Worst float ever, though

I had a minor professional disappointment last week, something I'd planned on not panning out. Not important, really. Ask Huey. But when I was lamenting this setback with Sis, she told me this excellent story about a similar conversation she'd had with our dad, a great little bead of hilarity and quintessential Dad Advice wrapped in black-humored hindsight.

Until very recently, Sis had not been employed by The Man, in a corporate environment, for some 14 months--the first half of that deliberate, the latter half increasingly, desperately not. Because they were both home all day, she found herself with many opportunities to chitty-chat with Dad on the phone, such that he was quite invested in her job search. I'm envious of these circumstances now--not the unemployment, duh, but of their regular, if random, conversations. Of how keyed in he was to her career trajectory, because I doubt my dad was ever really sure just what it is that I do for a living. "Write computer books" was about as close as he got to the truth. I do remember that when I went into management, I called to tell him the news. When I said I'd been promoted to manager, he exclaimed with pride--and extreme astonishment--"For all of NerdCo?!?" I can't describe how that irked and tickled me both: that my dad somehow thought I'd been plucked from obscurity to lead, like, 36,000 people for a multi-billion-dollar corporation, because, CATCH UP, DAD...but also that he sincerely believed I could do it. It was not outside his realm of possibility, for me. That's a vote of confidence I need to hold onto more tightly, now.

Anyway. So one day this spring, Sis happened to be on the phone with Dad at the precise moment she got an e-mail turning her down for a job she'd genuinely longed for. They'd gambled on the Other Guy, and she was devastated. Here is the first thing she says our father told her, in that moment: "You need a beer! Do you have any beer?"

Dad was never much of a drinker, to my recall; he might crack open a lone beer if the temperature got above 95 degrees. Or, on New Year's Eve, he'd consume a single shot of Bailey's Irish Cream, before tucking into bed. At 9:00 p.m. It's midnight somewhere. At his funeral, in the photo albums on display, I found snapshots of him in the mid-70s, sporting his Afro perm and brandishing a beer bottle, but that was not the man I knew.

This was, though: his immediate follow-up suggestion to Sis was "Go up to the Husky Deli and have a scoop of coconut ice cream!" Yeah. There is not one doubt in my mind that I inherited this gene from him; it's only slightly less obvious than the eyebrows, the considerable nose, that I see every morning in the bathroom mirror. There is never a wrong time for ice cream--any season, anywhere, any flavor, I will need no persuasion and I will not turn it down. Beer OR ice cream = not a contest. Also, surely someone must make beer ice cream, so point me at it, interwebs, and I will gladly taste it so you don't have to.

Dad had a longstanding relationship with the Schwan's delivery guy in his area. La Center isn't all that rural any more, and Schwan's is now a purveyor of frozen lasagnes and pizzas and chow mein and god-knows-what-all...but their legacy was ice cream, and Dad never didn't have half a dozen boxes of fudge pops and Neapolitan sandwiches stashed in the freezer. Or we'd drive out to this gas-pump mini-mart at some forgotten crossroads in farm country, where they had a drive-up window dispensing soft-serve cones: vanilla, chocolate, or "twist," the two flavors spiraled together in a frozen helix, the chocolate with flecks of real cocoa, rich and dark and gritty on your tongue.

When the funeral arrangements were still being determined, I made a joke about having a Schwan's truck in the cortege, or interring the ashes in a cardboard pint container. Sis got mad at me, and I regret that, I do...but I still find it funny, too. I'd like to think Dad would laugh. You could do so much worse, than to be delivered to your eternal rest in an ice cream truck. I might want that as my own second choice, right behind the Viking funeral with the boat and the flaming arrows.

Beer and ice cream. It's so him, it's so Dad, and in that it makes me laugh and wince both, not least because massive heart attack, you say? hmmm. In reading the Schwan's history linked above, I discovered what is surely no more than an unsettling coincidence: that Marvin Schwan, the company's founder, died on May 9 (my father's birthday), 1993. Of a heart attack. At the age of 64. Ice cream: a dangerous, delicious business.

But I am treasuring this little second-hand nugget of irrelevant career advice, Dad's best effort at long-distance comfort in a moment of crisis. I'm so grateful to Sis for sharing it with me, because it reminds me that, whatever conversations we did or didn't have, Dad is still in me. In the mirror, in the music, in the firm conviction that there is no ill so grave that a frozen dairy treat can't cure it, can't at least put you on the mend. Except, well, that one ill, I guess.

The hoagie moment

I come from a long line of sleep-talkers, at least three generations of women who mumble and mutter and occasionally shout out directions while seemingly unconscious. My grandmother could famously be engaged, with just a little delicate prompting, in utterly dadaesque "conversation" right on the edge of sleep. I share this trait, and I live in fear of it--specifically, of the fear that in some important meeting I will suddenly begin blurting out responses to the parallel thread of dream that gets going, while I do the head bob and struggle to stay upright in my chair.

I'm still not sleeping well, or enough, off and on. Today I struggled valiantly through a product demo and later confided to Sis how near to nodding off I'd been. And she reminded me of the worst such episode in my past, which I would be wise to never quite forget. This was years ago now; I was in what must have been a lunch meeting, because I was evidently both sleepy and hungry. I rested my eyes for just a second, and suddenly was dreaming: that I had a giant, delicious hoagie sandwich in my hands, hooray! I opened my mouth, cavern-wide, to take a big tearing bite of this hoagie...and then I opened my eyes, to find myself sitting at a conference table, meeting still droning on, and my jaw practically unhinged with imaginary hoagie anticipation. There might have been a bit of salivating, a lip smack, just possibly.

I don't know, to this day, if anyone saw this and wondered if I'd lost my mind. I set off a quick volley of tics to mask the weirdness, a fake yawn wrapped in a...chin stretch, I don't know. Panic, disorientation. And disappointment, because that hoagie had looked goooood. At least, by some miracle, I hadn't spontaneously volunteered any information to the budget committee about the hoagie. I would not put it past myself, to have mumbled "no, it's dijon" while we were supposed to be analyzing spreadsheets. At any rate, it's become shorthand between me and Sis for that terrible teetering on the lip of consciousness, in the dullest meeting of your life. Hoagie moment. Now you can use it too! I won't mind.

Couscous as metaphor(s)

I made a delicious couscous salad for dinner tonight, with chicken and cucumbers in it, and dried cranberries, and toasted almonds, and an orangey dressing with a hint of dijon. And it was splendid, but was also one of those things that somehow requires every single piece of your kitchen equipment, way more than you anticipated. A whisk, a huge chef's knife, a skillet for toasting the almonds, a plethora of parings and onion skins for the compost bin--right now I'm keeping those in a plastic bag in the freezer, so that I don't develop a fruit-fly situation, but it is odd to have a big clunky bag of frosty garbage in there. The orange-juice blend for the couscous boiled over on the stove, and that is basically like making sugar tar. And then there is the couscous itself, so yummy, but it exists basically to just be the slightly sticky miniscule pasta granules that disperse and multiply so that they are somehow adhered to every surface of sink and countertop and linoleum. My kitchen looks and feels like that right now, scattered couscous writ large.

I went to a Moroccan restaurant with a group of friends once, where we sat on cushions on the floor and the waiter poured warm fragrant water over our hands for washing, because we were going to eat with them. Our hands. And then we did, but the meal included a huge dish of couscous, and it was delicious but YOW SO HOT when you are sticking your fingers in there, oh my gosh...and then I was wearing a rather deeply cut blouse, while trying to fling clods of burning hot couscous into my mouth with my bare burnt hands, and man. Those couscous molecules really do get everywhere. You haven't lived until you have had a bra full of couscous. Well, probably you have lived, but nowhere near as interesting a life, I am here to tell you.

The other thing I am thinking of now, avoiding the silty couscoused sinkful of dishes, is my dad. Again. Here are two of his flaws, a convenient pair: he never installed a garbage disposal in their kitchen, and he could never scrape a plate worth a damn. My regular chore, when Sis and I were staying with Dad, was to do the dishes each night. (Sis fed the young beef steers out in the barn, big scoops of what I guess was Calf Chow; who had the more taxing task is debatable.) I will never forget, never be able to forget, putting my hand down into the greasy, cooling dishwater, feeling around for that last fork among the floating kernels of corn and pasta shells collecting near the drain trap. Shudder. When I bought my house, my absolute prize possession herein was the dishwasher, the first such appliance I ever owned. It remains just about the best magic act ever; you put in stinky, crusty dishes, and then clean shiny lemon-smelling dishes come out, still hot to the touch! Hot with cleanliness.

Strangely, I still don't have a garbage disposal myself. Or a sullen, grimacing eighth grader to scrub the stockpot and fish around, wincing, in the drain. Double damn.

Died and gone to pizza heaven

That was the tagline for a local chain when I was a kid: Pizza Haven--it's pizza heaven! I remember it being perfectly acceptable family night out food, though in retrospect I wasn't exactly a connoiseur of quality pies; we equally enjoyed $3.99-for-a-large pizzas with deafening Wurlitzer organ accompaniment (that's the history, but click here for the oompah strains of the Chicken Dance), or pizzas served to us by a giant stuffed rodent in a bowler hat. (Aha--it seems Chuck E. has upgraded to a ball cap and baggy shirt with a more urban hip-hop flavor.)

(Seriously, though, go listen to that music sample. It's crashing along in the background as I type and is the sound of every birthday party I ever attended. It's making me a little verklempt.)

Anyway. The Seattle-based Pizza Haven chain buckled under severe pressure from the national pizza purveyors eventually; there seems to be one remaining location at Seattle Center, which is still pulling down excoriating reviews on yelp.com, sadly. Sounds more like hell. But I've been sidetracked by this article about the founder, Ron Bean, from the Puget Sound Business Journal nearly seven years ago.

Back when Bean opened the first Pizza Haven in the U District in 1958, pizza was exotic, a suspect foreign dish few Americans had ever heard of, let alone tasted.

At the time, the only other pizza joints in the Puget Sound area were Shakey's Pizza and Pizza Pete. Pizza Haven was just open from 4 p.m. to midnight because Bean didn't think people would eat pizza for lunch.

But Bean, who started the restaurant to help pay his law school tuition, had faith its popularity would grow. Pizza was a favorite among his football buddies who grew up on it back home in Chicago.

Back then Pizza Haven charged $3 for a 16-inch pie with five toppings and Cokes were a dime. The chain offered a dozen kinds of pizza with a few creations - notably canned tuna and green olive - that were quietly scrapped.

Pizza Haven was among the first to make deliveries, Bean said. Restaurant employees used radio phones to relay orders to roving drivers who carried stacks of pizzas in warming ovens in the back of their jeeps and pickup trucks

Dude! I remember those trucks, the tall ovens with the pizzas slipped in there in racks. Picture it, these guys just driving around with ready-made pizzas in the truck bed, in case of a sudden pizza emergency. Like pizza ambulances. It's a far cry from some kid from Dominos with a vinyl pizza sleeve and a speeding ticket, no? Meanwhile--canned tuna and green olive? Yes, how did this exotic foodstuff ever catch on?

Anyway. The point of this whole entry is that, after a trip to the zoo this morning, my cousin and her family met me, Mom, and Sis at the Phinney Ridge Zeeks Pizza. Cuz has three kids, 8, 5, and 3; I'd suggested Zeeks because it's famously kid-friendly, but even I didn't anticipate how cheerfully welcoming they'd be to the younger set. While we waited for our meal, the waitress brought each kid a goodie bag--crayons, a picture to color, a Zeeks temporary tattoo--and a little ball of raw pizza dough to mash around on the table. When the pitcher of root beer arrived, she likewise handed out three plastic cups with lids, unprompted. I don't have kids of my own yet, but honestly I kind of felt like one again, there at the table with the whole fam-damily, sculpting slightly begrimed figures out of dough and sneezing from the hot peppers. Remember this, I told myself afterwards, remember what this is like. It had been too long.

All roads lead here

So Erin very kindly suggested that I ought to write a memoir, which makes me laugh a bit. I don’t know that I can sustain being interesting beyond more than the intermittent blog entry. But I’ll admit that I’ve actually had the title for my nonexistent autobiography for close to 20 years. And in explaining it, I get to tell a story and take full advantage of all kinds of Internet linkery in the process. I am so multimedia!

Okay. The Dog House Restaurant, a long-lost old-Seattle institution, opened in 1934 and operated 24/7 for more than half a century. Legend has it they might have closed for a night when Kennedy was assassinated, but beyond that they were serving up diner fare and camaraderie and poor attitudes every hour of every day for 60 years, during which period three generations of my family alone appreciated its many merits. The Dog House was seedy in all the most magnificent ways. People could still smoke in Seattle restaurants, during the Dog House heyday, and did they ever: the air in there was tangible, fog-dense with grease and nicotine. It could have been a lovely afternoon in May, no matter: in the Dog House it was always dark as two a.m. I have a vivid memory of standing up in a booth there as a very small child, and discovering that what I had thought were simply large brown squares placed at intervals on the wall were actually pictures. Photographs of scenic Washington vistas, Mt. Rainier and Lake Chelan, already all but obscured under several decades of tar.

Raymond Chandler would feel entirely comfortable in the Dog House, as would Richard Russo, and possibly the entire cast of characters from Mad Men, slumming. I would bet dollars to donuts that Kurt and Courtney whiled away more than a handful of hours in there over a plate of fries. There’d be drunks in one booth, a family with little kids in the next, ironic hipsters perched beside weary salesmen on stools at the counter. I had several awkward dates there, and several post-dates, trying to recover some dignity over gritty coffee. For years, my family went to the Dog House for Christmas Day dinner because, hell, it was open. On holidays, the elderly hostess would wear an eye-popping red sequined gown.

At least half of the waitresses had been there since its inception: irritable septuagenarians with towering white beehive hairdos and, after a lifetime slinging hash, zero tolerance for dithering. You’d damn well better know what you wanted when they asked for your order, or you were unlikely to get asked again any time soon. There was an attached cocktail lounge, too—you could thus order a cheeseburger and a chocolate ice-cream float, or pancakes and a Singapore Sling. The lounge, which I somehow never managed to legally enter, also contained a piano bar. I can remember sitting with my family at dinner and hearing occasional bizarre gusts of inebriated caterwauling blasting from the bar, in the days before karaoke. The noise was awesome, in all senses of the word. I could not wait to grow up and get in there to see the source of that racket, to make some of my own. I still can’t believe that I never did.

Up front, next to the cash register, they had a glass case full of other items you might want to buy while settling your bill: Hershey bars, packs of JuicyFruit, lottery tickets, cigars. The vice of your choice. A classic diner thing, that glass case of sundries just inside the door. I can’t remember the last time I saw one anywhere.

Above the pass-through to the kitchen was a large 3-D mural, replicated on the menus, the Dog House’s raison d’etre: a map, of all the other vices and foibles that would inevitably point you diner-ward. “All Roads Lead to the Dog House,” it proclaimed, and then the various paths were labeled with the sort of circumstances that might get you there. Most prominent among these: Blondes, Brunettes, Redheads. Though other vectors were also mentioned: Night Clubs, Taverns, Lodges, Private Secretaries, Boozers, Marines. Nagging. Usherettes.

When they announced the Dog House was finally closing, Seattle openly grieved. People made off with the fixtures and pocketed the menus, and yeah…Sis and I each have one (I’m pulling those road-to-the-Dog-House labels off of it right now). On one visit, we got to reminiscing with one of the veteran waitresses. In the early 1940s, my grandmother had been a carhop at the Igloo Drive-In, a rival restaurant a few blocks from the Dog House (it hadn’t held out nearly as long). Grammy’s boss would send her over to the Dog House in her street clothes, on spy missions: she was to sit at the counter with a cup of coffee and commit their menu prices to memory, see if the Igloo could undercut them a little. “Oh my God,” said the Dog House waitress when Grammy mentioned this, laughing and laughing. Turns out her boss had been sending her to scope out the Igloo, 50 years before. The Dog House’s final hour of operation was broadcast live on the local PBS station, and my hand to God, I sat in front of the television and cried. I heard, after, that they’d had to go out and buy a CLOSED sign, expressly for the purpose of flipping it over in the front window.

It wasn’t long before a new (and, I’m sure, inferior) 24-hour restaurant opened in the same location—coincidentally mentioned on Seattlest just today. Apparently the lot is getting too valuable, and the replacement ironic-hipster dive will now suffer the same fate, though it probably won’t be so missed. I can’t say—I’ve never been. At any rate, the Hurricane Café hasn’t established multiple generations of clientele like its predecessor. I can’t explain exactly what it was that so captivated me about the Dog House, always, even when I was a little girl. It was like walking into a novel, every time: the regulars cheek-by-jowl with truckers and lawyers and street kids, the million stories in the naked city, circulating in the perpetual night-owl nighttime of the Dog House, over whiskey and coffee, Monte Cristos and liverwurst sandwiches. I’m looking over my stained and dog-eared (heh) menu now, and it’s a beautiful thing. You could get a Diet Plate, or a Shrimp Louie. You could get a veal cutlet or a glass of “Double Jersey Buttermilk.” In small print on the bottom of the right-hand page, it says: SINGLES IN BOOTHS MUST SHARE TABLE WITH OTHERS…and I cannot even tell you how much I want to travel through time, right now, to sit in a single booth at the Dog House, order a cheeseburger—the bun glistening with the line cook’s oily fingerprint—and see who the hell shows up to sit opposite.

Oh, right: the point of this. The title of my memoir. It’s another quote from the Dog House menu, actually, the tiniest possible text, probably six-point type, the legendary 60-year caveat printed beneath their $5.75 Rib Eye Steak (served with Tossed Salad, French Fried Potatoes, and Toast). Ready?

Tenderness Not Guaranteed.

Oh, Christmas tea

Last Sunday afternoon I had the privilege of attending holiday high tea at the Fairmount Olympic Hotel, with a group of ladies I mostly know from book club. The lovely Kristin recognized that no one wanted to take on the extra responsibility of hosting, during December, but thought we could still get together and be fussed over by professionals, with the added benefit of access to downtown shopping. Genius!

I admit, I've been having a hard time getting into the holiday spirit this year. This worries me as much as anyone--Christmas brings out my most Martha-esque tendencies. I have everything Christmas. I possess a plush Santa Claus toilet-lid cover, and red and green silicone cupcake liners in which to bake sour cream-poppy seed streusel muffins on Christmas morning, and a CD of carols rendered by a Caribbean steel-drum band. Usually at this time each year my house looks like the finale of the Macy's parade without the blue police barricades. So my exhausted apathy this year is troubling, yes. I am not sure what to attribute it to; is this just more fallout from weaning myself off antidepresants this summer? I'm not depressed, but in not feeling Christmassy, I do not feel like myself, and I don't know what that means.

So it was more meaningful to me than the other ladies might have guessed, to walk into Seattle's swankiest classic hotel and be smacked with a double-barrelled Christmas blast. The Olympic is the closest thing we have to The Plaza, and it did not disappoint; it was like dropping into a 1930s movie musical, or the Warbucks mansion at the finale of Annie. Swags of pine garland and fairy lights everywhere. A massive tree at the center of the atrium, and another decked out in gold in the tearoom itself. A gingerbread rendering of the Pike Place Market in a glass case, with marzipan produce lined up in tiny rows. There was some sort of children's holiday party going on elsewhere in the hotel, too, and so all around us were little girls in red velvet dresses and little boys in crisp white shirts and dark ties, on high Good Behavior Alert not only for the environment but because of Santa's imminent final accounting. Several of us, arriving early, went looking for an ATM, and that was also "fancy": hidden away in a discreet alcove and paneled in oak, with the old-timey appellation "Miniature Bank."

It was good that we'd obtained some cash beforehand, because the special holiday tea was sort of psychotically expensive if you stopped to think about it. We were a large group, and so the included service cost brought our tab to $75 a head. Would I have gone, if I'd anticipated that? Probably not...so I am glad I didn't know. Because it ended up being entirely worth it. We had white linen and real silver, delicate floral china and our own individual teapots. Individual crystal cruets of raspberry jam and clotted cream stood at the head of each place setting. And at that price, they keep the wee goodies coming for as long as you're willing to sit there. A polite young man in a gold vest hovered nearby, with a tray and a pair of little silver tongs to hand out as many tiny open-faced sammiches as we could stand, each no bigger than my thumb. There was a smoked salmon triangle that simply dissolved on the tongue, and quarter-sized rounds of toast crowned with curried chicken salad. One savory had shavings of black truffle; one sweet was dusted with gold flake--two outrageous delicacies I'd never consumed before. I ATE GOLD. It was awesome. We gossiped and sipped tea and daintily ate many hundreds of tea goodies; we were all also on our best behavior, and managed not to knock anything over or guffaw too openly, there in the Georgian Room...which is lovely, all pale yellow with scads of white ornamental molding, like dining inside a wedding cake.

It reminded me of being a little girl, actually...all that dazzle, the giddy tension of being in a place and a situation 100% nicer than the rest of your everyday life. We went to some sort of Santa Claus brunch at the Space Needle, once, when I was a kid--I remember it being very early morning, still nearly dark as we revolved slowly above the Christmas-lit city, eating pigs-in-a-blanket and nervously awaiting the arrival of St. Nick, the guest of honor. There are pictures of us, me and Sis in matching (!) outfits that were actually Easter dresses from the previous spring--red and white calico patterned, but by December growing a bit alarmingly short. We are showing a lot of leg, for 8 a.m. Matching Dorothy Hamill haircuts also, I probably don't need to add. Anyway. We were excited, and impressed, and anxious in a largely good way, Christmas on the line and Santa keeping a watchful eye.

I haven't felt like that in years...but this was close. Worth every penny, and with the added benefit of having that salmon, boy. I would rather have poked out my own eye, as a kid...but after sampling that with an adult's palate, I can now die a happy woman. A holiday miracle indeed!

Cookie puss

This post from Salon's Broadsheet column--about Minneapolis-area Girl Scout troops actively recruiting little girls from the area's Muslim population--got me thinking about my own days wearin' of the green. On general principles, hey, I'm all for the outreach: Muslim kids, atheist kids, whatever--get 'em out there camping and making hideous craft projects, get them into the hideous green polyester jumpers, all in the name of cameraderie. I followed some of the links in the article and was genuinely shocked to see any discrimination suits brought against the Girl Scouts, frankly--someone tried to exclude particular kids? seriously? Because they ought to be BEGGING kids to join, based on the inevitable realization that came to me and every other girl of 11 or so in the whole Totem Council, eventually: that Girl Scouts were...pretty lame.

Oh, I wanted to love it. I think it's still very much a part of my nature, this craving for order and community that I experienced as a kid. To be an Official Member of any organization that had regimented achievement awards was frankly my wildest dream. Badges, buttons, stickers, cheap ribbons with PARTICIPANT in flaking gold print: sign me up. When I was about six, I had a rare begging tantrum in a thrift shop with my mother when I discovered a Campfire Girls Bluebird uniform on the rack. I thought that the mere outfit conferred Belonging, and would open a path to an endless stream of beads or patches, some tangible reward. I fell on the floor and whined, to no avail--obviously not following my reasoning, Mom saw no reason to buy me the perky paramilitary ensemble for a group to which I didn't belong. Eventually she did locate a Brownie troop with evening hours in our neighborhood. I hit it off famously with the leader's daughter and spent many happy hours, rocking that brown beanie and singing the "Johnny Appleseed" grace before snack. When we had our "bridging" ceremony to Junior level, somebody's sweet dad had actually constructed a wee wooden bridge, like the kind you'd see in faux Japanese-garden landscaping. It was painted seafoam green. They set this up in the rec hall basement and one by one we clomped over it and received our little gold-winged badges. I dragged my bored father to Penney's to purchase the official Juniors uniform, the REAL thing, not the brown Brownie baby dress...though I was unable to talk him into all the extra accessories I coveted, like the collapsible green plastic pill case/drinking cup, or the special tassels for my knee socks. No matter. I had the green jumper. It was the real shit, man.

Actually participating in Juniors, however, was a rite of passage very similar to getting my first period, in that it took me about 30 minutes to realize that this sucked. The troop leader was one of those rare lifers, in scouting; she'd achieved the rank of General or the equivalent, I think, and she had one of the old-school 50s scout leader uniforms, the olive-drab shirtdress and Mountie hat. I wish I was making this up. Her daughter was in the troop with us. Lois. Lois was adopted. We knew this because it came in her introduction: "My name is Lois and I'm adopted, so you have to do what I say." Is it wrong, to look back from an adult vantage point and think of a ten-year-old girl as a spoiled little bitch?

Junior Girl Scouts. It's a bad age, I think: 9 to 12, so that you have newly minted dorks like I was, dying to start raking in the serious badges...but they're paired with the jaded 6th graders who spend the campouts brushing their hair and applying lip gloss. I also hated the cookie sales, and was forever just making the cutoff to earn the little "Cookie Sale '80" patch. PARTICIPANT, again, basically. Of course there was always the one girl who sold, like, 500 boxes to your 24-and-eight-of-those-to-grandma. Nowadays, too, they just set up a card table in front of the Safeway and bludgeon you with their cuteness; sending little girls door-to-door is considered too dangerous. But me, I had to lug that damn carton up and down the block for what seemed like months at a time. The collection envelope had a little pie chart printed on it that illustrated what percentage of each sale went to the troop, to the council, to the bakery. I remember this because the old coot who lived two doors down would make me explicate this in detail each year before shelling out his $1.50 for a box of shortbread trefoils. This was also the period when our local council experimented with a "healthy" alternative to cookies, these whole-grain sesame crackers that were impossible to unload. Those made up a significant portion of Grammy's purchases, come to think of it. We had those suckers crushed up in meatloaves and atop casseroles for months. Possibly years.

I was a lousy Girl Scout, frankly. For all my covetous fascination with the merit badges...I earned one. One! That's got to be the record, for suckage, right? It was "Cooking," I remember, and I'd done all the tasks for it at home, on my own...my grandmother signing them off in the little red badge book. (So probably I made meatloaf with those effing crackers, no doubt.) I stitched it proudly, crookedly, to the dark-green sash (a "Sewing" badge was never in the cards, for me). Then I quit. They actually owed me a couple, but I left without cashing them in.

I still have the sash, though--slightly mildewed, that long swath of empty green polyester, indicating my considerable lack of merit. I know exactly where the damn thing is; it's made multiple appearances in Halloween costumes and, once, at one of Sis's "Survivor" parties--when that crazy Scout leader was on? Sis dressed up as her, strapping my fourth-grader's sash on over her 30-year-old bosom like a tourniquet. Good times.

My doom

Starbucks, this morning, was all tricked out in sparkly wreaths and snowflakes and red paper cups: it's peppermint mocha season again. Oh, my nutritional nemesis that I also secretly want to make out with! Curses upon you...my darling.

I'm short on words and time today, but here's an article from the Seattle P-I detailing the anticipatory frenzy that greets the release of their Christmas Blend coffee each year (or, if you prefer, "Holiday Blend." Shalom/Happy Diwali/etc.). I do enjoy the legends of people hoarding pounds of it or cutting deals with the baristas to get a bag before Thanksgiving, back in the dark ages.

I can't really blame them; when the local Frederick & Nelson department-store chain shut down in the early 90s, my grandmother stood in line for something like two hours to buy a stockpile of Frango mints. I don't care what those Whos down in Whoville are singing, Christmas can't come without those little chocolate crack nuggets! Thankfully, after a variety of contractual hijinks, Macy's still sells the candy throughout the region. Grammy used to put a box under the tree for each of us. Ohh...the year she died, Mom, Sis and I--worrying separately about tradition--each completed the ritual; that year, each of us came away from Christmas morning with our own pound and a half of mints.

Aw. I'm feeling all tender-hearted now. (And borderline diabetic, I suppose.)

The greatest city in the world

I said IN THE WORLD.

S'MAC: an East Village restaurant that specializes exclusively in varieties of macaroni and cheese. Evidently served up in big ol' cast-iron skillets. And they deliver.

The mountains and lakes n'all are pretty, but occasionally I have no freaking idea why I moved back home, man.

June Cleaver is dead

(Actually, after I composed that title, I had to run over to IMDB and check. I'm delighted to report that the lovely Barbara Billingsley, perfectly coiffed and fluent in jive, is very much alive and well, and was working as recently as 2003, bless her heart. Jus' hang loose, blood!)

My mom is a capable but largely indifferent cook. I mean no disrespect; she kept us adequately fed and everything, but Sis and I have no explanation for our own competitive culinary excesses and kitchen gadgetry...it's some genetic quirk that may have skipped multiple generations, we think. Mom was given detention in junior high for throwing lemons around like softballs in Home Ec, so maybe she missed something that day? At any rate, she was fun, but not at all a cake-baking sort of mom...more the "smuggle contraband candy into the movies" kind of mom, which has its own merits.

This is a lengthy prelude to saying that I can remember my mother baking only two cakes in my entire lifetime. One was for my twelfth birthday: a round layer cake frosted to resemble a giant hamburger, with real sesame seeds sprinkled over the top "bun." I had begged and pleaded and cajoled for this cake, which I'd found in a kids' cookbook, and I'm not sure what aspect of my whining finally propelled Mom to forgo the Albertson's bakery and approach the oven. She entered the kitchen with the grim focus of a Los Alamos physicist; I wasn't invited to participate in the endeavor, girlish bake-bonding be damned. But at the appointed birthday hour she emerged dazed but triumphant, burger cake in hand. She could, it seems, follow an existing template. I was ecstatic, as this was the coolest preteen hipster cake I could imagine. For a brief afternoon, I ruled the sixth grade.

Five or six years ago, Mom endeavored to bake a lemon cake for Sis's birthday. I think there were intimations that she could not do this, and she took umbrage. Over the years, Mom's limited-to-begin-with selection of decent cookware had continued to deteriorate, but the fact that she possessed one round and one square cake pan did not deter her. Maybe I should mention here that in her spare time, Mom is a collage artist? So. Sis received a square bottom layer of cake, with a vaguely starburst-y bunch of irregular cake cutouts arranged on top. Mom had covered this all with a Jackson Pollock motif of different-colored icings, some of which contained alcohol. "Is this the cake from MacArthur Park?" I asked, which made Mom mad. (You can tell when she is mad, because she says "I'm not mad!!" and smiles very very hard.) Anyway, the cake was delicious, if terrifying in appearance.

Last Saturday, we celebrated Sis's 33rd birthday with a plethora of curries at Bombay Grill. I don't know what prompted Mom to attempt another cake...but several hours before the meal, she called me in a state of some agitation.

It was quite the litany of woes. Again armed with a single round cake pan, she'd elected to pour the boxed mix into a sheet pan rather than baking three separate layers in shifts. The oven in her new house is somewhat overzealous, and so the edges and bottom of the resulting cake were...kind of charred. Mom decided to turn it out onto a cutting board, trim off the offending blackened bits, and then cut it down the middle and plop one half atop the other: layers! Sadly, the cake was not as architecturally sound as she had hoped. Increasingly frantic applications of cream-cheese frosting to spackle it all together were, likewise, temporary solutions at best. Martha should avert her eyes here, because Mom is not so much having the revolving cake pedestal, or the offset spatula, or the skillful crumb-coating. At some point in the decorative process, her frustration got the best of her.

Here is the cake Mom presented to Sis, to honor her birth:



Note the shoring up of the foundation, here (and that Mom had run out of the cream-cheese frosting at this point). It appears to be proceeding apace with the NOLA levee reconstruction as performed by the Army Corps of Engineers:



I wish I had photos of us all completely falling out in the kitchen. Alas, these were taken once we'd had time to calm down and catch our breath. We were too curry-stuffed to partake, but Sis brought the cake to her office the next day and it was a smashing success.

"As God is my witness, I am never baking a fucking cake again. I want you all to hear me," Mom announced formally over this production. Which in my mind is a real shame, actually. I am closer to 40 than 30...I kind of want all of my birthday cakes to make this same rousing declaration, for the forseeable future.

Losers

In the break room this morning: a tray of sad, blue-iced, leftover cupcakes, each inscribed with a crookedly frosted "S" for Seahawks.

* * * * *

On another note, whose large white granny panties did Mick Jagger politely flick back off the stage during the halftime show? Honey, it's the Rolling Stones; the very least you could do is buy a nice pair, special.

The Amityville cookie

Saturday was gingerbread-house-decorating day, as previously mentioned. Mom, Sis, and I headed down to Ballard proper, toting a few sacks of bulk candy items although SOMEONE FORGOT THE GOLDEN GRAHAMS AHEM.

Our first inkling that I'd perhaps misinterpreted the event surfaced when we arrived to find ourselves the only participants significantly beyond the age of eight. Granted, the other decorators had likewise brought their mommies...but we hadn't needed ours to drive.

It turns out that the charity portion of the event takes place among the local merchants; clever professionals decorate houses for display in business windows, and shoppers are encouraged to vote/bid on their favorites. Amateur hour, on the other hand, was intended solely as a fun family activity. We were much relieved when a young hipster couple showed up at the next table and declared their intentions to craft a "ghetto house;" Hipster Girl was responsible for the photos herein.

Because Cookies is an extraordinarly tiny storefront, the actual decorating took place next door at Floating Leaves Tea. Chinese stringed instruments pinged and poinged meditatively, if incongruously, in the background as we squeezed around the table and proceeded to glue gumdrops on rooflines and our elbows to the table and our fingers together. Royal icing surely has surgical and/or highway maintenance applications that are as yet undiscovered. Sis got a little Howard Hughes over the communal candy tubs, muttering "Kid fingers! KID FINGERS been in there!" as I blithely popped occasional mistakes into my mouth.

Mom seemed to be having a good time, though.


Sis provides chocolate-sprinkle landscaping; I appear to be...eating. Or about to.



At the end, we were further discomfited to learn that we were expected to take our creation home. We each have marauding pets that would make gingerbread-house-maintenance tricky at best. Our hostess suggested that we donate our house to a local hospital, as a common-room decoration or a gift to a lonely patient...and so, candy-crusted abode in hand, we walked over to Swedish Hospital--Ballard and, after wandering the halls aimlessly for a while, located an employee who promised to find our ginger house a home. "I'll give it to that lady," she noted significantly to a colleague. So either an isolated patient received a dose of rather garish holiday cheer, Saturday...or "that lady" is a kind euphemism for "the garbage, you crazy nutbars."

Here, Sis reaches for more ContamiCandy while Mom brandishes the icing bag in a threatening manner and I contemplate using the house to lure, roast, and eat small children.

Them that rejoice

I don't know if it's a lingering sense of catharsis from finishing NaNo, or I'm simply devolving into a sentimental sap, but I am weeeepy today, ready to leak like a busted faucet at the slightest provocation.

I was ready to relax in front of the television, chewing with my mouth open, and so I ordered a celebratory dinner from Thai Siam here in Ballard. Thai Siam is notable first for not screwing around with the spices; I was cowed and humiliated by a three-star dish there some years ago and have stuck with the medium-level since. Anyway...they are also reknowned for their annual anniversary dinner, a day-long bash in which all proceeds are donated to local charities. People line up around the block for this; they've been at it for nearly 20 years.

I went to pick up my food and sat reveling in the loopy warmth of the place: the waiters greeting regulars by name, the flower-wreathed Thai figurines, the enormous Christmas tree looming askew between two tables, the little kid waiting with her family and proclaiming her status as the Birthday Girl.

When I got to the counter, I noticed the stack of fliers they were tucking into every bag.

Free Christmas Dinner For Those In Need

If you know someone who would not be able to have a festive dinner on Christmas Day, Thai Siam Restaurant would like to extend our invitation to a free turkey dinner!

It's that "festive" that laid me out, made me want to roll around in front of the cash register blubbering. Such a lovely word, evocative of so much more than a charitable gesture. The broke, the lost, the lonely...deserving not just a free meal but a festive one. They'll get it, too, packed into that narrow restaurant with the tree and the ornate carvings and the golden origami fish mobiles twirling from the ceiling. Bless us every one, indeed.

I was snuffling into my sleeve until the cashier asked me if I needed chopsticks or forks included in my order.

"Nah, thanks," I said.

"Just gonna eat with your hands, huh?" he asked.

*****

Know someone who needs a little Christmas? You can get more info about the Thai Siam dinner, noon-2:00 on Christmas Day, by calling the restaurant between 2:00 and 5:00 p.m., Monday-Friday.

House of pain

In a fit of premature holiday geekiness, I've enrolled Mom, Sis, and myself as a crack gingerbread-house-decorating team at Cookies in Ballard. We are all artistically and culinarily competitive, occasionally at cross-purposes to each other, so I hope that we can collaborate on an appealing edible domicile without getting ourselves thrown out of the cookie store. For fightin'. Or cussin'. (I'll save the latter for Megan's holiday cookies, of course.)

At any rate, proceeds go to local charities--the Ballard Food Bank and PAWS among them, I believe. Sis took a little persuading to spend part of the hectic holiday season mucking around with icing and gumdrops, but I think the Good Cause element put her over the line. I hung up the phone with her, and 30 seconds later it rang.

Me: Hello?

Sis: You know what would make perfect roof shingles? GOLDEN GRAHAMS!

So, yeah, it's on.

Crackamint mocha

Ohh, Starbucks. My Dark Overlord. You know, as you must, that I am helpless in the thrall of your Winter Seasonal Beverages? That whatever havoc has been wreaked in my dietary needs by the novel would be rendered null? That whatever resolve I had to stem the relentless tide of sugar courses alternating with starch, alternating with some sugary starch, would be utterly undone by the sight of your holiday-decor-bedecked menu chalkboards, your red-t-shirted baristas, your Elton John's Big Gay Christmas Party promotional CD? Ah, the return of a favorite pairing of words, nay, of sensations:

The Peppermint Mocha.

It warms, and yet it cools. It is sweet, and yet it is peppy. It prompts caffeinated alertness, and yet it floats me away on a little minty cloud of joy. It costs more than three damn dollars, Starbucks, I mean COME ON.

It comes in that little red cup, emblazoned this year with holiday lights and a racially ambiguous couple smooching their bliss under the mistletoe. And a little koan of justification, right there on the Tall size: it's only once a year.

Yes. And at least once a day for the next two and a half months, Starbucks, you magnificent bastards. Damn.

Sweetness

A habit I picked up from my chef ex is reading cookbooks like novels. They're incredible social documents; I collect vintage ones, ranging from the early 1900s to right around the Kennedy assassination...but that's a handy essay for another time. Today, I was doing a little half-assed Google research for my novel-in-progress: would one of my characters have been likely to receive a birthday cake, in late 1920s rural North Dakota? What would it look like? Would there be candles?

I didn't find precisely what I wanted...but this description of an 1851 pioneer child's birthday cake, deep in the wilds of Texas, made me tear up a little:

This recipe was used to make a birthday cake for a small girl eighty-five years ago. There was no flour to be had, and corn was ground on a handmill. The meal was carefully emptied from one sack to another, and fine meal dust clinging to the sack was carefully shaken out on paper; the sack was again emptied and shaken, and the process was repeated labouriously time after time until two cupsful of meal dust was obtained. The rest of the ingredients were as follows: 1/2 cup of wild honey, 1 wild turkey egg, 1 teaspoonful of homemade soda, 1 scant cupful of sour milk and a very small amount of butter, to all of which was added the meal dust. The batter was poured into a skillet with a lid, and placed over the open fire in the yard, the skillet lid being heaped with coals. To a little girl's childish taste the cake was very fine, but looking back through the years, the honoree said relfectively, "It was none too sweet." ---Cooking Recipes of the Pioneer, Bandera Library Association [Frontier Times:Bandera TX] 1936 (p. 23)

From FoodTimeline.org. I could read this stuff all day...

Breakfast of champions

It's beginning to look a lot like Halloween. This morning, when I opened my car door in the NerdCo parking garage, I noticed something on the pavement directly below: a little pile of fun-size candy wrappers: Crunch bars, the orange foil of autumnal peanut-butter cups, random twists of cellophane. It amused me; I liked the thought of some engineer sitting down there in the subterranean dark, quickly snarfling down a double fistful of Halloween candy and sweeping the evidence out of the car.

"Mornin', Ralph--hey, whatcha got there?"

"...nuffig!"

What's the calorie burn on administering a bitch-slap?

This isn't a weight-loss blog. There are plenty of other ladies who write with fierce funny brilliance about that topic, some of whom have even parlayed it into a book tour, and to them I say right on! with envious admiration.

That said, I think I can speak with some authority on the issue. To wit: I am kinda fat. This is a known fact, despite my occasional psychological contortions to keep this matter somehow on the down-low. I realize that if someone sees me coming out of the Lane Bryant, or gritting it out on the elliptical trainer, or eating a candy bar, or conversely eating a heap of baby carrots...it's not like my secret will be suddenly exposed: holy shit! Kim's FAT! I knew there was something about her that I just couldn't put my finger on...

It's been a thought, and sometimes a struggle, for virtually all my life. I can remember the first time I thought "oooh, FAT" about myself, spurred by a photograph. In it, I'm six, standing with that swaybacked posture all little kids have, wearing a halter top, tummy out. I'm holding a bouquet of sweetpeas. Not a fat kid. I know that, now. But at the time, all I could see was the soft flesh around my navel.

Dieting was one of my primary bonding activities with my mother, growing up. She wasn't particularly interested in shopping, or makeup, but this was something girly that we could do together. It made me feel adult. We did absurd, ridiculous things, like subsisting on frozen grapes or cabbage soup, or a diet purportedly from the Heart Association that prescribed certain foods for specific days of the week: Thursday, we reeled around light-headed on nothing but bananas and skim milk, and thought ourselves virtuous. We drank Canfield's diet chocolate-flavored sodas and watched Richard Simmons. We "jogged" by sprinting wildly room-to-room in our tiny apartment to the "Fame" soundtrack, howling with laughter. We did some insane workout with Cookie's crazy sister that involved drills with broomstick dowels. We took up figure skating. We went to the drive-in movie with hoagies and Baby Ruths from the little deli up the street. Sometimes we were chubby. Sometimes we weren't.

It gets harder as you get older, another fact that surprises no one. In college, I mixed up SlimFast shakes from powder, but I could never stop supplementing them with buttered salt bagels from Zaro's. I have been on NutriSystem, Jenny Craig (twice), DietPower, Sound Health Solutions, and what Sis calls the "dump diet," where you wither away after an ugly breakup. (I looked fabulous.) I've belonged to three gyms, two yoga studios, and three therapists. For four years, I dated a professional chef; during that time, I put on 50 pounds. And I am here to tell you...it was a fucking BLAST! The entire time! Renee Zellweger gets PAID to have that kind of fun! Since then, I've meandered up and down that 50-pound spectrum. Sometimes, I am slim and active and magnificent, and some days (for example, when repairs cost NINETEEN HUNDRED DOLLARS on a nine-year-old Hyundai, let that be a lesson to all on The Perils of Deferred Maintenance), I comfort myself with a pint of New York Super Fudge Chunk and baby, I use the big spoon, right out of the carton.

My point: I know. I know everything I need to about weight loss, and it all comes down to four words: eat less, exercise more. When I do those two things, I lose weight. When I don't, I put some on. I get it. I don't need to drink potions or abide by Dr. Phil or spend any more thousands and thousands of dollars to learn this again; I get it. I know that I'm the only person who can do this for myself, and I know that I am the only one who can motivate me. And every day is different.

My second point: don't tell me. I GET IT. Don't volunteer the information unsolicited, as if it is some new fact. It ain't. And for God's sake, ESPECIALLY don't POINT at my chosen MEAL and exclaim with cheerful HORROR how many, many CALORIES it has, because I. GET. IT. And also, SHUT THE FUCK UP. Jesus.

I'ma come over there and slap some sense into you my damn self. Soon's I can get my ass out of this chair. Beeyotch.

Specsnackular

Gael is searching for Seattle's perfect burger, which has fueled quite the debate.

Different burgers serve different purposes, I think; I was born and raised on Dick's classic little gut-bomb beef pucks, and so I'll always have a soft spot for peeling melted American cheese off the sunny yellow-orange waxed paper wrappers. I kind of love them just by virtue of the fact that they basically make five things. The restaurants each feature a lurid painting of a massive, benign steer...there are no illusions about what you're getting. No, you can't have it your way. No, there are no salad tumblers or character-shaped cookies or any sort of protein-fingers. Next! I think a city ordinance requires that you have at least two Dick's napkins in your glove compartment at any time; god knows they've saved me from many a fogged mirror, wayward beverage, or traffic-induced blubbering jag. One of my earliest memories is of standing in line at the Wallingford drive-in, too short even to see over the counter, hypnotized by the orange, white, and brown mosaic tiles. (Full disclosure: Mom was one of the grand-prize winners in the 50th Anniversary Memory Book contest; she grew up a block away. Hee hee hee!)

Meanwhile I miss a classic New York diner burger, and made sure to have one while I was there: hand-formed patty, cooked to order, an onion ring on top if you're lucky. Have it rare! Melt your brain! They don't give a rip, it's your life!

Anyway. So people are coming out of the woodwork praising the late, lamented Baby Moons at the Triple-X Drive-In in Issaquah: cheese AND jalapeno-stuffed (thanks, Sis!) tater tots. Gael seems...aghast, but I'm telling you, these were one of the two perfect foods in the world. They covered four categories: spicy, starchy, fried, and cheeeeeese. All in one compact, bite-sized unit. God, I miss them still.

Would it be excessive, to try and hand-craft one's own tater tots?

The other perfect food: chocolate-covered pretzels, naturally. Again, four quadrants of snack coverage: salty, crunchy, fatty, chocolate. These are truly the only PMS snack, better than Midol and, thank goodness, readily available.

Biscuits and gravy and sympathy

Wow. Didja read Dave's post about the jilted Vegas bride he attempted to console at the airport?Go ahead, I'll wait here.

It's like him, really, to walk right into a Richard Russo story somewhere, while my fiction skills atrophy behind a corporate desk. But what really struck me about it is how much it speaks to an absolute core element of Dave, one that I really admire: his ability to trust people. He really has an innate faith in human nature, believes effortlessly that most folks want to do the right thing, and he tries to live that way himself. Occasionally, this philosophy has bitten him in the ass...but for the most part, it's allowed him to travel around the world as he does, making friends on practically every continent, confident that in a crisis, the universe will provide--be it a couch to crash on, or a malaria ward in a Pakistan hospital, or a three-dollar diner breakfast. Whatever it is, you know he'd do the same for you, if he could.

I don't know if Dave would call it karma, or call it anything, this cycle of goodwill he operates in. It's the thing I respect most about him, though. I'm nowhere near as trusting, and it's something I really must work at: to be less timid, to look up from my book on the bus or at the coffee house, to talk to strangers once in a while. I'm glad he reminded me.