that people everywhere are beginning to taste how good a loaf of home baked sourdough is, and that yeast shortages aren’t a cause for concern! Hopefully it’s more than a Covid fad and more people begin to bake their bread regularly. I have never been exact with timing or measurements when I make bread and as a result I’ve had my fair share of loaves that have failed to some degree, but I’m okay with that because I bake through the ups and downs of work and parenting and schedules that pull me from the kitchen, and my indifference to most schedules and rules for kneading and rising has shown me that dough has a very wide range of tolerances. The gold standard for a good sourdough loaf these days seems to be those big-holed, high hydration loaves that taste great and look beautiful on social media, but in my many years of baking I’ve never aimed for them. Maybe I don’t have the patience for weighing my water or taking notes, but I also like a more uniform crumb so when I make sandwiches the butter and honey and mustard and melted cheese doesn’t fall through the holes. Pragmatic failure, perhaps.
After St. Patrick’s Day my son and I made a big batch of sauerkraut and this weekend, a month since it began percolating on the kitchen counter, I put a half gallon or so into a smaller container in the fridge, and put the remainder into a cool, dark corner in the garage. With a diagnosis earlier this year of high blood pressure, I have significantly reduced my salt intake, much of which comes from fermented foods, and this batch of kraut is the first since I’ve started taking medication, so in response to it I’m rinsing all the kraut off before I eat it; I think a significant amount of the salt remains in the brine I dredge the sauerkraut from, and by further rinsing it I hope that my blood pressure remains in a healthy range. If not, it may be the end of fermented foods for me, which would be sad because I have a big crock of Korean doenjang fermenting for more than a year on the back porch, and an even larger crock of gochujang right next to it.
We go through phases of eating certain things and when my wife recently found an old pack of sprouting seeds I began watering them, and am happy to see that long-expired seed still has good viability. The sprouts will be ready in another day or two and after a few batches we’ll get sick of eating them and won’t make another batch for a year or two. As long as we don’t lose the strainer lid, we’re good to go whenever the mood strikes us. Eat well, stay well!

Brown rice and weeds

This is the place to begin.  A long season of change tempered by the steady influence of brown rice and weeds, oat groats, and sourdough bread. 

I left Minnesota with my family and moved to Middlebury, Vermont in October 2012, and we've spent the past six months settling into a new community, new schools, a new job, and everything else.  And now it's almost spring.

When I walk with my daughter in the evenings after the dishes have been washed I smell the still-cold air against the birthing earth, warm with rot and new growth, piles of crust and slips of green, always.  

Birthdays, Thanksgiving, Christmas, Lent, Easter; we've now celebrated these seasons among old friends, family with whom we haven't shared holidays in many years, and new friends who have been kind, generous, and welcoming.  I helped my sister make Thanksgiving dinner for thirty-five or so in Buffalo and we shared the Christmas season with my wife's siblings, parents, cousins, aunts and uncles, and other relatives in Montreal, eating great Vietnamese food and a few of our traditional Christmas cookies.  It's good to be here.

I've eaten oat groats for breakfast since I've been in Vermont, having switched to oatmeal more than a year ago after many, many years of coffee and doughnuts in the morning.  Lunch is typically brown rice and some leafy green -- weeds, as far as my kids are concerned, and I don't know if it's necessary to differentiate the chards from the kohls; what I notice is green life and energy as I walk back to work. 

And then there's everything else that we prepare and eat, buy and make.  Everything still is our food, and we eat at our table every night, candles lit and some form of grace said or recited.  On weekends there is wine, rare on a weekday unless a special meal is served.  Nuts and dried fruit find their way to the table most evenings, and when mangoes are ripe I peel one for my youngest.  We press our children to make desserts themselves, telling them that their effort is all that will produce a sweet on the table.  And still we talk, sit at the table and let conversations turn and grow into this tendril or that, as I hope this blog continues to do.