I'm with the Tralfamadorians.

In a recent blog, Jim remarked about how weird it was to think that he could remember his parents being the age he is now, and how surprising it is to realize that age doesn't necessarily bring certainty, contrary to popular myths of adulthood. (BTW, that's my paraphrase--Jim may have meant something entirely different.)


Since my mom and dad were, respectively, 38 and 40 when I was born, I'm only now getting to the point of being able to remember them at the age I am now. In fact, I recently came across this snapshot and realized that I'm the same age now that my mother was when this was taken. She looks a hell of a lot better at 42 than I do, by the way, and I can't even say that I've had four kids that ruined my figure like she could have (though clearly that wasn't even the case for her, dammit).

As you can see, this was shot the day of my sister's high-school graduation, which dates it to June 1970. My sister is thirteen years older than I am, and a few months ago while we were shopping in Pittsburgh someone assumed she was my mother (referring to me as her daughter). She was incensed, though I think it was a harmless assumption on the clerk's part. Still, I probably didn't help matters any when I remarked that people used to mistake the two of us for twins. D'oh! I really was trying to lighten the situation, but it was a thoughtless thing to say.

Still, it goes to show what a moving target the idea of age really is--though of course, that doesn't make the idea itself any less potent. Personally, I prefer the Tralfamadorian sense of time; as Kurt Vonnegut writes in Slaughterhouse Five, they "look at all the different moments just the way we can look at a stretch of the Rocky Mountains. They can see how permanent all the moments are, and they can look at any moment that interests them."

Like this one, for example.

All I can say is: ramps stink.

When we last met, I'd just purchased a bunch of fresh ramps (pictured below) and was rhapsodizing about the joys of rampy spring goodness. As you can see from the photo, the ramps had undoubtedly just come out of the ground, and they took forever to clean...so, they went into a bucket of water in the fridge for a few days until I could figure out what to do with them.

Well, yesterday I decided I'd chop them up and freeze them in anticipation of a visit from my parents next weekend (my mom was sad to have missed the ramp festivals, so I figured we'd experiment with some ramp cookery when she came down instead).

Everything I'd read about ramps warned of their stinkiness, but wow...I wasn't quite prepared. What's really odd is that they don't seem smelly at all initially--it's not like chopping onions, where you get that eye-watering blast of sulfur. They seem a lot like mild-mannered scallions, until...some gas escapes them and coalesces in the atmosphere after the fact, the molecules attracted to each other in some inextricable way.

And mind you, this was after making vegetable curry for dinner, so the ramps had a lot of competition for airspace. I tried opening windows, burning some Body Shop satsuma oil (which only resulted in an appalling ramp/orange combo)--nothing worked. And the odor seemed to take on a nearly physical form and migrate through the house; I got up in the middle of the night to go to the bathroom and walked out in the hallway upstairs and there it was, like an olfactory poltergeist.

I'll cook these babies when my mom comes, but outside on the side burner of the gas grill (with apologies to the neighbors).

Ramps!

For years I've been hearing about the Appalachian delicacy known as ramps, which are wild leeks that can only be found growing in the region in early spring. So when not one but two ramp festivals were being held this weekend just north of Morgantown, I had to go check them out. And besides, having been disappointed by the other famous local foodway--pepperoni rolls--I was ready for a shot at local-food redemption.

The first festival we went to was on the Pennsylvania side of the state line, and was what I think most folks think of as a typical local festival: parking in the grass, baby animals, some guy with a guitar playing old Hank Williams songs over a crappy PA system, and a dubious but humorous craft sale (my favorite item: varying lengths of railroad ties lashed together with rope, with a lamp on top and some ceramic figurines and fake flowers on the lower levels...pigs, angels, whatever charms you).

And, of course, the food. Here you could get beer-battered, deep-fried ramps (thumbs up), hard-boiled eggs pickled in ramp vinegar (big thumbs down, though whatever wild creature eventually eats the half that Tom flung into a field might disagree). We eschewed the ramp wine, but did get the ramp sampler platter: ramp latkes (really), ramp tapenade on bread, baked beans seasoned with ramps, deviled eggs with ramp filling, ramp salad, and a ramp chocolate-chip cookie (which, believe it or not, wasn't bad). And some home-brewed sassafras tea to wash it all down while sitting on a blanket looking out over the hills where the redbuds are in full splendor. Paradise.

Once we were able to waddle back to the car, we tooled down Buckeye Road along Dunkard Creek to the ramp festival on the West Virginia side of the line--aptly enough, at Mason-Dixon Park, where the intrepid surveyors apparently had to stop their initial expedition when their Native guides refused to continue into Shawnee territory.

Here, I'd say the "festival" was a little more like your traditional single-food celebration, with no a la carte options: you pay your $9.00 and you get your sit-down ramp-themed dinner, eaten at long communal tables with folks who probably live right down the road. Since we were still belching ramps from the previous adventure, we declined to get in line, but were intrigued as we walked back to the car to hear some guy in a car with Florida plates asking where there might be chanterelle mushrooms growing wild. Another wild spring foodway that we need to find out about, perhaps?

Unfortunately, I don't trust my foraging skills to recognize non-poisonous mushrooms, or to find ramps in the wild (though I could've bought a ramp hoe at festival #1). Instead, we bought a bunch of fresh ramps to bring home. Who knows what we might do with them--not cookies or wine, I can assure you. But with their mild, garlicky-onion flavor and leafy texture, they'd probably be delicious in just about anything else. (Maybe these recipes from the Pittsburgh Post Gazette will provide some inspiration.)

But man, I already know that late next winter, I'm going to start craving the battered and fried version again. Maybe by then my arteries will have cleared...

Botanical nostalgia

The last couple of days have turned out to be surprisingly lovely here in Motown; each day, it looked like we were imminently about to get a thunderstorm, then the clouds moved off and by the time I got home from campus, the sun was shining, and it was about seventy degrees. So what else is one to do but get a bug up one's ass to trim back the ivy that's started to grow across the driveway and finally rake up all the dead leaves that have accumulated around the garbage cans? Which is precisely what I did.

Aside from such quotidian--if necessary--tasks, I've also been drooling over gardening catalogs and waxing nostalgic about the many plants we had at our old house that I miss and would like to try to grow here. My hope is that if I was eventually able to be a successful gardener on the godforsaken corner of 10th Street and 13th Avenue in Greeley, Colorado--land of drought and duststorms--I should be able to make a go of it in a more generous climate.

In particular, this time of year I've been missing the pasque flowers and the black, stubby beginnings of the Virginia bluebells that grew under the viburnum bush in a shady corner of the backyard. And later, I know, it'll be the enormous, fragrant pink peony blossoms that I'll think about, and the Canadian shrub roses and lavender.

Frankly, I can hardly believe I'm even writing any of this, since I grew up watching my mother lavish attention on her garden thinking, "What's the point?" And I honestly thought that I was doing all that yardwork in Colorado just because I couldn't understand the point of watering something as boring as grass three times a week.

But apparently I got the bug, and I get the point: gardening is a crucial way of making an anonymous space home. Waiting for the reappearance of plants you put in over the years not only marks territory, it marks the passage of time, and is a long-term investment that pays off repeatedly and continuously. So, I'm looking forward to getting my hands in the dirt here, which is so loose! Not like the rock-hard soil of Colorado...the early white settlers weren't nicknamed "sodbusters" for nothing. And already I'm thrilled to see things blooming that I never saw there--for example, this magnificent forsythia in our front yard. And the azalea bush out there is already full of buds.

Uh...clearly, I got reacquainted with my seasonal affective disorder this winter! But the long-awaited reward is right outside:

For winter's rains and ruins are over,
And all the season of snows and sins;
The days dividing lover and lover,
The light that loses, the night that wins;
And time remembered is grief forgotten,
And frosts are slain and flowers begotten,
And in green underwood and cover
Blossom by blossom the spring begins.

--From Swinburne's "Atalanta in Calydon" (1865)

--I think Swinburne had a bit of a case of SAD, too...

They're baaaaaaack!

Enjoy your peeps without guilt, cavities, or a blood-glucose spike. Check out this year's Washington Post Peeps Diorama Contest winners.

Holy holy week, Batman

I've been much in need of cheering up lately, and have found some welcome hilarity on the Washington Post's website. They're holding their annual Peeps Diorama contest, and the slideshow of last year's winners is a real hoot. I'm reminded of a grad-school acquaintance's annual Easter Jell-O creations: the only time I ever saw one in person, it was a Jell-O rendition of the parting of the Red Sea, with Cool-Whip waves and some kind of action figure dressed up as Moses. (Mike, Don, Sarah--what were some of the others?)

All I know is, one of the things that's gonna get me through this last week of classes before spring break is knowing that next Sunday I can see the winners of this year's diorama contest. And maybe the Easter bunny will bring some Peeps of my own to start drying out to be crunchy and ready to eat around, oh, Memorial Day. However, I won't be doing any cooking with them.

Best cat ever

That Lucy was destined to be my cat, there can be no doubt. On the sunny June day in 1987 that my friend Kate took me to her aunt's farm in Danville, Ohio, to see the kittens that had been born to one of their barn cats a couple months earlier, I picked out a different one to take home. As I recall, it was an adorable little black and white ball of fluff, but it was feral enough to run under a bush when we tried to catch it.

"No problem," Kate's aunt said. "I'll round it up and bring it over later." At that, we went back to Kate's parents' farm for dinner, after which the aunt showed up with...a brown, stripy kitten with no tail.

"What happened to the black and white one?" I asked, not wanting to sound too disappointed.

"Oh, I never did find that one, but this one was right out in the open," she replied, depositing the impossibly tiny creature in my lap, where it promptly curled up and fell asleep.

That was nearly 21 years ago. Lucy was born on Easter in 1987, and almost made it to Easter 2008. She saw me through half my life: the end of college, more years of grad school than I care to admit, nine different apartments and houses, many bad relationships and one good marriage, two cross-country moves, and every other major (and minor) event of my adult life.

She was a rabble-rouser; a stubborn, spoiled brat; too smart for her own good and too sweet to let go of. She lived a good, long life, and died a relatively peaceful death. And I'm glad she's not in any more pain and confusion. But christ almighty, I'm heartbroken and I know it's only going to be worse over the next days and weeks as I wait for her to come up the stairs in the morning and she doesn't, or expect to find her curled up on the corner of the couch when I get home from work, and she isn't there.

But nobody wants to read a maudlin, sentimental blog about someone else's dead cat (however much I'd like to write one). Instead, I'll just say a public thank you to her here for her companionship, her spirit, and all the other gifts she's given me over the last two decades...including making it easy to know when the time had come to see her out of this world and into the next.

Vade in pace, sweet thing.

The lighter side of ephemera

Here's a site after my own heart: a paean to the joys (and horrors) of kitchy paper crap from the past. One look at this and--sorta like Proust's madeline--I was transported back to elementary school, where all the teachers dressed just like this.

And did I have a "Little House on the Prairie" getup? And elephant-bottom pants (so called, I guess, because they were even wider than bell bottoms)? Well, I think the evidence is right here.

Ephemera

Last Saturday Tom and I went down to Fairmont, WV, to troll a couple of antique malls. At the first one we went to, Tom showed up at the checkout counter with this object, saying it was in a book he'd been looking through. He asked the owner if he could buy it without the book (which didn't interest him), and after she looked it over for a minute, she asked him, "Why would you want that?"

[What it is: a handmade book of school football cheers from the 1930s or thereabouts.]

I can't tell you how much of this stuff we've collected over the years: dance cards from the 1920s, valentines from the Victorian era through the 50s, promotional cookbooks (see below), old postcards, and various other odd bits of paper material that collectors refer to as "ephemera."

I've been thinking about that term, "ephemera," a lot lately. Last summer, one of my dearest, oldest friends, Christina Cappelletti, moved back to Ohio after many years in the Bay area. Though she'd ditched a lot of stuff before her move (even having a ritualistic bonfire to destroy a lot of stuff she'd been hauling around for years), she held onto a stack of old letters that she'd received from me and our mutual friend Kristin during college.

After she'd settled in to her new house in Columbus, Christina invited us over and we spent an amazing afternoon reading over these letters. Some were hilarious (a letter from Christina which basically came to the conclusion that "Spring is all about f*cking!!!"); some sobering (a letter in which I described a humiliating experience that I'd always felt guilty about, but which--after reading the letter I'd written to Christina afterward--was clearly date rape); some incriminating (the letter that proved, despite her vehement denials, that Kristin not only smoked, but inhaled in college).

I understand that such things are labeled "ephemera" because they are so often lost, discarded, destroyed--and because they capture such specific and fleeting moments in time. But that term seems so dismissive in its suggestion that such objects are trivial and weightless. I can tell you from my experience of that afternoon that rereading those letters, holding them in my hands, was a far weightier and meaningful experience than flipping through a photo album or watching a home video of that same time period would have been. Far from being "trivial" and "light," that ephemera knocked me on my ass as unexpectedly and suddenly as if I'd been sideswiped by a car.

I still have the letters that Christina and Kristin (and others) sent me during college and afterwards, but it was a very different experience to see what I'd written to them all those years ago. And yet, I couldn't tell you the last time I wrote a personal letter to someone. The three of us were amazed at how much we'd forgotten, or misremembered, or blocked out that came back to vivid life on the page, especially when seen in one's own undeniable scrawl. And we wondered: what happens to all these memories now, in the age of e-mail and text messaging and--god forbid--blogs?

I don't want to fall into the trap of romanticizing the written word and lamenting "kids these days" and how much they're missing. But given the rapid pace of technological change, even if people diligently archive all their e-mail and other electronic correspondence, will we still be able to access that stuff in 20 years? And will the experience of rereading those missives on the screen be the same as holding a letter you wrote, stuffed in an envelope, and mailed to someone decades ago?

Someone bothered to write down those stupid cheers and put them in a in a misshapen-football booklet. The back of the valentine pictured above reads "To Ned from Wilbur." I don't know who any of these folks are, but I admire the care that went into the assembly of the football-cheer book, and the wobbly grade-school handwriting on the valentine. Perhaps, then, ephemera is aptly named, since it's becoming ever more ephemeral: while there's a lot of paper crap documenting the 20th century, there's probably going to be ever less of it as we move to a "paperless" ideal.

And, even if it is hopelessly romantic to say it, that strikes me as sad. In the end, these pieces of ephemera are often the only, and certainly the most personal remnants of our past and those we loved.

In looking through my own old letters to share with Christina and Kristin, I came across a number of letters from another friend I'd had since childhood, Jay Solomon. Jay died of AIDS in the summer of 1986, shortly after his 21st birthday.

One of the letters I came across was from the spring of that year, when he was in Florence for his junior year abroad. It's dated March 23rd...just a little more than four months before he would die, at the end of July. There's nothing in that letter to indicate that he was sick, or knew he'd been infected; rather, the letter is full of classic funny Jay observations...stories about his roommate, a guy from Duke who, when getting ready to post his own letters, "licked each stamp ten times--twice at each corner and twice in the middle!!"...and rapturous descriptions of Italian art: "The Sistine Chapel is a miracle of painting--I'm sure you've heard it before, but it's true."

It's ephemera, to be sure...just as his life, and life in general, is all too ephemeral. But rereading it now means so much more to me than it would have in March 1986--it offers me some comfort to know that he didn't spend the last months of his life in fear or pain. And then there's Jay's beautiful handwriting; I'd forgotten about that.

So. "Why would you want that?" Because in the end, what else is there but ephemera?

lolprofs

So, I'm teaching a class this semester called "Folk Literature"--great title, terrible course description: “The folk ballad, its origin, history, and literary significance.” That's it. Nothing else.

Since what I know about the Child ballads would take me all of about ten minutes to impart to students, I was a little stymied about what to do with the other hour and fifteen weeks. (Plus, as Don Yarman once brilliantly noted, "folk music is annoying," plain and simple.)

As the picture to the right illustrates, I decided to go straight for the jugular on the first day of class and implode the idea that folk literature is only about the ballad. We talked about internet fan fiction (which I believe is what I was discussing when a student snapped this photo) and "lolcat" pictures and language, among other topics.

So, as I said, the student apparently took this picture during class (unbenownst to me) and ran it through a "lolcat builder" page at mine.icanhascheezburger.com to create this image, then e-mailed it to me.

It's either the creepiest or most flattering tribute I've ever gotten from a student. (At any rate, it's way better than the lilac-scented-teddy-bear-in-a-tulip-shaped-mug that I got from a student once.) Either way, it was very reassuring: you know you're back in a real folklore class when all the wack jobs turn up. As George Bush famously said, they're my "base." Then there's the student who claims to be a traditional ballad singer. Oh yeah! And away we go...

Anyway, the student who mocked up this shot suggested that perhaps there should be a "lolprofs" website, which I think is a fabulous idea. Maybe I'll try to put together some other pics of unsuspecting colleagues and get a start on that...nah. I'm enough of a wack job as it is without going that route.