We are about to embark on the final leg of our journey that started back in 2005 when we left California and moved to England. My chronicle started here on this blog in 2007 when we bought a Cotswold cottage, became more sporadic during the eight months we spent in Berlin in 2011, then waned dramatically since arriving in Boston back in November. But now, in the final weeks before our return to Santa Monica (and before I get to add the final clause to the subtitle of this blog “…back to burritos and margaritas.”), I thought I should take a few moments to commend the most recent city that has hosted us. It’s no California, but it’s pretty fine as far as the east coast goes. As they say on American Idol, Boston, here are your best bits:
Favorite places to have a glass of wine
Bin 26 Enoteca
26 Charles St.
Boston, MA
(617) 723-5939
http://www.bin26.com/
With lots of wines sold by the carafe, the only drawback here is you have to order some food with your drink due to their licensing restrictions. Not that I am complaining about being forced to eat saffron risotto balls.
Beacon Hill Bistro
25 Charles St, Boston, MA
(617) 723-7575
http://www.beaconhillhotel.com/
Corner seats by the window are ideal for people watching on Charles Street and around the rest of the bar. Try the homemade fig-infused vodka. It reminded me of the flavoured gins so beloved in England.
La Voile
261 Newbury Street, Boston, MA
(617) 587-4200
http://lavoileboston.net/
Best place to stop if shopping on Newbury Street has worn you out. I am sucker for all things French, and the proprietor here does the double-cheek kiss thing.
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| Public Garden photo by Boston Photo Sphere from Flickr Creative Commons |
Taj Hotel
15 Arlington St, Boston, MA
(617) 536-5700
http://www.tajhotels.com/Luxury/City-Hotels/Taj-Boston-Boston/Overview.html
Old fashioned, excellent service and bar snacks, and a great view of the Public Garden.
Best Dose of Culture
The Institute of Contemporary Art
100 Northern Avenue
Boston, MA 02210
(617) 478-3100
http://www.icaboston.org/
Don’t miss the viewing room that overhangs the harbor. Try Sam’s restaurant (next door) if you are visiting the museum. Awesome food and views.
http://www.louisboston.com/sams/
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| Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum photo by me before docent reminded me No Pictures Allowed. |
Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum
280 The Fenway
Boston, MA 02115
(617) 566 1401
http://www.gardnermuseum.org/
What can I say? I like quirky women’s art collections, my other favorite being Peggy Guggenheim’s Venetian Palazzo. Here we have a real-life Boston-Venetian Palazzo. You won’t find any of Peggy’s surrealist buddies on display, but there is plenty else on offer and an excellent restaurant as well.
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| Photo of Boston Public Library in her Christmas finery by me |
Boston Public Library
700 Boylston St.
Boston, MA 02116
http://www.bpl.org/central/tours.htm
For a bit of Hogwarts here in the good old USA, hang out in the reading room of the McKim building (free wifi). Better yet, take a free art and architecture tour.
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| Barking Crab photo by Lars Ploughmann from Flickr Creative Commons |
Barking Crab
88 Sleeper St, Boston, MA 02210
(617) 426-2722
http://www.barkingcrab.com/
Classic New England seafood shack. Wood burning stove inside in winter, picnic tables underneath a crab-trap decorated tent outside for summer. Close to the ICA too.
75 Chestnut
75 Chestnut Street
Beacon Hill
Boston, MA 02108
(617) 227-2175
http://www.75chestnut.com/
Just off Charles Street, our trusty standby for post-work drinks and dinner. While you can spend $30 on a lobster, you can also have a bowl of chili or a turkey sandwich for considerably less. The same cannot be said of many of the places nearby on Charles Street, which are either very good but expensive (Bin 26 Enoteca, Toscano), overrated (The Paramount), or shockingly bad (Figs actually messes up pizza, Panificio loses orders, and Cafe Bella Vita is a waste of prime real estate).
Cantina Italiana
346 Hanover Street
Boston, MA
(617) 723-4577
http://cantinaitaliana.com/
Probably not the best in Little Italy, but solid enough and lovable for its old school kitsch and charm that starts with the neon sign outside of a basket of Chianti being poured into a wine glass. Skip dessert and stop by Mike’s Pastry just down the street for a cannoli (I favor the limoncello flavor) afterwards.
This morning I attended a book sale in the basement of the Boston Public Library. I was there by chance, having seen a listing for the sale in a neighbourhood newspaper over breakfast. I have been wanting to visit the library, and with husband out of town this was the perfect chance.
When I arrived at ten minutes to ten there were already twenty or so misfits loitering in the very grand lobby of the old McKim building waiting for the doors to the sale to open. (I know the architect’s name because after the book sale I geeked out even more and joined the library’s Saturday art and architecture tour.) The public library is not where the beautiful people hang out on a Saturday morning. We were a motley crew comprised of the elderly, the odd, and the possibly homeless, although winter clothing tends to make everyone look homeless. What we all had in common other than a love of books was sensible shoes. I was surrounded by the kind of people who wear running shoes with normal clothes and almost certainly never to run.
As if to tease us the first room of the sale was filled with romance novels. Dispensing with this genre at least partially explained the oxymoron of a public library holding a book sale. But why was T.S. Eliot on the poetry shelf in the next room, its spine still wearing a Dewey Decimal sticker and a manila pocket still intact on the inner back cover? I nabbed The Cocktail Party and moved on to the New England section.
Despite the sedate surroundings, there was a distinct air of frenzy mingled with aggression as bibliophiles jockeyed for prime position from which to survey the thousands of cast-offs on offer. A man sporting fresh-from-cataract-surgery-sunglasses and a red parka body blocked me from the Art shelf. A middle-aged woman pleaded with a peroxide-haired man to watch the stack of books she had selected from the rolling cart of Music titles. He shrugged as if to say that what she left behind was fair game. People carried plastic shopping baskets full of books or leaning tower of Pisa stacks. My final selection of three seemed downright modest in comparison.
I made sacrifices along the way. Larousse Gastronomique (only $10!) stayed put because it was too heavy to carry around for the rest of the day. A pang of guilt over promising husband I would not buy any more books gave me the strength to resist Confessions of a Prairie Bitch by the woman who played Nellie Olsen on Little House on the Prairie. I regret that one. In the end it was the Eliot plus a collection of essays on New England Life called Here at Eagle Pond and a book by Ludwig Bemelmans called La Bonne Table. (I bought the last because it had sweet line drawings and a chapter on the Tour d’Argent, only finding out after I got home and searched online that Bemelmans also wrote the Madeline books.) I am starting to make friends with my Kindle lately, but for $5 I got all three of these gems. How could I say no?
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| Sculpture from 798 Art District in Beijing |
This is not really a letter from Beijing. I would have liked to have written it there, but Blogger is blocked in China. Facebook is also blocked there, which was less distressful than I imagined. I can now attest to the fact that nobody ever died because they couldn’t check in somewhere cool.
Of course China has come up with its own version of Facebook, just like it has its own version of Google (Baidu) and Yahoo (Sina) and PayPal (Alibaba), to name a few. It’s really a cross between Twitter and Facebook, and it’s called Weibo. Last Tuesday my colleagues and I braved the Beijing smog (shocking even by the standards of a former Angeleno) to sit down with a few folks from their team and talk shop. I was there with the Western European, aged, behemoth of a technology company I work for, along with some partners from an American, aged, behemoth of a technology company. Together we easily averaged twice the age of the our Weibo colleagues. We sat listening attentively while Gaofei, Jerry, Terry, and Ianli regaled us with tales of their three-hundred million and growing user base. I half expected them to dab the dribble from our chins and tuck blankets over our laps before they wheeled us out to contemplate how we might capture just a few drops from their overflowing cup. Instead they gave us each a red scarf — Weibo apparently sounds a lot like the word for scarf in Chinese — which was promptly stolen from my hotel room by the maid.
There were other memorable if more predictable experiences over the course of the five-day trip. There was the restaurant lit up from the outside like a Vegas casino with hostesses dressed in matching fur-collared camel coats and rhinestone tiaras who ushered us up escalators in a corridor with AstroTurf-lined walls to eat fried fish with a spiked ridge like a dog collar. Then there was the dinner at a restaurant laid out like the villa of a rich Qing dynasty family, where women in elaborate costumes — embroidered peony pink dresses, fan-shaped head pieces crowned with a single oversize flower, white socked-sandals resting on a squat stilt under the center of the foot — served us individual carafes of hot, clear liquor alongside a taunting plate of deer tongues. The tongues were redeemed with a duck hamburger, a crisp patty sandwiched between a spongy oyster shell-shaped bun, scalloped like a madeleine.
Culinary miscellany aside, the meeting at Weibo made the deepest impression on me. I feel like I have seen the future, and it coincidentally looks a lot like the above picture I snapped in the trendy Beijing 798 art district. Because of course Beijing has trendy art districts now, just like they have Zara and iPhones and social networks that are on course to dwarf Facebook before the year is out.
I leave shortly for a work trip to Beijing. The last time I was in Beijing was about eighteen years ago. I was a graduate student in Singapore on my way to visit an old college boyfriend—let’s call him OCB, which sounds pleasingly similar to ODB—who was working outside of Tsingtao. OCB was too busy to meet me in Beijing, but it seemed crazy to visit China without first stopping in the capital city to take in some of the sights. So OCB arranged to have another one of his ex-girlfriends, a petite French woman named Agnès who was living in Beijing, take me around the city. I was pretty naive at twenty-two, but even I could smell the potential awkwardness in this arrangement. (It was awkward enough that I was flying to China to meet up with an old flame, but somehow that had failed to register.)
Agnès picked me up at my hotel on my first night in town and pedalled me, a large American woman, on the handlebars of her bike to a Muslim part of town where we bought flat breads and beer from street vendors, then sat around consuming them at street-side plastic tables. To this day I don’t know if Agnès was trying to give me an off the beaten path experience or if taking me to this dingy street was some kind of joke. Either way, the next day I decided I would take in the Forbidden City and Mao’s tomb on my own.
After four or five days in Beijing I flew on to Tsingtao where a private but rickety cab took me out to the tobacco factory where OCB was working. It was a harrowing drive that included having a bucket of worms as a co-passenger (dinner for the driver according to OCB) and witnessing what I am pretty sure was a road fatality but was too afraid to look back to confirm. When I arrived I was introduced to a couple of other ex-pats working with OCB. One was having a full blown breakdown over the fact that his case of Mars bars—apparently this man’s sole daily pleasure—had been stolen. The other’s daily pleasure was hardcore porn; from him I learned that Germans were the filthiest porn makers in the world. Thankfully we left for Hong Kong the next day.
And so it is that my abiding memories of my first visit to China are not of golden pagodas but of golden showers (explained that is) and French girlfriends of old boyfriends. I have no idea what this visit holds for me, but odds are the memories will be improved.
I recently returned from a week long vacation at my parents’ house for Christmas. It included the usual stroll down memory lane as I flipped through my high school yearbooks, dusted off my once treasured Beatrix Potter figurines, and examined the contents of my childhood bookcase. The last includes a book called What Do People Do All Day? by Richard Scarry that my father used to read to me. According to the jacket, the book “shows and tells what busy people do every day to build houses, sail ships, fly planes, keep house, and grow food.” In other words, I am not a busy person.
Nonetheless, the subject of what I do all day seemed to be a favorite of my father’s on this visit. It first came up as husband and I were on our way out the door to see a movie for the third night in a row.
“Is this what you do all day? Eat out and go to see movies?”
Well, yes, dad, we like to do those things.
“We are on vacation,” I reminded him before heading out the door for Mission Impossible – Ghost Protocol, a movie in which Tom Cruise’s character Ethan Hawke breaks out of a Russian jail, rappels off a skyscraper and crashes a car from ten floors up on a parking platform to save the world from nuclear annihilation. Or, by Richard Scarry’s definition, is never really busy.
I am not surprised by father’s reaction. Something about going to the movies seems to set people off, especially people with kids. Invariably the news that I have seen a new release in an actual movie theater is greeted with wistful comments from my parent-friends who cannot remember the last time they went to a movie theater unless it was to see the Muppets or Sponge Bob or such.
But there was some subtext to my father’s comment, which translates roughly as “Ok, now that you are practically forty your mother and I accept you are never going to have kids but can you please be a little less blatant about what an empty shell of a life you live for nothing but your own pleasure?” In other words, it is ok to busy yourself with your kids, but if you are childless the ways in which you choose to busy yourself are subject to scrutiny by the virtue police. Best not to appear to be enjoying yourself too much; that would just upset people.
Normally I ignore everything my father says, but in the spirit of New Year’s Eve I have indulged in some seasonal guilt/self-flagellation. I have asked myself what the point of my life is and concluded only, pathetically, that I need to make some charitable donations. No, I am not reconsidering my decision not to have kids. Sure, children will guarantee you will be busy for the next eighteen years or so, but even parents are subject to the virtue police. Mothers tell me there is a special force dedicated to unsolicited advice on breast feeding, toilet training, and preparing your infant for an Ivy League. Besides the older I get, the less convinced I am there is any virtue in being busy. Being busy is easy; it’s the doing something I am finding hard.
This year’s Christmas letter is being written later than usual. I blame Facebook. After a year of prolific posting, I am frankly bored of myself. (I can only imagine how my Facebook friends feel.) Still, despite the never-ending status updates featuring snapshots of husband drinking Riesling, there are a few things left to say about our year.
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| River Spree, Berlin |
2011 is a tale of two cities, one I will tell here in the type of revisionist history that befits a Christmas letter. In other words I will highlight all the best bits and skim over the seething underbelly of marital discontent I provoked by our move to the first of those two cities, Berlin. It was not exactly a life of hardship, what with the company-sponsored Mercedes and apartment, not to mention all that two-euro-a-glass Riesling. And yet while I revelled in nostalgia from my childhood time there in the eighties (courtesy of my father’s employment flying shuttles with Pan Am), husband felt like he had gone back in time to the grim environs of northwest England circa 1976.
To cheer him up we made frequent visits back to the Cotswolds, like the time we went back to celebrate a little local wedding. We watched from the wine bar — where else? — as Kate and Wills tied the knot, then celebrated our own tenth wedding anniversary a few months later in Paris. But returning to Berlin did not get any easier for husband, although it was lightened by a few welcome visits from friends and family. Late in the summer my personal best interest aligned with my professional best interest when I finagled a new job opportunity at my company into a move stateside, where husband was yearning to return. And so in October I bid my goodbyes to Berlin—her golden Lizzy, her Käsespätzle, her nudist Tiergarten sunbathers.
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| Elterwater, Lake District |
We returned to England where we were treated to a special melodrama facilitated by the US embassy in
London. Husband went in for what should have been a routine visa interview, and yet somehow my plans for post-interview celebratory champagne at Claridge’s turned into manic taxi rides around London securing missing paperwork before degenerating into a week of obsessive waiting for his visa to arrive. When it did we finally felt secure enough to start saying our goodbyes to those places and people we had grown to love most over the past six and a half years, up in the Lakes then back down in the Cotswolds where our last stop before Heathrow was, naturally, the wine bar.
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| Boston Common |
In November we arrived in the second city of our tale of two: Boston. We quickly felt at home — it’s not called New England for nothing. (Husband was, I daresay, a bit miffed to find that his collection of cravats, bow ties, and tweeds would fail to achieve the desired effect of standing out as English in this town.) After skirting our way around “hills” in Europe — the still-waiting-for-gentrification perimeter of Notting Hill, the ‘wolds, and atop an old rubble heap that comprises one of the few rises in Berlin — we have settled on Beacon Hill, complete with views of the Common and Public Garden. Sure being above one of the busiest crossroads in the city means it sometimes sound like we are sitting track-side at Nascar, but never mind for now. We are told that soon enough the snow will come, nature’s welcome muffler.
The year has ended on a sad note. My grandmother, Willie Pearl, passed away at the age of ninety-two. (I wrote a little about her here.) There is nothing nice about death, but the fact that this one happened so close to Christmas forced my family to let go of any expectation about the holiday. There are fewer presents under the tree and no turkey in the freezer. This is all fine with me. At the risk of having an expectation, I’d be happy with scrambled eggs for Christmas dinner.
Merry Christmas to you and yours, whatever your table holds!
My grandmother, Willie Pearl, is dying. Willie is her real name, not a nickname or short for Wilhelmina. It is a name as blunt and bleak as her early life in Texas where she was raised by her grandparents after the Spanish influenza epidemic left her orphaned as an infant. It is not, however, appropriate for the grandmother I got to know when I was growing up.
In my eyes my grandmother was all about sophistication, from her royal blue Mazda RX7 to her beloved Pomeranian, Foxy, to her weekly visits to Doris the hairdresser with copious amounts of aerosol hairspray in between. Her most glamorous accessories were a diamond bee brooch and a matching three-piece Samsonite luggage set in Dijon mustard yellow leather. (The carry-on for the latter was a tackle box-shaped treasure trove of cosmetics mysteriously referred to as her “training case.”) She never left the house without lipstick, jewelry, matching knitwear, and three-inch heels—the last until sometime in her seventies when she broke an ankle at the garden store. By the time I knew her, she and my late grandfather, Woody, had realised the American middle class dream. This was not so unusual for their generation, but what was unusual was that this was not achieved on the income from my grandfather’s career alone. Willie didn’t just work; she had a career too, culminating in heading a county department complete with headcount and her own office where I remember hiding as a little girl when we came to visit. When she retired it was a big deal. Woody threw her a party at the Arrowhead Country Club with all her friends and the people who had worked for her as guests. It was big as any wedding I had ever been to.
I came of age in the nineteen-eighties, the era of industrial-strength shoulder pads and Working Girl. Society was doing its best to tell me that women could do it all, but I already knew that. I had learnt it from Willie. I will always have more grandmotherly associations with her—of roses and snapdragons, the strawberry planter and hummingbird feeder on the back porch, her copious supply of Delaware Punch drunk through bendy straws, and shopping, lots of shopping: at Fashion Island, Bal Harbour, Rubel’s jewellers, and the Cooper Building. But looking at my life today, I suspect being a working girl is her real legacy to me.
For the past few days Willie has been at home in a hospital bed. Her name has again become appropriate for her as she faces down death, no longer eating or drinking or speaking except for the occasional words summoned to chastise my mother. I am told she is setup with a view out the window to where the snapdragons would be planted in spring. Her roses are just the other side of the bedroom wall.
Last night husband and I went to see the Nutcracker. Husband had never seen it and enough years had passed since I had that we were both genuinely excited to be hoisting this holiday cliché upon ourselves. It started well enough. We were both impressed with the Boston Opera House, a vaudeville palace built in the 1920s in a style that apes the best of Euro-gaudy. It was only in the second act when Mother Gigone waddled out on the stage that things started to sour. In a ballet full of dainty, delicate things, Mother Gigone is a man in drag wearing a giant hoop skirt and walking on stilts. Clown children scamper in and out of his/her skirts from time to time, and this is where the trauma comes in. Long ago I too was a clown child.
It wasn’t supposed to be that way. I had different aspirations when as an awkward tween I auditioned for my local production of the Nutcracker. I had the good sense to realize that sugar plum fairydom was the preserve of older girls like Francesca, girls who had boobs, wore eyeshadow, and smoked Marlboro Lights between pointe and tap on Thursday nights. All I wanted was a modest role in the opening scene as one of the Christmas party kids hanging out with Clara and Fritz. Instead I got the indignity of clown child.
While I was busy suffering from my PTND, husband was busy enjoying himself. It turns out the Nutcracker is rife with British cultural references, including the 1970s Cadbury fruit and nut case ad and the inspiration for Keith Lemon’s Celebrity Juice Russian dance (you have to wait for it, but it does come around 1:30). In the end I found some consolation in the production, mostly in the fact that the role of reindeer-pulling-the-Snow-Queen-sled did not exist in my local production. I got over being hidden underneath a drag queen’s skirt, but I may never have recovered from a walk-on part in a white unitard and jingle bells.
Some time ago in a fit of writerly ambition I setup a Twitter account and a Facebook page for this blog. I added HTML widgets to its margins so the world could adore me with a single click. I methodically Tweeted and posted each new blog. This is, after all, what you are supposed to do if you have aspirations of going from blog to book: build your platform. I had read the publishing blogs, and I knew a lovingly crafted manuscript was not enough. I had to talk unique visitors and followers and likes in those query letters I sent out to literary agents.
And now, many months in, it is time to admit my failure. It’s not like it’s a secret. The two likes I have garnered on the blog are there for everyone to see. (Not that I am ungrateful to husband and my friend Bertie, who sometimes appears in my blog as R. number one, for their unfailing support.) On Twitter I have fared slightly better. There I have three followers: a friend from my old L.A. writing group, a Cotswold local and wine bar stalwart, and, my favorite, somebody named Candelaria whose last tweet was “super experience with hooking up with chix.” In social networking terms I am a nerd. A loser. A geek. It’s like high school all over again.
When it comes to querying literary agents my stats are more voluminous. My rejections positively dwarf my social network admirers, weighing in at nineteen not counting the two queries I wasted on perfectly good agents last year before my rewrite. Still I think my manuscript for Cotswoldia: A field guide to the not so simple life is good enough to be published, even if my percentage odds are about the same as the number of my Twitter followers. I think this because I read a lot, and I have put in the work, and because other people, including a handful of those nineteen literary agents, have read it and told me so. And so I query on, working my way down my ever dwindling Excel list of agents looking for memoir. I suppose I should remove the Facebook Like button from its prominent position on my blog seeing how it practically bleats “no platform” to potential agents with its measly proclamation “2.” But I won’t, because on today of all days I am thankful for them both.
One of the pleasures of reading is coming across a passage where the author elucidates something—a thought or feeling or situation—in such a way that you understand yourself better. This is how I felt when I read the following in Christopher Isherwood’s Berlin Stories (my one and only attempt to read thematically relevant literature while living in that city):
…Otto is naturally and healthily selfish, like an animal. If there are two chairs in a room, he will take the more comfortable one without hesitation, because it never even occurs to him to consider Peter’s comfort. Peter’s selfishness is much less honest, more civilised, more perverse. Appealed to in the right way, he will make any sacrifice, however unreasonable and unnecessary…
Isherwood may as well have been describing husband when describing Otto. He habitually takes the seat with the view, and preferably within earshot, of the other patrons at any restaurant. I am the less honest Peter, pretending to be irritated by the implication that my company alone is insufficient to entertain him for the duration of a meal, but really annoyed by not having the view myself. And on the basis of this feigned virtue, I nobly concede the seat every time. What is most troubling about recognizing my marital dynamic in this passage is hard to say: that Otto and Peter inevitably split or that Isherwood is describing the relationship between two gay men.
I was reminded of this passage on the flight from London to Boston on Monday. Lunch had been served and eaten but not cleared when husband decided he wanted to use the bathroom. He stacked my tray on his and, balancing both as he climbed over me, very nearly dumped a quarter of a plastic bottle of Albariño and the dregs of a pot of chocolate mousse that tasted suspiciously of suntan oil into the lap of the woman in the adjacent row. I sighed and chastised him for not being able to wait like a grown up for the flight attendants to clear the trays, but he didn’t listen. He returned our trays to the galley and relieved himself long before the rest of the punters, dutifully awaiting tray clearage, formed an orderly and lengthy queue in the traditional post-in flight meal rush for the loos.
Husband’s action were selfish, but what bothered me most was his refusal to follow the generally accepted norms of airline etiquette. Surely if all passengers decided to return their trays and trash at their own convenience the flight attendants would revolt, turning on the fasten seat belt sign and demanding everyone wait until they were ready to make their way up and down the aisles with the trash trolley and tepid coffee nobody really wants but takes anyway because they are bored.
You see I am a rule follower. I see the dentist every six months, save for retirement, and generally wait my turn. This is a character trait that has not gone unnoticed amongst friends, one of whom christened me “rules, rules, rules” after a visit to the theater when I nearly had a conniption fit because he was still out bidding on eBay in the lobby when the three-minute bell rang for the curtain. Husband on the other hand abides by no such rules other than, generally, his own comfort. Where he does appear to follow rules, they are a Byzantine code of conduct decipherable to no one but himself. For example, he will casually leave garbage in a roadside motor stop parking lot claiming “there are people employed to pick that up,” as if he is doing his part for the nation’s unemployment rate, but would chase someone down if he saw them drop litter from their car in the pristine Cotswold countryside.
I am unlikely to ever penetrate the world of husband’s rules. Perhaps the best I can do is learn from them. Next time you are annoyed by the woman sitting next to you on the plane who practically dumps her tray into your lap so she can use the loo, it may just be me.