Food, Family and Memory

My introduction to oysters came when I lived in Boston in college, and had a roommate (let’s call her “Ellen”) who was one of the most unattractive specimens of humanity I have encountered in my years on earth. I am not referring to her physical appearance; I’m not that shallow.

Her significant deficits had mostly to do with manners, and with the fact that she kept a small refrigerator in our extremely small dorm room, from which she regularly withdrew and inhaled various edibles ranging from liverwurst and cream cheese sandwiches to ice cream. She often consumed these items in her bed, never offered to share, and frankly made such a display of dripping, chomping barbarousness that any appetite I might have had was crushed. 

After decades of biting into and spitting out mouthfuls of mealy mushy flavorless fuzzy fruit sold as ‘prime peaches’, suddenly this year the peach crop is reminding me of the juicy beauties I enjoyed 40 years ago. Almost certainly it’s because I’ve been getting my peaches at local farmer’s markets from growers who actually let the fruit ripen on the tree before hauling them off for sale.

This wondrous ‘back to the future’ phenomenon has spurred me to forego dinner on many a night for big bowls of sliced peaches lightly dusted with brown sugar and tossed with sour cream, a childhood summer treat I thought I’d never again experience. In my enthusiasm to recapture a fond memory, I have several times purchased many more peaches than one person could possibly consume.

The first time my sister cooked for me, we were both in our 20s and living together in my 500 square foot studio apartment on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. It was the day I had quit my job working in book publicity and had decided to go back to freelance film production work. My sister, Alexandra, having just finished up her first transfer semester at the Fashion Institute of Technology, wanted to make us a home-cooked meal to celebrate our big life changes. She was already cooking by the time I arrived at our apartment that evening. I smelled pasta boiling and lots of lemon and basil. I started over towards the blender to take a sniff, but she shooed me away. “It’s almost done. Go and sit down.”

Two times a week I have to find stuff to do for several hours in Old Town Pasadena. This is a part of Pasadena that is, well, the oldest.  If you can imagine any part of California old, this is it. Many of the ‘old money’ resides here and the architecture reflects the Spanish influence tinged with Victorian and Craftsman flavor. The reason I go is because my daughter Hannah is a competitive cheerleader. Not the kind connected with a school. She’s too young for that. The kind from Bring It On. The kind you see on ESPN. My little Westside dolly is the one they throw up in the air. The one who brings her leg back to touch her head while being hoisted aloft.  Frankly, I’d puke if I ever had the guts to get up there, but she’s tough and fearless.

If you attend one of these competitions, which I’ve done for many seasons now, you hear sped up hip-hop for hours on end. I actually like hip hop to some degree, but after hours of it, I want to kill myself. This past season, her team; Explosion, had a sixties theme, so their music was a mash up of Sam and Dave, Buffalo Springfield, The Beatles, The Monkees, Steppenwolf etc. It was fabulous and they took first place nine times out of the eleven times they competed. Obviously, not because of the music, but because they ‘stuck it’ every time.