I have returned from a busy weekend in Brooklyn—the borough of NYC from which my mother’s parents hailed. They left Brooklyn for another great immigrant city—Worcester MA—long before I was born, so I had never been to Brooklyn before. All my prior trips to NYC were Manhattan only.
We were there to celebrate the marriage of a beloved nephew in his early 40s and got a glimpse into his life there. A very urban life.
Due to Amtrak cancelling our train, we had to drive from Massachusetts. A last minute detour sent us over the iconic Brooklyn Bridge, from which we could see the Statue of Liberty, which was very cool. It almost made up for all the traffic we hit in Connecticut.
This part of the Brooklyn waterfront is called Pebble Beach. There are great views of both the Manhattan and Brooklyn bridges.
Manhattan Bridge
Blue steel is a feature of the Manhattan Bridge
Jane’s Carousel, built in 1922
View of the financial district from under the Brooklyn Bridge. That’s the Freedom Tower with the black spire.
Lady Liberty in the distance
A bison puppet in Brooklyn
A herd of bison puppets 🤷♀️
My son and his girlfriend in front of a chain link fence with a heart on the Lower East Side/Chinatown (Manhattan), where we went for an interesting dinner
Both jellyfish (top) and chicken feet (bottom) were served as appetizers. I tried both.
I couldn’t bring myself to try the “live fish” because I was too afraid of getting a bone stuck in the back of my throat, which happened to me once as a kid.
The happy couple sharing their absolutely beautiful vows 🥹
Weather was pretty rainy so this lovely patio area was a bit soggy, but we enjoyed ourselves anyway.
We made it back to Massachusetts in much better time. (The traffic gods were with us.) But my ears are still ringing. Brooklyn was loud. From the constant sirens to the extremely noisy restaurants and bars, I’m happy to be home and can’t say I’m dying to head back to NYC anytime soon.
I gotta say, this whole situation with the midterm election (and Trump’s plan to undermine it), the mess in the Middle East, inflation, AI coming for us…and on and on…is…STRESSFUL.
Baking with fruit from our own trees is a good counterbalance to the news.
A friend’s trip to Germany inspired me to try making apple strudel for the first time. My husband cut-up the last of our Winesap apples and we used a recipe I found online.
I have very little experience baking with puff pastry. It turns out the timing of when you take it out of the freezer is a key.
There were dots of butter under the top sheet of puff pastry, which I brushed with milk.
After 30 minutes in a 350 degree oven
Amazing. No ice cream needed.
The midterm elections have begun. VOTE like your life depends on it, because it does. VOTE early if you can.
What’s one thing that would instantly improve your city?
We’re having high suburban drama here in my leafy suburb outside of Boston over…trash.
Due to budget constraints and a failed vote to raise our own taxes, the town has implemented a new trash policy whereby every family gets one small trash bin. (Recycling bins are separate.)
It’s proving to be very dramatic and upsetting to a lot of people. If you fill your bin and still have more trash, you have to buy special $15 bags to dispose of the rest.
Since my husband and I are empty nesters, we can deal. For families with young children, disposable diapers alone would fill up about half of these little bins. It’s an actual hardship for them.
In the grand scheme of things, this is a relatively minor problem, but it’s also just another way we’re making life harder for young families.
Conservatives say they want more babies and growing families, yet they continually vote down money to pay for schools and other services that families need.
Typical post in a town Facebook group that elicited 100+ comments and devolved into several online fights
Typical comment from a white guy who thinks he shouldn’t have to contribute to the community because he has no family of his own (gee, I wonder why?) I mean, he doesn’t even “USE THE ROADS.” Maybe he has a Jetsons-style space saucer to get around.
My husband’s new Retirement Garden (aka The Graveyard) will not sit idle until spring. With hopes for a warm October, he went ahead and put in a bunch of seeds and surprisingly, they all sprouted.
He planted spinach, radishes, Swiss chard and four kinds of lettuce seeds.
Also, he now has a spigot out there. 💦
For my friends facing knee replacement: his two new knees are really pretty darn good now. Walking is not a problem. Stairs are not a problem. I would say that this optimistic return to his lifelong love of plants and gardening has been made possible by those surgeries.
I had a recipe for “Dutch Pear Pie” printed out in a 3-ring binder. I had scribbled “good” in pencil across the top—and so it is.
My husband did the hardest job of chopping up most of our remaining Asian pears. The rest is pretty easy. Something about a streusel-topped pie that’s just so delicious. And it’s really not that hard. No special equipment required. I just softened up the butter for about a minute in the microwave on 50% power and then made the streusel with a fork.
How do you like my “staging” of my pie in this photograph? I feel like I really nailed it. I’m getting a lot of compliments from my friends on Instagram. So many, that I’m reminded of a Josh Johnson comedy bit about how much white ladies LOVE autumn. (Oh they do, they really really do. I’m a summer lover, but my friends love fall.)
Side view of a slice 😋
This is one of the rare baked fruit pies that doesn’t require ice cream or whipped cream. (I mean, they won’t hurt, but they’re not needed.) It’s a complete dessert on its own. I think the sour cream in the filling fulfills the dairy role.
1 box Pillsbury refrigerated pie crusts, softened as directed on box
Filling
1 cup sour cream
½ cup granulated sugar
1 tablespoon Gold Medal all-purpose flour
1 teaspoon vanilla
1 egg, beaten
3+ cups coarsely chopped fresh pears (6-8 pears, or as many as will fit in your pie shell)
Crumb Topping
1 cup Gold Medal all-purpose flour
½ cup packed brown sugar
½ cup butter or margarine
Instructions
Heat oven to 425°F. Make pie crust as directed on box for One-Crust Baked Shell, using a 9-inch glass pie plate; do not prick crust. Carefully line pastry with a double thickness of foil, gently pressing foil to bottom and side of pastry. Let foil extend over edge to prevent excessive browning. Bake for 10 minutes. Carefully remove foil; bake 2 to 4 minutes longer, or until pastry just begins to brown and has become set. If crust bubbles, gently push bubbles down with the back of a spoon.
Meanwhile, in a medium bowl, mix the filling ingredients. Pour into the warm baked pie shell.
In a medium bowl, mix the crumb topping ingredients with a pastry blender or fork until the mixture looks like fine crumbs. Sprinkle the topping evenly over the filling.
Reduce oven temperature to 350°F. Bake for 40 to 50 minutes, or until the top is light golden brown. After 30 minutes of baking, cover the top of the pie with foil to prevent excessive browning. Cool at least 30 minutes before serving. Store in the refrigerator.
How does your mindset affect your financial success?
One thing that people who are on the other side of the political spectrum from me (my father for one) love to say is that there’s no other country in the world where people can just “have an idea” and make millions of dollars. They say that’s a uniquely American thing.
Here’s an article from the Wall Street Journal that doubles down on this idea that America is great because anyone who works hard can get rich. I’ve also noticed that these same people tend to say Europe is poor and declining. “They don’t even realize how poor they are,” I heard one Conservative acquaintance (another white man) say.
I’m all for people working hard and doing well as a result, but this idea that everyone should just “have an idea” (like opening a hot dog stand) and through sheer grit and a positive attitude make a fortune seems…naive. And also, given who tends to espouse it, the height of privilege.
If your pet an elephant could talk, what would be the first thing it says?
100 life-size elephant sculptures, each hand-carved from the invasive plant lantana camara by roughly 300 Indigenous artisans from India’s Nilgiri Hills and modeled after real, named elephants, are on display for free along Boston’s Commonwealth Avenue Mall. They’re all facing in the same direction—moving as a herd down Comm Ave.
Once, for my Book Group, I selected a classic that was highly recommended by the author Ann Patchett on the Instagram account of her Nashville bookstore—Parnassus Books. The book is called Independent People by the Icelandic author Halldór Laxness. It was written a long time ago and considered a seminal work. It led to the author getting a Pulitzer Prize.
It was awful. Nobody in my book group made it through to the end, but I felt like I HAD to finish it, because I chose it.
I’ve mostly blocked it out, but let’s just say I know more about sheep and their various disgusting ailments than I ever wanted to and Iceland is permanently OFF my Bucket List. 😉
What’s the most annoying trope in books or movies?
Listen, one thing I know about is Massholes. I grew up with plenty of them. I know when the accent is real.
In movies, they never get it right. Even Matt Damon and Ben Affleck, who grew up in highbrow Cambridge, don’t get it quite right. (Despite that slight flaw, I loved the filmGood Will Hunting. It captured one of the key characteristics of Masshole mentality—class awareness. “You think you’re bettah than me cuz you go to Hah-vahd? Well Faaaack you”)
Mark Wahlberg, on the other hand, is an objectively terrible actor, but an authentic Boston Masshole. Did you know he grew up in the infamous South Boston “projects” and was involved in a number of serious racially-motivated assaults and harassment incidents as a teenager in Boston during the mid-1980s? I did! He’s the type of guy I would’ve avoided like the plague in high school.
This is a famous image by Stanley Forman. Titled “The Soiling of Old Glory,” the photo won a Pulitzer Prize for breaking news photography. Forman took the picture on April 5, 1976, for what was then the Boston Herald American. A young white man lunges at a black man (Ted Landsmark) with the sharp point of a flagpole, with the American flag attached.
Well, this is all a long-winded way of saying that I finally saw an authentic portrait of that trope last night. The film Tony about one summer in the life of the late celebrity chef Anthony Bourdain has a great Masshole character played by Leo Woodall. He’s SO good in this. In my opinion, he steals the film, which is largely set on Cape Cod in the summer of 1975. His accent and demeanor are perfect. It just figures that he’s a Brit! He totally nailed his part. GENXers should go see the film for Woodall and the soundtrack (including some classic Jonathan Richman) alone.
Leo Woodall as the Masshole character—a restaurant worker named Sal—in Tony (in theaters now)
Here’s me at a dinner with Ted Landsmark (from the Pulitzer Prize winning photo) in 2013. It was an honor to meet such a distinguished Bostonian.
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