Oulu sits at the edge of the Bothnian Gulf, where ground and sea wear the same coat of snow. In 2026 the city holds the title European Capital of Culture, though culture has been working the night shift here for centuries. In winter the city feels borderless. Frozen waterways blur into land, and only a bridge or half-buried boat hints that water still moves beneath the white. The cold is not decorative. It is structural.

I step into Ravintola Toripolliisi with ears burning and fingers stiff from the air. Inside there is ritual. Coats come off slowly. Hats. Gloves. Scarves unwound with patience. The room reclaims you. I order lohikeitto, salmon soup, and a glass of Portuguese red to remind my toes they are still alive. The bowl arrives pale and steaming. Salmon silky. Potatoes sturdy then soft. Dill lifting through cream. I break grilled sourdough, dip a bit then a lot, doing a side dance with the spoon. The broth does not attack the cold. It absorbs it. Around me candles hold steady light and conversations stay low.

This is how you begin here. You let winter into the bowl and tame it.

Morning comes crunchy, which is what Finns call a very cold day. Each step over refrozen snow snaps like thin sugar crust. Commuters and dog walkers move across frozen water below as if it were a park. Steam rises from chimneys, from warm patches of river, from mouths. I retreat into Jaanan Puoti café and repeat the door ritual. The world softens.

Heli greets me warmly and without flourish. “What should I have?” I ask. “Coffee,” she says. “Hot chocolate, lemonade, but it’s not summer.” She laughs. “Beer is always popular. The cold isn’t the problem.” The dark is. In December daylight shrinks to a handful of hours. Coffee solves that not because it heats you but because it sparks you. Finns drink staggering amounts of it. Hands wrap around ceramic. Steam meets faces just in from the blue. You sit. You talk. You fill the dark. Warmth here is social before it is thermal.

I order a latte and a whole grain pastry twisted with ham and cheese. Nutty, sturdy grain that carries the field into February.

Want more great food writing and recipes? Sign up for Salon’s free food newsletter, The Bite.

After more strolls along the tundra, I dine at Grill It restaurant, where winter appears plated rather than resisted. Jerusalem artichoke soup arrives earthy and thick, built for thawing. Pike perch tartare from Lake Oulujärvi rests on malt bread with capers and dill oil and a whisper of pine tar. Tar-tartare. Just enough to evoke boats and long coasts. A barley risotto studded with dried autumn mushrooms follows, Finland’s breadbasket turned into comfort. Torched dessert cracks like ice, crème brûlée with salted caramel mousse and cloudberry compote, fire and frost in one spoonful. Winter is not hidden. It is arranged.

A morning of museums, Sámi tribal art and intellectual warmth. I can’t shake the image of a woman in traditional dress sharing forest coffee with a bear, an art scene reaching for myth and landing, briefly, in sitcom. I head to the beach. As beach as Oulu winter permits. I walk a frozen Bothnian Gulf at Nallikari, an obscured lighthouse, a delinquent lifeguard stand, and makeshift saunas stand on white expanse like archaeology. With each step a faint echo and a reminder that the sea sleeps but does not disappear.

The sun just barely awake sets in a blaze sandwiched between vast grey sky and vast grey sea.

That evening at Oula Restaurant, a gem inside the Lapland Hotel, I sit for an Arctic Food Lab dinner led by program coordinator Matti Moller, who speaks about northern food with the calm confidence of someone describing architecture rather than cuisine. Northern food is not novelty, he explains. It is system. Rye and oats for endurance. Cold water fish from lakes and sea. Fungi from spruce forests. Berries dried, brined, or frozen against winter. Roots that wait patiently in cellars.

The meal begins with scallop brightened with currant and rye-seasoned buttermilk, then slow-cooked reindeer, sirloin and tongue, finished over wood, mushroom purée beneath and fermented cabbage cutting richness. Preservation refined into elegance. Dessert revives malt bread as French toast alongside sea buckthorn and pumpkin held through autumn and sharpened into sorbet. Even sweetness carries the logic of storage.

Over coffee I ask Matti what winter food means here. “It’s more like soul food from your cellar,” he says. “Preserved berries. Fermented ingredients. You heat up your house with a burning stove, and at the same time you put root vegetables or a meat pot inside. You share the warmth in that way.” Food and fire in the same motion. Winter is not a crisis. It is a system.

Before sunrise I drive north to the country and Tornio. Snowshoeing across a frozen river with Sweden mere feet away and drilling a fishing hole through thick crust, I discover I am better at casting through air than dropping a line through ice. The day remains crunchy and humbling.

Strangers gather in a riverside fire shelter and brew coffee the old way. Snow packed into a pot and melted. Grounds tossed in. A spruce branch threaded through the spout as a filter. Steam rises into white sky as enamel mugs are passed and sweet bread tears open near flame. This practice predates borders. Sámi reindeer herders carried leather coffee pouches into forests for generations. Start fire. Melt snow. Brew. Share. Snow becomes water. Water becomes coffee. Coffee becomes ceremony.

That night I test myself in a public sauna above the frozen river. Sit in heat. Step into biting air. Climb down and plunge through a carved opening in the ice. The shock empties the lungs. I return pink and laughing. Someone hands me a chilled sauna beer, ironic and perfect. Later karaoke. Finnish licorice liquor loosens the room. Some singers cool it down, others heat. My “Copacabana” is electric.

I return to Oulu by lunch and duck into Särkkä pub as snow drifts sideways against the windows. Candlelight, wood, hot oil, coats hanging heavy near the door. From my seat by the glass, the world outside remains white and distant, framed for observation rather than endured. Oulu does this well. It warms the inside and lets you study the cold without mittens. I order fried vendace rolled in rye flour, mashed potatoes beside it, and a local IPA. The fish is small and northern, crisp at the edges and tender within. Rye grows in stubborn soil and stores well. The beer is not for heat. It is for rhythm. It keeps you seated. It keeps you talking while winter performs behind the pane.

Later back at Lapland Hotel I meet Chef Satu Tilus, steady hands behind my Artic Food Lab feast. “In winter nothing grows here,” she says plainly. So you plan. “We preserve and we eat root vegetables, and of course slow-cooked food.” When I ask what winter cooking means personally, she answers simply. “It’s always cooking that brings the people together.” Not plating. Not serving. Cooking. A pot on the stove unites while the world outside freezes.

She returns to the kitchen and I order her Lapland Delicacies platter, a kind of northern greatest hits presented on a slice of tree. Potato flatbread with spruce sprout pesto and pickled white currant. Sugar salted whitefish with horseradish. A profiterole filled with trout roe cream. Reindeer tartare with red cabbage and fermented garlic mayonnaise. Sweet cheese with gooseberry jam.

Cellar vegetables. Preserves. Smoke and salt where nothing grows. Acid to wake the tongue. Fermentation doing quiet work in the background. Berries held for months. Grain that survives poor soil. It is not showy. It is deliberate. The platter does not fight winter. It leans into it.

On my final morning Puistokahvila Makia glows gold against a blue commute. I order a korvapuusti. Sticky buns feel immature once you have said korvapuusti. Laminated with cinnamon-cardamom butter, it promises a fragrant sauna when torn apart. I wrap both hands around my latte and watch the cold press pale against the windows.

Back in my room at Lapland Hotel I turn on the private sauna. Heat gathers slowly. Wood releases its scent. I wait. Outside, winter shows its envy and its poise. Oulu may hold a European Capital of Culture title for the year, but nothing here feels temporary. The culture lives in repetition. In ritual. In the way a bowl of soup absorbs the cold and a room of steam loosens it.

When the sauna is hot, I ladle water and splash the stones. Steam rises fast, strikes the ceiling, then settles over my shoulders. And here I sit with no sauna beer. I just hum “Copacabana” and smile.

The post In Finland, winter is a way of eating appeared first on Salon.com.

There are other tells. The patch of bus-stop snow that’s turned the color of weak coffee, shared democratically with a pack of teenage boys wearing basketball shorts under their puffer coats. The sweet, slightly feral smell of soil shrugging off ice. The persistent plunk, plunk, plunk of icicles dripping into an aluminum gutter — a sound that is less birdsong than plumbing.

And then, of course, there’s the food.

Late spring gets the romance: tender asparagus, first peas, market bouquets staged like still lifes. Here, the grapes that tangled themselves around corner-bar trellises all summer fall frozen to the sidewalk, shattering softly underfoot. You find yourself in your kitchen holding a pint of strawberries that look airbrushed, but taste like wet air. Or standing at a farmers’ market where only three tables have braved the wind — and one of them is selling storage onions, steadfast and unapologetic.

The Thaw is easy to overlook, in part because we have trained ourselves not to see it. The grocery store offers blackberries in January, cherries in October, tomatoes that arrive with the bland composure of year-round availability. Under fluorescent abundance, time flattens. The seasons blur into one long aisle.

Outside, the ground is doing something slower and more precarious. A 70-degree afternoon buckles into sleet. Buds hesitate. Farmers revise their plans in pencil.

Want more great food writing and recipes? Sign up for Salon’s free food newsletter, The Bite.

When we talk about eating seasonally, we tend to mean abundance. We mean strawberries at their blushing peak. Ramps that vanish in two weeks. The operatic entrance of the first tomato. The season as crescendo.

We do not tend to mean the in-between — the weeks when the carrots pulled from cold storage bend instead of snap, when the last onions sprout pale green shoots from their crowns, when gardeners study the sky with the wary patience of gamblers. In Chicago, spinach goes into the ground in staggered rows, insurance against frost. Some of it will make it. Some of it will not.

Lately, I’ve been thinking about the Japanese micro-seasons, kō: brief, named passages of time with titles like “fish emerge from the ice.” The phrasing is so concrete it feels almost documentary: something hidden becomes visible; something held still begins to move. To name a moment so precisely is to insist it exists.

And perhaps The Thaw — this slack, uncertain hinge between spectacle and bloom — deserves the same treatment. Not as prelude. Not as waiting. But as its own condition of being.

While this stretch can feel gray and suspended, the cookbooks tell a different story. When I consulted some favorites like “A Taste of Spring,” Angela Clutton’s “Seasoning” and the gently tide-marked pages of “First, Catch,” I realized early March is less a void than a handoff. Winter loosens its grip, but does not disappear. Spring enters tentatively, leaf by leaf.

Artichokes arrive looking like small medieval weapons. Asparagus, too, still slender and tight-fisted. Broccoli and spinach, dark and mineral. Kale and bok choy with their cool, lacquered leaves. Citrus lingers — oranges, grapefruit, tangerines — holding onto the last of their brightness like a lantern carried through fog. Radishes snap. Carrots, if you’re lucky, still taste faintly of earth and sugar.

It is not a season of excess. It is a season of overlap. These are the days that smell faintly of iron and wet bark. They ask you to cook with what remains rather than what dazzles.

If I were to name it more plainly, I might call it Beatrix Potter weather: damp cuffs, garden gates, the feeling that something is pushing up just beneath the soil. The sort of days that make you want to raid Mr. McGregor’s garden not out of greed, but out of hunger for green.

Perhaps I realized, fittingly, this is the only time of year I truly crave carrot soup.

Not the silken, restaurant version piped into porcelain. The simple, stovetop kind: winter onions, softening in butter; carrots — either sweet from cold storage or newly pulled and still a little tender — sliced into coins. Stock, poured without ceremony. A swipe of miso, if you have it. A glug of cream.

Let it simmer until the edges blur. Blend. Taste.

Then tip it toward spring. A fistful of chopped dill or thyme. A grate of orange zest — carrot and citrus are conspirators this time of year. Maybe a squeeze of lemon if the day demands brightness. The result is neither winter nor spring, but something that holds both: earthy, sweet, quietly radiant.

The Thaw in a bowl.

The post The tiny season we forget to eat appeared first on Salon.com.

This is how my dad described me to my wife at the time, sitting across from us at a Monical’s Pizza during what would be our last meal together. In between that and bites of food that was our favorite — hardly able to enjoy it amidst the tension — he pulled something else from his memory bank to share about me, neither of us knowing that it would be one of our final moments face to face before he died of a heart attack, alone on his bathroom floor, just a few months later.

“She was always off doing something weird, like writing poetry in a cemetery.”

An unfair appraisal. What he didn’t understand, nor tried to understand, is that I didn’t frequent cemeteries looking for death. I went to them to look for the pretty weeds and wildflowers that grew in between the rows of people who lived lives long and short before me. And, most times, I was writing poems about the sun that shone down in brave defiance of the inevitable. I also went there to sneak cigarettes.

I thought of this on the day the news broke that Bud Cort died, remembrances for whom barely cut the stream of outpourings of grief for one-time teen heartthrob, James Van Der Beek, who died on the same day.

Cort had a lengthy career in his 77 years that included roles in films like “Brewster McCloud,” “But I’m a Cheerleader,” “Dogma” and “The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou,” but it was his role as the death-obsessed Harold Chasen in Hal Ashby’s 1971 cult classic, “Harold and Maude,” that cemented him in my life, and the lives of many others, as a hearthrob and/or idol for those who didn’t quite find what they were looking for in shows like “Dawson’s Creek,” but were yearning to identify with pop culture and have their thoughts and passions reflected back at them none the less.

Those who flocked to Dawson Leery were the sort who spent their spare time at after-school club events and hamburger stands. Harold’s people, like me, well they could be found daydreaming in cemeteries or sipping coffee on the stoops of abandoned houses. Both sorts looking for life in the lives being lived, all the same. And what “Harold and Maude” taught me most is that it’s perfectly OK to be fascinated with death, so long as it helps you to appreciate everything that comes before it, because they go hand in hand, and a life lived fully makes death nothing to fear at all.

I can’t remember when it was or where it was that I first watched “Harold and Maude.” I feel like it was always there, like a foot. Just doing what it’s supposed to do. Putting together a rough guess, since the film came out in 1971 and I was born in 1977, I’d imagine I saw it for the first time pretty early on, especially considering the fact that one of the first films my parents took me to see in the theater was “Scarface,” which came out in 1983, so it’s not like, you know, content restrictions were paid any mind.

What I do know for certain is that I’ve related more closely to the character of Harold than I have many others and, like writer Ava Pauline Emilione recently wrote for Salon regarding their affections for the characters in “Heated Rivalry,” despite being a known lesbian since I was 14, I often couldn’t decide if I wanted to smooch Harold, or be like him. If the latter, I wouldn’t have had to try very hard.

Want more from culture than just the latest trend? The Swell highlights art made to last.
Sign up here

Our introduction to Harold in Ashby’s film shows him faking his own suicide for his mother’s attention.

“Dinner at 8, Harold. And do try to be a little more vivacious,” she says in passing as he hangs in the background, his display only the slightest of distractions in her plans for the evening.

“Of course, you know, Harold’s father had a similar sense for the absurd,” she later says to her dinner guests, using Harold as the launching point for an anecdote to entertain amid the clatter of forks and knives on fancily set plates. “I remember once in Paris, he just stepped out for cigarettes, and the next thing I knew, he was arrested by the police for floating nude down the Seine.”

“I have a sore throat,” is the first line of dialogue we hear Harold say, after being chided for playing with his food at the table. Faking illness when faking death didn’t seem to work.

(FilmPublicityArchive/United Archives via Getty Images) Bud Cort and Ruth Gordon in “Harold and Maude”

Harold’s pre-dinner faux hanging is the first of many stunts of this kind: A staged wrist-slashing in his mother’s bathtub. A mock drowning in the pool, floating face down in the water as his mother does a butterfly stroke back and forth right next to him. When Harold’s mom decides that the only way to divert him from his morose lifestyle is to sign him up for a dating service so he can find a wife, he pretends to shoot himself in the head while she’s reading off a questionnaire from the service, which screens out the “fat and the ugly.” Elsewhere in the film, he scares off dates by staging self-immolation and hara-kiri.

As Harold later explains to his therapist, these were not for what he’d call his mom’s . . . benefit. But they were for her attention. And mine, though far less elaborate, were too. In my pre-teens, I ruined one Halloween by taking handfuls of random pills from my mom’s medicine cabinet, so many that it caused some sort of nerve damage that made my tongue swell up and my neck bend back. Forced to cut trick-or-treating short as I could no longer speak and was drooling out of the slit in my Jason Voorhees mask, I returned home and was coolly appraised by my mother (a nurse) and then instructed to gargle with mouthwash and go to bed. As I was gargling in the bathroom, she appeared at the doorway to snidely say, “Don’t drink it.” The implication being that I was going to use that opportunity to get drunk on Scope. Then there was the time in my teens when, in a screaming fit over who knows what, I made a feeble slash at my wrist with a steak knife. “Bob, she’s cutting herself,” she called to my father in the next room, one hand on her waist and the other holding a cigarette in the air. As I stood there crying, waiting for whatever would come next, she came closer and took hold of my arm. “You didn’t even do it right,” was the last that was said of the matter. Not the outcome I was hoping for, but neither was death. In moments like those, same as Harold, my unspoken and maybe even unknown goal was life, but a better one.

In therapy, which Harold attends often, and I have also been in and out of for most of my life, he’s asked what he does for fun, what gives him that “special satisfaction.”

“I go to funerals,” he says after a long pause for effect.

At one such funeral, Harold meets Maude (Ruth Gordon), an eccentric woman one week away from her 80th birthday, having a picnic lunch at the base of a tree while mourners cry, drawing Harold’s attention and, soon, giving him a new kind of “special satisfaction.” Their first conversation is during a different funeral, where she offers him a rope of black licorice.

Before taking off in a light blue Volkswagen bug we soon find she stole from the priest overseeing the funeral they just attended, she asks Harold, “Do you dance?” Which he responds to as most anyone would in that situation: “What?”

“Do you sing and dance?” She probes further.

“No,” he answers

“No. I thought not,” Maude says, laughing with glee as the priest, Bible in hand, chases after her. Like death itself chasing after a soul holding onto as many final moments of life as it can.

At a visit to Maude’s house, she shows Harold her painting titled “Rainbow With Egg Underneath and an Elephant” and then wins him over further with her odorifics machine that allows users to breathe in the scent of roast beef, old books, mown grass and full scentscape scenarios like snowfall on 42nd street.

Growing fonder and fonder of Maude, Harold shares with her that when he isn’t attending funerals for fun, he likes to go to demolition sites and scrap yards.

“But is it enough?” Maude asks him.

On another day, Maude asks Harold what kind of flower he’d like to be, and he says one of the many daisies they’re walking amongst, because they’re all alike.

(FilmPublicityArchive/United Archives via Getty Images) Bud Cort in “Harold and Maude”

“Oh, but they’re not,” she says. “Some are smaller, some are fatter. Some grow to the left, some to the right. Some have even lost some petals. All kinds of observable differences. I feel like much of the world’s sorrow comes from people who are this (points at daisy she’s holding) yet allow themselves to be treated as that.” At this, the camera pans out to row upon row of white grave stones, seemingly all alike. In moments like these in the film, Harold is finding what he’s been looking for. And those who relate to him are too.

The only time we see Maude seem anything other than bursting with joy is when she talks about her deceased husband and the battles she used to fight for justice, using an umbrella as her defense against police, which he used to chide her for.

“He was so serious . . . But that was all before.” She lets herself sit with this for a minute, and then we see her perk right back up. “Well, should we have a song?” Moving to her piano to bang out “If You Want to Sing Out, Sing Out” by Cat Stevens, wearing a daisy in her hair that she picked in the cemetery earlier. Towards the end of the film, while she and Harold are holding hands after a day of adventures together, the camera hovers on her just long enough to get a glimpse of the tattoo on her arm, a historically weighted sequence of numbers.

After stealing a tree from town to transplant in the forest, Harold and Maude smoke hookah in her living room, dressed in kimonos.

“I sure am picking up on vices,” Harold says

“Vice, virtue, it’s best not to be too moral,” Maude replies. “You cheat yourself out of too much life.”

“I haven’t lived,” Harold says. And here, we learn the origin story of his fake suicide attempts.

Harold tells Maude of a botched science experiment at school that led to an explosion and the police informing his mother that he had died, not knowing that he had simply snuck back home to hide upstairs, where he witnessed her dramatic response to the news, as though giving a grand performance in a play.

“I decided there and then that I enjoyed being dead.”

On Maude’s birthday, just as she’d hinted several times in the film, she takes tablets to end her life at the stroke of midnight, ensuring that her 80th birthday will be her last. In tears, in the ambulance, Harold holds on to her and tells her he loves her over and over.

“Oh, Harold, that’s wonderful,” she says. “Go and love some more.”

(Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images) Ruth Gordon and Bud Cort in “Harold and Maude”

After it’s confirmed in the hospital that she’s gone, we see Harold racing along a twisty turny road in his car, a Jaguar with a hearse top welded onto it. When we’re shown the car careening off a cliff in slow motion, anyone seeing the film for the first time may assume that this was his final suicide theatric, but for real this time. But then we see him at the top of the cliff, strumming the banjo that Maude gave him, choosing to live, although he’d just lost what led him to come to the conclusion.

Rated only one and a half stars by Roger Ebert in 1972 and referred to in his review as “a movie of attitudes,” writing, “Harold is death, Maude life, and they manage to make the two seem so similar that life’s hardly worth the extra bother,” it’s clear that many missed the point here, but those who got it, got it.

While Cort himself has said in interviews that he felt “an instant, profound connection” to Harold’s gloominess and need for connection, he’s also quoted as saying that the role was, in hindsight, both a blessing and a curse as it typecast him as a morbid weirdo. If he were still with us, and I was able, I’d thank him for that weirdo.

Pushing 50, I’m almost closer to Maude’s age than I am to Harold’s and while I’m still fascinated with death, it’s taken an optimistic turn, in no small credit to the examples their characters set. Where I once may have viewed death as some sort of dramatic ploy for attention or, at my darkest points, a chance to finally put my heart and mind to rest, I now see it as something to earn. Something inevitable that there’s no point rushing towards but, If I live to the best of my ability, like Ram Dass says, will be like taking off a tight shoe.

Lately, rather than focusing on the deaths and thoughts of death that have punctuated my life thus far, I’ve been fixated on NASA’s Voyager 1 “Pale Blue Dot” photo that’s found a new life on TikTok. Taken on Feb. 14, 1990, the photo shows Earth at a distance of 3.7 billion miles (6 billion kilometers) from the Sun. Just a speck in the sky. Looked at from this angle, you can see how little good it does to worry about death, or anything at all for that matter. Floating like a flower petal in the spring breeze. The lesser character of a mysterious grand design. 

The post “Harold and Maude” taught me to not fear dying appeared first on Salon.com.

I called Barcelona home for a spell, and I feel the draw to cap this visit by seeing an old doughy friend. I stand outside Boldú’s flagship shop in Eixample to take it all in. One window houses all manner of ads for what they’re trying to push. The barbecue chicken sandwich notwithstanding, behind the next window is the object of my affection. A phalanx of Boldúmen, lined up ready to sacrifice themselves for the good. Boldúman was born to make people happy. Stay Sweet is the motto. The sight of the full battalion brings grins to every passerby.

Boldú Bakery opened in Barcelona in 1939. It was a good year for bread, and a bad year for everything else. Spain had just finished beating itself in civil war. Franco was consolidating power. Rationing made food scarce. But in the neighborhood of Gràcia, the Boldú family kept baking.

At first, it was the basics: crusty rounds, lean baguettes, rustic grainy loaves, the kind of bread that made a meal stretch. Later, the counter began to crowd with flaky croissants, sticky pastry, brioches with amber sheen. They made flatbreads in spring and almond cookies in fall. You could tell the season by the craft. But donuts? Those came later.

Fried dough has scratched guilty pleasure for millennia. The ancient Greeks did it with honey and wine. Romans fried theirs in pork fat. In Spain, fritter-like buñuelos showed up with the Moors, and by some reports, churros were a Chinese idea that was later dragged through molten chocolate by hungry Madrileños or wandering shepherds or both. But the donut –the real donut– has more than one lineage.

In Germany, the berliner was a round, jam-filled ball with no hole — fluffy, sweet, capped in sugar. Austrian cousins called it Krapfen. In France, booule de Berlin. They crept across the border and Spain met them as berlinas by the mid-20th century, mostly in quiet corners of Catalonia and the Basque country. Then beyond. They landed like stowaways. Never known enough to replace buñuelos or churros, but too good to ignore.

In America, some say the round one with the hole was born aboard a ship. In 1847, a sailor named Hanson Gregory had a genius of a mother. She punched out a hole in the traditional berliner and yes, it cooked more evenly, but notably, young Hanson could store them on the helm spokes. Just keep a steady course, Captain! Donut destiny and by the 1970s, Spain saw the hole-y truth.

Boldú took these seriously and blended the two pastry technologies. Their dough, slow-fermented, eggy, kissed with citrus, closer to brioche than sponge. Then ring-cut, fried, and glazed. And those donut holes? They got a little candy star and a dollop of filling, plump and honest like their German ancestor. But in 2012, something changed.

They cut the dough into people. Think gingerbread men, only soft, chubby, and less fearful.

Want more great food writing and recipes? Sign up for Salon’s free food newsletter, The Bite.

Nobody quite knows who decided to give them icing eyes and smirks. The family is tight-lipped, the bakers even more so. The story goes quiet in the telling, which only adds to the magic. But suddenly, there they were. Men of dough. Some smiling, some drowsy, some lopsided. All irresistible. Their visceral cream of pistachio, hazelnut, dark or white chocolate, lemon, raspberry, cinnamon apple, caramel, or speculous. The occasional candy and nut coating to match the goop hidden inside. Their holiday attire celebrating Pride month or Saint George’s dragon kill, or Jesus’s birthday. Their custom lettering, expression in sugar, or giant-sized for parties. Indeed, there is also a Boldúgirl.

There are shining temples to baking in this city, to be sure. Places where glazes gleam like car paint, espumas suspend among dough sheets, croissants of a million layers. But Boldú feels lived-in. Human-scale. No Boldúman is perfect. Coating cools while dripping from an arm, smiles askew send mixed signals, smeared eyes like they’d been up late partying with the tarts, blemishes, cracked sugary skin. We all relate. And that appeals.

There’s always a place to rest your angst here and a staffer who pours a coffee better than the barrista nextdoor. I belly up to the counter and call for my usual. One classic glazed, or “naked” Boldúman. The name makes me giggle like a kid. One original capped with white chocolate and footed with dark. Both unfilled. The truest to buttery brioche in flavor and texture, and through its lightness, one could almost convince oneself this is breakfast. I appease the meal gods by adding a ham and cheese bocadillo to my order, a little salty with my sweet. And a café con leche.

(Howie Southworth) Boldúman, with a view

My donut dealer for the morning, Karla, places my Boldúmen in a box with a kind of reverence. “Buen provecho,” she says, and I nod, thanking her for being my enabler. I carry my fix to a street side table facing Carrer de Provença and sit quietly, sip my café con leche and nibble my bocadillo, and watch more passersby point and smile. Go ahead. Buy donuts. I could grab another espresso to cruelly dunk my Boldúmen, but I have a better idea.

To my increasingly normal perch atop an NH Collection hotel, this time the Calderón high above Rambla de Catalunya, I take Boldúman on a journey. Not for a glass of Rioja with a view. Not to mingle with the Gen Z crowd making this skybar their personal VIP section. But to snap a portrait of one delicious little donut dude with a backdrop of the city that embraces him. Then I bite his head off.

Food ties you to place. Marks a moment. Tells a story without subtitles. Boldúman –a German doughboy with Catalan flair, ridiculous and adorable– is one of Barcelona’s best stories, seldom heard beyond its borders. Food gives shape to memory. And sometimes, if you’re lucky, it gives that memory crooked eyes and a weird smile.

The post The donut that smiles back in Barcelona appeared first on Salon.com.

A few nights a week, I exit class sweaty and ravenous and walk straight for a grocery store to fill it.

I’ve come to love the rhythm of it: exertion followed by provision, movement followed by dinner. It feels faintly pastoral — hunting and gathering — translated into an urban evening, conducted in sneakers and leggings under fluorescent lights.

It’s now simple routine, but that overlap of food and dance isn’t something I ever would have predicted.

I have one of those familiar dancer stories. I spent more than a decade in studios, realized I wasn’t going to be one of the talented few who make a living at it and drifted toward other work, carrying along the kind of disordered eating that often tags along for the ride. When I look back at my teenage years, I remember real joy: the day I got my first pointe shoes; being dipped low while waltzing in a cerulean, beaded ballroom dress; winning a trophy in a midriff-baring tiger-print number you couldn’t pay me to put on now. I loved to jump. I loved airtime. An instructor once joked we should choreograph a routine where my feet never touched the ground.

I also remember being hungry. Not the pleasant hunger that follows exertion, but a hollowed-out, ambient kind, so constant it felt almost procedural. When an instructor suggested my body didn’t “indicate to judges that I was serious about the craft,” I took the note. Inspired by weekly episodes of “The Biggest Loser,” I spent two weeks walking for hours on a treadmill in my parents’ basement, under a Larry Bird poster my dad had tacked above a rack of free weights. Alongside a steady diet of cottage cheese and salsa, the weight came off relatively quickly.

“Have you been sick?” my instructor asked the next time we met, his voice softer than usual. I said I’d been working out. His tone shifted. He beamed. “You look good.”

Want more great food writing and recipes? Sign up for Salon’s free food newsletter, The Bite.

I missed dancing. I did not miss that.

But something shifted in February of this year.

It wasn’t a body thing, exactly, though this was a year very much saturated with chatter about GLP-1s, “thinspo,” a term I hadn’t thought about since my Tumblr days, and its sharper, more judgmental daughter, “skinnytok.” No, it was something a little more elemental.

Inspired by books like “Beginners: The Joy and Transformative Power of Lifelong Learning” and “The Power of Fun: How to Feel Alive Again” (I was clearly constructing a personal curriculum here, which, in retrospect, deserves its own syllabus) I had decided this would be a year of deliberately being bad at things. The kind of intentional fumbling that leaves you feeling both exposed and alive.

I was wandering one of my favorite local markets — a European specialty shop with German-Italian flair, excellent deli salads and an impeccable display case of sausages — when I noticed that the studio was offering beginner adult ballet and barre classes, including a free trial.

And yes, I felt like a beginner. Reacquainting myself with the way an arm extends from the shoulder, the way the back can stretch into a gentle crescent and, let’s be honest, the fact that my hips now prefer first position with a grinding protest. I expected frustration in that yawning gap between memory and present ability, but instead, it was exhilarating.

I liked the space, the even-keeled instructor in her 60s, the other women — everyone over 25, a smorgasbord of body types — and the fact that I left class soaked in sweat, trembling and oddly triumphant. I signed up for the “semester.”

By spring, I was feeling stronger than I had in years (though the 90-second mid-class plank still eludes me). And, frankly, a little hot. A little flirty. I scanned the map of nearby studios and, to my excitement, found one that offered salsa, another dance form I had missed terribly, only 15 minutes away.

I fell into the same rhythm: starting over, drenched in sweat, sheer exhilaration, “sign me up.” The body remembers pleasure as quickly as it forgets skill. And it was there, slipping off my shoes and dropping them into my dance bag, that the thought arrived in full, undeniable force: I’m starving.

Next to the salsa studio sits a tiny specialty market — a “shoppy-shop,” in internet parlance — about the size of my apartment galley kitchen, packed with ingredients that make me want to stage a miniature dinner party, even if only for two. Tremendous loaves of parchment-wrapped sourdough dangled from hanging wicker baskets; specialty pastas and sauces lined the shelves; tinned octopus and sardines winked at me from the corner; and a mini-refrigerated case displayed cheeses, sausages and pristine hand-wrapped onigiri.

Stomach gnawing and hands slightly shaky, I loaded up on ephemera for fancy paninis, held together with swipes of giardiniera mayo, and splurged on some pastel-hued botanical sodas for drinking straight from the can. It was late, and the store was out of disposable bags, so I tucked some of the loot into my dance bag and cradled the rest in the crook of my arm. “You’d better bring another bag next time,” the cashier quipped. Not a bad idea, I thought.

And thus began the two-bag habit.

On ballet nights, I wander to the studio, then to the market with its staggering sausage display, usually emerging with a tub of hearty, fresh-made soup, another deli tub of some vinegary salad or slaw and a gloriously dumb hunk of bread. On salsa nights, it’s the shoppy-shop, where my most recent indulgence was a jar of vodka sauce so good it almost felt luxurious to simply carry it home.

And let’s be clear: I know the two-bag habit is not some masterful triumph. I am a realist (though if you’d seen me juggle those groceries and my dance bag, you might have questioned my definition of “grace”). But for anyone who’s tangled with an eating disorder — and the way its tendrils quietly siphon joy from even the simplest routines — it is something. While the dominant culture seems, yet again, obsessed with appetite suppression, I am rediscovering appetite: earned appetite, physical appetite, the kind that shows up after exertion and politely demands to be honored.

Dance and food used to feel incompatible in my life; now they feel braided together, a quiet symphony of movement and nourishment. A gift, really, to begin the year with.

The post Dance changed how I eat — for the better this time appeared first on Salon.com.

You’ve heard of the Italian beef sandwich — thanks to the Chicago-set FX show “The Bear,” it’s practically a household name. But its humble, often-overlooked sidekick, gravy bread? That one rarely gets the spotlight. It’s exactly what it sounds like: toasted French or Italian bread soaked in the rich, savory jus of an Italian beef sandwich. Gravy bread, sometimes called a “soaker,” is neither Instagrammable nor refined. It’s beige, stodgy, unapologetically itself.

Other Chicago delicacies have entire guides devoted to them — the best hot dog stand, a giardiniera ranking, a breakdown of deep-dish versus tavern-style pizza. Gravy bread has none of that glamor.

Maybe that’s exactly why I fell for it so hard.

I grew up just outside Chicago, though “grew up” feels like a technicality. We moved four times before I turned ten, with the threat of a fifth and sixth always dangling in the periphery, which ingrained something of a perennial outsider feeling. In a place, never from it. But this is my third time back in Chicago as an adult, and the first that feels like more than a long layover — the first that’s starting to stitch itself into something like permanence.

Working in food means I’ve always learned cities by eating my way through them, so when I landed here again, I gave myself permission to do a kind of edible survey of the place. Not the hip, media-mandated “taste the city like a local” version — the honest, first-draft one. I started at the outer ring of the funnel: the tourist catnip. Deep dish (still not for me), hot dogs with sports peppers piled as high as civic pride — I’ll fight you for those — then inward toward the rib tips, the tavern-style pies, the jibaritos (sandwiches that wisely swap bread for fried plantains), the jars of hot giardiniera waiting like glitter bombs on corner store shelves.

Maybe that sounds try-hard. Maybe it is. But nobody warns you about the liminal stretch of time when you technically live somewhere — utilities set up, bills forwarded, the DMV clerk squinting at your address in the system — and still feel like a visitor. You’re rooted and unmoored at once. Eating the city felt like a way to close the distance.

And then, without fanfare, my life started to take on the contours of the city itself. Not in grand, cinematic sweeps but in the quiet, accumulating ways that make you realize you’ve rooted more deeply than you intended. Mostly at the intersection of people and food, one of the places where Chicago’s pulse is easiest to feel.

Want more great food writing and recipes? Sign up for Salon’s free food newsletter, The Bite.

I became enough of a regular at the corner grocery that the clerk once held back a good loaf of sourdough because they “thought I might come in today.” I learned my barista’s favorite drink before they learned mine, and I now track the status of their foster dog with the devotion of a godparent. I built out a mental rolodex of congee spots along my morning commute up Argyle Street — that historically Vietnamese stretch on the North Side where steam rises from dining rooms even on the coldest mornings — and found myself falling in love with how nonsensical it is to try to find a breakfast place here that doesn’t serve excellent chilaquiles.

Somewhere along the way I learned that bus drivers give the best cold-weather food recommendations — pragmatic, no-frills gospel. One of them, a man who’d been running the same route for decades, knew the city at stomach level: where to warm your hands, where to sit without freezing, where to eat well for almost nothing.

By the time our paths began overlapping regularly, we had fallen into a gentle rhythm of recognition. We’d chat while waiting at the little Middle Eastern bakery that turns out the neighborhood’s best Barbari bread — long, sesame-and–black-caraway–speckled loaves that come out of the oven so hot the air around them shimmers. The bakery runs on its own kind of liturgy: a punctual 10:30 a.m. batch, and a second that might appear anytime between 4:30 and 6, the sort of unpredictability you start building your afternoon around.

In that warm, yeasty pocket of the day, we traded food notes — what was good, what was underrated, what was worth the walk. A friendship in increments: a nod, a comment, a shared enthusiasm for dough.

It was after one of those late-afternoon bread drops that he told me about gravy bread, delivering the tip the way someone offers a home remedy, low-voiced and almost tender. “When I was young and broke, I’d get a soaker,” he said. “A dollar, maybe eighty cents. Just the Italian beef jus poured over bread.” He paused, remembering. “There were always little scraps of meat in the gravy, too. Enough to hold you till the next thing.”

In a world obsessed with rankings — the best slice, the best sandwich, the best whatever — he was refreshingly agnostic about where the ideal version might be found. “They’re not always on the menu,” he shrugged, “but any Italian beef joint with bread and gravy will make one for you.”

I promised him I’d try one and report back.

So I did — at Al’s, where a soaker runs $4.50 (another $1.50 if you want a pop) and is described on the menu with the kind of brutal plainness that makes me trust a place: bread dunked in the gravy. Full stop. No flourish. No marketing copy trying to seduce you into believing it’s more than it is.

The thing about foods like this is that chefs have been trying to warn us for years. Anne Burrell with her simple “brown food tastes good.” David Chang celebrating the kingdom of the ugly delicious. A soaker is their thesis statement: a triple-beige stack of crisp-edged bread surrendering to brown gravy, studded with little hunks of meat that run a satisfying gradient from fatty to caramelized.  It’s the best part of an Italian beef, distilled and democratized. All comfort, no spectacle.

And when you lift it from the paper boat, warm and heavy in your hands, you understand instantly why people keep coming back to it.

The next time the driver and I crossed paths, we traded updates like neighbors comparing garden crops. He’d finally tried what I maintain is one of the most staggeringly flaky croissants in Chicago — the kind Peter Yuen makes, all shatter and steam, from the bakery four blocks from my apartment. I told him I’d gotten the gravy bread.

“Was it for you?” he asked.

I nodded.

He grinned, this soft, knowing beam that made the whole thing feel like a small rite of passage. “I figured it might be.”

Since then, gravy bread has stopped feeling like a homework assignment on my self-imposed tour of Chicago foods and started becoming something closer to a genuine craving. The kind of carb-y beast I want after a cold walk or an icy bike ride; after a night with one drink too many or some other little vice. Like the driver, I’m not a purist. I’ve had it at Portillo’s, at a couple of mom-and-pop shops, and — on one extravagantly cozy night — ordered it for delivery alongside a deli tub of hot peppers.

Craving enough that, on that seven-inch snow morning, it was the thing that got me out the door.

And sure, maybe falling head-over-heels for something so unabashedly beige — so simple, so structurally unseduced by aesthetics — makes me a bit of a try-hard. Maybe it marks me as someone still learning the contours of the place she calls home.

But honestly? There are worse things to be than a person who lets herself love a city through the food that warms her hands. There are worse things to be than someone who walks out into the snow for a soaker.

The post A love letter to Chicago’s gravy bread appeared first on Salon.com.

When I revisit my one-time hometown, I carry this quote with me. It frames the way I look at the food here—how Catalan chefs toy with tradition, nudging it just far enough to feel fresh but never so far that it becomes unrecognizable. Innovative, but not molecular, still warm-blooded. On a recent return, I ate well.

Morning in Spain welcomes fried pastry. I ducked into Artchur in Eixample, a bright corner shop busy challenging the humble churro.

Yes, they make the sugar-dusted classics you dunk into thick warm chocolate, but here churros cosplay as dinner. Tripe stew, nachos, even “mac” and cheese arrive with ridged, cut-up fried dough standing in for potatoes, tortilla chips, or pasta. “In the end, a churro is like bread,” co-owner Adrià Gracia told me, and once you accept that, the universe tilts. I ordered the “mac” and cheese, molten and sharp, the crunch of the churro cutting through the cream like it had something to prove. One bite and that boxed orange stuff was a distant, shameful memory.

I took a few hours to digest the meaning of mac and cheese for breakfast, then it was time for lunch. At Granja Elena in Zona Franca, I enjoyed a tomato and scallop tartare that could entice even the staunchest carnivore. Diced and seasoned tomato—red, sweet, alive—stacked under finely chopped, lightly cured and anointed scallop and a drizzle of creamy soy dressing. It arrived at the table like a jewel, its colors shimmering as if coy about its own perfection. When I stirred and spread the mixture on bread, the texture echoed beef and I half-expected it to bleed. Patricia Sierra, who owns the place with her brothers Guillermo and Chef Borja, said, “If the tomato isn’t perfect, it’s off the menu. We wait for the tomato.” You could taste the waiting. It made you sit up straighter. Summer itself locked in a bite.

Down a busy street in Sants, Maleducat was rewriting Catalan home cooking with a straight face. Billed as a modern casa de menjars—a house of meals—the restaurant applies precision to Grandma’s recipes without stripping out the soul. Their pequeño arroz seco arrived like a culinary magic trick, a flawless disc of rice, each grain glistening as if individually coached. Sandwiched inside was braised, chilled and improbably thin-sliced “carpaccio” of pig trotters, tender enough to vanish on contact. On top sat red shrimp tartare and some final dollops of shrimp-head emulsion tied the dish together like a well-written ending. “A traditional, understandable dish with a twist,” co-owner Marc Garcia told me. It wasn’t paella, and it wasn’t the surf-and-turf rice you’d find down the block but it carried the same heartbeat. Louder.

Want more great food writing and recipes? Sign up for Salon’s free food newsletter, The Bite.

That same thump carried me back to Eixample and Batea, a sleek bistro where Catalan and Galician food dance until closing time. Chef-owners Carles Ramón and Manu Nuñez reworked the classic Galician dish vieira a la gallega, which usually tosses scallop, jamón, and breadcrumbs into a shell and bakes it all into submission. At Batea, each part was prepared separately then layered—a sofrito base, sea-water-cured then lightly smoked scallop, jamón whipped into a silky mousse. “The cooking points are different, the textures are much better,” Chef Manu explained, “and we respect the ingredients much more.” Respect tasted lush and elemental. The kind of bite you close your eyes for, partly to enjoy a private moment and partly to ignore the envy from the table next to you.

(Howie Southworth) Vieras a la Gallega at Batea

Franca, in the same hood, takes a subtler tack. The dining room glowed like a film set, its gently arched brick and brass softening Barcelona’s usual edge. Fran Baixas, Marco Greci and Chef Josh McCardy, an American import, had taken the beloved and traditional winter stew escudella and turned it into a salad. That last word alone might turn heads, but at Franca it draws you in. Chickpeas, root vegetables, and the stew’s usual cuts of braised meat and offal were cooked to the individual ideal, diced, scattered over greens, and dressed with a mustard vinaigrette blessed by some of the stew’s cooking liquid. “Putting the broth in service of the meats, rather than the other way around,” according to Baixas. A dish that felt like a wink—nostalgic yet completely new.

Not far away, at Pepa Bar a Vins, irreverence was the raison d’être. I couldn’t resist their stacked ensaimada, a coiled Mallorcan pastry enriched with lard, usually powdered with sugar and served for breakfast. Not here. It arrived and as owner Camila Espinoza instructed, “we want you to see the layered colors,” topped with smoky red sobrassada, soft Mallorcan sausage, whipped ricotta, and a drizzle of honey. It was a lot. Sweet, savory, silken—like a food group that shouldn’t exist but somehow does. By all reports, there’s an ensaimada on every table every night. They can’t take it off the menu. I understood why, and ordered a glass of DO Tarragona red to help pass the evening.

Jordi Brullas, a friend and restaurant guru, once told me, “Chefs in Barcelona are reinterpreting tradition with great respect, but without fear.” Looking back on my stay, the surprise and the indulgence and the whimsy proved him right.

(Howie Southworth) Ensaimada at Pepa Bar a Vins

By nightfall, my table sat above the city at the NH Collection Calderón rooftop over Rambla de Catalunya. Barcelona stretched out in every direction, a mosaic of old stone, glass and spire, Gaudí’s Sagrada Familia standing like an undone sentry among the rest. There’s a Catalan phrase, “seny i rauxa”—reason and impulse. It explains a lot. The city has always been comfortable with contrast—old and new shoulder to shoulder, solemn tradition twisted into something unexpected without apology. I thought of Patricia’s tomato at Granja Elena, how she waits for it to be perfect before letting it sing.

Barcelona is like that, too. It knows when its creative bones are ready for prime time — and when they are, it hands them a mic where nobody expected to hear them yesterday. You’d be a fool not to listen.

The post Barcelona’s bold new food frontier appeared first on Salon.com.

In 1954, at the age of 16, my dad was living with my grandfather in the Bronx when he was diagnosed with Hansen’s Disease, the preferred designation for leprosy. He was sent to Carville where he stayed under federal quarantine for nine years, until he was cured and discharged in 1963. Fifty-three years later, he was going back for the first time.

For my dad, our journey to Carville was a bittersweet homecoming. For me, it was both research trip and pilgrimage. I’d recently started writing my novel, “King of the Armadillos,” inspired by his experience, and he was helping me access material from the archives of the National Hansen’s Disease Museum. Located on the grounds of the former institution, which is now partially occupied by the National Guard, the museum invited my dad to record his oral history, so we decided to go.

My husband stopped the car in front of a set of high, iron gates. A guard in military uniform directed us past a white plantation house with sweeping balconies and Corinthian columns, through an avenue of live oaks, old and gnarled, and draped with Spanish moss, to the infirmary. It had been converted into military conference accommodation where we were staying.

Founded in 1894 on the grounds of an abandoned sugar plantation, the 330 acres of the institution were well-manicured with neatly mown lawns, flowering bushes, ornate gardens, a lake, a golf course, and sprawling fields amid the Victorian-style dorms, covered walkways, and numerous amenities that made Carville look more like a prep school than a leprosarium. But just as it had been when my dad was there, all that beauty was surrounded by a barbed wire fence.

The post My father’s bittersweet homecoming: A family visit to the institution that treated him for leprosy appeared first on Salon.com.

“But I was doing good work, wasn’t I? Even Aaron said I had a good outline.” My voice went up an octave, squeaky in its terror.

The showrunner didn’t respond to me at first. Then, finally, he spoke. “You can take your stuff out of this office tonight. You can use my parking space if you want.”

His eyes weren’t even angry, just unemotional. My boss went back to his managerial duties. Perhaps he was going to look over an edit of Episode 108. Perhaps he was going to write the new season’s arc. I didn’t know. But my firing was just a quick part of his day, a checklist to finish before he moved on to other work. I took my “Empire Strikes Back” poster and some sundry supplies out of the office. My days as a professional screenwriter were done.

Driving home, my belongings in the backseat, I talked to myself. “There’s been tons of famous people who were fired, right?” I repeated, a desperate mantra. “Francis Ford Coppola. Didn’t he get fired from ‘The Godfather’? Or was it ‘Apocalypse Now’? Hmm. Spielberg. He got fired, too. What was his movie? ‘Jaws’? Can’t remember, but he definitely got fired from something.”

If somebody was watching me on the 405 Freeway, they would have seen a lone driver, sweating obscenely, mumbling to himself like a madman. People do indeed get fired in Hollywood every day; it’s not some world-altering event. But for me, on a high from my first television writing job, being fired so quickly plummeted me flat on my ass. Already the owner of an anxious and depressed nervous system, I was truly and devastatingly rocked. A wave of negative wouldn’t stop ricocheting in my head. “You’re a failure. You never had any talent in the first place. You didn’t deserve it. This is proof.”

A normal person might have been able to brush off the loss. But I had inherited my father’s depressed DNA, and like him, I couldn’t recover.

* * * 

The next day, I called my manager Paul, a kindly man in his late fifties, with frizzy hair and a gregarious manner. We met at a writing convention in Burbank a few years back. He liked a couple of my movie pitches and we developed a friendship, and from there, a working relationship.

“I need to talk to you, it’s important. Can we get together?” My voice on the phone was anxious.

He quickly agreed. My office belongings still packed up in my car, I drove to Canter’s Deli on Fairfax. Paul and I sat across from each other, a bowl of matzo ball soup in front of each of us.

“I got fired yesterday.”

“I’m sorry, Kuang.” He looked at me kindly. “I could tell by the sound of your voice.”

“Thanks for being here.” I looked down at my matzo ball soup. It looked like a beached whale.

“It’s fine, buddy. This happens all the time. You write a new script, we get back right at it,” he said.

After that, we ate our food in mostly silence. As we left the deli, Paul handed me a ticket with a clown face on it. “What’s this?” I asked.

“It’s a stand-up comedy class. Comp ticket. I forgot to give it to you last time we met.”

“Um. Sure.” I shoved the ticket into my pocket, my shoulders slumped. Paul gave some more encouraging words about getting back to writing and a hug, and we parted ways.

The next morning, a dull dread enveloped me. I listened to a voicemail from my mother. “Kuang. Your father wants to talk to you. Can you call us back?” Talking to my Baba was the last thing I wanted to do. But I didn’t have a job to go to, and after wallowing in my own sweat for what seemed like hours, I pulled Paul’s crumbled comedy class ticket out of my jacket pocket.

I drove over to downtown Los Angeles’ Garment District, a neighborhood that wasn’t unsafe per se, but one I’d never visit if I didn’t have to. I looked up at my destination: a building with a bizarre extra-large clown head hung over its awning, with a sign, The Clown Palace, written in giant Comic Sans. My thoughts went into overdrive. This class, a gift from Paul, was supposed to just be a lark. I was supposed to squeeze this in between my Emmy Award party and a flight to Vancouver to oversee my season finale episode. It was supposed to be a cherry on top of my huge crest of success.

I walked inside a large studio filled with bizarre clown paraphernalia, and saw a group of aspiring stand-ups, old and young, of all races and body types, staring at a tallish man in cowboy boots standing beside a microphone stand on stage riser. That man turned to me.

“Kuammmggg right? Hey, have a seat!” A native Texan, the teacher, Cash, was a handsome man with craggy lines on his face, stamping down his shit-kicker boots onto the stained floor as he spoke. He looked at me with wide-open eyes, waiting for me to respond.

“Yeah. Kuang. That’s me,” I murmured.

“Sit over here. We’re clearing now.”

“Clearing?”

“Just sit, Kuanmmg.” He raised his voice, his hoarse Texas accent growing stronger. I went and sat in the back of the class, wary of the eyes of the other would-be comics surrounding me.

A bald middle-aged man stood up, “I’ve had sexual thoughts about my aunt. And my grandmother. And my kitten. All at the same time.” I squirmed in my seat.

One woman got up and simply shouted hoarsely into the mic for a minute, with no actual jokes. Or words. There were some funny folks who got up onstage, but Cash shouted out to them, “You don’t need to be funny! This is just clearing!”

For the next couple of hours, I got to understand what “clearing” was. It was getting onstage and just getting shit off of your chest. As the class cleared, I witnessed the greatest assortment of weirdos I’ve ever encountered. Hollywood burnouts, fringe folks, individuals with serious mental health problems. They were all here at the Clown Palace.

Then Cash himself went up to clear. He told us about how he self-destructed a promising comedy career to end up here, teaching comedy at the Clown Palace. “Here, I’m among my people, my fellow clowns.” Cash smiled wildly, pointing to the eerie jester statues and paintings throughout his studio. “There’s Jack, Devon, and Ulysses. They’re way better company than club promoters or industry people. They don’t talk!”

I wanted to get out of there. This wasn’t my tribe. I came from a good upbringing. I had Hollywood options. But here was the truth. Mental health struggles? Check. Hollywood reject? Check. Unemployed? Check.

“Kuannngggm? Do you want to go up and clear?” Cash again looked straight at me.

I looked away. “I’m sorry. No, I need to head home.”

He put up his hands, “It’s gonna be good for you, man, trust me.”

I grabbed my car keys and phone. “Sorry. Gotta go.” I rushed out of there. I quickly looked behind me, where the comedy weirdos watched me leave.

The next morning, my body and mind railed against me. I had nowhere to be, no real purpose. That realization expanded into an existential uselessness throughout the day. It only subsided in the late afternoon. The medication that my psychiatrist recommended? It wasn’t kicking in yet.

Glum, I listened to another voicemail from my mother. “You haven’t called in a few days. What’s going on?” I texted instead of calling her back. I wrote that I was fine. That it was just a work thing. She texted back immediately. “Did something happen with your job?” I ignored that text, but another one came quickly from her. “Kuang, your father wants to talk to you. Can you call us back?”

This wasn’t the first time my mother called on me on my father’s behalf. But that time, it was Baba’s depression she was concerned about, not mine.

* * * 

One evening, when I was a sophomore English major at UCLA, my mother called me at my dorm room, when I was about to go out to the apartment parties near campus. I was ready to drink cheap Keystone beer and meet girls.

“I think you need to come home for a few weeks”, she told me.

“Why?” I was looking out my dorm room window. The night beckoned. I could already hear the sounds of the Friday night partying, the tinkling laughter, the clinking of glasses. My friends had told me to meet them up at the party on the corner of Gayley and Westwood. Annie said she actually had some mushrooms tonight.

My mother’s voice knocked me out of my wishful thinking. “Your father’s having some problems.”

“What kind of problems?”

“Problems with his nao tze.” That was the Chinese word for brain. Looking back at it now, almost 25 years later, it’s significant that she didn’t actually say the word depression. That was typical of our family, and actually the entire Chinese culture: keeping a stoic face during a severe mental health crisis.

“Problems with his brain? Um. Can you give me a little more context?”

“Just come home. Tomorrow!” My mother’s brisk voice rattled into my landline phone. She had lost her patience with me. Click.

I came back home from UCLA, back to my suburban home in Agoura Hills to help take care of my father, because Baba’s depression (or problems with his nao tze), made him incapable of self-care. That was the first time I had heard of these words, this kind of mental health condition, and my mother tried her best not to talk about it while I was at home.

* * * 

After the Clown Palace encounter, I met with my own psychiatrist. Dr. Wong was a Chinese-American man in his sixties who rocked John Lennon glasses, his office featuring pretentious South American and African furniture.

“I got that particular piece in the early ’80s, during my travels to Brazil.” He swelled in pride while talking about his precious items.

Meanwhile, I was in a full-blown mental health crisis. “Can we talk about my situation, Dr. Wong?” I finally whispered, unable to continue our conversation about from which boutique art dealer he got his finely carved Brazilian table. At a steal.

He scratched his beard, looking at me as if I was a puzzle he was trying to solve. “How is the Lexapro doing?”

“Like I said, it hasn’t kicked in yet.”

“You still have the anxiety and depression symptoms?”

“Yeah. Dread in the morning. Anxiety and depression throughout the day. Sometimes I wonder if even worse when my parents try to help me — ”

“You can talk to your therapist about that.” Dr. Wong quickly cut me off. I guess that wasn’t his responsibility.

“Noted.” I tapped my foot, anxious.

“You should start feeling the medication soon. The anxiety and depression should level off shortly.” A pause, then Dr. Wong continued, “What are your plans after that?”

“What do you mean, what are my plans? Once I get through this, I’m going to stop taking the Lexapro and get back to my life.”

He looked at me again, a gaze that made me feel like I was a butterfly on a pin. “I’d advise staying on it.”

“Um. For how long?”

“You have depression in your family, your father in particular. I’d classify you as a depressive. It’s in your best interests to continue on the medication.”

“Forever?”

“If that’s the way you see it.”

“I’m not sure I want to do that.” I shifted in my seat.

“Like I said, you are a depressive. I’ll see you next time.”  He stared at his furniture, the signal for me to get the hell out. I was furious.

“You know, your furniture sucks. It’s pretentious and looks like a middle school kid could’ve carved it.”

I didn’t say that, of course, but I wish I had.

On the drive back to my apartment, I heard a voicemail from Cash. “Hey, Kuannnggmmm. I hope you come back for another class, buddy.” I suppressed the urge to click Delete and finished listening. I could hear the sound of cats, meowing in the background. He continued, “You should at least clear. It’ll be good for you.”

* * * 

The first few days I was back at home from college, I tried my best to help my mother. I’d go grocery shopping for her, and tried to help Baba with what he needed. He was prone to sleeping past noon in those days, the anti-depression drugs making him hazy, tired. One afternoon, while my mom was in the kitchen, getting lunch ready, I approached her.

“What happened to Baba that made him like this?”

She looked at me, blinked a couple of times. “When your Baba was teaching in Taiwan last semester, some burglars snuck into his University apartment and stole money.”

“Oh. Wow. How much?”

“About two thousand dollars.”

That was a lot of money, I thought, but it wasn’t that much money. How did he become a shadow of himself because of just two thousand dollars? He wasn’t physically hurt; he still had his family.

“That doesn’t seem to be enough to cause this to happen,” I said.

“It’s not just that. It’s something that’s physical. A disease of the mind.”

“Disease?”

“It’s part of our family. His mother. Your Nai Nai, she had this too. Depression.” There. She had finally said it. The word that she hid away from for so long. Depression. The word itself made me feel very uncomfortable. A sense of shame bubbled inside me. We didn’t talk about this subject in the family. Why was my mother talking so openly about it now?

“If you feel yourself going through this, Lexapro is the drug that worked for your Baba and your Nai Nai. He’s taking it now.”

“I’m not going to need it.”

“You should just have the information. It’s good for you to know.”

* * * 

My mother came over to my apartment after my visit to Dr. Wong. It started to rain, hard drops onto the Los Angeles cement. She brought over some food from Sam Woo restaurant, setting plates of hot noodles and duck on my kitchen table.

“Did you see your psychiatrist?”

“Yes, I did. His furniture sucks.”

“What?” My mother narrowed her eyebrows.

“Just a joke,” I said. “I’m taking the medicine he prescribed. The same one Baba took.”

My mother smiled slightly, then closed the lids of the takeout, placed them in my refrigerator and gently closed the door.

“How is Baba?” I asked.

“He’s fine. He’s worried about you.”

I pushed my plate away. “I think I’m going through what Baba did when I was in college.”

“I know.” My mother responded, her eyes kind.

Later that night, I got an email from my father, telling me he was thinking of me, just like my mother mentioned. He wrote that he hoped I felt better soon. He told me about the medication that was making his new depression go into remission. Then he quickly got back to telling me about his newest Physics textbook. “It’s my best yet.”

I turned off the computer and went over to my balcony, overlooking the starry Echo Park night. The rain had stopped, and the streets had a lovely glistening texture. Neighborhood folks strolled outside, ready for a night out at the local bars.

I thought of my father. I took solace in the fact that my father had this problem as well. I wasn’t alone. Perhaps I was wrong to keep it all bottled up.

“Thank you for the message,” I replied. “I appreciate it.”

* * * 

I went back to the Clown Palace. It was just Cash inside the studio that day. He was sitting on the stage, on a weathered stool.

“Hey Kuannggmm.”

“It’s Kuang.”

“Sorry about that.” His face became less exaggerated, more open. “What would you like to do today, buddy?”

“I want to work on some material.”

“That’s great. Do you want to do some clearing first? It looks like you have a lot on your mind.” Cash looked at me with empathy. It was a huge change from the cartoon comedian from last week. “You get on this stage, and it doesn’t have to be funny. You just get some shit off your chest.”

A pause from him. “I think you might need it.”

“You’re probably right.” I stepped on the stage and Cash took a seat. The stage was just a platform a few feet off the floor, but I felt high up on a ledge, as if I could fall down thousands of feet.

“I’ve been having some really bad thoughts lately.” The microphone made my voice expand, the volume filling the room.

“Talk to me, brother!” Adam hooted and hollered, as if I was Chris Rock at Madison Square Garden.

I spoke a little louder. “I had some suicidal thoughts, but I didn’t do anything about it. I guess I was never that good at follow-through.”

More barking laughter from Cash. He looked at me. But this wasn’t like Dr. Wong’s clinical look — this was supportive, generous.

“Which is weird,” I continued, “Because I’m Asian. We’re overachievers. I would’ve thought I would have gotten that right.”

“Better than us white hicks from Texas for sure!” More peanut gallery antics from Cash followed, but I was loving it. I was feeling heard.

“I’ve never really been that amazing at anything, if I’m being honest. I’ve always been an average Asian.”

More laughter from Cash. “The ‘Average Asian!’ I love it!”

That afternoon, we worked on some jokes. But really, we worked on my sanity.

* * * 

The journey back to feeling myself again wasn’t straightforward. It was full of twists and turns, from doing therapy to pushing my body to its limits with a marathon. But my self-healing began that day with Cash at the Clown Palace, with a commitment to being honest with myself.

This irony isn’t lost on me. Our Chinese culture is full of stoicism and saving face. Letting it all hang out on a grimy comedy stage was the furthest thing from that. When sadness and despair take hold, we often turn to shame and hide our emotions. This silence only worsens our mental state and deteriorates our self-worth. Although clearing was awkward, weird and sometimes not even very funny, it forced me to be truthful.

Just like my mother took a brave step and opened up about our family’s depression to me, I took her baton, and let it rip on the Clown Palace stage. And that made all the difference.

If you are in crisis, please call the 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline by dialing 988, or contact the Crisis Text Line by texting TALK to 741741.

The post Adventures at the Clown Palace: Stand-up comedy helped me confront my depression and cultural taboos appeared first on Salon.com.

“Fookin’ Mikey screwed us, Johnny. Said he had a .38, but it was bulls**t. Fookin’ single shot .22 anybody’d laugh at soon as stick up their hands.”

They were meeting up to plan another robbery that very night, Christmas Eve, less than a block away. Neither the robbery nor the timing made much sense, but making sense wasn’t on the menu for either Johnny Machine or Beansie, his friend since they were kids on Avenue C on the Lower East Side. It seemed like a long time ago they were sprinting down Eighth Street in the West Village, snatching purses, coming up behind tourist couples as they came out of bars at night, sticking a wooden dowel in the back of the guy like it was a gun, warning them not to turn around or they’d shoot ‘em, croaking gimme your fookin’ wallet in as deep a voice as they could muster, then taking off in their stolen sneakers down McDougal into the dark corners of Washington Square.

They had each been in Sing-Sing up the river the year before, Johnny at the end of a three-year stretch for, what else, robbery, Beansie finishing up five years for pistol-whipping a bartender near to death on Avenue B in ’62. Cops caught him a few blocks away on St. Marks Place in a joint where his girlfriend, Roberta, worked tables flashing her boobs and getting her butt pinched for tips. 

Beansie was short, round as a barrel, with a crew cut that looked like he barbered it himself, which he did standing at the sink in the kitchen of Roberta’s sixth-floor walk-up on Avenue C, a block from where he grew up on 11^th Street. It was a railroad tenement, three rooms, you walked into the kitchen and you could see into the living room in one direction, a bedroom the size of a horizontal phone booth in the other, toilet down the hall, window in the kitchen stuck open six inches, you got slammed with blast furnace heat from the airshaft in the summer, snow swirling down off the roof in the winter, misery in every breath, every corner of the dump tenement, but with forty dollar rent, who was complaining.

Johnny slept on a daybed in the front room the nights he didn’t score a hippie chick hanging out in Thompkins Square Park or a waitress in one of the coffee shops on 14^th Street where you could get coffee and an egg and two slices of toast for fifty cents. Women’s knees folded like a lawn chair for Johnny, somebody once said, watching him do his act in a corner booth one-night, dark, hooded eyes he got from his father who beat him Saturday nights after losing at the track and a mother he had to scrape out of junkie crash pads when he was still in grade school. Chicks love the wounded ones, he told guys he played poker with when they marveled at his prowess with the women.

Beansie said poker had Johnny by the balls. Johnny was always short of money. He was into loan sharks in Hells Kitchen, on the Lower East Side, the Village, all over town when it came right down to it. Johnny and Beansie were what they called take-off artists. They had knocked over a bar in Chelsea two nights ago, but the owner had taken most of the cash out of the register when he went home an hour before closing and all they got was a couple hundred which didn’t cover the vig on even one of Johnny’s loans. So, a day later, they were in the 55 Bar gaming out how they were going to hit the Buffalo Roadhouse, half a block away down Seventh Avenue at the corner of Barrow.  The Roadhouse was a hip bar with a younger crowd. Johnny had had a thing with one of the waitresses who told him that the take on Christmas Eve would be enough to retire on, crowded with dudes flashing cash to impress their dates and look big. Champagne assholes, she called them. 

Gay bars had more money, but the mob owned the gay bars, so they were off limits. The Stonewall, next door to the 55 on Christopher, was owned by the Demartinos and raked in gazillions from Wall Street closet cases cruising the boys after work, but you didn’t take off joints owned by the mob.

“What are we gonna do, Johnny?  I tole’ you we shouldn’t have dumped those pieces.”

“I told you the rule, man. You don’t use the same piece twice.”

“We didn’t even shoot the fookin’ things, Johnny. Cops can’t trace them without a bullet.”

“Bad luck, Beansie. You know that better’n anybody. The place you put a gun after a job is the East River. That’s that.”

Beansie pointed to Johnny’s cup and raised two fingers. The bartender grabbed the pot, refilled Johnny, poured another cup, and topped off both with Jameson’s.

Johnny said, “You still got that shotgun we stole off that guy up at Bear Mountain?”

“What good’s a fookin’ shotgun gonna do us. You can’t walk around carrying a fookin’ shotgun on the street, man.”

“I got an idea,” Johnny said.

Want a daily wrap-up of all the news and commentary Salon has to offer? Subscribe to our morning newsletter, Crash Course.

An hour later, Johnny and Beansie were at the Salvation Army storefront south of Canal off Broadway, volunteering to be street Santas, ringing bells, quarters clanking into their tin buckets. 

As they walked out in their beards and red suits and Santa hats, Johnny ran down the scam. 

“It’s perfect,” he told Beansie.  “Nobody will recognize us in these beards, and we can carry the shotgun in a sack, you know, like it’s full of presents.  We walk in, pull out the shotgun, blow out the back bar, wave it around, tell the assholes to hand over their wallets.  The bartender will shit bricks, give us the whole take.”

“We’re gonna rob the Roadhouse wearing Santa suits.  You’re outta your fookin’ mind.”

“You got a better idea?”

Beansie pointed at Johnny’s nose. “What we gonna do ‘bout that beak of yours?  Anybody at that bar will be able to pick you out of a mugshot book.”

“We’ll glue a couple of clown balls on our noses. C’mon. I know where we can get ‘em. Magic shop on 27^th Street.”

“Fookin’ magic store?”

“Magicians, man. Losers workin’ kids birthday parties as clowns. They rent’em the whole outfit.”

*    *        *     

The storm hit in the late afternoon. When they headed south from Roberta’s apartment on Avenue C around 10,  there were two-foot drifts against the side of stoops. The snow was blowing sideways so hard, when they reached 9^th Street, they couldn’t see Thompkins Square Park at the end of the block. On the corner of East 4^th Street, the all-night fried chicken joint was empty, and the counter man was sitting at one of the tables reading a copy of the News. 

Johnny pulled his Santa hat down over his ears as they turned west on East 3rd, leaning into the wind. Beansie was walking behind him trying to stay out of the wind, complaining with every step. The gates were down and the lights were off in Slugs Saloon when they walked past. By the time they reached the Bowery, the snow was a foot deep on the sidewalk. They hadn’t passed a single person the whole way.

At LaGuardia Place, a cop car pulled alongside. The driver’s window rolled down. “What are you two doing out so late?” the cop asked. 

“Headed home, officer,” said Johnny. His feet were freezing, and his Santa beard was caked with snow. 

“You want a ride?  It’s fuckin’ freezing out there.”

“Thank you, sir, but we just got a couple more blocks.”

Beansie was clapping his hands together, trying to keep the blood flowing.

“What you got in the sack?” the cop asked.

“Presents, sir,” answered Beansie. 

The cop shot him a look, shook his head as he rolled up the window and drove on.

As they reached the corner of Sullivan Street and turned uptown, a door opened. A thick figure in a bathrobe grabbed Johnny by the arm. Beansie skidded to a stop. Everyone knew who the man in the bathrobe was:  Vincent “The Chin” Gigante, the biggest bookie and loan shark in the West Village. 

Gigante took the cigar out of his mouth and dragged Johnny inside, signaling Beansie to follow. He did. The room was dimly lit, with an espresso machine and several small tables where men in suits sat with tiny cups and saucers before them.

“Fuckin’ mook.” Gigante pulled the red ball from Johnny’s nose. “You owe me two fuckin’ grand, Machine, you loser.  I’m guessing you don’t have it on you.”

“You’re right, Chin,” said Johnny. His face broke into a smile. “But I know where I can get it.”

The post Jingle bells, shotgun shells: The stick up on Christmas Eve appeared first on Salon.com.

Ernest Hemingway’s “The Sun Also Rises” begins in Paris but it doesn’t stay there. It follows a group of post-World War I expatriates, led by the emotionally distant narrator Jake Barnes and the captivating Lady Brett Ashley, with whom he shares a deep, impossible love. Their chaotic summer journey is joined by Brett’s fiancé, the troubled Mike Campbell, the charming but cynical Bill Gorton and the perpetually lost Robert Cohn, who is hopelessly infatuated with Brett.

The novel finds its messy center in Pamplona during the festival of San Fermín and the running of the bulls, a story of camaraderie, longing, and disillusionment. Beneath the clipped prose and bullfight bravado is a meditation on appetite, both emotional and physical. Food and drink mark the rhythm of the novel, from an early evening absinthe to trout beside the Irati River. What the characters eat reveals who they are, or who they wish they weren’t.

We begin our own journey in Bayonne, not Paris.

The city is rather overrun now than in the roaring 1920s, but the bones of Hemingway’s Europe remain if you know where to glance over coffee. “It’s the caffeine in it. Caffeine, we are here. Caffeine puts a man on her horse and a woman in his grave,” writes Jake Barnes. Coffee in the novel means moments of grounding, clarity, normalcy and lays a foundation for our day. Within view from where we enjoy a buttered baguette and sip our café au lait, the cathedral’s twin towers rise above the tiled roofs, and just beside us, tucked behind faded red shutters, is the ghost of the Hotel Panier Fleuri, where Jake stayed en route to Pamplona.

We stroll across the Pont Neuf, its international flags snapping in the morning breeze. The Nive and the Adour meet beneath our feet. It’s barely 10 a.m. and already the day promises heat. At the midpoint of the bridge, we hesitate. Ahead is the rest of France. Behind us, a story yet to be told. We turn back toward the car. Time to head to Spain.

(Howie Southworth) Cafe au lait in Bayonne

It’s mid-morning and the car hums past the border and into Navarra. The road winds through the foothills like a prelude, each turn offering a sharper light and a deeper green. We stop to appreciate the color and a local omelet. Our first glimpse of Pamplona’s sandstone walls is a jolt. This city may be small, but in 1926 it became immortal, the place where a fiesta, thundering hooves, and a novel collided to shape modern legend.

We’ve come for the smaller festival, San Fermín Txikito, held each Fall to commemorate the saint’s original canonization, before the Summer celebrations stole Hemingway’s heart and the international spotlight. No bulls. No fireworks or colored kerchiefs just yet. Castillo Square is hushed, the anticipation almost audible.

Want more great food writing and recipes? Sign up for Salon’s free food newsletter, The Bite.

Jake and his friends stayed at the Hotel Montoya, a fictional stand-in for the long-gone Hotel Quintana, where Juanito Quintana, Hemingway’s friend and fellow bullfight aficionado, once welcomed the lost generation. But we check into the Hotel La Perla, Hemingway’s favored lodging for his later visits. Our room, his suite, overlooks Estafeta Street, the long stretch of the bull run that wakes the city during San Fermín. Realization, rest, then the hunger sets in.

We lunch late, even by Spanish standards, maybe it’s an early dinner. We walk past the Plaza de Toros. The ghost of young matador Pedro Romero, the quiet center of Jake’s storm, waits on the bullring sand. We cross the street and take our seats at El Burladero. A restaurant named for the protective wooden barrier in the ring, a place of strategy, escape. In “The Sun Also Rises,” Jake describes the first meal in Spain as a shock of “hors d’oeuvres, an egg course, two meat courses, vegetables, salad, and dessert and fruit. You have to drink plenty of wine to get it all down.” We do our best.

We begin with a gilda, a tiny skewer of anchovy, olive, pickled pepper and a platter of cured meats and cheeses. There are scrambled eggs with wild mushrooms, revuelto de hongos, followed by pisto, a tomato-and-eggplant stew on thick bread. We indulge in not one but two meats: carrilleras, stewed pork cheeks with red peppers, and perdiz escabechada, cold partridge preserved in vinegar and herbs with a crisp salad. We skip Robert Cohn’s plate of cold meats. For dessert, a slice of Basque cheesecake, no crust, just burnt sugar edges and silken center, served with fruit. Café con leche to finish. It’s lavish. It’s ritual. It’s the welcome Hemingway promised.

After dinner, we walk the narrow streets of the old town to Pamplona’s cathedral. The building is silent, the courtyard empty. In the novel, Jake often questions his Catholicism but still enters churches when the weight of the world catches up with him. “It was a grand religion, and I only wished I felt religious and maybe I would the next time,” he laments as his thoughts wander without aim and we can relate. The doors were heavy and carved and we push them open. It smells of incense inside and we light a candle. The motion is not absolution, but acknowledgment.

We step back out into the cool night, amble back to the center and take a seat in front of the arcade at Café Iruña.  The square is quiet, no garlic wreaths, no romping crowd, no fiesta. Not yet. Just the clink of glasses and the shuffle of a waiter’s shoes. We order vermút and watch the lights in the windows of La Perla flicker on in time with the tall streetlamps above the plaza.

The next morning, We rise early for toast and marmalade and strong coffee at the same seat at Café Iruña, a nod to Jake and Bill’s breakfast at the hostal in Burguete. Then, we drive into the mountains to see it ourselves. On the road rising to the Pyrenees, we stop at a posada, a roadside inn where strings of chorizo and peppers hang like wind chimes above the bar. We drink cortados and observe the quiet trade of bread, wine, and words among Basque locals. This is the Spain Hemingway loved, humble, enduring, built for utility and warmth.

Farther on, through wooded curves and at the edge of the rise, Burguete. The town is shuttered. Its windows closed tight against the Autumn wind. We park and stroll past the inn where Jake and Bill stayed, the café closed for the afternoon. Then down the street, past the church, along the first legs of the Camino de Santiago. Among a dozen, we meet two pilgrims from the States, boots barely muddied, walking sticks barely warmed. We nod, exchange stories. They continue west.

We ponder the hours-long walk to the town of Aribe and Hemingway’s fishing spot along the Irati River. “That’s a hell of a hike,” we agree in our best Bill Gorton voice and choose the short drive instead. We park with a view of the village church steeple backed by steely limestone peaks of the Pyrenees and lunch at a bar some feet away. Smoked trout and white bean salad, a gesture to Jake’s hostel in Burguete whose open hours we missed.

Across the river on a span built by Romans and following the path through firs and beech, we soon reach a bend where the Irati turns back south. Where the old sanitorium stands watch above the river, overgrown, now only ghosts and damp stone. Where Hemingway’s characters fished for trout.

The water is low, but clear, lined with the shade of willows. We didn’t bring a rod. Just a notebook and ample time to sit on a rock and write. No bottles of wine cooling in the current, no talk of chickens or eggs or which one god invented first, no naps in the spots of sun. Only the peace that drew a contrast for Jake and Bill and Hemingway to what was to come back in Pamplona. Nothing but the song of birds and our own footsteps on the return to the car.

Ahead of our return to the city, we drive back up the ridge, back through Burguete, the inn still shuttered, and up to Roncesvalles, where the old monastery looms like a sentinel over the pass. The road cuts through a thick oak forest and opens briefly near a meadow where sturdy and patient Basque horses graze and pose for photos with passers-by, mostly Camino pilgrims. There’s a café just ahead of the monastery, there to serve armies of those on foot and on bikes.

(Howie Southworth ) Chistorra and pepper sandwich near Roncesvalles Monastery

We sit on the terrace and order a bocadillo, a sandwich of chistorra sausage and green local peppers, a memory of those hanging at the posada earlier in the day, now crisped on the griddle and folded simply into a toasted roll. Bill and Jake enjoyed a bottle of red or a few on this pass with this view at what we imagine was this café, but we have a drive ahead. Sparkling Pyrenees water is bright, cold, and good.

As we descend through Hemingway’s hills of escape from the madness of life, the mountains fade behind us. We return to Pamplona and the square as dusk greets us at La Perla. The city is stirring now. In a few hours, this small festival will not seem so small, fireworks, music, revelry, maybe garlic wreaths. Two tornados named Lady Brett Ashley and Robert Cohn loom. For now, a short rest. Tonight, the chaos.

Act II: The Fiesta

We never stood a chance. Not against the music, the wine, the crowd or the memory of Hemingway’s Pamplona, which surges through these streets even now. Jake Barnes’s July fiesta unfolded over seven days. Ours, in keeping with the condensed and frenzied logic of travel and literature, the San Fermín Txikito erupts in one wild final autumn night and bleeds into the next morning. We don’t mimic the tale of Jake’s not so merry band, not exactly, but its shape matches ours.

“The fiesta exploded. There is no other way to describe it,” writes Hemingway in Jake’s voice, but here and now, it’s more of a hum slowly reaching its crescendo. The square is already abuzz. It’s just after sunset, and the smaller, local San Fermín Txikito is about to reach its heights. No bulls run. No gored tourists. No Robert Cohn or his green-eyed monster. But it’s still Pamplona, still a fiesta, still a hell of a ride. Of his novel’s effect on the town during the July festival, Hemingway once wrote, “It is all there as it always was except forty thousand tourists have been added.” Tonight, they’re gone. This is intimate exuberance and feels closer to his “goddamnedest wild time.”

(Howie Southworth ) Hemingway statue near the bullring in Pamplona

We begin with a green fairy under the colonnade. “The absinthe made everything seem better,” Jake says as the last night of the party begins in The Sun Also Rises. We raise our glasses with a wry smile, like his, and let the warm burn signal the start. A brass band cracks the calm, something between ska and Basque tradition, loud and local. Trombones bleat, a tuba bellows, drums are the heart. The band leads an impromptu parade through the arches, and we are caught. We march too, clapping, bopping, dodging those not yet caught and puddles of the sudden rain and spilled gin. We are already sweating.

We break from the pack, duck down San Nicolás Street, and find Restaurante Baserriberri. We hear the chef has a trio of thematic plates for us and we’re curious. An early dinner for Spain, but sustenance just enough to fortify before the night carries on. Chef Iñaki Andradas cooks like a man born too late to fight bulls but too inventive not to try something just as daring. First, the bOOmVeja tapa, only here in Basque country, they’re called pintxos. It arrives smoking, dramatic, and served in a hollowed bomb shell. A tribute to Jake Barnes’s unfortunate war injury. Inside the shell as the smoke clears is stewed lamb over a cream-filled Japanese pancake.

Next, a little deep-fried quail leg, crisp and savory, like a miniature Southern Colonel’s specialty or Bill Gorton’s riverside treat, paired with a sharp aioli. Then a “hot dog,” local chistorra, red with spice and crisped, tucked in a brioche bun and loaded Chicago-style, plated in a cardboard bull. It’s theatrical and ridiculous and the only bull we’ll see tonight. We sip a glass of Crianza and talk with GM Javier, who praises Chef Iñaki’s approach. “Contemporary, but not molecular,” he tells us. “Flavors first, then fun.” In the novel, Jake laments “the first meal of prices being doubled for the fiesta,” and here we’re glad to pay.

Outside, the band marches on along the borders of the square and we rejoin to work up to the next meal, gin tonics now in hand. We don’t know where we’re going, but neither did Jake and Bill and Brett and Mike. Not really. They followed noise, hospitality, and instinct and casually kept tabs on a drunk Cohn, and we follow suit.

Bars beckon along our path of modern-day “riau-riau music, the pipes shrill and the drums pounding,” and we dance our way in and out of a few joints, looking for the right madness. We try a tight corner off the square, a bodega with hanging leather wineskins and plenty of barrels, and finally win a spot at the small counter. On the bar, mojama con cebollas encurtidas, salt-cured tuna with pickled onions. Hemingway never writes of mojama, but Mike Campbell shared tuna and onions and oil and vinegar with the band of dancers who adopted them along the festival’s path. This ruby-red ham of the sea counts and we share with new friends and toast the night. Our toasts from glasses, not wineskins, which we try to solve.

Like Jake before us, we step out of the bodega to find a shop that sells wine botas. We get as far as the church of San Nicolás. Church doors are open, but not for us tonight. We ask an older woman. “Las Tres ZZZ moved out of the center years ago,” she says of Hemingway’s favorite brand and we vow to find them later. For now, more music if we can track down Gazte Txaranga, the band from before. Just follow the sounds and wide smiles, we think.

Once outside, we catch a glimpse of tapping heels ducking down a blind alley and it looks like the back of our crowd. Rain again threatens and a sheltered corridor becomes an impromptu disco for two-hundred die-hards. That’s all that fits and we make the cut. “All you saw was the heads and shoulders going up and down, up and down,” as Jake would observe. We dance away from the weather, toe-to-toe with strangers, as cups get drained and refilled by now-roving bottles. The ground slick with overflowing delight instead of rain. We’re all ridiculous and glorious and now tired. The music fades and we, the hangers-on, disperse.

Hunger strikes and we think of the appeal of pintxos. Too small to overwhelm and there’s always room for more. Maybe a walk first to stay fresh.

We stretch beyond the cathedral and onto Pamplona’s city walls, where the stone holds centuries of sieges, prayers, and heartbreak. “Across the plain it was dark, and we could see lights on the mountains,” writes Jake. Here we talk of impossible love, of passion and jealousy, of loss and the practical cruelties that make desire without relief. It is Brett and Jake’s dilemma distilled, her hunger for love, his incapacity, their knowing futility. Brett’s lust for the young matador Romero simmered. He would complicate it all.

Somewhere earlier and prescient, Jake admits, “You can’t get away from yourself by moving from one place to another.” The line fits here, at the edge of town, where escape feels close yet never arrives. The silence of the walls, the weight of their history, presses on our words until they, too, are pared down to essentials.

We step off the wall as the tentative rain finally makes a commitment. We wander back wet, down to Castillo Square, down to the ghosts of Bar Milano, a stand-in for Bar Torino, and Café Suizo, where the fiesta unravels in insults, a love polygon and fisticuffs. Hemingway wrote it as the night when everything collapsed. Jake sends Brett off with the bullfighter Romero. Mike gets jealous and drunk. Cohn gets jealous and violent. “It is awfully easy to be hard-boiled about everything in the daytime,” Jake writes, “but at night it is another thing.” Perhaps better that the places where it all happened are long-shuttered.

Jake describes Bar Milano as “a small, tough bar where you could get food.” This may be the case with many bars here, but we head to the best food and not so “tough.” Bar Gaucho, Pamplona’s most famous temple of pintxos. Though it opened well after Hemingway’s time, he would admire the bar’s seamless operation, the dishes emerging with military precision on a cramped night like this. Cold pintxos on the bar for the taking, hot pintxos appearing like clockwork from the tiny but powerful kitchen.

We meet Iñaki, the manager here who is appropriately more matador than barkeep. He leads his crew not of banderilleros and picadors, but of drink crafters and cooks through flawless passes to a demanding mob, his “domination of the bull.” He calls his pintxos “the best of Basque cuisine, only tiny.” And we agree.

We order Iñaki’s finest dishes, pintxo de anguila, roasted eel set atop a tomato gel and a sliver of white toasted bread. Elegant and delicious, and persuasive for those afraid of eel. Next, a showstopper, the dish that disappears as quickly as it appears on the pintxo bar is their huevo trufado, the truffled egg. A glass filled with black truffle cream in which a perfectly soft-cooked egg rests, topped with crisp French fries and dust of jamón. A dish Hemingway couldn’t have imagined when he wrote “eat an egg.” The barkeep pours small glasses of Fundador brandy as a nod to our project, the fuel that fed peak drama at Milano and Suizo.

(Howie Southworth ) San Fermín Txikito crowd

As we wander back across the square and into the maze of old town streets, the festival is in full swing. Lanes are rivers of people, laughter and music spilling from every corner. At the confluence of three alleyways, the crowd swells, a living, breathing thing. We meet three strangers-turned-friends here, likely by stepping on a foot or three: José, Mikel, and yet another Iñaki. They greet us with warmth, embracing us as the only foreigners in sight. Our Spanish is like their English, sparse, but effective. They, like many others in this sea of humanity, are here to reunite with old friends, the ones they see but once each year during the Txikito. And now us.

The trio takes us in, guiding us through the mass of revelers. We talk of Hemingway, of Spain, of Basque pride, and of food. After an hour, they disappear into a crowded bar, but we had our fun. Then, they emerge triumphantly with a round for us all. As a gesture of true camaraderie, they grin and untie their own blue pañuelos and tie these kerchiefs around our necks. “Now you’re in our peña,” Mikel says. Jake’s crew never earned a scarf. They partied among the peñas, but never of them. Ninety-nine years later, we are tied in.

Events stretch on, the rain long forgotten, the music and laughter our bosom companions. Eventually, we find ourselves back in the square, watching the lights and merrymakers dance on the wet stones. The festival feels timeless, unhurried, alive in a way that the modern San Fermín cannot be. It is a smaller celebration, yes, but no less significant. A festival unspoiled by spectacle and overflowing with soul. We feel it and Hemingway and his cast of misanthropes would be home.

(Howie Southworth) Fried shrimp at Café Iruña in Pamplona

The night doesn’t end. It just softens. Somewhere half past exhaustion, we stagger back to Café Iruña. Hemingway’s and Jake’s favorite haunt. Ours too. It’s quiet now, but the fryers are still on and reflection is on the menu. We order fried shrimp and cold beers and remember that Jake in the end liked Robert Cohn. As do we, tragic. Here, No fights break out. No tables are tipped over. Our shrimp are safe. For a moment.

At the end of their longest night, Jake writes, “I do not know what time I got to bed.” We’re with you, Mr. Barnes. Back at our suite, we leave the balcony doors open to Estafeta Street for the cool post-rain air, that freshly clean smell that cannot be replaced and the joyful noise fading over time. If only to keep living it the best we can, but far too burnt to party in earnest into the wee hours. Our blue scarves hang from a chair, limp with gravity. The sounds of this life happening and this breeze are enough, and even Jake Barnes and crew would approve of our calling it a night. Tomorrow, recovery.

Act III: Leaving Pamplona

“In the morning it was all over. The fiesta was finished.” Jake’s words hadn’t rung louder, like these damned church bells. First light beams through the curtains and doors we left open to the balcony and confirm our well-earned sleep is over. A chill had moved into the room, slowly replacing the bluster of revelers over the wee hours. Now there is silence, no shouts or clinking or songs or even whispers to break the quiet. A few distant screeches of brooms on cobblestone, that’s all. We stand on the balcony over Estafeta street taking it all in. This was Hemingway’s favorite perch for the running of the bulls, above the fray. Some say he never ran it. A few of his mended ribs beg to differ.

We hit refresh, shower, toss on clothes and head down the stairs and into the streets, eager to witness the aftermath of San Fermín Txikito at ground-level. One hundred feet into the square, Café Iruña’s terrace and vapors of freshly brewed coffee beckon. After a night like last night, we stick to strong coffee. That hits the spot. To repeat, “It’s the caffeine in it. Caffeine, we are here.” Iruña feels relaxed, as if exhaling after the madness of the past hours.

Outside the terrace, the square is immaculate. Not an ounce of litter, no errant barware lost with the throngs, no drunk soldiers left behind. The city has successfully deleted the night before, scrubbed it clean with unseen hands. The breeze carries no aroma of red wine or rain-soaked ska bands. It’s almost as if the fiesta never occurred, but we catch a glimpse of the blue and white neckerchief of one clan or another tied to a column of the gazebo. It wasn’t all a dream.

(Howie Southworth ) Clean streets after the fiesta in Pamplona

We pay our small tab and walk on toward the end of town. As we round the corner out of the municipal plaza, those same green hills that called us to the countryside appear just beyond the end of the road. A corral sits on the right, this is where the bulls begin their ill-fated run. The fences hold no bulls today, the streets, no runners. But there looks to be one last parade. A troupe of musicians and dancers collects just outside the corral, its members clad in the whites and red of Basque tradition.

Flutes and drums tune up as spectators begin to line the curbs and balconies along the street. The desolate morning we had first walked into suddenly blossoms into a different type of festive crowd. “There’s no more wine in our veins, just cold coffee and the sound of flutes,” writes Jake and it feels good. The music and marching begin in earnest, the dancers gesture and move in unison with wooden swords. We’re drawn into the procession marking the true closing ceremony of the Txikito.

Just as the parade reaches City Hall, another parade is on a slow-motion collision course with our own. “Great giants… thirty feet high” and big-headed protectors, the kilikis and zaldikos. The giants spin and bob along the route, their long skirts whirling over the crowd. Children giggle and run as kilikis with soft foam truncheons bop them if they get too close. We run and laugh with the kids and also take a few hits and learn our lesson. This is Pamplona without the need for bulls and a triage nurse, a kinder tradition that precedes Hemingway by a century, one he saw as pure joy.

The now-merged parades funnel up the hill toward the cathedral. We stick it out until what seems like the religious end and then slip away. San Sebastián calls to us as it did Jake to put a bookend on his own fiesta. To rest, to breathe, to eat near his beloved sea. Maybe a swim if these clouds give us a break. For now, we have one more Pamplona thing to do.

(Howie Southworth ) The Pamplona bullring, empty

At a bar called Viva San Fermín, we buy a rabo de toro sandwich, braised oxtail on crusty bread, and carry it to the bullring. We take the tour and linger and sit in the sunlit seats above the sand. We eat in silence. Sacrifice hangs in the air. Barnes once says, “Nobody ever lives their life all the way up except bullfighters.” Jake, this toast is for the bulls. We chew slowly.

On our way out of town, we detour to the Las Tres ZZZ wineskin factory, just outside the center. Though almost a century has passed, Jake had it right. “Inside it smelled of fresh tanned leather and hot tar. A man was stencilling completed wineskins. They hung from the roof in bunches. He took one down, blew it up, screwed the nozzle tight, and then jumped on it.” With the pleasure of having an exact moment from the novel, we bid goodbye to Pamplona and hop a train.

We retreat to San Sebastián like Jake Barnes before us. The train delivering us from the hangover of Pamplona into the arms of Donostia, where the sea breathes more slowly. “Even on a hot day,” Jake writes, “San Sebastián “has a certain early-morning quality.” And that’s how it greets us now, crisp light over washed stone streets, air sweetened by sea spray. A city of recovery.

We check into the Hotel Londres, Hemingway’s hotel, a corner room with a side view of La Concha and a ceiling fan that stirs the salt in the air. Hunger has caught up with us. We cross to the harbor and settle in at a terrace overlooking the boats and the bay, asking little of the menu but for one essential dish. Merluza en salsa verde. A Basque standard. Flaky hake-fish in a light, briny parsley sauce and an emulsion of olive oil, on a bed of smashed potatoes. Crowned with crispy lardons. It’s subtle, restorative, simple, like Jake would have wanted. Needed. To drink, a glass of Rioja, a damn fine wine. For dessert, a stroll.

We walk through the old quarter and onto the promenade above Hemingway’s beloved La Concha beach. With a towel and swimsuit in tow we open Jake Barnes’s playbook, rent a locker, and change. La Concha is usually a smooth bay protected by the green hill of Santa Clara Island. Today, it’s rougher, the waves higher. As Jake reported before us, “They came in like undulations in the water, gathered weight of water, and then broke smoothly on the warm sand,” and warm it was. The water however is bracing on first touch, just a toe, but we then dive in whole.

(Howie Southworth) La Concha Beach in San Sebastián

We wade out then float farther into the surf, our progress dented a little with each passing roller. Once fully committed, the cold is comfortable, and the blue sky helps. Kids leap and slide from the floating docks, their sounds of delight travel across the surface. Yachts sail in, fishing boats sail out, and we get a few jumps off the docks ourselves. The sea cleanses.

The sun now focused on our swim, the sea warms around us and so we linger, dive longer and deeper, letting the current sway us to the opposite end of the bay. As we walk the long beach on toasty sand toward the lockers, the sun dries us and leaves us salty.

After a quick shower and change, we follow Jake’s lead back into the old town, “then up one of the cool streets to the Café Marinas. There was an orchestra playing inside the café.” Only it is now a jewelry shop, there’s no orchestra. As luck has it, there is a gelato joint next door and so we continue his lead, sit on the terrace, people-watch and while away and enjoy lemon sorbet. We skip Jake’s “long whiskey and soda.” An early train to Madrid in the morning sends us to bed without dinner.

Early AM. We enjoy the view of La Concha one last time before boarding the train to Madrid. The rhythm of the rails is a tonic, and we nap. Hard, waking just before the Atocha station to enjoy a jamón sandwich with grated tomato and olive oil as a smear. The capital greets us not with wild crowds, but with shadowed buildings and the whir of taxis along San Jerónimo Street.

We ask the taxi to go the long way and pass the Hostal Aguilar, the novel’s Hotel Montana. Where Brett Ashley shacked up with bullfighter Pedro Romero until she booted him to the curb and Jake swept in as he tended to for Brett. We nod in Romero’s direction and descend toward the golden glow of The Westin Palace for martinis in the footsteps of Jake and a newly matador-free Brett.

As Hemingway exclaimed in the voice of Jake Barnes, “It’s funny what a wonderful gentility you get in the bar of a big hotel.” As Jake and Lady Brett may agree, The Palace certainly fit the bill. Our barkeep is pleasantly chatty. The room is opulent, the patrons sharp, and the stools oddly comfortable for stools. The barkeep turns to artist as he shakes our martinis frosty and pours. That first sip of cold, sharp gin and the illusion of vermouth cuts through our train ride haze. No nonsense, a tap of the power switch.

Now awake and aware of the need to eat, we walk the old stone to Sobrino de Botín, “It is one of the best restaurants in the world,” according to Hemingway, who immortalized the place. Jake and Brett dined upstairs. We go below, into the cave where the walls lean in like old companions. We’re prescribed to order cochinillo asado, the roasted suckling pig in the book, and sopa de ajo, garlic soup just for fun.

The pork arrives garnished with buttery potatoes. The skin is crisp, and the meat is tender, barely holding onto the bone. There is nothing nuanced about this dish. Fire, salt, olive oil, a branch of thyme or rosemary thrown in for aroma. Hemingway enjoyed foods for what they were, and this was that. Botín and the 18th-century wood oven have endured on this very philosophy. It’s primal.

Want more great food writing and recipes? Sign up for Salon’s free food newsletter, The Bite.

Though a fork and knife make one feel civilized while digging into the roast, this ruby glass of Rioja Alta doesn’t hurt. Its oaky, sharp, clean character cuts through the lush bites of pork perfectly. Hemingway, always particular about his wine, held Rioja Alta at the top. It played nicely with the robust flavors of Spanish cooking. This pure and balanced duet of meat and drink echoes Hemingway’s sentiment that food isn’t mere sustenance. It’s culture and it’s a way to connect. In this restaurant with aging walls, deep roots, and possible ghosts, this bite and this sip in this moment is Spain.

Then, the table gets more crowded. Garlic soup. Rich broth thickened with bread, dusted with paprika, spiked with bits of cured ham, with a poached egg to mix in. Hemingway wrote of long braided strands of garlic around the necks of San Fermín revelers. They say it wards off evil spirits. And that may or may not be true, but why take chances.

We step out of Botín into the Madrid sun, full of garlic and pig, Rioja and memory. Jake and Brett ended here too, in a taxi that wound up the Gran Vía. “Oh, Jake, we could have had such a damned good time together,” she tells him. And he answers, “Isn’t it pretty to think so?” Their love, impossible. Their appetite, insatiable. Their story, unfinished.

We don’t hail a taxi. Instead, we walk. Through Hemingway’s beloved Centro district over to Gran Via for one last look, the neon and marble, the noise of traffic and midday tipplers. The city feels endless and awake. We sit on a bench and let it wash over us, wondering what ghosts of the lost generation would make of this, our Spain. The air is thick with possibility, with futility, with the truth that some hunger is never fed.

The post 99 years later, “The Sun Also Rises” is still delicious appeared first on Salon.com.

A reckless juvenile on 440 N. Robinson Street

My earliest memories of Thanksgiving date back to the late 1980s and early ’90s: Adolescent me, chalk-ashy with a box fade, in my cramped bedroom at 440 or in a cramped bedroom at my Aunt Trudy’s across the street, or at my Grandma Famma’s house surrounded by too many cousins playing Double Dribble and Arch Rivals and Jordan versus Bird before NBA Live 95 dropped. We’d compare our Jordans and Ewings and AF1’s that matched our Starter Jackets or Triple Fat Gooses that eventually landed on the floor because fighting over the joystick was much — much — more important.

Nobody on our block ever heard of a ventilation system because the smells packed the house and buried themselves inside the fabric of our jeans and shirts. We’d smell like grease all the way up until we washed our clothes.

The spread was turkey, baked and fried; sweet potatoes dripping in King Syrup, which I hate; cheap biscuits that pop out of the can; stuffing with sausage I couldn’t eat because my mom kept me away from pork; a big shiny ham I couldn’t eat because, again, pork; five-cheese macaroni and cheese, which had to be slightly burned on the top; collard greens; canned cranberry sauce that falls onto your plate in the perfect, scientifically-modified cylinder, which everybody loves more than homemade cranberry sauce; seafood salad and about 12 sweet potato pies, because no respectable Black person has ever heard of pumpkin pie.

While playing Nintendo, before TurboGrafx-16 dropped — I was the only brat with a Neo Geo, and then later, a Sony PlayStation — I’d be summoned for a plate. My aunts had to make sure I got my fair share because it wasn’t strange for my older cousins to eat everything, leaving 60-cent rice from the Korean store as my only option for dinner.

“Lil Dwight, put that game down!” they would yell. “Come eat!”

This is where one of my glorious aunts would grab my hand and guide me past the spread, pointing at each dish. I would have the luxury of selecting everything, excluding the pork, or at least everything my inexperienced palate deemed edible. Maybe the food was delicious and maybe it wasn’t. Honestly, I didn’t care about flavors, plate presentation or the quality of what I ate. I was a growing street kid. I would have inhaled whatever you put in front of me as long as it didn’t have mayonnaise in it.

My older cousins always talked about who cooked what: How my dad made the best seafood salad, and how Aunt Trudy made the best macaroni and cheese, the best pies, the best cakes, basically the best everything. My mom mastered sweet potatoes — that was her dish. Famma made everything, even though her kids brought dishes. She loved to present her options. My uncles were worthless; they only brought things to dinner we didn’t need, like chips and ice. Don’t get me wrong, everyone loves a cold drink, but once you’re in your mid-20s and on your way to your early 30s, you have to do better than paper plates, chips and ice. No one has ever said on Thanksgiving, “Where is Uncle Vincent? We need him here! He brings the best ice!”

The plate: In this phase of uninterested culinary discovery, I’d normally end up with some thinly shaved slices of fried turkey breast, a chunk of macaroni with the burned top picked off, collard greens and a slice of sweet potato pie. Under no circumstances should any of my food overlap or touch. All servings must be at least a quarter of an inch apart on my doubled-up paper plate.

* * *

To be 20-something and radical

“Why would I ever celebrate a holiday that brought death and destruction to our native brothers and sisters? Get the f**k up out my face!” That was how I approached Thanksgiving throughout most of my 20s and early 30s.

I read Howard Zinn’s “A People’s History of the United States.” That powerful text, along with a mix of conscious rap, had me ready to whip a Pilgrim’s ass each and every November. Which seems wildly selective as I reflect now — I mean, if I was such an advocate for my Native brothers and sisters, why didn’t I want to kick Pilgrim ass all year long? Why did I save all of my anger for the month of November — and not even the entire month, just Thanksgiving Day, forgetting about my anger as soon as those Black Friday sales kicked off?

“I’ll save my burning anger for you Pilgrims for next year,” my brain would tell itself as it switched over to Black Friday. “Eighty-five-inch flat-screen televisions are 95% off. And even though I could be trampled by other irresponsible shoppers in the process, and even though I don’t need another 85-inch flat-screen television, I just have to buy it, because it is Black Friday and it’s 95% off!” Wait — shouldn’t we all hate capitalism?

My grandma died in 1997, and that was the last year my family held a big dinner with my mom, all of her sisters and brothers, and the endless collection of cousins. We tried to bring the big dinner back a few years after she passed; however, we failed terribly. My grandma was too strong; she was the one who kept us together, leaving no one to carry the torch.

In these years I rarely attended formal Thanksgiving dinners, if I even hooked up with people who knew how to cook at all. My Thanksgivings were spent hanging out on the block, passing around tightly sealed blunts in one direction and a bottle of liquor in the other. Or else I was keeping cozy indoors in the middle of dice games that housed 30 to 40 shooters, all thirsty to grind up some of that Black Friday money. Or I’d try my best to link up with whichever woman I was dating at the time after she left her big family dinner, because I had no interest in being the “holiday date.” The “holiday date” normally ends up being the most questioned, judged and talked-about person in the room.

Once I was a holiday date for a woman I wasn’t even dating. We attended the same middle school, lost touch during our high school years, and then reunited when she moved two doors down from me with her cousin, my homeboy.

Wherever she went between high school and then left her with a serious weed habit that mirrored mine. The two of us puffed constantly, like chimneys on a cold day. She used to always try to chip in, or buy little pieces of bud off me, but I didn’t sell weed; it takes too long to get rid of, and the people who buy it talk too damn much, usually about nothing. So I would gift her a little piece of bud here and there, and tell her she could break me off a piece when she purchased her own, which was never. This woman was really into bartering, though, like, if you give me weed, I’ll braid your hair, and I was not. The only thing I ever wanted trade goods or services for was cash.

“You gotta let me pay you back, bro,” she said during an early-morning Thanksgiving smoke session. “Come with us to Thanksgiving. My grandma makes the best everything!”

I wasn’t into the devilish holiday, but I was also free and hungry, so I rolled right into the Thanksgiving date trap. As her family passed tin containers of sweet potatoes and macaroni around, her mom and grandma and uncles and aunts pressed me like, “he’s such a nice young man” (I wasn’t) and, “How long y’all two cuties been going out?” (we weren’t) and, “lock him down, he’s a child of God.” (If they only knew.)

I made it up out of that family dinner with some sausage-less stuffing, turkey, a hot-ass homemade biscuit and two healthy cups of Hennessey. The three of us laughed uncontrollably at how they all thought I was her boyfriend, and we went back to my place to smoke again.

The plate: These were by far the worst Thanksgiving dining years for me. One year I fasted as a middle finger to the Pilgrims, though I doubt they received my message. Chinese food fed me well for a few of those years. Maybe a turkey sandwich after someone’s family dinner, or a woman I actually was dating would bring me a plate, which often scared me because of my well-documented trust issues. I ate Lunchables, cold pizza, four wings and fries, and Golden Grahams. Sometimes I’d eat these meals without a plate, pouring the cereal into a red plastic cup, or eating off a ripped piece of the greasy pizza box big enough to balance my extra slice.

* * *

Growing into the person you thought you’d never be

Everything leveled up in my 30s. I wore an overcoat. I drank dairy-free lattes with extra foam. I read books about politics, studied at an elite university, purchased glasses, attended spoken word poetry events even though I hate spoken word poetry events. I smoked less weed and then no weed. I discovered craft cocktails that pair beautifully with farm-to-table food. I started identifying as a writer and began my journey into being an amateur snob, saying things like, “I don’t eat McDonald’s — I guffaw at the idea of a person indulging in McDonald’s!” OK, I never used the word guffaw or indulging in a sentence. I did act just like a guy who would use the words guffaw and indulging in sentences. And I wore sweaters.

And with this new attitude and new diet came new ideas. One of the biggest ideas was that I had to redefine Thanksgiving, separating it from the holiday commemorating the colonizers who practiced genocide on our Native American brothers and sisters and reclaiming it as a time for family, friends and love. With that in mind, I started hitting up dinners with my new taste and understanding of aesthetics. If the food you served me was delicious and plated well, I would tell you. And if it wasn’t, I would also tell you, but not in front of everyone — after all, I was sophisticated, so I would pull you to the side and say, “thanks for the invite, but you have some things you need to work on.” These conversations, not surprisingly, never went well.

I began sharing Thanksgiving dinners with all kinds of people: successful artists, executives, and other creators with way more experience than I had. During this time I met a lovely interracial couple, Keisha and Sam, who invited me over for Thanksgiving after I had already had dinner. I loved talking to them about art, music, our government, and sports, all of which we talked about over dessert. Keisha (who I should mention is Black) served me a healthy slice of warm orange pie, placing it perfectly next to a scope of almond ice cream. To the naked eye, it looked like sweet potato pie. I put a little ice cream and a little pie on my fork as I ran my mouth about the things we all loved to run our mouths about, then took a bite. Delicious. It was like sweet potato pie, but not as sweet — a perfect companion for the ice cream.

“What do you think?” Sam (who I should mention is white) asked, watching me enjoy the pie. “What’s the verdict?”

“I love sweet potato pie! What are you talking about?” I laughed. “This may be new to you.”

Sam’s eyes lit up. “That’s pumpkin pie, bro!”

My eyes stretched across my face as my hosts burst out in laughter. I wish I had a story that revolved around me spitting out the bite, finding the nearest stack of sweet potato pies and cleansing myself of pumpkin madness because of my commitment to Blackness, or taking the young couple hostage, taping them up, and then throwing sweet potatoes at them full speed until and they swore on their lives that this moment never happened. But I do not.

As embarrassing as enjoying pumpkin pie was, I was also going through a whole lot of other changes. Don’t get me wrong, I know I should never get on a public platform, especially in front of a bunch of Black people, and talk about how great pumpkin pie is, mainly because part of my commitment to my race is showing my people — actually, all people — that sweet potato is better. But between us, I could go for some pumpkin pie right now.

The plate: In some ways, the plate now feels far from the one from Famma’s table. Yes, I still eat some of the traditional Thanksgiving dishes; however, it’s not strange for me to also serve lobster, prawns and crab cakes; two or three different kinds of fried turkey; mac and cheese made with Manchego; fresh collards and other vegetables from somebody’s organic garden; and aged Cabernet and champagne. But there’s also Stove Top stuffing and that fake cranberry sauce, because I’m still from the block. And F those Pilgrims, because I’m still that radical in his early 20s learning about solidarity with indigenous people. And yes, there may even be pumpkin pie now — intentional pumpkin pie, even. Please don’t tell my cousins.

The post The evolution of my Thanksgiving plate appeared first on Salon.com.

Outside, the ground crackles with frost — but I’m still cultivating, tending my attitude of gratitude like my life depends on the fruits of my labors. And it does. Farming is not gentle work; the body and spirit require as much regard as the land.

On this farm, there’s no Thanksgiving. Here, it’s harvest season. Firewood season. Wrap-your-salad-garden-in-blankets season. This is the week when the browns and grays come, and stay. It’s almost time for Mother Winter to blow down the door and wipe the fields clean.

Over the years, this slice of soil has nourished wild alliums, huckleberry, sassafras — even ancient apple trees planted by those who came to claim these West Virginia acres as their own. But this land did not see itself as acreage, or as part of any country — and knew humans only as itinerant intimates. When I arrived, the meadow burned purple with ironweed. Soon, fields turned to pasture, feeding poultry and sheep alongside the hairy, feral pigs who churned earth into muck into grass without cease. Until they, too, moved on.

Our first hard frost dropped weeks ago, but the radish, nettle, and corn salad are still holding on, tucked against the frigid ground like ears on a mad cat. I may yet find one last flush of shiitakes stair-stepping up the side of an old stump, feeding themselves on the rich red oak.

On Thursday, I’ll dig horseradish. I’ll drag my grandfather’s spade along behind me as I pick through overgrown ferns of asparagus, dodging burdock as I search for the perfect clump of spicy white roots to cleave out of the chilly clay. Just one fat tuber will do, or two.

Out of the freezer, I’ll pull a roast — the last of a Red Devon steer raised on the wild grass of a friend’s farm, nearby in the Allegheny Mountains. As I grip the hunk of frozen meat, frost shears off, crystals prickling my skin as they melt against my hand. I plan to roast the beef low and slow after a long, two-day thaw.

Only after the beef is in the oven, bracketed by the last of those steadfast Summer onions and maybe some sturdy sprigs of rosemary, pinched from the bush up the hill, will I turn to the potatoes.

Onward to the root cellar, basket in hand, to forage for ingredients. I’ll let my eyes trail along the shelves as I catalog the colorful canned goods: red and yellow salsas studded with chunks of sweet onion, whole fuchsia plums shedding their skins as they float in the jars, pickled green beans so thick and straight I feel my tastebuds jump at the piquant thought of dill and garlic. I never tire of admiring the bounty gathered in this small, dark room dug into the hillside. I’ll load a basket with waxy yellow potatoes still matte with soil, dark cherry preserves, that last jar of golden pickled beets.

Once back inside, the canning jars will frost with fog in my warm kitchen as I mound potatoes in the sink before scrubbing their skins to a shine. Each potato opens with a juicy whack of the old arc-blade knife my father gave me, the carbon steel pitted with as many dents as its wooden handle. Soon, rounds of potato nestle against the beef like stones encircling a grave. I will chop the cabbage next, though I always cook it last — a wild nest of shreds dropped onto the hot flat of my cast-iron skillet — the cherry-lacquered beef nearby, at rest.

One hour before dark, as the wind hurls itself against the mossy north side of my house, breaknecking up the long, crooked trail from the river, I’ll be hauling more firewood inside, simmering a pot of chaga and spices into mushroom chai on the small wood stove. The roast will glow, burnished and blazing, as I open the oven door to baste it with preserves and turn the glowing globes of potato in their spitting fat.

Over the Greenbrier River, past Cold Knob and the blinking windmills, I know my mother is doing much the same. So, too, are conscious farmers and cooks from Maine to Arizona. People who celebrate food do this simple work every day: we harvest, we cook, we eat. Daily nourishment can be uncomplicated; reverent eating doesn’t need to mean overabundance.

On this Thursday, I won’t be harvesting and cooking and sitting down for dinner to glorify the barbarity of my pinched-faced European ancestors, but because I believe that the effort to tend soil, cook slow food and savor each plate is worthwhile, that sharing real food with other humans is an act of radical gratitude.

Or because — in the absence of a more perfect solution — the best way to honor land that has never been mine is to steward it with the greatest care I can muster. So that, in the wake of cold and weary fingers, long hours peeling garlic and simmering broth, early mornings and late nights nurturing seedlings and tending trees and carrying water, the land — the Grandmother of us all — may thrive.

The post On this farm, there’s no Thanksgiving appeared first on Salon.com.

A lifelong Illinois farmer and lover of maintaining a stretch of land, big or small, papa must have gotten a kick out of me buying my own home in 2019, situated on a 3,615-square-foot lot in New Orleans and raised up just ever so on brick columns, holding on for dear life in the years of punishing weather it’s withstood since I became its steward.

Spending most of my formative summers attached to the heels of his boots as he puttered around in the various barns and sheds of his farm, flanked by walls of corn on two sides and soy beans and a crick (not creek) on the others, the smell of my papa is cellular to me. Good, warm, dark and healthy soil. Dutch Masters cigars. Motor oil, dispersed among the tractors, pickup truck and the red motorcycle he’d take me out on some afternoons. The smell of the breeze through the apple trees on a summer day. And Chiclets, a constant rattling in his front shirt pocket. This combination meant comfort and security to me, more so than the roof over my head, so it’s nice that, when he’s here, my own property as an adult can take on some of that sensory coziness, which makes a home feel more like a home than anything else.

I’ve always had a thing for smells. That weird Strawberry Shortcake doll that would burp its signature scent in your face when you squeezed its stomach. Scratch ‘N Sniff stickers that ran the gamut from traditional yum to secretly preferred yuck: Root beer, bubblegum, grass, wet dog. Throughout the years, my affections for my friends would be tied to their smells (Marlboro Reds, dirty jeans, sandalwood or CK One . . . um . . . fog machine). And my other closest family members, similar to my papa, all come with specific scents that map their presence in my home from room to room, front yard to back, so vividly. So significantly. I often find myself calling out the name of who the smell belongs to after they’ve passed by.

I’ll catch a whiff of my papa’s tractor-y cigar smell out back, by the tankless water heater.

“Hi, papa!”

I’ll walk from my bedroom to the kitchen, straight through a cloud of hairspray, Febreze and Barclay cigarettes.

“Hi, mom!”

A strong waft of cut cantaloupe.

“Hi, gramma!”

And, when I need it the most, a freshly washed flannel shirt comingled with the oddly pleasant aroma of uncooked meat.

“Daddy.”

Makes it easy to forget that none of these people have ever stepped a foot in my house. And never will. Because they’ve all been dead for years.

Start your day with essential news from Salon.
Sign up for our free morning newsletter, Crash Course.

As someone who has always been fascinated with the paranormal, as far back as I can remember, I have always kind of assumed that, at some point or another, I would come in close contact with a ghost. I’ve certainly made myself an easy target for them.

My first dabbling with the paranormal took place in the living room of the previously mentioned farm in Illinois when, one sunny summer afternoon, my cousin Amy and I made contact with who knows what from the beyond via a Ouija Board she discovered in her attic — inarguably the most terrifying of places to chance upon such a thing.

(Ellen Denuto/Getty Images) Two young girls playing with a Ouija board

After asking it the standard sort of questions that we both suspected the other was moving the planchette to answer: “Does so and so like me back?” “Will I ever have a golden retriever like Brandon from ‘Punky Brewster?'” “Do I actually need to learn math?” I stepped up to crank the freakiness dial, establishing a burgeoning personality trait, and voiced the question: “What do you look like?”

“Mirror,” the board spelled out. And judging by my cousin’s face, she did not spell this out herself.

After staring into each other’s eyes for several very long seconds, I summoned the courage to get up from where I was seated, criss cross applesauce on the rug, to walk to the nearest mirror, which was in the hallway bathroom. Flicking on the light switch, because no way was I gonna do this in the dark, I padded apprehensively to the narrow mirror over the sink, knowing with everything in me that I was about to see the scariest thing I had ever, or would ever, encounter in my life. But it was just me in the reflection, and my mushroom hair.

I wanted more, though. I was already hooked on the concept of finding proof that there was something beyond death for all of us. That there was more to life than what could be seen, or even imagined.

Start your day with essential news from Salon.
Sign up for our free morning newsletter, Crash Course.

As I grew older, starting in my teens, when I had my own money to spend on spooky pastimes and adventures, I read as many books as I could get my hands on that told tales of ghost sightings and haunted locations, making a mental note of places that I hoped to one day visit myself in my continued pursuit of paranormal confirmation, and I’ve made it to quite a few since, with plans to cross more off the list. And though nary a ghost has been sighted — yet — that doesn’t mean I haven’t gotten all the proof I’ve been looking for.

In 2012, I took my girlfriend at the time to stay at the Lizzie Borden Bed & Breakfast in Fall River, Massachusetts, celebrating our first (and only) Valentine’s Day together with plans to spend a romantic evening in what’s marketed as the most haunted room in the house, the John Morse room, the very room where Abby Borden was found dead, right next to the bed where we’d be sleeping.

(Matthew J. Lee/The Boston Globe via Getty Images) A portrait of Lizzie Borden hangs inside the Lizzie Borden House.

I say “where we’d be sleeping” here, rather than “slept,” because no sleep was had that night, and not because romance activities kept us from our slumber.

After checking in, putting our stuff in the room and joining in on the pre-purchased tour of the house, the giggles and “this is so crazy” fun of the experience transitioned into earnest fright, especially once the sun went down. I remember walking up the creaky stairs of the house to our room and feeling like I was walking somewhere with high elevation. As the night wore on, I felt dizzy, sick to my stomach and, at the worse of it, was overtaken by the out-of-nowhere feeling of rage. Sitting on the bed and looking around the room while my girlfriend dozed off for a bit, I jumped out of my skin when I heard her voice after a long stretch of silence, telling me that she’d had a brief dream that someone was dragging her under the bed.

We fled late at night to stay at the house of a friend who lived nearby, returning the next morning for the included breakfast of Johnny Cakes shaped like axes. Talking to the only other couple who managed not to chicken out like we did, I’ll never forget the looks on their faces when they learned we’d left in the midnight hour. They’d heard footsteps that they’d assumed were ours walking up and down the stairs all night long.

To redeem myself from that experience, I stayed at a few more haunted locations and actually did manage to find sleep within.

In 2016, I took my wife at the time to, regretably, spend our 2nd wedding anniversary in a cottage on the grounds of The Myrtles Plantation in St. Francisville, Louisiana, said to be one of the most haunted locations in all of America. The cottage we stayed in, specifically, was said by our tour guide to be one of the most “active” spots on the grounds, thought to be a hangout for the ghosts of children who died on the property, using it as a playhouse just as they did when they were alive.

The guide told us that previous guests had reported toys packed in their luggage for their own children would be discovered misplaced and something seemed to have found a toy of sorts in our luggage as, on our first waking morning, the freshly charged battery on a certain something or other that we’d brought with us for the anniversary trip had gone dead in the night, and it wasn’t our doing, as much as I’d like to brag that it had been.

(wanderluster/Getty Images) Caretaker’s Cottage at Myrtles Plantation, built in 1796, is one of America’s most haunted places, Great River Road, St. Francisville, Louisiana.

Where many a ghost hunter has robbed themselves of a successful fact-finding mission by considering lack of a visual ghost sighting to be a bust, when seeking proof of the paranormal, I’ve been guilty of the same.

For all the eerie experiences I’ve had, I still find myself questioning if ghosts can possibly be real, even though I live alone yet, entering the house after being gone for a few hours, I’ll find it smelling exactly like the house I grew up in with my parents. Or, sitting down on my couch to watch TV at night, I’ll look over at the framed aerial photo of my gramma and papa’s farm hung on the wall, and, all of a sudden, the room will smell like their TV room, circa 1982.

I have to ask myself, how much proof is proof enough?

I’ve felt my heart stop, swearing I caught a glimpse of my long-dead cat saunter by, out of the corner of my eye. I’ve played with a handheld ghost detector at a Christmas party and been surprised by the shocked expressions on the faces of my friends, hearing it go off continuously when touched to the necklace around my neck, which belonged to my mom. And I’ve been playfully baffled to hear, time and time again, that no one else who’s taken the Graceland tour in Memphis, Tennessee thought, like I had, both times I’ve gone, that the kitchen area still smelled strongly like fried food.

The proof is there. And if this ends up being nothing more than a figment of my imagination, where’s the harm in choosing not to question it, if it gives me something I’ve been so painfully missing.

The post I smell dead people appeared first on Salon.com.

If Reddit is to be believed, a “Far Side” cartoon in 1987 that made impolite suggestions about Goodall’s relationships with chimps earned cartoonist Gary Larson an angry letter from the executive director of the Jane Goodall Institute. But Goodall herself, like many scientists, was a “Far Side” fan and responded with good humor: “Wow! Fantastic! Real fame at last! Fancy being in a Gary Larson cartoon!” She went on to write the introduction to the fifth “Far Side” compilation. The anecdote speaks both to Goodall’s truly iconic status and to her unfussy, unbureaucratic and highly adaptable personality, which made her so well-suited to the work she did at Gombe. Not to mention her keen sense of humor (demonstrated by the “chimp-slap” Goodall gave a different comics artist).

Perhaps these qualities also prepared her to weather the slings and arrows of international NGO leadership and public speaking. Once Goodall realized, in the 1980s, that deforestation was rapidly putting the habitat and lives of the chimpanzees of Gombe at risk, addressing that issue became her principal mission, and she left Tanzania to travel the world with the goal of protecting them.

Goodall was born in 1934 in London, as Valerie Jane Morris-Goodall. From early childhood she loved both reading and animals from early childhood, and had many living family pets as well as a beloved stuffed chimpanzee, a gift from her father. Her “first animal research program,” according to her mother, was a study of earthworms to determine how they were able to move without legs, a project she carried out in her bed.

In 1957, Goodall visited a school friend’s family farm in Kenya. She was then working as a waitress and secretary, but already had dreams of living among animals in Africa. She telephoned famous anthropologist Louis Leakey out of the blue just hoping for some advice. That turned into an offer of secretarial work, and then a far more adventurous gig as an observer. Leakey wanted Goodall to live among a group of chimpanzees and study them, in the same way that anthropologists study human groups by observing their daily lives, rituals and behavior.

It took two years for Leakey to secure funding for Goodall, but eventually she and her equally intrepid mother set up camp in what was then known as the Gombe Stream Chimpanzee Reserve, on the shores of Lake Tanganyika. It was Leakey’s insight that younger women who had not been indoctrinated in the male-dominated norms of anthropology would make the best possible observers, and Goodall became one of the great trinity of primatology research, along with Biruté Galdikas, who studied orangutans and is now a professor in Canada, and Dian Fossey, who studied mountain gorillas in Rwanda until she was murdered by poachers in 1985.

(Robin L Marshall/Getty Images) Dr. Jane Goodall at Sierra Club’s 2025 Trail Blazers Ball in Los Angeles, April 2, 2025.

Goodall founded the institute that bears her name to expand and carry on her work with chimps — a project that has been running for nearly 65 years — and, just as important, to educate humans. The Jane Goodall Institute points to six important findings its founder made that have transformed the human understanding of chimpanzees, our closest relatives in genetic terms, by demonstrating that behaviors previously thought to be uniquely human were, in fact, nothing of the kind.

In 1960, during her first year at Gombe, Goodall observed a chimpanzee she called David Greybeard carefully strip a twig of leaves and use it to root out tasty termites from a mound. That might seem commonplace now, but it was a Eureka moment for Goodall: Like humans, chimpanzees not only use tools but actually make them. As Leakey memorably put it, “Now we must redefine ‘tool,’ redefine ‘man’ or accept chimpanzees as humans.”

Chimps, Goodall went on to discover, are omnivorous, just like us. They had previously been characterized as entirely herbivorous, like gorillas, Goodall observed them hunting, killing and eating small mammals such as bush pigs and colobus monkeys, by any standard a complicated collaborative enterprise. Indeed, the Jane Goodall Institute now runs a longstanding baboon research project based partly on the fact that baboons are important chimpanzee prey. Chimpanzees are like us in more troubling ways as well, Goodall found; they sometimes wage war on rival groups of chimps, occasionally killing each other. Goodall’s institute works on conservation of chimpanzee habitat and best conservation practices globally, and now has a youth outreach program called Roots & Shoots in 70 countries around the world.

Start your day with essential news from Salon.
Sign up for our free morning newsletter, Crash Course.

At Gombe, where she established a research center in 1965 and helped train generations of primate researchers and ecologists, Goodall made minutely detailed observations of daily interactions between chimps, many of them strongly reminiscent of human behavior. Female chimps form close bonds with their babies, but if a mother dies the babies are often adopted by other community members. Goodall also witnessed chimpanzees embracing and comforting each other after the death of a loved one.

”Jane Goodall’s trailblazing path for other women primatologists is arguably her greatest legacy,” Gilbert Grosvenor, chairman of the National Geographic Society, told the Jane Goodall Institute well before her death. “During the last third of the 20th century, Dian Fossey, Biruté Galdikas, Cheryl Knott, Penny Patterson and many more women have followed her. Indeed, women now dominate long-term primate behavioral studies worldwide.”

Goodall was not solely a chimpanzee expert and animal rights activist, even if those are the issues for which she will be most widely remembered. Just over a year ago she wrote, “And let us pray for the end of conflict, especially the genocide of the people of Gaza. And for those risking their lives to help the wounded and feed the hungry and care for the animals suffering as a result of human violence, cruelty and war.”

While working at Gombe, Goodall married the Dutch wildlife photographer Hugo van Lawick; they raised their son, Hugo, in the field. They divorced in 1974 and Goodall married Derek Bryceson, director of Tanzania’s parks, who died in 1980. Goodall earned her PhD, appropriately enough, at Darwin College, Cambridge University. She was a dame of the British Empire, a U.N. Messenger of Peace and the author of many books, including the now-classic “In the Shadow of Man” and “My Life With the Chimpanzees.”

The post Jane Goodall’s work with chimps changed how we see humanity appeared first on Salon.com.

Even though our funeral home is consistently busy, I’ve learned that one of the best things I can do for George is to push aside my to-do list, take a deep breath and just listen. So I did. He told me that losing his wife was so much harder than he thought it would be. He recounted how his pastor wisely told him that there was no timetable for his grief and that he should be patient with his feelings.

“I’m throwing nothing of hers out,” he told me. “I’m keeping all her stuff right where she put it.” He went on to say that every morning he makes her breakfast like he always did when she was alive and that he even bought her a Christmas gift.

“It helps,” he finished. “It helps to go through the motions; even though she’s not here I still love her just as much as I did when she was.”

A couple of years ago I might have felt uneasy with George’s insistence to make his wife breakfast, his keeping her stuff, and his gift-giving, because it smacks against the acceptance stage of grief work. Like many others, I had mistakenly believed that “The Five Stages of Grief” in the Kubler-Ross Model were meant for people grieving the loss of a loved one. I was wrong. The model was a reflection of what Kubler-Ross saw in people who were dying.

As new grief models have come out, it seems that this whole idea of reaching the last stage, or of closure, is a myth altogether, because our grief lives as long as our love. What George was experiencing and doing wasn’t morbid, or weird, or pathological, it was . . . good. He was, in a sense, living in the liminal space of Halloween. He was still connected, in love and life and memory, with his dead — but still alive to him — wife.

Dare I say he was living with her ghost?

Every year Halloween comes around, and with it those classic horror flicks, with their dated special effects and well-timed scare scenes that make us jump even though we know they’re coming. Who doesn’t love seeing children dressed in costumes? The weather. The fall leaves. The Pumpkin Spice everything. It’s the most wonderful time of the year! But beneath the cute and fun is this flirtation with the spiritual — albeit the dark side of the spiritual — that abides talk of ghosts, spirits and hauntings.

In the traditional Irish calendar, there are four “quarter days” that mark the beginning of a new season. The first of November marked the beginning of winter, considered the “darker half” of the Irish year. But the day before the first of November (October 31st) was seen as a liminal, in-between period where the Otherworld seeped into this world, allowing spirits — some good and others bad — to visit the living. Instead of shutting their doors and pouring some pre-Christian version of holy water around their houses to keep the spirits away, people would often do the exact opposite. They’d open up their homes, set extra places at the dinner table, and even prepare a meal with the hope that maybe the dead would bless them with health and wholeness through the winter months.

I want to believe in the spiritual kinds of ghosts. I love how the imagination can dance around these ideas, but the rational part of my brain usually wins over the mystical. You’d think a funeral director would’ve seen something, right? Maybe a ghost in the funeral home late at night? Or something misty and creepy at the cemetery? I’m often awake at the witching hours, going on late-night death calls, strolling through the silent corridors of nursing homes. There is a silence to the witching hours, a calm that can be disarming, but it’s never been an eerie silence for me, even when I’ve been handling the dead. I can say that the tragic deaths — the murders, some suicides, and some grisly accidents — have a presence to them, but I’m not sure if the presence is spiritual, or just the weight of the horror.

Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe there are spirits. Or maybe spirits do exist and they’ve always been kind to me because I care for the dead. I’m willing to entertain the maybe.

I do, though, believe in another kind of ghost. One that can be much scarier. Much more damaging. And much more haunting.

There is this liminality between the living and the dead, an in-between where the bonds of love can still dwell. Liminality is something that makes us uncomfortable. We like binaries, like yes or no. On or off. But some things exist in the in-between. They are yes and no. Dead and alive. Present and absent. The liminality of our dead is like a ghost, like Halloween. Because our loved ones are gone and they’re still here with us. Their actions, character, and — yes, I think I can use this word — spirit have literally helped form your neural pathways, so that the way they thought, their little idiosyncrasies, are dwelling in you. I write in my book, “Confessions of a Funeral Director,” that behavioral epigenetics have found that our experiences can be passed down on a molecular level. I write, “There are literal pieces of your loved ones in you from generations ago. And there will be pieces of your love for generations to come that play out in joy, confidence and bravery. Love may not be the same as power, and it may not always lead to survival, but love, unlike anything, finds a way to live on.”

Like my friend George, and the traditions that shaped Halloween, instead of closing out these liminal spaces — these ghosts of our loved ones — we’d do well to let them in. Ghosts get mad if we shut them out, if we don’t acknowledge that love lives on, if we force them into binaries. Repressed emotions, repressed bonds, repressed loved ones can haunt us for the rest of our lives if we decide to shut them out. This doesn’t mean we have to keep all their stuff and make them scrambled eggs and bacon every morning, but it does mean that closure is a myth. Not only is it a myth, it’s also harmful, for the living and the dead.

The dead can be scary if we don’t give them space. But, if we make peace with our grief, peace with our liminal spaces, and peace with our dead, it might provide us with favor during the cold, dark winter that lies ahead.

The post Finding peace with your ghosts: Advice from a funeral director appeared first on Salon.com.

It is not a place most people go to fall in love.

Yet in its own unexpected way, it’s quite beautiful. The feelings of awe and trepidation I felt walking into the neo-gothic institution, enclosed by its 30-foot walls, were overwhelming. Standing in the central rotunda in 2014, beneath the cathedral-esque vaulted ceilings, it was hard to take in: I gazed down cellblock after cellblock, stretching out like spokes on a wheel. All around me were crumbling walls that revealed their history in layers, like rings on a tree: from grey stone, to copper colored brick, to cement, to the green and white flaking paint. Heavy and jagged portions of the floors and walls sat in piles where tree roots and vines had pushed through and wound around the remains of scavenged equipment, a kind of mechanical carnage.

I was there doing research for a book on fear and why and how we engage with scary material. I’ve spent the past 10 years working in the “haunted attraction industry,” a surprisingly booming economy built for people who love nothing more than to have their socks scared off. In this little world, there are few places as grand and influential as ESP.  I knew I had to come, because, in addition to the ghosts and whatever animals have made ESP their home, it houses a massive haunted attraction, Terror Behind the Walls. It is the site’s most successful fundraiser, welcoming more than 100,000 guests each season. It’s also one of the most impressive in the industry, thanks in part to the work of the creative director Amy, who makes a living thinking of ways to scare people. In this case, me.

I’d met Amy two years before and was immediately crazy about her. She was into scary stuff, confident, magnetic, oozing charisma. I flushed when she said my name, and I startled easily and often when she tried to spook me. I, on the other hand, hadn’t registered on her radar as anything more than a professional colleague.

But a lot had happened in the two years since I’d met her. ESP was my last trip in a series of adventures I’d undertaken for my book: I had been lost in a dangerous section of Bogotá, pondered mortality in the mysterious Aokigahara Forest in Japan, hung by a cable from the side of the 117-story CN Tower, and survived more anti-gravity roller coasters and Hollywood-caliber haunted houses than I could count. The experiences had made me stronger, braver. I did not scare easily.

That night, standing with Amy in a dark, abandoned prison, I felt my heart race and I wiped my sweaty palms again and again on my shirt to keep the grip on my flashlight. These were classic symptoms of fear — or in my case, a searing crush on an amazing woman.

It was around 10 p.m. and we were the only ones left on site. Amy would take me first through one of their attractions, and then move on to tour the entire site. “Hopefully you won’t get too scared, Margee.” Her smile was equally devious and adorable. I’d never heard a voice like hers — singsong, expressive, yet controlled. She could go from whisper to shout in less than a breath.

Matching her playful tone, I told her I wanted to get scared, that’s what I was there for, that she should do her best. (Amy would later tell me this is when she knew that she had to be at her most terrifying. “It was on,” she said.)

We ventured from one cellblock to the next, encountering rodents of every kind, along with large black beetles that scurried with every labored opening of the heavy wrought iron gates that block each corridor, each cell. We walked through tree branches, tangled vines and sharp hanging stalactites, over roots as thick as a human leg, and carcasses of birds, mice and God knows what else in varying states of decay. Small signs of life and death were everywhere.

All the while, we shared stories of the creepy places we’d been and vendors with the most realistic body parts for the best price. We brainstormed costumes, characters and sets for the perfect scares. Amy even shared her secret recipe for fake blood: between two fear industry professionals, this is a true gesture of intimacy. We eagerly and anxiously made choices about what to say, what to share and what to keep secret, exploring each other’s boundaries like the darkening walls of the old stone prison, boundaries built from histories of loss and pain and a desire to bring light into the dark places.

The time was approaching 2 a.m. and there was only one place left to see: the punishment cells underground, where I would finish out the night.

The punishment cells, or the “Klondike,” are described in a 1924 warden’s report as a row of unsanitary, windowless cells with black painted ceilings and walls, and only an iron toilet and faucet.

“Are you sure you want to do this?” Amy asked as we stood at the top of the steep stairs.

“Yeah, I’ll be fine.” I replied. But I didn’t want to. I didn’t want to descend into a dark, damp, claustrophobic space. I didn’t want to leave Amy.

“OK, step where I step and take your time,” she said. “Be extremely careful. I’ve seen your squirrel moves.”

“I will,” I said with a hint of defiance — and honestly, a touch of ego. I’d survived a lot in my travels.

But Amy stopped me, held my hands and looked me in the eyes.

“I’m serious, Margee. I really don’t want you to get hurt.”

There it was again, the feeling of being lifted gently off the floor and set back down as she said my name. But this time her voice was nothing but sincere, her face nothing but concerned. I believed her.

“Thank you. I’ll be careful.”

I went into the hole and crouched down in the first cell off to the right. The ceilings were only about five feet high, which became unbearably uncomfortable almost immediately. But that wasn’t the worst of it.

There are few places in our well-illuminated world that are pitch black. Even the pin light of a cell phone charger gives us something to orient ourselves against, a way to make sense of where we are. But not here. Reading about these places is not the same as being in them. There is a physical reality that is impossible to replicate.

I was hot and cold at the same time, and the thick damp air made me feel like I was suffocating. I felt frantic; a profound sense of powerlessness and loss of balance in the total darkness came over me. My eyes were open, yet saw nothing. I tried to strain and refocus a thousand times. I waited for my eyes to readjust, but when they didn’t, there was no place left to go except into my own mind. I felt a deep and genuine terror.

I lasted only a little over two hours, and when I left, I took the stairs two at a time. My relief upon reaching the top was quickly replaced with panic as I looked around. It was still dark, and I was disoriented. I desperately scanned up and down the never-ending stone walls, and finally saw a dim light in the distance.

“Amy?!” I shouted and started running towards her. As she stood I wrapped my arms around her and held her tightly.

“You waited here for me?” I said, as tears welled in my eyes.

“Of course,” she said. “I wanted to be close, in case you needed me.”

I did need her, and Amy has stayed true to her word. That night was now over three years ago, and on July 8, this time inside the walls of a historic military fort that is rumored to be haunted, we promised each other that we’ll always be close, that we’ll be each other’s light when darkness inevitably falls. After we exchanged our vows, with friends and family gathered, we stood together, each with one hand on a flaming torch, and fired a 200-year-old cannon into the night sky.

The post I found love in a haunted prison appeared first on Salon.com.

I was finally living out my sour candy dreams.

I’ve always been a fiend for sour things, whether that’s candy, fresh fruit, snacks or frozen desserts. But it wasn’t until recently that I started to wonder why I was addicted to what has been described as a “bizarre” flavor profile. A 2024 study by Penn State researchers found that approximately one in eight adults enjoy intensely sour flavors, dispelling claims that extreme tartness is only favored by children. They concluded that sourness isn’t “an effect of prior exposure.” Rather, there’s “something innately different” about individuals who responded favorably to an increase in sour. That special “something” still remains a mystery today.

My affinity for sour began when I was a baby — well, at least, according to my mother. Growing up, she’d tell me stories about the first time I tried a lemon. My face would scrunch up and I’d shudder from the intense flavors, but I never cried. Instead, I’d laugh, cooing for more lemon to revel in those strong sensations over and over again. If my parents withheld the lemon slice for too long, I’d become restless until they’d let me indulge in the citrus fruit.

Memories of that incident are non-existent. And I’m not sure how much of that story I even believe, considering that it makes me sound like some sort of super baby, an anomaly of newborns. But perhaps it isn’t too far-fetched. After all, my love for sour continues to prevail — and intensify — into adulthood. I enjoy eating Warheads, sometimes popping multiple in my mouth. I enjoy eating pineapple until my tongue feels raw. I prefer unripe mangoes over ripe. And I’m a sucker for a sour beverage, alcoholic or not.

“When researchers consider the classic five categories of taste — sweet, salty, sour, bitter, and umami — there’s little disagreement over which of them is the least understood,” wrote Katherine J. Wu for The Atlantic. “Creatures crave sweet for sugar and calories. A yen for umami, or savoriness, keeps many animals nourished with protein. Salt’s essential for bodies to stay in fluid balance, and for nerve cells to signal. And a sensitivity to bitterness can come in handy with the whole not-poisoning-yourself thing.”

Sourness, she continued, is “a bizarro cue, a signal reliable neither for toxicity nor for nutrition.” So, why then do so some folks willingly crave foods that make their mouths pucker and tongues tingle?

According to Rob Dunn, a biologist and professor in the Department of Applied Ecology at North Carolina State University, our taste for sour foods is both biological and evolutionary.

“We’ve lost the ability to produce vitamin C, or ascorbic acid, and liking acidic foods might be a way for us and other primate species to be reminded to ingest it,” Dunn told Science, the peer-reviewed academic journal of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS).

“Another argument is that ancient primates ate way more fermented foods than we recognize. One way to tell if rotting fruits are safe is if they’re acidic, because the thing that makes them acidic is lactic acid bacteria and acetic acid bacteria. The acid in these bacteria kills bad new bacteria, so those fruits are almost always safe to eat.”

Want more great food writing and recipes? Sign up for Salon’s free food newsletter, The Bite.

Dunn explained that early evidence has repeatedly shown that there are different populations of so-called “sour tasters.” Indeed, Penn State researchers found three “distinct patterns” of response to sour flavors: a strong negative group, who showed a strong dislike for increased sourness; an intermediate group, who showed “a more muted drop” with more sourness; and a strong positive group, who showed a strong like for increased sourness. Simply put, perception of sour is a spectrum.

John Hayes, director of the Sensory Evaluation Center at Penn State and an author on the study, noted that individuals in the strong positive group perceive concentrations of sourness the same way as those in the strong negative group. It’s not that the former is less sensitive to more sour foods.

“You could imagine a case where they’re just less responsive to sourness in general,” Hayes said. “But that’s not what we find. We find the people that like really sour flavor actually experience it just as sour as other people. They simply enjoy it more.”

Aside from the science, some people like sour — specifically, sour candies — purely because it’s nostalgic. “A lot of people have fond, nostalgic memories of being a kid and eating way too much sour candy and they just want that feeling back,” Michael Fisher, Founder & CEO at Rotten, a sour candy company, told The Takeout. Throughout my tweens and early teens, I’d enjoy an abundance of sour sweets during Halloween. I’d spend hours rummaging through my trick-or-treat bucket, exchanging chocolates for sour candies with my friends. By the end of the night, I had already enjoyed a handful of candies, coming off a sugar and sour high, unbeknownst to my mother.

To me, sour is more than just a taste. It’s a return to innocence — a gustatory reminder of those carefree childhood moments when I indulged in the sourest of sour treats to my heart’s content. Sour is an embodiment of glee, of pleasure and of great joy.

The post Why I crave the sourest bite appeared first on Salon.com.

María José had already clocked me as a novice. I’d just moved to Barcelona and, like any newly anointed local, had been eating pan con tomate  – crunchy, tomato-slicked toast –  in cafés and taverns all over town. Sometimes more than a slick. But I hadn’t noticed how one plate sang while another spoke in hushed tones.

That day, María José became my teacher. She sent me to see Jordi at Semón for olive oil and good salt, and to Claudia at La Farineta for proper bread. I returned with golden oil, salt like snow flakes and a warm sourdough loaf to join Maria José’s swish tomato. That morning, I tried to get it right at home. I bit into my first attempt and the tomato spoke. It was clearer now, louder than I’d heard before. From that day forward, I chased the voice.

Pan con tomate became a compass, pointing me deeper into Spain. It guided my mornings and set a baseline for every journey. On a recent visit, I was hunting down the last threads of Ernest Hemingway’s Spain for my latest book. There’s only so much suckling pig and paella one could handle, so I found myself seeking the finest examples of tomato bread, city by city. Each carried its own dialect, each one another lesson.

It began tucked into a charming stretch of the Chueca neighborhood of Madrid at Café Toma 1. Warmed by sundry houseplants and a caffeinated cloud, I was handed a plate full of intent. A thick slice of sourdough marked by a grill. A dense, scarlet mound of tomato in the center. A drizzle of fine, fruity arbequina extra virgin olive oil from Córdoba. Maldon salt in a small pile off to the side, to dose as I wished.

The tomato mound was deliberate. “Some things are better left a mystery,” Santi Rigoni, one of the founders, laughed when I asked. With a knife I spread it thick and thin as I went, saving the saturated center for last. Some more crisp. Some soft. All indulgent. The tomato spoke again. I drained my café con leche and moved on.

(Howie Southworth) Pan con tomate at Cafe Toma 1 in Madrid

La Latina neighborhood was next. El Perro de Pavlov Café is said to have Madrid’s best pan con tomate. Maybe it is. Owner Leva Birstonaite said of her tomatoes, “The moment that one variety starts to lose the intensity of their flavor, the frutería sends us new ones.” Their tomatoes are blended a bit chunky, doused with olive oil from La Mancha and sprinkled with flaky salt, then mounted onto a toasty slice of whole-grain bread from the famed Obrador San Francisco around the bend.

It was advised – and I obeyed – that I eat it immediately. The crunch, the sweet, the tang, the salt. The tomato was alive with a voice clear and strong.

I carried that clarity onto the train to Valencia. Vineyards and citrus groves blurred outside the window like frames of an old film reel. I twisted open a screw-cap tempranillo, toasted my tomatoed tongue, and let the country run past.

In Valencia, the rules bent. At Travieso Bar in the Eixample district, pan con tomate’s vessel was focaccia. Pillowy, fermented, irreverent. Nacho Otamendi, the maestro behind this 90% hydration masterpiece admitted, “We wanted to give our personal take on the traditional tomato bread.” It arrived with more irreverence, roasted garlic for spreading before the tomato smear. A sly nod the raw cloves rubbed on toast by the Catalan herdsmen who stake claim to the dish’s origins.

I bucked the trend and mashed garlic and tomato together on that airy, comfortably salty focaccia. Genius. The tomato spoke low but sure. Softer than Madrid, but still there — and the garlic gave an Italian accent. This was lunch and called for a glass of Valencian Bobal red.

It may have been the wine and it may have been curiosity, but another afternoon snack was on order. A vegan café called Madrigal a few blocks away in the Rufaza. Will Kuchenreuther, the owner, insisted the secret was “simple ingredients.” But his simple meant exquisite Valencian tomatoes, teardrop in shape, premium Andalusian olive oil and ciabatta bread from the vaunted Horno de Valencia bakery. Split and toasted perfect.

Here, you assembled it yourself. I dragged the tomato smooge, pulp catching in the crevices, a ritual both primal and exact. It wasn’t fancy, it was participation. I added avocado, but not their plant-based cheese. The textures danced. The tomato spoke again, brighter this time. Cream meeting acid, crunch grounding both. Another glass of Bobal.

Another train. This time to Barcelona. Enough wine. Sleep.

I’ve known Barcelona as a home and pan con tomate feels the same. Many places in Spain claim the dish, but Catalonia holds it like a birthright. There are plenty of great versions here, but Tapas 24 delivers the ideal. Chef Carles Abellán, with his El Bulli pedigree, serves the dish without fanfare. Cristál bread shatters like spun sugar. Garlic rubbed in restraint. Tomato glossed with precision and salted true. The tomato tasted like it had lived in the sun, and then perhaps in Maria José’s closet. I could almost hear the swish swish.

Want more great food writing and recipes? Sign up for Salon’s free food newsletter, The Bite.

After the best of it, there was nowhere left but home. On the last morning, I visited an old friend, Mantequerias Pirenaicas in the Mercat de Galvany, near my one-time flat. Here, colgar tomatoes – hung on the vine to ripen slowly – are blended with good green arbequina oil and crystalline salt. The bread, narrow flauta loaves, are the secret. Owner Miguel Pujol pinched one for me. “We give it just the right touch of moisture before baking,” he said, “so it comes out crisp.” The crackle at the heel was enough to draw me in. No need to toast. Split the loaf, spread the smear, serve.

I sat at my final breakfast, a perfect double espresso breathed its steam, the bread still warm, the smear glistened and pooled in the nooks. I bit in. The crust cracked, the oil and salt rose. And the tomato whispered my name.

The post Chasing Spain through tomato bread appeared first on Salon.com.

My heart, however, yearned for lychees.

I don’t remember many specifics about the very first time I tried a lychee, but what I do recall is that it was love at first bite. There’s something rather whimsical about eating the oblong fruit. First, one must peel back its leathery skin, which, when ripe, is a beautiful shade of pinkish-red, sometimes with faint streaks of gold or light green. Inside is the lychee fruit. Its translucent-white flesh — which is soft yet has a bite to it — tastes mystifying: floral with notes of rose, pear and strawberry.

Growing up in the suburbs of Maryland, I looked forward to summers because it was the only time my family’s refrigerator would be stocked with bowls of pearlescent lychees. I’d spend hours basking under the sun, popping one lychee after another into my mouth, indulging in their syrupy goodness. There’s a running joke amongst my friends and me that a bowl of lychees hates to see me coming. It’s basically internet slang that means I can never have too many lychees. Leave me with an entire bowl (which typically contained anywhere between 20 to 30 lychees) unattended and I’d be able to finish it all in a matter of minutes.

As I got older, my love for lychees intensified. In addition to enjoying the fruit, I’ve also acquired a taste for lychees soaked in booze, namely, lychee martinis. A few years after graduating from college, I moved to Washington, D.C. — my first “big girl” move away from home. With any major move comes the quest to find your “go-to” trifecta: coffee shop, restaurant and cocktail bar. Within a few months, I found my “go-to” bar: Silver Lyan. I fell in love with its cozy yet sultry ambiance (which occupies a former bank vault) and its expertly crafted Lychee Martini. The cocktail itself touts a homemade lychee syrup made from clarified frozen pure lychee puree, Roku gin (flavored with six Japanese botanicals, including cherry blossom, yuzu, sencha, and sansho pepper), Ginrei Shiro and cherry blossom salt. Simply put, it’s heaven in a cocktail glass. And while the drink wasn’t the most frugal beverage to enjoy every week on a night out — especially as an early 20-something — it offered a sense of excitement and nostalgia. Each sip and bite of boozy lychee transported me back to those slow summer days spent feasting on fresh fruit to my heart’s content.

In recent years, the lychee martini has been making a sort of comeback after enjoying its heyday in the late ’90s and early 2000s. As written by Eater’s Lulu Chang, “The comeback cocktail starring the bobbing fruit from East Asia made its first appearance in the early 1990s — around the same time fusion cuisine seemed to be all the rage in big metropolitan cities. For a time, the lychee martini was almost as ubiquitous as the Cosmopolitan — a not-so-distant cousin popularized not by a cooking trend, but rather, ‘Sex and the City.’”

There’s much debate about who created the cocktail in the States, but some reports attribute that achievement to Decibel, an underground sake bar in New York City’s East Village. Established in 1993, the bar debuted a lychee syrup–flavored vodka martini, which, according to Decibel owner Bon Yagi, was already being served at the bar’s Tokyo location owned by his brother. “When I first started working there, nobody was serving Lychee Martinis,” former Decibel manager Takahiro Okada told Punch in 2019. Reading about Decibel’s original lychee martini, I felt an odd kinship — as if my own fruit obsession had been quietly waiting in the city all along.

Want more great food writing and recipes? Sign up for Salon’s free food newsletter, The Bite.

From underground sake bars to high-end fusion spots, everyone seemed to put their own spin on the drink. “Part of what makes finding the original Lychee Martini so difficult is the sheer variety of early iterations,” wrote Chris Crowley. Jean-Georges Vongerichten’s Vong began serving lychee martinis around the same time. And Indochine, which opened its doors in 1984, continues to offer its Lychee Saketini — sake chilled with lychee and lemon juices.

With the lychee martini’s overall popularity comes its expansion into various cuisines. The cocktail has long been a staple at various Asian or “Asian Fusion” establishments, considering that the lychee fruit is native to the subtropical regions of southern China and Southeast Asia. But in recent decades, it’s been spotted at American, French and Mediterranean dining hubs.

Last year, I moved to New York City and thus, my search for a bar with exceptional lychee martinis resumed. I’ve settled on two bars: Verlaine, for its exceptional $8 lychee martinis during happy hour and Levant on Smith, for its artistry and chic martinis.

I don’t think my love for lychees and the elegant lychee martini will ever fade. Summer’s quintessential cocktail has carried me from childhood markets to New York rooftops — and I suspect the lychee still has more places to take me.

The post I fell for lychee (and its martini) appeared first on Salon.com.

Hypervigilance is the name of the game when you have a reactive dog. It wouldn’t pose as much of a problem if she weren’t such a social being. She loves meeting new people and runs faster than any dog I’ve ever seen. To me, Ivy is a perfect dog. She cuddles next to me when I’m sick and sits on my chest when I cry. But when she sees another dog, everything changes: she snarls, barks loud enough to startle a city block, and lunges with so much force it takes all my strength to hold her back. In just one moment, she is reduced to an aggressive, rescue pit bull and nothing more.

I knew that moving to New York would be a challenge, but I didn’t think about how, with dog parks off the table, there is no off-leash space for her. And I thought, “I wonder if there’s something like Airbnb for yards.” So I googled that phrase, and Sniffspot came up. Their homepage reads, “Rent safe and private dog parks hosted by locals.” One of the locations was a 15-minute walk from my apartment, and for $15 an hour, Ivy could play and run without any risk. It wasn’t a huge space, but it was something.

The whole experience got me thinking about rental culture and privatization. Everything we need (privacy, calm, companionship, etc.) costs extra. The rise of the gig economy is well-documented. We rent bikes, dresses and chargers. We rent side gigs. We rent other people’s time to clean our homes, walk our dogs and run our errands.

Services like rentable yards and InstaCart highlight something deeper: the way city living often turns basic needs into things we have to schedule and pay for. Open space becomes a subscription. Saving time and carving out a little peace of mind for ourselves becomes a luxury.

Take dog yoga and kitten therapy. Our love for animals runs so deep, and our need for their companionship is so strong, we’ll pay for it by the hour. These programs are especially exciting for people who can’t afford to have a pet full-time. Pat Apap, a graduate assistant at NYU, helped plan kitten therapy for grad student appreciation week. “This served as our mental health or wellness style event.” The process was fairly simple. “They were able to provide six kittens for two hours of ‘therapy’ sessions for students, and on top of that, they provided materials going over how to foster and adopt the kittens, so there was the opportunity for our community to support theirs.” Just a couple of phone calls and there they were, kittens for everyone’s enjoyment. Michelle Rifkin Mamaradlo owns The Party Pups in Staten Island. “ I do everything from baby parties to adults, to elderly homes, to employee parties.” Mamaradlo breeds cocker spaniels that live with her when they’re not “working.” Currently, she has eleven “champion trick-trained” dogs that can even ride skateboards if the party gets too dull. She says her business succeeds because of one universal truth: “ people love animals.”

Start your day with essential news from Salon.
Sign up for our free morning newsletter, Crash Course.

It’s easy to laugh at pet culture until you realize this market didn’t emerge out of nowhere. The loneliness epidemic, combined with late-stage capitalism, means that anything can be rented. Who said that money can’t buy happiness? The desire for connection is so strong that, in the fallout of remote pandemic work, people are willing to pay just to work next to another person.

Olivia Bannerman, 27, used WeWork twice, but it didn’t stand out to her. She couldn’t find a coffee shop that fit her needs. Poor Wi-Fi, time limits, and a lack of seating are common issues she still encounters. I asked her if she had ever worked at a public library as an alternative, and she said that she “honestly hadn’t even considered that.” The one bonus of a paid work environment? Security. “ I felt like I could get up and go pee and just leave all my stuff . . . I wasn’t worried about theft or any weirdness.” Even businesses are renting offices now. Regus offers companies space “by the hour, day, or as long as you need,” according to its website. Lana Zolzak, an associate of Regus, told Salon that its flexibility is what sets it apart. “Some people don’t want to have to get a long-term place,” she says, and signing a lease doesn’t allow any wiggle room for exigent circumstances. Plus, when companies use Regus for their office, they deal with “bills, cleaning, and everything.” While Regus’ co-workspaces are more common among young people and start-ups, Zolzak says, established businesses are opting for office rental post-COVID. As remote work ends, people need a place to go, she adds.

I’ve seen a lot of talk online about the loss of “third spaces.” These are areas separate from home and work, including parks, libraries, coffee shops, bars, etc. Bannerman lives on the Upper West Side and has noticed a lack of third spaces. Every option has a catch: cafés close early, bars are solely focused on alcohol, and restaurants are expensive. She commented that the hostility of anti-homeless architecture and police presence has even made parks less enjoyable. She said, “I  think it’s important to get out; you have new experiences, you learn new things about yourself. You develop friends, memories and connections. You get closer to your community, which can make your life fuller and richer.”

(Illustration by Salon / Annie Bennett / Dikas Studio) Ivy in relax mode

I think that renting has also soared because it’s been normalized by the unaffordability of ownership. ZipCar is more affordable than a car payment and a 12-month lease is a great option for those of us who can’t afford to buy a home. Having a pet is expensive, but an hour of dog yoga is cheaper. Renting used to be a phase. Now it’s a way of life.

David Adams, the founder of Sniffspot, spoke with me about the company’s immense growth over the last seven years. He said that their rise in popularity has been slow but steady. “It’s been a gradual process of learning that this is something people want.” As of June 2025, Sniffspot has over 30,000 hosts and almost one million guests.

The sites range from the U.S. to Australia, Canada, and even South Africa. Adams saw a gap in the market for his app because “people love making their dogs happy . . . and Sniffspot can be part of that.” He explains that dog parks are important but unpredictable. In addition to dogs like Ivy, who can be aggressive towards others, there are unknown diseases, people, and elements in a public park. When Adams lived in Seattle with his pets, he realized that all these factors disappeared with private land that he noticed was “otherwise not being used.” These days, in cities, especially, he argues, “dogs are bred to run free and that’s just not possible.”

Airbnb has simply changed the way we look at assets. Adams said that even though that company was his primary inspiration, he has also taken measures to ensure that Sniffspot doesn’t follow a similar path towards unfair practices that draw public criticism. For instance, the business model doesn’t lend itself to people buying property just to rent out. And since the sales are hourly, not nightly, hosts don’t make enough to rely on it. It’s a quieter, more sustainable kind of sharing economy, one where empty spaces serve a specific emotional need, not just economic opportunity.

Loving a dog like Ivy is a profound act of emotional labor. It requires you to be patient, calm, gentle and alert. It’s not that I haven’t tried to fix the behavior. After thousands of dollars in training, she’s able to happily interact with people in controlled spaces. But New York City is not controlled. I may have rescued her from a cramped pen in a city pound, but I brought her into a world that wasn’t designed for her. And I’m not sure it was designed for me either. Sniffspot is a great resource to have in my back pocket, but it’s not a catch-all solution. People say Ivy and I act alike and even look alike. I don’t know if that’s true, but we do have one thing in common: we’re both relying on rental culture just to get by.

The post What my reactive dog has taught me about rental culture appeared first on Salon.com.

It wasn’t just me. Over the last few years, selling feet pics has gone from niche kink to buzzy income stream, boosted by platforms like FeetFinder and an algorithm that rewards young women for whispering the words “passive income.” Over one million videos have been posted on TikTok with the hashtag “feet.” Despite the surge in popularity, it’s unclear how much a beginner can realistically expect to earn. FeetFinder claims its top creators rake in serious money, highlighting stars like “SeducingSole,” who reportedly earned $200,000 in 2023.

Obsessed with research, I found myself deep in Reddit threads, trying to figure out how to actually make money on sites like FeetFinder. It was way more involved than TikTok made it seem. Your profile has to have a personality. Buyers want to feel like they’re supporting the girl next door. To stand out, you need a bit of a gimmick, like wearing the same red heels in every photo or taking pictures in mud. Consistency helps people remember you. You also have to promote yourself, whether that means making a dedicated Instagram or posting on r/feet with your account name. And while it’s possible to make money without it, showing your face brings in way more. That was my one hard no.

I was completely unwilling to show my face. The idea of strangers recognizing me, or worse, someone I knew stumbling across my profile, felt like a personal scandal waiting to happen. The thought of commodifying myself in such a blatant way, essentially putting a “for sale” sign on my identity, was enough to make me balk. Yet, after weeks of lurking in forums, I tried to convince myself that anonymity was possible. Plenty of people claimed to be making money without revealing their faces, so why couldn’t I? After months of deliberation, a glance at my bank account and the painfully low number was all the motivation I needed.

Something I should establish early on here: My feet are ugly. I am not a woman blessed with long, finger-like toes and a high arch. My feet are remarkably babyish. My short, stubby toes curl into each other, sprouting from my fat foot. My nails are almost always unpainted, wide and short, my pinky nail practically just a sliver. I stay away from sandals, only wearing flip-flops at the beach. But with the rise of the $690 The Row flip-flops, toes out all over New York City, I figured there must be someone out there who liked my kind of feet, especially if they were packaged in the right way.

Creating an account online to become part of the podiatric photography cartel is incredibly easy. I made my username “Ogre_Girl,” alluding to the state of my toes. I hoped that my feet fell into some sort of fetish category. To finish making my profile, the website had to establish that I was over 18 years old. I sent in a photo of me holding my ID up to my face. The instructions said it would take 48 to 72 hours to confirm my age, and I accepted that I would have to wait a few days before making any money.

Start your day with essential news from Salon.
Sign up for our free morning newsletter, Crash Course.

It took seconds. I was in. All I needed to do was pay a subscription fee. “What was $5 when I had the potential to make so much more?” I thought. I set a reminder to cancel the payment before the end of March. My credit card thought the charge was suspicious, but I pressed on, heaps of money on the horizon.

The need for a profile picture brought me back down to earth. Showing my face was still out of the question. My feet looked even more unsightly through my iPhone’s camera lens. I snapped my feet from all angles, each photo more repulsive than the last. I slipped on my only open-toe heels (black slingback with beading on the toe strap), positioned my camera and set a timer for three seconds. I took one step backward and waited as my phone took the picture. That was the best it was going to get.

Remembering everything I had learned from my research, I carefully crafted my bio to sound as relatable as possible while using a fake name, of course. I presented myself as a young woman whom men, or really anyone, might feel compelled to look at. I wrote:

“Hi! My name is Eve. I am in graduate school and hoping to make a few extra dollars. I am addicted to making New York Times recipes and have become a pretty good cook. I never like to show my feet because my toes are short, stubby and ogre-like (hence the name). I am a sandal avoidant, but indulging in some extreme exposure therapy!”

I added a couple more pictures of my feet to my account. It was all very abstract, a joke, a story, something to laugh with my friends about. “So a couple of pictures of my feet are online,” I reasoned, “No, big deal.”

I received my first message right away. A user asked:

“Hiii, do you take requests for leg pictures? I’m looking for legs that have strawberry skin.”

I looked down at my legs. They were unshaven and pale. I’d be willing to send photos of my legs, I responded.

“Do you have strawberry skin?”

Was he referring to Keratosis Pilaris (KP), often referred to as ‘chicken skin’, a common condition causing small bumps on the skin? (I didn’t have it.)

“I don’t think so!” I replied, “But I have a good personality.”

Cruising the site, you start to learn about the different niche desires people have that you, as a foot content producer, can cater to. There are foot fetishists who want a video of you stepping on the camera, to simulate the experience of being stepped on. There are people who have a hankering for high arches or for feet covered in lotion.

FeetFinder has a page listing active buyers. Their pages often feature reviews from other sellers and a list of their specific fetishes. To attract people to your page, you have to reach out to specific buyers and persuade them to buy a photograph or video from you. My opening message was always, “Hiii!!!!!”.

Many of the people I spoke to wanted a teaser photo, something that could lure them in. Why would they pay for a picture or video if I was giving them out for free? “Scammers,” I thought to myself, ignoring those messages entirely. Others really just wanted to talk. They wanted to know you were there, you were listening.

It had been a couple of days, and I still had not made any money. I grew jealous of the girls on my For You page, raking it in. On TikTok, I saw a video of a girl selling her dirty gym socks, claiming she makes $500 a day. I knew I needed to amp it up.

The “Hiiii!!!!” messages were flying all over the place. I reached out to every active buyer I could find without a specific fetish. Someone responds with a voice message.

“I am just heading home from work.” His deep voice came out of my computer speaker. I listened intently with my roommate as if it were a true crime podcast. He lived in Seattle, and he seemed normal, at least from what I could tell—we started to talk.

“I’m watching ‘Real Housewives‘ right now,” I replied over text, my voice feeling too intimate to use. “But it’s late here, so I’m going to start getting ready for bed soon.”

I learned that he used to live on the Upper East Side. “1000 years ago,” he said. We chatted about work. He asked if I used any other sex work platform. I started to build an image of him in my mind: red hair, freckled, pale skin, a slight beer gut, maybe around 40, single, no kids.

We texted back and forth for days, without any mention of personalized photos or videos, and the more I thought about it, the less I wanted to send them. I began to consider what it would take for me to actually send over a photo. That a man in Seattle would have seen my feet, feet that I’m too afraid to show my acquaintances in the summertime, wrapped in a sandal. A man with a username of a random amalgamation of letters and numbers would own a photograph that I had taken only for him.

He wanted me to be a person, but being a person was too much, too private. He wanted softness, charm, just enough vulnerability to feel like I wasn’t just taking his money. He wanted to feel like I needed it, needed him — That I enjoyed our conversations, that there was something special about our exchange. I didn’t want to give him that. I wanted to make money without having to perform intimacy.

Selling pictures of your feet is sex work. It didn’t matter that I wasn’t naked, or that no one touched me, or that it was just my stubby toes. There’s no way to divorce the transaction from the implication: someone is getting off, and you’re getting paid. The boundary between body and product gets blurry. You start to learn that even the most innocuous-seeming parts of your body can be eroticized if someone decides they want them badly enough.

I had spent $5.54 on the subscription fee and made zero dollars in return. All I had to show for it was engaging in awkward conversations. It was all a little sad, not just because I hadn’t made any money, but because I’d let myself believe that I could sell intimacy without actually giving any of it away.

I stopped speaking to the voice on the other side of the country. I stopped going on the site completely.

The next three days, the man messaged me each morning: “Hello?”

I felt guilty for not replying.

The post Selling feet pics makes boundaries blurry appeared first on Salon.com.

Until very recently, I took a firm “no thanks” stance on the things. Now my tiny household refers to me as “Miss Bird,” after I developed what feels like an out-of-nowhere obsession with them. Not because anything particularly magical happened, but because I’m old.

I’m, apparently, in my bird era now, and I’ve got the feeders to prove it. It happens fast.

In 1995, the year I graduated high school, Peter Murphy released an album called “Cascade,” which features the song “Wild Birds Flock To Me.” During this time, I worked at a small amusement park in Riverside, California, as an illustriously titled “ball floater,” which means that for five days a week I would spend my after-school and/or weekend hours walking around the park’s mini-golf course picking up trash with one of those grabby sticks and waiting for people to alert me to the fact that their golf ball had gotten stuck in something, dispatching me to go fish it out. That was my job description in theory, but mostly — after a few laps just to make myself seen by my boss — I would sit on the back fence of the course, up against the flashing lights of the Tilt-O-Whirl, sneaking cigarettes and listening to music, with this album, and this particular song, in heavy rotation on the Discman concealed in the waistband of my pants.

“The Crow,” starring tragically deceased Brandon Lee as Eric Draven — a musician who, along with his fiancée, is brutally killed and then brought back to life one year later via a crow pecking on his grave, aiding in the avenging of both of their deaths — had just been released the year prior. As much as I would love to sit here and stretch listening to Peter Murphy while thinking about “The Crow” into the basis of my “Miss Bird” origin story, it’s just not the case. Birds were as lost on me at that time as the majestic California mountainscapes that my mom would yell for me to pay attention to while I was engrossed in a book in the backseat of our family Jeep. “Look how, beautiful!” she’d exclaim, in frustration, while all I saw was dirt. And heat.

There’s an Oscar Wilde quote to put to use here: “With age comes wisdom, but sometimes age comes alone.” It doesn’t come alone though. It comes with birds. Just like the house sparrows that use their beaks to break open seeds in the three (THREE!) feeders I’ve newly installed in my backyard to get to the soft bits inside, the years have softened me, cracked me open. Now, seeing a rare raven perched on my fig tree, sizing me up and then resuming its work on the summer fruit hanging from it, a song from “The Crow” soundtrack doesn’t immediately come to mind. I think something deep. Something about the fragility of life, and of the creatures that live it with us. I think of peaceful moments, and how they sometimes just happen, taking us by the shoulders as if demanding, “Stop. Just stop a minute and breathe.” And I think about how, every minute, I’m getting older. And will, hopefully, one day be as old as my gramma, who died at 91 as a “Miss Bird” herself.

Want a daily wrap-up of all the news and commentary Salon has to offer? Subscribe to our morning newsletter, Crash Course.

For as long as I knew my gramma, she was into birds. She had bird figurines in her kitchen, some of which made their individual bird songs when you pressed a button. She had ceramic cardinals and bluejays on tables in the living room of her farmhouse in Illinois, where I’d spend every summer. And she often wore T-shirts and sweatshirts with birds on them, one of which I took home with me after helping to clean out her house after she’d died. I’d never stopped to think about what her whole deal was with birds. It was just part of what made her my gramma. But now it’s all so clear. Born in 1927 and growing up to catch the eye of a local farmer named Dale, my papa, it’s doubtful she was going around in her bobby socks or whatever they wore back then talking to him about birds. That came much later, when she was old. At 46, I’m still far from my “gramma” years, but I’m closer to them than I ever was before, and getting closer each day. Birds, man. They just happen to you. It’s happening. Right. Now.

I’m aware that there are young people who are into birds, and that having a fondness for them isn’t an exclusively “old person” thing, but this feels like a turning point for me, and I’m embracing it as such. Like in “The Crow,” when Eric pulls on his tight-fitting, long-sleeve black shirt, paints his face white, and goes out onto the perpetually rain-slicked streets, crow on shoulder, to hunt down bad guys. I sit here now, facing the feeder I hung outside my office window, watching the sparrows, bluejays, cardinals and grackles eating the seeds I put out for them and I feel . . . something. I feel so much. Watching my birds, I’m fighting for something too. I’m fighting for my own peace. For the ability to pause for a minute and take deep breaths, while I can still take them.

After my gramma died in 2018, I got a tattoo in her honor, same as I did when my mom and dad died. For hers, since she loved birds so much, I got a bright red cardinal. And it means so much more now. Most things do.

The post With age comes birds: Notes on time, awareness and watching for wings appeared first on Salon.com.

And to the overly literal, I don’t mean tithing or some religious-themed amusement park or you popping out that shiny quarter to cover your entry fee into the pearly gates. I’m pretty sure that’s way more expensive. I am talking about a sweet, syrupy frozen cup on a 95-degree day. That is the heaven I know, and yes, it used only to cost 25 cents.

My childhood babysitter Boo Boo was always pulling my coat to something. Pulling a person’s coat means putting them on, enlightening them with the knowledge they need to better their living experience. Boo Boo introduced me to bitter Maxwell House coffee when I was two years old, showed me how to tuck my shoelaces under my insole when I was too young to tie my shoes, and even though we loved Different Strokes — the show where an old rich white man came to the projects in a limo, and invited two poor Black kids to live in his mansion — she taught me never to trust old rich white men in limos.

“If you see an old rich white man in a limo around here, baby, you better run and don’t stop, don’t even look back!”

All of these life lessons are extremely important and relevant to this day as I still drink my coffee black, and I don’t trust old white men and limos. As a matter of fact, I don’t trust anybody in a limo (why are there still elongated cars riding around in 2023?). But the most important lesson I ever got from my dear babysitter was the instructions for making and enjoying a frozen cup.

Not a snowball — a frozen cup.

Snowballs are everywhere and we don’t want to mix the two summer treats. For one, snowballs are more elite because they require both an ice maker and flavored syrups that aren’t used for anything else for the most part except making snowballs–– like, are you seriously going to make a cup of egg custard-flavored water? I think not. They are also overpriced. Even back in the day when I was a kid, snowballs always cost between 75 cents and $1.50. Add 25 more cents if you wanted melted marshmallows. That’s too expensive, and now they are even higher! I went to a snowball stand last summer, and they were pushing the idea of them being gourmet to justify the ridiculous $5 price tag.

“Five bucks!” I screamed on the inside, “Like a whole five bucks?”

Frozen cups are for the people. Boo Boo, always the eager investor, made a killing off of selling $0.25 frozen cups every summer. She had a corner house with a side window, perfect for serving customers. And you knew she had the best because she always sold out.

Early on, Boo Boo’s frozen cups consisted of Kool-Aid poured into a Styrofoam cup and placed in a freezer. Once they were frozen entirely, she’d crank open that window, and the kids would line up. The early flavors were grape, strawberry, fruit punch and orange—the basic Kool-Aid flavors. These were not heaven. But as her business grew, so did her ingredients, technique and storage. Everything was enhanced except the price.

Before I introduce you to what heaven tastes like, it’s essential to understand the correct way to eat a frozen cup. I practically lived at my babysitter’s house then, so I used to go into her kitchen and grab a teaspoon, and angle it enough to scrape off this sugary top. A scientist could explain this better, but when you freeze a sugary drink, somehow the sweetest part rises to the top creating a sticky entry point. You don’t have to eat the sugary top, but you do have to use that teaspoon to dig a hole into the center of the frozen cup so that you can scrape, scrape, and scrape, filling your spoon with sweet ice from all angles. Once it looks like a hollow cave, you have probably been in the sun long enough for the sugary top to weaken, and you can use the back of the spoon to turn the remainder into slush. Boo Boo’s transformation changed all of this.

Boo Boo was selling out too much, so she purchased the deep freezer to store more frozen cups. She also got tired of people asking to borrow spoons because children who borrow spoons typically never bring them back. Hence, she found a way to revolutionize her product by eliminating the need for a spoon. This is what made it heaven.

Boo Boo did this by purchasing those syrups used for snowballs, yes the elite ones. The new frozen cups recipe was with half Kool-Aid and half snowball syrup –– and she even added one marshmallow that always floated to the top as a chef’s kiss. The new method allowed her frozen cups to freeze perfectly. They were easy enough to devour with a plastic spoon if you wanted to be fancy, but also soft enough for us kids to flip the contents upside down, and stuff the larger side back in the cup. From there, we could eat it top-down without teeth and without making a mess. It was perfect.

I made frozen cups for years and still eat them in my 40s. Except I don’t use Kool-Aid, and I don’t know if they even still sell the Kool-Aid they gave us back in the day. Instead, I make a smoothie with almond milk, agave, fresh blueberries, spinach, fresh strawberries, a banana, water and raw almonds. After I take it out of the blender, I pour some into a cup to drink now, some into my daughter’s little cup, and I put the rest in the plastic cup that I place in the freezer–– because it makes for the perfect adult frozen cup.

I do miss Boo Boo, and her original invention, but at least I still have my teeth along with those sweet memories.

The post Frozen cup: When the best part of summer cost just a quarter appeared first on Salon.com.

It was, therefore, a weird choice for me to book myself on a weeklong Caribbean cruise. Particularly, one targeted at the elderly. Particularly, alone.

Let me back up. I’m a married woman in my 30s with a horror of vacationing in hot places, breaking bread with strangers and visiting ports of call where the local culture consists of Margaritavilles and novelty T-shirt shops. My ideal vacation is renting a villa in the Mediterranean during shoulder season when it’s cool and breezy, eating elaborate meals and driving to offbeat museums and hidden beaches.

But I’m also a romance novelist, devoted to my craft. And cruise ships are, for all their arguable faults, an excellent setting for forcing two strangers to spend a week together. Which is why I decided to maroon two characters on such a ship, against their respective wills, and make them fall in love. Because I am a comic genius, I also decided that my 30-year-old characters should make this journey on a boat for senior citizens.

Problematically, the only cruises I had been on in real life were those forced upon me in my youth — the Disney and Carnival variety. For verisimilitude, I needed to do research. And how do you research a luxury cruise for the 60-plus demographic?

Very sadly … you take one.

For plot reasons, I needed this cruise to be very fancy, which was at least a point in this venture’s favor. I researched boutique cruise lines and landed on one with a reputation for gourmet meals and pampering.

“Darling,” I said to my dear husband, “would you like to take a cruise with me for author research?”

“No,” he said flatly.

“It’s not what you’re thinking. It’s a fancy boat filled with old people.”

“Absolutely not.”

“Unlimited alcohol?”

“Still no.”

“Our own butler!”

“Please stop.”

Which is how I found myself setting sail one fine November morning alone, save for 600-odd silver-haired strangers.

Because this trip was for work rather than (dubious) pleasure, I could not merely observe the cruise. I needed to participate in the same way my characters would be forced to. Attend shipboard activities. Book shore excursions. Make friends.

Unfortunately, participating in group activities and interacting with strangers are two of the activities I’m worst at.

The very enthusiastic cruise line representative with whom I arranged my trip had assured me this wouldn’t be a problem. Our ship, he swore, would be full of repeat cruisers who love to mingle and who would naturally take an interest in a relative spring-chicken. I’d be the social darling of the sea.

This is not what happened.

The rep was correct that the boat’s denizens were veteran cruisers devoted to the ship’s luxe service and intimate nature. What he miscalculated is that they are so devoted that many of them already know each other. They already have their cliques and social darlings. My relative youth did not provoke intrigue.

I felt like I had in middle school: awkward. Socially inept. A fish, pardon the metaphor, out of water.

But I did have one thing I lacked as a preteen: access to alcohol. The ship had many bars, and I am very good at drinking. I decided to station myself in front of a martini and strike up friendly chats with fellow guests sitting nearby.

But here was another fatal flaw. The ship was not fully booked, meaning the bars weren’t full. In order to sit next to a stranger, I’d have to eschew vast stretches of empty stools and plop down right beside them like a creep, hitting on unsuspecting old people.

But OK, I thought, as I drank alone. There’s the nuclear option: the singles table in the restaurant. The ship happened to have recently rolled out a new “solo traveler” package, so surely there would be other lonely stragglers eager to make new friends. I showed up at the restaurant in a party dress, heels and a big smile, trying not to let memories of finding a table in the school cafeteria paralyze me.

At first, it didn’t go well. The eight-top table for solo travelers was half-empty, and it quickly became apparent that none of us had anything in common. The pauses in chat were glacial as we all tried to think up stimulating questions that might lead us somewhere other than strained silence.

But then two men appeared and sat down like they owned the place. They were medium-handsome, in their 70s, and dressed dapperly in khaki slacks and navy sport coats bearing name tags that identified them as Bill and Frank. They had captain of the football team energy.

“Hi,” Frank said, waving the sommelier over to pour him a glass of wine. “How are you enjoying your first night?”

I’m not, I thought, but I gave him a big smile. “I love it,” I said. “I’m having so much fun.”

Casual chitchat flowed as Bill and Frank revealed they were “cruise ambassadors” — single men in their golden years who sail for free on the ship in exchange for spending their evenings dancing and dining with solitary female guests.

Frank, I learned, was a retired firefighter from Toronto who got into ballroom dancing when his wife passed away and learned of the ambassador circuit from his fellow students. Bill was a divorced grandfather from Michigan who spends “the season” at sea. “You get all the benefits of the other guests, plus a $30-a-day per diem,” he told me rapturously. “You just have to be in the ballroom from nine to midnight. And you can drink all you want.”

Given that the boat serves excellent food, top-shelf liquor, free Wi-Fi and twice-daily housekeeping, even my modest math skills calculated that this was a very good deal indeed.

Our hosts excused themselves before dessert to get up to the lounge in time for dancing. I leaned into the experienced cruiser to my left and probed her for more information.

“Are those guys gigolos?” I asked.

Though we’d struggled to say two sentences to each other before their arrival, now she looked at me with the conspiratorial twinkle of a longtime girlfriend.

“Technically,” she whispered, “they’re not allowed to ‘fraternize’ with guests. But it happens.”

She proceeded to tell me a soapy story about a friend who’d struck up a steamy interaction with an ambassador the year before on a different ship. It was hot and heavy until another woman boarded the following week and also struck up a steamy interaction with him — while his original lover was still on board. A torrid love triangle ensued, and one of the women left the cruise early, brokenhearted.

Cruise ships, I realized, are not just a little like middle school. They are very similar indeed.

I wanted to watch this drama in action, so immediately after dinner I went up to the lounge to observe the ballroom dancing. In my haste, I tripped on the carpet in my heels and rolled my ankle. I limped on, ordered a drink and stationed myself on a sofa near where the ambassadors were congregated to view the action. It did not escape me that I was behaving exactly the way I had at every school dance I’d ever attended: sitting in the shadows, unwilling to participate.

What I learned is that while you have to know how to dance to be a cruise ambassador, you in no way have to know how to do it well. The courtly gentleman guided women around the floor to big band standards with all the aplomb of teenage boys waltzing at a cotillion dance they’ve been forced to attend by their parents. But the women on their arms — better dancers all — didn’t seem to mind. The ladies were into it. And I was into the show.

One woman in particular danced with verve. A gorgeous middle-aged brunette spun and dipped with grace, putting more hip into it than you might expect with such a partner. She had moves and she had charisma. No one could take their eyes off her. I had found her: the most popular girl in school.

I was grinning despite the pain in my ankle, typing furious notes into my phone, when my dinner companion Frank noticed me in the shadows and, to my horror, asked me to dance. My blood ran cold.

Start your day with essential news from Salon.
Sign up for our free morning newsletter, Crash Course.

I explained that I am a terrible dancer in the best of circumstances, and could barely walk owing to my ankle. (It was not lost on me that I, the 38-year-old, was the one with mobility issues in a room full of people 40 years my senior.)

Despite my excuses, Frank didn’t take it well.

“Come on,” he coaxed, obviously offended but not willing to give up. “Just a spin.”

“I’m sorry,” I demurred. “I really don’t want to.”

Frank walked off with a sour expression, clearly feeling rejected. It seems cruise ambassadors can be as vulnerable as the rest of us.

Since I’d offended one, however, I knew I could not depend on their pack for social salvation. What I needed was an anchor friend. An extrovert better than I was at mingling.

I eyed the popular girl.

In school, I’d finally found acceptance by seeking out a few girlfriends who had many other friends. Their ease made me comfortable and allowed me to be more charming.

So when the belle of the ball took a break from the revelry and sat down to order a drink, I subtly repositioned myself on the couch across from her.

“You looked amazing out there. You’re such a good dancer,” I said.

“Thanks,” she said in a western twang, beaming at me. “I used to be a professional belly dancer.”

A rich opening line if ever I’d heard one. I peppered her with questions and learned she was a travel journalist from Oklahoma. She was bubbly and as committed to gathering cruise stories and new acquaintances as I was. And unlike me, she had an obvious gift for it.

I willed her to be my friend — and because she was everyone’s friend, it worked. By the end of the week, I was not only comfortable on the boat, but I’d made a cadre of vacation friends whom I genuinely liked, and whose life stories were useful local color for my novel.

I had graduated from weird dork to cool kid.

And this is a valuable skill. Because, as chance would have it, my mother-in-law requested a cruise through Alaska for her seventieth birthday this summer. It’s on a fancy boat, geared toward an older crowd.

I can’t wait to dance the night away with an ambassador.

The post I went on a senior citizens cruise. It felt like middle school appeared first on Salon.com.

We come to this Pearl City with his footprints in our pocket, ready to discover where he planted them.

The sky darkens as we stand on the corner of Queen’s Road and Pedder Street in Central. Today’s glass and steel tower over the bones of what was once the grande dame of colonial luxury, the Hong Kong Hotel. The waterfront then just a block behind, our couple strolled from seaplane to their suite to begin their first foray into Asia. Surrounded by imperial charm, palm trees and wartime tension, Hemingway quickly found his niche.

The hotel’s lobby bar called The Gripps was made for a tough, hard-drinking, worldly crowd of voyagers, tucked into the far corner of an empire. This became his nightly perch.

The pair met “a maddening, intriguing, colorful world of dictators and drunks, scoundrels and socialites, heroes and halfwits,” per Peter Moreira in “Hemingway on the China Front.” Ernest, being Ernest, quickly fell in with many on the list. Those who trade stories to match pace with endless whisky sodas and hubris. He called them his “Hong Kong millionaires.” One proved to be a favorite for Hemingway, Morris “Two-Gun” Cohen. A fellow globe-trotting adventurer, game hunter, storyteller, and an old bodyguard to Sun Yat Sen. The closest thing to a soul mate he found in town.

Whether it was Gellhorn’s “groaning and sighing steadily” over Hemingway’s nightly revelry or her general distaste for narrow rickshaw-packed streets and “the sheer numbers, the density of bodies”, the pair shifted operations from Central to the relative emptiness of Repulse Bay. We’ll get to that later.

It’s possible the hotel was also happy to bid them farewell, given Hemingway’s conversion of their suite into an impromptu boxing ring with an indoor firecracker habit to boot.

(Howie Southworth) Luk Yu Teahouse

Each night after tall tales and a fair bit more than a tipple at The Gripps, passing on the expected scotch eggs and roast beef at hotel’s Grill Room, the gang would head for an adventurous Cantonese feast. Hemingway “swearing they’d been served by geisha girls,” according to Gellhorn. So we follow suit along with our own thirst.

Luk Yu Teahouse on Stanley Street is emblematic, iconic even, and most importantly, close to the erstwhile hotel. When they served their first steamer of dim sum in 1933, a refined ambiance drew the elite clientele of the era. Though there’s no direct line between Hemingway and Luk Yu, it was the popular spot for an entourage such as this, so it’s the odds-on favorite.

Through the weighty door lives Hemingway’s heyday — but for all the Instagram posts. The wood is dark and heavy, floor tiles worn as if they remember every shoe that’s passed. Waiters float about in starched whites under slow fans and amber lights. Tables thick with steam, clamor, and the smell of curiosity. Our order walks the line between Cantonese classics that would suit Hemingway’s taste and dishes that surprise then please.

Roast pork belly redolent and tender as Castilian suckling pig. Succulent shrimp wrapped in a scant blanket of starch that would bring him back to Havana. Velvety chicken reminiscent of a Parisian poulet. All manner of poultry, game, seafood and vegetables stuffed into fluffy white buns. Shape and aroma be damned, these were his dishes dressed up in ginger and bamboo. On special is an abalone soup, an alien beast in his time, and not our cup of tea, but they say Hemingway took a shine.

On wine, missing were his beloved Spanish reds. An expensive French bottle? Sure enough, even back in the 40s, someone had a stash, and the needy paid through the nose. Hemingway chose to dive deep into Hong Kong, especially at a meal like this, at a table like this, with a crowd like this. In place of fermented grapes stood yellow rice wine, incendiary sorghum liquor and, if the night was long enough, out came a bottle of the latter infused with snake bile, promising virility. Peak Hemingway in a bottle. We opt for puerh tea, a Luk Yu specialty.

We head back out into the night, the rain’s begun, and soon we feel the old stone slabs of Pottinger Street under us. They’re slick when wet. Trinket vendors with whom Hemingway found a passing repartee still line the sides. There is very little else that remains of Hemingway’s Hong Kong at ground level. Streets repaved, sidewalks repointed, shorelines reformed. But these planks of granite lined Pottinger in the 1850s and tilted and dented with time. Millions of feet have fallen on them, and his were surely two. The most authentic moment of our route. That and roasted game birds hanging behind glass. Onward.

(Howie Southworth) Game birds, roasted and displayed

We’re told we must pay a visit to The Old Man, a Hemingway-themed bar a few blocks away. Up the steep part of Aberdeen Street and down a narrow staircase into an equally narrow alley, we find the nondescript door marked only by an illuminated hanging sign at the bottom of the stairs. The interior is chic, minimalist. Old books, some obscure, exotic liquors, and bar menus from around the globe line a few shelves on the walls. The drinks, complex and perfect. A stone mosaic of Papa’s mug dominates the rear wall, it’s abstract. Hemingway would never have drunk here, although the fanfare upon his entry may tip the scales.

This is a tribute bar, to be sure. But not to bullfights, bullets, or bravado. The tribute is to the challenged mind of a genius. The menu is like a novel about a complicated man, and mixology to match. We meet Art, one of the bosses here. Voluble and deep, an artist in his own right. He calls their menu “a progression from balance to freedom to chaos,” and talks of a drink called “Expert of Danger.” It spins the tale of Hemingway the hunter. A jar is filled with hay, then the hay is burned, the mix including pine cone jam and pomegranate is poured inside. A foretelling of last earthly smells, whether for the hunted or the hunter. “It’s pretty dark,” admits Art.

As a last gesture, and to lighten things up, Art orders up two refreshers, one a classic Papa Doble, a fine sip, said to have been invented by or for the man in Havana, and one they dub “The Hemingway Daiquiri,” built stronger and slightly more bitter. All quite fitting.

Now slightly askew, we ascend many stairs and descend many hills from The Old Man and cross the harbor toward Kowloon. Our lodge is not The Peninsula Hotel, but it’s not far. It’s not a proletariat hostel, but it’s in the right neighborhood. The Mira Hotel is a contemporary stay in the heart of Tsim Sha Tsui, and Hemingway never slept here, but we enjoy a nightcap as he would. We sip and think about the Spanish Jesuit missionaries who filled this spot long before it was a hotel. Spain and that old Catholic guilt. Two things that followed Hemingway across the world. They ran in him like rivers of red wine. We raise a glass, a sacrament.

The next day brings humidity but thankfully no rain. It is far from cool. Nonetheless, we take a page out of Hemingway’s book and leave The Mira “as soon after first light as possible.” We can only imagine the sun through this thick air. But it is there, we’re assured. Breakfast is next and cha chaan teng seems to be the move. These Cantonese-style diners cropped up after World War II as a way for locals to enjoy an East-meets-West refueling, and eggs-on-bread options abound. Hemingway missed out on the trend.

One of his creations for a typewriter-friendly bite was sliced onion and peanut butter on white bread, nothing fell apart. A popular and packed cha chaan teng just around the bend serves up something just like it. We order this onion-omelet sandwich held together by peanut butter and bolstered by a strong black coffee. Strange but good. Corned beef, egg, and cheese on a soft roll, cold slab of butter on a warm “pineapple” bun. These places stay competitive with such inventions and the rulebook is always evolving. This time, right in Hemingway’s favor.

Breakfast in the rearview and the city slowly rising around us, we trace Hemingway’s footsteps into one of his more peculiar Hong Kong habits: the track. The sport of kings to some, the sport of paupers for most. Invited by then American Consul General Addison Southard, Hemingway’s first visit proved the beginning of a habit. Like the rest of colonial Hong Kong, that habit saw heavy betting matched with equal parts meat pies and cheap dim sum. And like the rest of modern Hong Kong, that menu met the decades with growing diversity, culminating in choices from fast food burgers and tapas to black truffle potstickers and wagyu beef sliders.

There are no races this day, but from my roadside perch, the vacant track below verdant hills is a sight. Gazing across to the grandstand, it’s easy to spot the memory of Hemingway in his locally-tailored “racetrack jacket,” pickpocket-proof to combat the greedy, his colorful entourage, thundering hooves on matted grass, cursed betting slips being tossed, vendors shilling beers weaving the crowd and wisps of cigar smoke, cheers and despair rising above. Happy Valley used to be covered in gravestones. Plenty more ghosts to see if we stick around.

Over the green hills, we meander beyond Happy Valley to find Repulse Bay. A relief from the urban heat, and like the Hemingways before us, respite from the throng of humanity called Central. Shortly after arriving here, Gellhorn returned to the China front and once again left Ernest to be Ernest, this time with an ocean view and manorial comforts, with a bearable touch of pretension. And Ernest he was, writing in the morning, hiking the lush seaside overlooks in the afternoon, maybe bagging a pheasant or two with “Two-Gun” Cohen, and entertaining in the evenings at the bar.  Time drove the old hotel here to the ground as condos rose, but the bar and restaurant wing remains, The Verandah.

Ceiling fans turn lazily above the afternoon dining room, open to the breeze in Hemingway’s day, now glassed-in. The view remains stunning. We settle into rattan chairs overlooking the South China Sea. In 1941, Hemingway sat feet away, entertaining war correspondents, expatriates, and political notables. Some say he spent most tea times with New Yorker reporter Emily Hahn, two legends living legendarily, sharing tales over cucumber sandwiches, curried prawns, scones with clotted cream and strong black tea. Standard fare for the colonial elite. That is, until the gin gimlets started to flow at sundown. “The tipple of Hong Kong,” according to Hahn.

The menu has evolved into a contemporary affair, though our lunch still hits Hemingway’s seaside obsessions. Crunchy and smooth shrimp croquettes, bright and flaky Basque ham and asparagus tarts, briny confit tuna and conserved-tomato toast, crisp then juicy, and pistachio white chocolate mousse. Hemingway didn’t cave much for desserts, but this is irresistible.

We move to the bar and sip the expected gimlets, expertly poured by the bar captain Joe Chan. His eyes perk when we mention Papa, and he leads me to a small salon. A glass case holds a shrine to the man, a painted portrait, photos, a borrowed typewriter. Hemingway visits around the globe, even brief, often left a trail.

(Howie Southworth) Bar Captain Joe Chan, a Hemingway fan, at The Verandah restaurant

Gellhorn finally persuaded Hemingway to leave the comforts of Repulse Bay and journey to mainland China and the real war. Myth may say Hemingway was sent to Asia as a spy. To the extent this was true, whatever intelligence he was able to collect on a barstool in Hong Kong paled in comparison to his boots getting muddy in China. Visits to the front, rousing of troops, evading rampant typhoid, enigmatic encounters with notable leaders like Republican Chiang Kai-shek and Communist Zhou Enlai. If any intelligence was gleaned, it would have been on the deep divide between these two men trying hard to collaborate while defeating the Japanese. But, we digress.

Amidst the chaos of war, Gellhorn and Hemingway dined with Chinese generals in Chonqing, feasting on spicy Sichuan dishes, many of the usual suspects unsurprisingly from Hemingway’s playlist –  smoked duck, braised pork, real kung pao chicken buried in mounds of red chile. Guangxi, their second stop, enjoys a cuisine that celebrates wild game, which would scratch Hemingway’s itch in another way. Throughout, he toasted his hosts with baijiu, a fiery clear liquor. Hemingway, ever the raconteur, regaled the cadre with stories, matching them drink for drink of this local elixir until the nights blurred into memory. Hemingway, remembered by Gellhorn, “planted on his feet like Atlas.”

The harsh realities of the mainland wore on him, and soon he returned to Hong Kong, seeking solace in the familiar surroundings of The Bar at The Peninsula Hotel. When not at The Gripps, The Verandah, or the racetrack, Hemingway soaked himself in the glow of the regular gaggle of journalists here, his personal happy valley. Contented, he lodged the last of his Hong Kong nights at The Peninsula before returning to the US, separately from Gellhorn. After our afternoon of clean salty air at the Bay, we too end here. One final cocktail to remain salty, a Bloody Mary.

After all, Papa laid claim to debuting this concoction in the East on this very spot.

He wrote: “I introduced this drink to Hong Kong in 1941 and believe it did more than any other single factor, except perhaps the Japanese Army to precipitate the Fall of that Crown Colony.”

The post I drank like Hemingway in Hong Kong appeared first on Salon.com.

Come on, I think, you can do better than that.

“I fell in love with _____!” (Fill in the location of your choice — everyone does.) It’s the most over-used sentence in travel writing. I’ve been to Wales 30 times in 40 years, yet I’d rather have my tongue pierced than say I fell in love with it. Editors and publicists often try to push me into the love corner, but I snap and growl, as cornered creatures do.

I know I sound grouchy. But only because I want to get this right.

I love a woman — my partner of 36 years. I love a dog — my Welsh Corgi of three years. My parents are dead, but I still love them. I also love ice cream and seasons 1 and 3 of “Ted Lasso.” And I’m OK with all that. Love is an elastic verb.

When I was 23 and an American graduate student in Wales, the rolling pastures of Ceredigion at dusk, sweet-smelling of dung and the day’s photosynthesis, quiet with sheep and centuries of secrets, teetering on the edge of darkness, silence, and poverty, brought me to my knees with an aching need to do more than testify to their existence. More than take a photo or write a description. I needed to know the Welsh countryside in time as well as space. I strained against the edges of mortality to grasp the whole of it in a way off limits to humans. I felt compelled to imagine, to resurrect all those who’d stood alongside the darkening fields before me, tending animals, dreaming of home, praying to gods whose names were unknown to me.

Is this love? Is love wanting to scream in frustration because even though all you did was watch the sun set over a line of receding hills, it felt like the planet was offering you a gift you didn’t have the age or wisdom to be able to accept?

I don’t know, but it’s where I draw the line. To say I fell in love with Wales collapses the relationship of person and place into something sentimental and two-dimensional, in a way that saying I fell in love with my partner, Marguerite, does not. Maybe that’s because when we apply love to people we understand that the verb “love” turns and twists like a multidimensional kaleidoscope — we’ve all seen the colors and patterns change, been dazzled, furious, confused, contented. And we know what “I love mint chocolate chip” means, too. We understand that “love” contracts in that sentence to convey something like flavor lust + icy mouth feel = ten minutes of happiness. And nothing more.

Love of place is just as complex as love of people, but we’re not used to excavating all that the word can mean when we say, “I fell in love with Wales.” There’s a whole lot more going on than a hearty appreciation of sheep, interlaced, rolling hills and Iron Age forts.

Up until I was 20, when I studied in Paris, I thought I’d find my place in France. It turns out I found Marguerite instead. France — a place I deeply admire — embraces centrality. Paris is the center of France and France is (arguably) the center of the universe. I didn’t articulate any of this at the time, but a previously unknown, murky appendage in my brainstem lifted its head and howled disagreement.

When I arrived in Wales three years later, it changed its tune. Wales is central to … well, nothing. As I wrote in my 2023 book, “The Long Field – Wales and the Presence of Absence, a Memoir,” the very name “Wales” is a Saxon word meaning “Home of the Foreigners.” The name Wales calls itself, in Welsh, is Cymru (KUM-ree), which means “Home of Fellow Countrymen.” The difference between the two is the difference between “Us” and “Them.’ To the world at large, after Wales became the first colony of the future English empire in 1282, it was defined as a negative: This is the place where we are not. It became the home of “Them.”

Ever since, the view from its minority rung on the UK geopolitical hierarchy has been alternative. A strong social­ist bent in politics, nonconformist in religion, working class. The Welsh language has been a marker of difference, too. Far more so than other Celtic strongholds in the British Isles — Ireland, Scotland, the Isle of Man, Cornwall — Wales has hung on to its tongue, about which shifting opin­ions have formed over the years. It’s preserved our identity; no, it’s held us back. Whichever you believe, Welsh remains stubbornly spoken in shops, on TV and radio, in kitchens and government conference rooms throughout the country.

As a young woman lurking on the edges of Welsh sheep pastures, I sensed Wales’ marginality before I understood it. While there was a grandeur to the geography, the towns’ and farmhouses’ lack of studied prettiness—a hallmark in England—testified to Wales’ exclusion from generic British prosperity. It was far from London; it was hard to get to; it was different. And you know what? That felt familiar. I was a middle-class kid from New Jersey, but like a poultice, this ancient, colonized country drew out an answering difference from my bones.

I grew up as part of an American anti-establishment generation against the backdrop of the Vietnam War, Watergate, and the feminist movement. All of that led me to shy away from the center and naturally embrace the edge. Not to mention my hunch, shoved into the depths of my psyche, that I might be gay.

Marguerite and I had already met in Paris, but it was Wales’ nearly two-millennia-old embrace of its alternative path in the UK — the place where people speak “that funny language with no vowels” (not true: “w” and “y” are vowels in Welsh, so it actually has more vowels than English), where there are more sheep than people, where Americans don’t visit—that suggested to me that an alternative path might not be so bad. More than that: it helped me realize I’d already been on one, all my life.

When I went home to New Jersey after grad school friends demanded a sentence about my experience. “School was OK, but I loved Wales,” would’ve sufficed. Yet every time I gave in and said something along those lines, I felt like I was betraying the extraordinary experience the Welsh call cynefin. (I was relieved that my family never used the “L” word; they just called my connection to Wales, “Pam’s Welsh thing,” as in, “Is Pam over her Welsh thing yet?”)

When I was researching “The Long Field,” Gillian Clarke, the former National Poet of Wales, introduced me to the word cynefin. (Pronounce it Kun-EV-in. In Welsh a single f is pronounced as a v — it takes two fs to make the noise in “fight” — and the emphasis is always on the penultimate syllable. Even speaking English the Welsh stress the second-to-last sound. I love the soft way they skid into “seven,” pronouncing it SEV-un, dragging out the “ev” and swallowing the “un.” When they say that I hear the tide receding.)

Gillian wrote in an email, “Cynefin is the word used for the way a sheep passes on to her lamb, generation after generation, the knowledge of the mountain, the exact part of the mountain that is hers.” I understood why that would matter to the lamb, but not to me. Then Gillian continued: “Or it can mean that sudden sense you have that you belong to this particular place though you may never have set foot in it before.”

Ah ha! I understood. Cynefin is a way of describing the threshold where the interior imagination meets the outside world — the place where love resides.

It wasn’t just marginality that coaxed cynefin from me in West Wales. It was the landscape, too. I’d grown up in suburban New Jersey, where the geography of the planet is hidden beneath a barnacled crust of 20th-century houses, highways, and shopping malls. As a child I felt there was nothing to hold me in place — no anchor in space or time to keep me from floating away. And then I went to rural Wales and found a world with few trees and a distant horizon. A place where you could climb a hill and understand instantly how the earth had been made, where the glacier had passed and how rivers sculpted out valleys. The landscape’s clarity sliced through my memories of over-built New Jersey, slicing down to the mental bedrock beneath — a primary place of understanding where memory and concept conjoin. And that place looked like Wales. I’d always seen it in my mind’s eye, and now here it was beneath my feet. I remember writing in my book, “I felt I’d found the key to a map I’d carried in my head since I was a little girl but had never before been able to read. And until I could read that map, I’d had no perspective on my species’ place on the planet,” and shivering with the understanding I’d never written truer words.

Surely this is love—but I didn’t fall into it. Falling is just too easy. Although cynefin may be sudden, it requires preparation. There has to be longing first, and a fiercely imagined “geography of the soul,” as novelist Josephine Hart calls it, before there can be cynefin. And only once you’ve felt it comes the real effort. I had to work for decades to earn the right to love Wales. I had to learn its language—well…let’s say I had to try to learn it — and its myths and history, to read its poets and novelists, to listen to its hymns and folk songs and bands, descend into its mines and walk its paths. Let its rain soak my hair and creep inside my bones. If anything, my love for Wales has been more of a climb than a fall. I suspect it’ll take a lifetime to reach the summit.

The post Don’t “fall in love” with your travel destination appeared first on Salon.com.

She saw a man once a month for expensive dinners. He was kind, but he didn’t want to do any hugging. My mom wanted to hug. And more.

Now that I was ready to get back out there, I imagined us swapping stories and talking about what we planned to wear on each date, like the best friends we were.

That wasn’t what happened.

“The good news is that your mother’s panic and anxiety are lifting,” the social worker said when she called with an update. “The bad news is she thinks she’s in Italy.”

My 79-year-old mother was actually on a locked ward in a psychiatric hospital, where she’d been for four weeks. I had to commit her on Christmas — not because she refused go to, but because she was unmoored in time and space. She couldn’t sign herself in because she didn’t know where she was. While volunteering at an elementary school in October, my mother had fallen and fractured her pelvis. Her body was healing; her mind was not. The fall and resulting hospitalizations triggered delirium which stubbornly refused to lift.

My mother had a history of stubbornness. When I was young, she’d talked often of divorce. Yet her complicated 51-year marriage to my father only ended when he died. I guess that’s love, but it also looked like pain. My mother was the weakling; my father was the smartest person in the room. They once did go to Venice together for the wedding of their friends’ daughter. I wondered if, in her delirium, she’d returned there to be with him, or if she was traveling alone now.

During her hospitalization, I did some casual dating. A few hours away from the relentless demands of elder care a few times a week was a welcome respite. I wasn’t looking for anything more than that.

Then I met Andre.

Invited to a New Year’s Eve-Eve party, I decided to wear a black leather dress I’d last put on for my 25th high school reunion. It made me feel bold. I talked to friends and then sat down to listen to music. Someone was playing the piano.

“How do you know Doreen and Ayo?” asked the man sitting next to me, with the smooth voice I later found out he’d used to narrate one of Barack Obama’s audiobooks.

I told Andre I’d met the hosts when our kids were younger. We talked about my son and his two children, his work and mine.

“Like any good West Indian,” he said. “I have four jobs.”

“Like any good Jew,” I said. “So do I.”

I said I regretted not learning to play the piano despite the three years of lessons I took in elementary school.

“My mom plays beautifully, though,” I told him. “I mean, she did. She’s in the hospital now.”

He spoke with reverence about his own mother, alive and well in her mid-80s. Venezuelan-born, she’d emigrated to the U.S. from Trinidad with nothing to become a successful movie producer while raising three children and helping her 11 siblings.

A man this good-looking who was also caring and family-oriented? He had on nice leather shoes, tan with red stitching. I was impressed.

We’ll tell people we met at this party, I thought. We’d go back next year, for our anniversary. It was an annual event.

Then Andre stood up and said he was going to get a drink.

“So that’s it?” I asked.

“I’ll find you later,” he said.

Unconvinced, I remembered the first rule of parties: Like a shark in water, keep moving.

Meanwhile, my mother was drowning. She didn’t know it was almost New Year’s Eve, or that she’d fallen two weeks before Halloween, or that Thanksgiving had passed, then Hanukkah. The doctors said her delirium might lift, or it might evolve into dementia. The psychiatrist kept referring to “the tincture of time,” promising we’d know more in three months, or six, or nine.

In my family, it had always been like this: If Mama ain’t happy, ain’t nobody happy. My mother’s bipolar disorder had overshadowed my childhood. Her moods had a centrifugal force, pulling in everyone in her orbit. When she was sick, we were all sick.

Years of therapy helped me see that my mother and I could be two separate people having two separate emotional experiences at the same time. A month before I turned 50, I realized that her being in a psychiatric hospital while I was at a holiday party didn’t make me a bad daughter.

On the dance floor later, I saw Andre come downstairs. He made his way over to me. We moved near each other, and then up against each other. At one point the DJ told everyone to grab a partner, and I wrapped my arms around his neck.

“Uh oh,” he breathed into my ear. “We’re in trouble.”

Later, taking a break from dancing, he asked for a kiss, and then for my number. I gave him both.

In the month she’d been in the hospital, my mother mostly thought she was at a school — an institution where she’d felt most at home. She’d held jobs and volunteer positions in elementary education for her entire adult life. In a recent call, she’d cheerfully told me about a celebration for her in the teachers’ room.

“Will you help me write thank-you notes after the party?” she asked. I assured her I would.

“You sound so good. I can’t believe it,” she kept saying. I knew what she couldn’t believe was that I was living a life apart from her. It didn’t mean I didn’t love her. It meant I loved myself, too.

As the party wound down, Andre walked me out and leaned me against my Honda Civic. We kissed again, then we each went into our own cars and drove away. I didn’t know if I’d hear from him, but I did. A first date led to a second and then a third.

One night in January, Andre’s children were at their mother’s, so I went to his place. He’d ordered what I’d told him was my favorite food, sushi. Suggested we watch the beloved movie I’d mentioned, “Terms of Endearment.” Bought the whiskey I drank: Jameson.

Our hours together slipped by. Now I was unmoored in time and space, too.

I wished my mom could find this kind of happiness with her own dream man. The dam between us had always been porous. Now it had burst, and what she wanted most was rushing into my own life.

I wondered if what I felt for Andre was novelty, the newness of initial attraction. I’d never found romantic love to be enduring. I was worried I might look silly to friends I told about him, or get hurt in the end.

But who gets to say what was real? One person’s love could be another person’s lust could be another person’s pain. Maybe someone’s Italy was always going to be someone else’s psychiatric hospital.

What if early love was just another form of delirium? It might lift, or evolve into something deeper. We’d only know given the tincture of time. I told myself it didn’t matter if I felt this way in three months, or six, or nine. I felt this way now. I wasn’t going to back away from it. Instead, I’d going to lean in.

When my mother’s pragmatic sister asked for an update on my mom’s recovery in late January, I told her about the improved mood but continued confusion. My aunt liked rules and order. She was having a hard time with my mom’s delusions. When my mother asked her recently why my father hadn’t come to visit, my aunt answered, “Because he died four years ago.”

I told my aunt I was planning to go along with whatever my mother said, because if we wanted to be with her, we had to step into her reality. My mom’s psychiatrist suggested we pretend we were doing improv with my mother. Take her lead and run with it.

“But how will she feel when she finds out she’s in a hospital?” my aunt asked.

“It doesn’t matter,” I told her. “Right now, she’s in Italy.”

On February 14, my mother was officially diagnosed with dementia. It hurt, letting go of the hope she would fully recover. Holding onto a different sort of hope, I asked Andre to be my Valentine. He said yes.

The post Love in the time of delirium: As my mother fell into a strange new reality, I found romance again appeared first on Salon.com.

“Have you ever craved something you’ve never had before, but it sounds so good in your mind?” Smith asked in a separate video that has since become its own meme. For me, it was the bubble plate, which had become a newfound need rather than a want. I fantasized about eating an array of bubble plate-friendly foods: crudités, scoops of vanilla ice cream drizzled in olive oil and elaborate yogurt bowls topped with fancy granola, cut-up fruit and cacao nibs. Eating wouldn’t just feel good, it would look good too. And in our digital era — where taking photos of our food before actually eating it is now a major phenomenon across social media — my phone would be booked and busy, always “eating first,” as the popular internet saying goes.

But looking good always comes at a price. In my case, it was a rather hefty one, considering that the plates, courtesy of Gustaf Westman Objects, currently retail for 55 euros, or a little over $62 each. My desire to have those specific plates remained unwavering, however. So I thought, “If I couldn’t buy them, why not just make them myself?”

I knew it was ridiculous — a $62 plate leading me to spend hundreds more just to try and make one? But the idea lodged in my brain like a stone in my shoe: persistent, irrational, impossible to ignore. I’m a complete novice when it comes to ceramics. The last time I even touched clay was back in elementary school art class during a brief unit on hand-building. I also had no experience using a pottery wheel. And yet, here I was. Fueled by my motivation to own a singular bubble plate and my commitment to staying frugal (if I made even ten usable pieces, I reasoned, I’d come out ahead — plus, I’d gain a new skill along the way), I signed up for my very first wheel throwing class in April.

Call it naiveté or just plain stupidity, but I showed up to my first day of class overconfident. I had watched countless videos of ceramicists compressing and lifting cylinders of clay with ease, failing to realize that they’ve been practicing the craft for years, decades even. “How hard can it truly be?” I recalled thinking to myself. Well, incredibly hard, I soon learned. To start, my form was egregiously bad. In wheel throwing, it’s important to anchor your elbows to your hips, forearms to the splash pan and thighs to the outside of your wheel — I didn’t do any of that. I couldn’t center the clay on my wheel, causing it to wobble uncontrollably as I also struggled to control the wheel’s speed, oscillating between going too slow and too fast. In one instance, I spun the wheel so fast that it sent my freshly made piece flying as I tried to cut through the clay at its base. My piece enjoyed a few seconds of airtime before tragically plopping onto the floor with an audible “splat” for everyone in the studio to hear. 

I wanted to quit at that moment. “Maybe ceramics wasn’t for me,” the little voice in my head said as I recoiled from embarrassment. “And maybe, I wouldn’t be able to make a bubble plate after all.” 

Want more great food writing and recipes? Subscribe to Salon Food's newsletter, The Bite.

There aren’t many things in life that I’ve given up on — I can thank my stubbornness for that. Ceramics certainly wasn’t going to be one of them, especially after just one class. So, I persevered.

By the third class, I had established an unspoken understanding with the clay. It’s a bit difficult to describe when things started to finally work out. I could just feel it. With my elbows anchored, I compressed my mound of clay before coning it up and down like my instructor had shown me countless times. Wet clay dribbled down my palms as I used my thumbs to gently make a hollow cavity to form the base of my piece, then gently pulled up clay to create its walls. The studio smelled faintly of wet earth and glaze, and the rhythmic hum of spinning wheels made it feel almost meditative. I was focused, and before I knew it, I had made my very first piece: a bowl. It wasn’t perfect, but it was mine.

That’s the beauty of making things with your hands: You get to revel in the arduous process of making something from scratch and once it’s complete, you’re left with something that’s uniquely yours. Ceramics taught me about patience and perseverance — the same lessons I grew to appreciate when I first started cooking and baking on my own. It also taught me about the importance of finding beauty in imperfection. There’s something almost whimsical in enjoying breakfast out of one of my lopsided, handmade bowls. Or drinking coffee from a mug that isn’t perfectly straight.

I left my first semester of ceramics class with a handful of bowls, a mini mug and a flower vase. As for the bubble plate, it remains an ongoing project — and, hopefully, a possibility during round two of classes.

The post My kitchen needed ceramics. So did I appeared first on Salon.com.

All through high school, college and my first job, and then on through my marriage and the birth of our two children, my nana kept plying me with payouts, now $100 a pop, then more like $1,000.

I never had to ask for a cent. She would just extend her hand with some fresh currency, or a check would materialize magically in my mailbox.

I was already earning a living, more or less, and never really needed the supplementary funds. But hey, the infusions came in handy, and I saw no reason to say no.

Grandparents helping grandchildren financially — and generously — is nothing new or unusual. Almost all lend a hand on an ongoing basis, whether contributing to savings accounts, setting up trusts or defraying the costs of college tuition, medical bills and other expenses. Indeed, 94% of grandparents chip in, doing so with an average of $2,562 a year for each grandchild, according to a 2019 survey by the American Association of Retired Persons.

But in 1989 my finances went off the deep end. I had dug myself into debt by falling behind on back taxes, federal, state and city. I was in the hole for about $12,000. 

The fault belonged to nobody but me. By then I’d lived as a freelancer for about eight years and had started coasting. I’d earned about half as much income as the previous year and was now unable to fulfill my civic obligations. 

For the next eight years, as if submerging into quicksand, I sank deeper into debt. My wife and I watched our pennies. I took a part-time job, then finally went full-time. I worked six days a week and soon earned twice as much money as ever before. 

Still, penalties and late fees on my tax burden expanded exponentially. They took a toll, onerously so, like an undertow at the ocean shoreline that yanks you down into the muddy sand underfoot, and my debt more than quadrupled. At age 45, I now owed more than $50,000.

All I could manage to do on this most slippery of slopes was to pay down the debt on my debt. A day never passed without me fully aware that we now lived our lives squarely behind the eight ball. It looked like it could take me the rest of my life, however long that might be, to break even, if ever. 

Then in 1997, we struck a deal with the Internal Revenue Service, thanks to an arrangement called an Offer In Compromise. Taxpayers who demonstrate a clear inability to pay the full freight owed anytime soon can be negotiated as a recourse. The rationale is the IRS would rather have some of your money now rather than wait to get all of it much later. The amount would be $15,000, less than one-third of the debt owed and only $3,000 more than the original debt incurred eight years earlier. 

My grandmother paid it. And that was that.

Grandparents typically pitch in financially while grandchildren are young and then into early adulthood. But some research suggests that the older the grandchild, the less likely such support is to be given as generously and frequently. Grandparents may step into the breach if adult children are unemployed, receiving low wages or hit with an unexpected and expensive hardship.

Talk about turning points. In the 28 years since, I pulled a 180. I developed a more robust work ethic and was employed at global professional services firms, rising to senior management.

I always pay my taxes on time, too, along with all our other fiscal obligations, strictly avoiding any kind of debt. In due course, I rebuilt my credit rating. We even managed to save a few shekels and paid cash for our house in Italy. 

Nothing like a close call, a brush with doom, to scare you into staying on the straight and narrow. I learned my lesson, and then some.

Offering a lifeline can, and often does, strengthen the bonds between grandparents and adult grandchildren. Lowering financial stress generally promotes a sense of security. But getting help in your 30s, 40s and beyond can come at a price. It can foster guilt and create a dependency that discourages, delays and even deters a grandchild from developing an independent life.

Only now, all this time later, do I recognize that being spared the disgrace of bankruptcy and insolvency was a blessing and a curse. Getting a handout ate into my pride, my sense of independence and my self-respect. To this day, I feel embarrassed and ashamed. 

I let myself play the victim twice — first of the debt itself, then of the life preserver tossed to bring me back onboard. I’m still second-guessing my decision to accept the charity. Could I have saved myself? Should I have solved my own problem with a free-market self-correction?

I’ll never know. It’s probably just as well. And it no longer really matters.

Besides, as banks, airlines and automakers well know — whether it’s JPMorgan Chase, Delta or General Motors — bailouts are nothing new. I, too, was once the beneficiary of a bailout. Only mine just happened to come from my grandmother.

The post Nana bailed me out of debt — and I’m still ashamed appeared first on Salon.com.