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Jewish Family Envy

Posted on October 17, 2010

Last week my parents went to Stanley Freeman’s 70th birthday party. Stanley is the father of one my best childhood friends, and she was in attendance along with her gynecologist and dentist brothers, and all three of their spouses. There were also four grandchildren and, for good measure, the dentist brother used the occasion to announce his wife was pregnant. On our weekly call my parents went on and on about the filet mignon and the speeches the kids gave and how funny Stanley’s wife, Rivanne, was with her five martinis, but I’m pretty sure all that progeny made quite an impression too.

My parents have a long tradition of Jewish family envy. I know it’s a stereotype, but the truth is all the Jewish families we know are big and close and successful. It makes quite a contrast to our own family’s grandchild-lessness and waspish trademark lack of warmth and intimacy. It’s not that we don’t like each other, it’s just that we’re not very touchy feely about it. I, for one, am quite happy with our familial arrangement and have no desire to be “friends” with my parents. And frankly, none of us can really be bothered. While the weight of responsibility for the family being grandchild free rests squarely on my shoulders, my parents aren’t going out of their way either. Despite the fact that I’ve lived in England for five years, they haven’t found the energy to pay a visit.

The last time my parents admired a Jewish family this much was when my cousin married into one. The wedding was an extravagant affair at a ski resort in Utah, culminating in a Sunday champagne brunch thrown by the groom’s grandparents. At breakfast the bride’s family took a backseat as the groom’s family toasted each other with lavish compliments highlighting their multi-generational successes. My parents were suitably impressed.

The happy couple were divorced within a year, and while I take no pleasure in the breakup of my cousin’s marriage, I do view it as a cautionary tale for my parents. For now, the closest my family is going to get to being Jewish is a bowl of matzo ball soup at Canter’s Deli.

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One of Those Calls

Posted on October 14, 2010

The first one of those calls I remember was when I was about thirteen. It came in the middle of the night, and I’m not sure if it was the phone or my mother’s scream that woke me up. M., the son of family friends, had been killed in a car wreck. The next one of those calls came through to me on the ladies’ dresses checkout desk at Burdines department store. I was working there over the summer after my sophomore year in college, saving up money for a fall semester abroad. It was my friend D., calling to tell me our friend A. had been murdered. Then there was the call on Monday night. I didn’t answer the phone when it rang because I was washing dishes. When I was done I checked the phone and saw there was a message from S. I figured she was calling about our planned upcoming weekend visit and called her back without listening to the message first, which is why it was even more of a shock when she told me that DDB was dead, shot himself on Friday.

I’ve written about DDB on this blog before, most recently about his instruction in making dry and extra dry martinis. He was one of the characters from English central casting — posh, mustachioed, and seeming to belong to a bygone empire era even though he was too young (sixty-ish) for that to be possible — that we met at the Boylestone village pub. He drank too much, but I never thought much about it because he never seemed drunk. Rather he seemed perpetually charming, always armed with a story like the one about the time he took a business trip to Texas and got such a kick out of the way the locals pronounced “Hereford” (as in cattle).

I was only an acquaintance of DDB’s and I have no idea why he committed suicide; as far as I know there was no concern amongst those closest to him, no note of explanation. The only conclusion I have is the obvious one — these were the actions of a man in despair. And I feel a little bit ashamed at how I fell for his charismatic public front hook, line, and sinker. It was such a perfect fit with my romanticized version of the English countryside that I had no motivation to see anything deeper in him.

Wednesday morning I watched as the first of the Chilean miners was rescued live on the morning news. It made me a little teary and before I knew it I was heaving full blown sobs for DDB.

I’ll miss him, and his yellow socks.

Uncategorized

The Yorkshire Muse

Posted on October 10, 2010

I spent the first week of October at the Ted Hughes Arvon Centre, the poet’s former West Yorkshire home that has been converted to a writers’ retreat. I went to work on fashioning a manuscript from the raw material of this blog, something I started a year and a half ago out of boredom when I got sick and had to spend a few weeks in bed. I feel spoiled for leaving one rural idyll to go to another to write, but the Yorkshire moors have the advantage of being distraction free. There was no television, no Internet, and no husband.

Of course I still found my distractions, mostly welcome, in the form of the disarming number of literary and artistic links packed into a twenty mile radius of the tiny village of Heptonstall where I was staying. I started with a visit to the Bronte parsonage in the village of Haworth, ten miles to the north. That feeling I had read Wuthering Heights because I could summon the names Cathy and Heathcliff and place them in the moors turned out to be the same phenomenon that makes you think you’ve seen It’s a Wonderful Life just because it’s playing in the background or you flick by it a million times every December. But the fact that I had never read anything by the Bronte sisters didn’t detract from my enjoyment of the small museum, the beautifully restored parsonage that was their former home. My favorite was the sitting room with the table around which the sisters apparently circled endlessly while writing their books. In the upstairs bedroom directly above this room an artist had installed the sound of footsteps coming up through the chimney breast.

Nearer to my home for the week was the village of Hebden Bridge, packed with independent bookstores, coffee shops, small galleries and shops selling fairtrade organic cotton. It was confusing, as if a slice of Seattle retail had been airdropped into West Yorkshire. Up the hill in Heptonstall, Sylvia Plath is buried in the church cemetery. I found out she was buried there ahead of time and made the effort to read The Bell Jar. Somehow I had escaped it in my scant two university literature courses, although I seem to recall my feminist studies friend, Jenny, was a big fan. I became a fan on page one, as soon as I read the phrase “fusty, peanut-smelling mouth of every subway.” I did not, however, feel moved to leave a pen in the plastic jar on her grave as some other fans had. (I have felt strange about visiting the graves of the famous ever since that time when I was 19 and visited Jim Morrison’s grave in Paris, littered with dropouts and half-empty liquor bottles. Pens, on balance, are less depressing.)

I wasn’t safe from distractions even when I was in the house. I felt ashamed that I’d never actually read any Ted Hughes and I was staying in his former house, especially when some of my fellow writers confessed that was the main reason they had come. To compensate I plucked a copy of Birthday Letters from the library where I did most my writing and read it when I needed a break.

I ended the week with a visit to Salt Mills, a former mill that now houses a large David Hockney collection only a few miles from where the artist was born and raised. It is not as slick as the Tate Modern but shares that same comforting feeling of a saved former industrial building. Inside there is a happy marriage of art and commerce, including an airy cafe. It was the perfect place to end my week with the muses of Yorkshire.

Uncategorized

Letters to the Editor

Posted on September 19, 2010

My father is fond of writing letters to his congressman. He is also in the Tea Party. He is one of those kind of retired people, the kind with just a little bit too much money, bitterness, and time on their hands. In other words, nothing like me.

Or is he? Lately I have noticed my predilection for writing letters, not to my congressman or MP but to newspapers and magazines. I am embarrassed to admit that I can count six semi-recent occasions on which I have taken the time to submit my thoughts, compliments, or complaints to various editors and columnists. How this has happened when I have trouble finding time to get cash, buy milk, and do the laundry is a mystery to me. For my efforts I have been variously published, graciously replied to, and ignored. I like to think that I am part of the reason that Small Talk, the author interview in the Weekend FT, has returned (although it’s just as likely it was simply on an August hiatus), or that one day the columnist from the same paper, Mrs. Moneypenny, may just read this blog and, bowled over by its superiority, hand over her column to me. In other words, I am slightly delusional. Just like someone else I know…

Cotswolds

Good Morning, Cirencester

Posted on September 19, 2010

It’s a shame husband wants to move back to Los Angeles because I’ve just located one of the key missing features of life there, at least for me. The Vietnamese have arrived in Cirencester, our nearby market town, and they bring with them not bánh mì or pho but reasonably priced pedicures in the aptly named Hollywood Nail. Even the salon is reminiscent of the Santa Monica Fifth Street venue I was addicted to for the five years before we moved to England. It has pale pink textured wallpaper, chairs that look like they were purchased at Office Depot, speakers the size of a ghetto blaster spewing out easy listening pop, well thumbed trashy magazines, and the noxious scent of nail polish remover.

Back in the nineties when I got my first raise at my first grown up job, my first splurge was a regular pedicure. The nail salon was on the corner of my street, right across from the laundromat I still had to use because I didn’t yet own a washing machine (confused priorities?). In my defense, flip flops are a plausible year-round shoe choice in Los Angeles so a pedicure had some practical relevance. With each move around SoCal, I always located my local nail salon with the same urgency that I identified the local grocery store and dry cleaner. They were always Vietnamese run, the Vietnamese having cornered the L.A. mani/pedi market like the Cambodians had with the donut market.

When I moved to England the weather negated the strict requirement for having year-round presentable feet, but the habit was formed and for the past five years I have been on a quest for the reasonably priced, utilitarian, yet thoroughly enjoyable pedicure of my Los Angeles years. Unfortunately a pedicure in the UK remains largely a splurge in which ladies indulge before a holiday to Dubai, and it comes at holiday prices. Lately I had taken to being shunted into a stuffy back room — purportedly a beauty room — in the Bristol Harvey Nicks because at least they give you a glass of pink champagne to accompany your £45 pedicure. Still I longed for the no-frills pleasure of the SoCal version.

Imagine then my delight at finding Hollywood Nail where the vaguely art deco looking desk consoles are manned by a task force of Vietnamese women and men, one who wears a Michael Jackson style surgical face mask and a giant diamond stud in his ear. This turned to disappointment as I was greeted in my undulating faux-leather massage chair by a young Welsh woman, the only British employee in the place, who took an extraordinary amount of time filing my toenails. Mid-way through she was dispatched to manicure a man and replaced by a young Vietnamese woman who loofah-ed my feet and painted my toenails with alarming and thrilling speed and accuracy. To celebrate I chose a color reminiscent of Chanel’s Vamp, the it color of the era when I first started getting regular pedicures.

Cycling Europe

A Week in Provence Part 3: Aups – Tourtour – LA?

Posted on September 10, 2010

Day four and I was grateful for the distraction of a day of cycling. It was a steady but pleasant ascent for the first hour. In La Bréguière we stopped at a small outdoor café for coffee. Across the street several games of pétanque were underway in the square in front of the mairie. The only other table was occupied by a group of four, one of them wearing a windbreaker from the Saint-Maximin pétanque club. On the table was a torn baguette and an open can of some dubious looking pâté. The leader of the pack — trim, cropped white hair and beard, shirt unbuttoned to the navel — was opening their second bottle of rosé, undeterred by the fact that it was 10:30AM on a Sunday.

“How French is he?” I whispered to husband.

I wanted to be charmed. I wanted us both to be charmed. But living in a small village as I do, I knew enough to know that if you lived in La Bréguière, this boisterous Gaul would quickly become a bore. I paid for our café crème at the bar beneath the watchful gaze of a mounted boar head wearing sunglasses, and we headed off to cross the scrub forest Domaniale De Pélenc. It was only 10km, but it was hot and dull and undulating. The market town of Aups was a welcome sight, and after a quick walk around the streets behind the market square we sat down in the shade of Auberge de la Tour. Pizza, postcards, and a pichet of rosé later, we headed out for the final push to Tourtour.

This was some of the nicest riding of the trip, hugging mountains to the left and, to the right, views across the Var of olive groves and villas. After about 10km, we started the final ascent through the winding main street of Tourtour, past its square and a few kilometers further to the Auberge St Pierre. The hotel is set into a hillside with a stone terraced pool and its own herd of bell wearing goats. There was also a tennis court, jacuzzi, and sauna, which, along with the village of Tourtour, were just enough to keep us busy for the two nights we were there.

The last day of cycling was both the longest and the easiest. We stopped in Entrecasteaux for coffee and quiche aux poireaux from the boulangerie, but otherwise focused on getting back to Le Thoronet. That night there was a wild storm. Thunder rolled through the hills and lightning floodlit the room. It was a perfect metaphor for an epiphany, but I had already had mine. When you start vacationing in places that remind you of home, maybe it’s time to go back.

Cycling Europe

A Week in Provence Part 2: Battle of the Farmers Markets

Posted on September 10, 2010

On our third day we freewheeled into Barjols for a visit to the market. I had read about the markets in the south of France in books by Elizabeth David, the English equivalent of Julia Child. And in Los Angeles, a chef acquaintance of mine used to talk about how these markets were the only ones she had ever been to that were better than the Santa Monica farmers markets. I had expectations.

The market was in a small square off the main road (where I spotted the woman in the photo reading). It was petite, just four stands. There was a handsome man selling handsome melons from Fox-Amphoux and another with stacks of gleaming eggplants, red peppers, and perfectly imperfect blush coloured tomatoes. Opposite was a stand specializing in goats cheese, each crotin hand decorated with either golden raisins, fresh herbs, or pink and black peppercorns. And finally there was the elderly lady tending her long table of almond biscuits in shades of pastel that matched the houses and shutters. The market was small but perfectly formed, and yet all I could think of was how the Santa Monica farmers markets spilled out for blocks, dwarfing this. And you could get chilaquiles. Husband was rubbing off on me.

I spent the afternoon by the pool finishing a mystery novel set in Marseilles, the kind of thing you are supposed to do on vacation. Husband lasted about an hour poolside before he retired to our stuffy room to text R&R with tips about their imminent vacation to — where else? — California.

Cycling Europe

A Week in Provence Part 1: Where Not to Take a Husband Homesick for California

Posted on September 9, 2010

I first read Peter Mayle’s rural idyll classic, A Year in Provence, in 1993. Last year, twenty years after it was first published, I read it again. The tales of languorous life in rural, sun dappled France had lost none of their appeal despite the fact that I now live in my very own rural idyll. This coupled with the fact that husband has put a two year deadline on moving back to California steeled my resolve to visit the region, and I’ve just returned from A Week in Provence.

The adventure did not start well. After landing in Nice we had a three hour wait for our train northwest into the Var. It was enough time for a seaside lunch in a posh restaurant had one been prepared and made such a reservation. One had not. We ate rubbery mozzarella panninis and nursed pastis in a smelly cafe with a view of an overpass while husband waxed lyrical about Los Angeles. It was the ocean front approach to Nice airport that did it. Even I saw the resemblance to flying into LAX.

Once in Les Arc the perpetually smiling Belgian, Ludmilla, met us at the station to drive us the remainder of the way to Le Thoronet, where our bicycles, dinner, and a night’s rest awaited us. All were in order but the steak — rare despite husband’s request for bien cuit — and the good night’s rest — blame smokey sheets and a barking dog. Buoyed by a triple carbo whammy breakfast of tartine, croissant, and pain au chocolat, we pedalled out of Le Thoronet and made it to our first winery, Domaine Sainte Croix La Manuelle, by 10:30AM the next day. The ride thus far had been indecipherable from say, Topanga Canyon, and now we were in a tasting room as modern and customer friendly as any in Napa. We were humored by a Frenchman with excellent English (if you clicked on the link, he’s the tall one in the back) who explained the difference between Crémant and their sparkling wine technique while upselling me on a jar of lavender honey.

We left our purchases for Ludmilla to collect — one of the perqs of being on a supported ride — and continued on the vineyard lined road to Carcès and on to Cotignac. Here amongst the plane trees on the main street we selected a table at the nicest looking of the plentiful cafés and restaurants, La Table de la Fontaine. I was worried for a moment we had chosen style over substance, hoodwinked by the wrought iron chairs, red patterned tablecloths and broad, cream coloured umbrellas, but the escargot Provencal put my mind to rest. Inside each of the eight miniature egg cups was a snail resting on a bed of tomato concasse surrounded by a moat of garlic butter and topped by a pillow of toasted crouton. Heaven. And they cooked husband’s filet de bouef bien cuit.

As we earned our lunch on the steep climb out of Cotignac, husband’s thoughts turned back to California. And it was more than a little like the Hollywood hills with all those Spanish tiled roof tops below us. As we rode on to Pontevès, the resemblance to southern California only grew. There were the same pink oleanders as those that line my grandmother’s driveway in San Bernardino, the scent of pine, the scrub clinging to rocky, terracotta-coloured soil. Even the houses behind our hotel looked like a miniature version of the terraced streets of Silverlake. In the center of town there was a departure with a medieval tangle of houses accessible only by pedestrian alleys, each with their door open and a beaded curtain for privacy. We wound our way to the ruins of the feudal château, backlit with rose gold light, and took in the 360 view of the mountains. Husband was back in California, granted a California of one hundred years ago. He sunk into a homesick slump eased not even by the evening’s daube Provencal.

Cotswolds

I am big!

Posted on August 30, 2010

Last night our resident rock superstar played a gig at the pub in the next village over. Sure, his heyday may have been the seventies and eighties, but there’s no denying this was a major coup for the pub—roughly the equivalent of Phil Collins playing at your parents’ anniversary party in your backyard—and a major social event. A major social event that, I hasten to add, I did not attend. I didn’t even know about it until doppelganger couple mentioned it in passing a couple of weeks ago by way of making an excuse for a far less glamorous invitation I had extended to them. At that point all the tickets were long gone and my fate as one of the excluded was sealed.

I thought I had gotten over it, but yesterday morning while chatting with J., one half of doppelganger couple, I was reminded of what I was missing. And just like that my frail ego flared up into a bonfire of vanity over the gall of the local community not to ensure my attendance at the soiree of the summer. How very dare they. J. tried to downplay it, complaining they had paid £40 each to stand in what was likely to be rain that night, but I was having none of it. The only thing to do was to sulk and then plan a fabulous evening of my own. For this I enlisted husband and R&R, all of whom had also been snubbed, and booked the cinema at our local country house hotel to be preceded by a meal at the village pub—the one where our resident rock superstar was not playing.

For husband our humbler evening could not have turned out better. As we sat down at our table, he clocked none other than his third favorite film director in the world eating dinner a few tables over. It would be gauche of me to mention this man’s name, but keep in mind husband is a film buff and his first and second favorite film directors are Mike Leigh and Ridley Scott, so calling this man third favorite is hardly a slight. (Some might even say he is bigger than the man who was singing at that other pub.) In the end husband was too embarrassed to ask the director for a photograph, but he was not too embarrassed to ask the waiter if the director was a local. It turns out he is, and is a regular in the pub on Sunday evenings. I think I know where we’ll be eating supper most Sundays this autumn.

My own redemption for the evening came later when we watched the film. It was Sunset Boulevard, which I had somehow never managed to see and was all the better for being shown on a big screen. Norma Desmond’s delusions of grandeur were as big as my own, and early in the film she summed up my feelings about the evening perfectly. To paraphrase, “I am big! It’s the Cotswolds that got small!”

England

Escape from London

Posted on August 30, 2010

The Boylestone Show and its giant vegetables came and went without us on Saturday. I wrote about my unforgivably blasé attitude in my last blog, but that wasn’t the only obstacle to our attendance. It turns out our longstanding hosts and pillars of the Boylestone community, B&R, abandoned their own village show and are currently cruising the Med. We were lucky, however, to be able to spend our Saturday afternoon in the company of B&R’s daughter-in-law, T., and grandson, J. They are friends from Los Angeles and were over to launch J’s boarding school career at Repton. It is a bold move for a 15 year old from Malibu to willingly launch himself into Britain’s public school system, and we celebrated with pizzas in south London.

It takes a lot to get husband to abandon the Cotswolds and drive into London on a Saturday, but seeing T&J was a worthy reason. In the process we proved that getting to south London from anywhere—even other parts of south London as friends who joined us from Greenwich proved when they hit roadworks—is painful. It took us three hours to navigate our way to Streatham from the Cotswolds, impeded on both they way in and the way out by traffic for the Chelsea match. (Don’t ask me why we went through Chelsea to get to Streatham from the Cotswolds. I blame the sat nav.)

In any case, we had anticipated as much effort and decided to make the most out of being in London by spending the night at the flat. We booked a film at the Electric for the evening and planned a jog around Kensington Gardens followed by brunch at Raoul’s on Sunday morning. Despite the Chelsea traffic, we made it to Portobello Road on time for the movie. It wasn’t until the film finished and we were wandering around the darkened streets that we realized our miscalculation. Most of Ledbury Road and Westbourne Grove were boarded up. Notting Hill was a ghost town, its residents all in exile in preparation for the annual Carnival that would take over the neighborhood on Sunday and Monday. We headed into Bayswater for some noodles and replanned the weekend. By 7:30AM the next morning our escape from London was underway as we bombed along the Harrow Road just ahead of the police putting up barriers behind us.