Dinner Club, Apple Pie and Blind Squirrels

Just over 10 years ago Rachel and I started a monthly dinner club with 5 other couples in Evanston and Wilmette. The group had various individual work/neighbor/college connections, but overall we didn't know each other that well at first. It didn't take long.

The hosting responsibility rotated each month, and duties included a) picking a cuisine and/or theme, b) assigning out appetizers, side dishes, desserts, etc., c) preparing the main dish, and d) hosting. The first year we enjoyed Italian, Mexican, German, Fondue, Hawaiian, and Diner, among others. Everyone also brought beer and wine, and little of that was left at the end of the night. Dinner Club nights were raucous, fun affairs, and we all arranged our calendars to make sure we didn't miss. It was a big part of our social lives.

Along with the adults-only dinners we mixed in some family get-togethers, since our kids were all pretty close in age and got along wonderfully. This included a few road trips over the years, to Galena in Illinois, Lake Geneva and Elkhart Lake in Wisconsin, and even the maternity ward at Evanston Hospital, where in October of 1999 three Dinner Club Kids were born on the 1st, 2nd, and 4th...

Nothing lasts forever, though. After a few years one couple moved to California, another to the western suburbs of Chicago, and a third to the northwest suburbs. The clockwork monthly dinners became "a few times each year" for those of us still in Chicago, and "every couple of years" when the Californians came to visit. But we'd all gotten so close that there wasn't any talk of drafting replacements and re-forming an Evanston/Wilmette club; it would have felt like...cheating.

Four of the six families got together last Saturday at Kara and Rob's in Deerfield. We did our share of "My, how you've grown!" with each other's kids, and retold stories from the early days, especially about the folks who weren't there. It was a great meal and a great time.

I had been assigned a dessert, and I'm not really sure what Kara was thinking -- she has a pretty good idea of my cooking limitations. Was it an invitation for me to just bring something from Dominick's, like a quart of ice cream? Or was she mad at me for some reason? Or maybe it was a challenge, to see if I could rise to the occasion and really make a dessert?

I chose the last of these possibilities, and picked a recipe out of our recipe box: Sour Cream Apple Pie. We had loads of apples already, and it didn't seem too complicated. I remembered that we had an apple peeler/corer/slicer in the closet, which I figured out how to use, and it worked wonders; the apples took all of 5 minutes to prepare, sliced perfectly. And the rest of the recipe did seem to come together easily -- almost too easily. It goes like this:

Sour Cream Apple Pie

Filling:

2 Tbs flour

1/8 tsp salt

2/3 cup sugar

1 egg, beaten

1 tsp vanilla

1 cup sour cream

Topping:

1 tsp cinnamon

1/4 cup butter

1/3 cup flour

1/3 cup sugar

Instructions:

1. Spread 2 cups thinly sliced apples evenly in a 9" pie shell. (Note to guys: you just buy the pie shell frozen, you don't make it.)

2. Combine filling ingredients, pour over apples.

3. Combine topping, sprinkle over pie.

4. Bake 25-30 min. at 425 degrees.

I had a friend whose expression for someone's unlikely accomplishment was "Well, even a blind squirrel finds an acorn every now and then." No one said that Saturday, but they'd have been justified, as the two pies turned out way better than I could have hoped. And better than everyone else was expecting, I'm sure. What else is in that recipe box?

So Dinner Club will continue meeting a few times each year, and I just may be able to hold up my end. Maybe.

Pat

Cameroon: Nah So!

Time for another Cameroon story, eh?

I lived and worked in the English-speaking western part of the country, but that description isn't perfectly true. The official language was English, but everyone who grew up in a village spoke his or her tribal language first, and there were over 200 of these around the country. And the real lingua franca of western Cameroon was Pidgin.

The history is interesting, dating back hundreds of years. Traders who went from port to port around Africa and Asia couldn't learn each local tribal language to do business, so a simplified version of English developed for trading purposes. It incorporated words from the local languages, and from other European colonial languages. Cameroon Pidgin is similar (but not identical) to Nigerian Pidgin, but apparently pretty different from, say, Malaysian Pidgin.

So in western Cameroon kids grow up fluent in their own tribal language and in Pidgin, and then they have to learn English starting in grade school. If they stay in school they also learn French starting in 7th grade ("Form 1"). A smart high school kid in my town of Mamfe would think nothing of speaking French with his French teacher, in English later with someone else, walking home chatting with his friends in Pidgin, and then talking with his grandmother at home in the local language, Kenyang. Imagine!

I shouldn't overstate the average Mamfe kid's French ability, though. The smaller English-speaking West is dominated politically and economically by the larger French-speaking East, and there is plenty of resentment over this. More than a few Anglophones wear their ignorance of French as a badge of pride -- it wouldn't shock me if the same were true in Toronto or Edmonton...

Back to Pidgin: We received some instruction in the language during our model-school teacher training -- just a few hours each week, to learn some of the basics. We certainly could have gotten by without it, but it's kinda fun, and useful in the many places you might not be dealing with formally educated folks, like the market or the bar. It's also a cultural touchstone, so being able to speak some Pidgin shows an effort at fitting in. That's especially true if you can use the right proverb or saying at the right time.

Some Pidgin tidbits:

• Many common words are straight from English: house, book, foot, eye, etc.
• Some are clearly from English, but pronounced or used a little differently: "waka" for walk, "tree" for three, "beeya" for beer, "dis" for this, "ee" for he, him, it, and his. A funeral wake is called a "cry-die".
• Others are from various sources, including some tribal languages somewhere: "mimbo" means alcohol, "chop" means eat or food, "nyanga" is decoration, "Ashyia" is Sorry, "kombi" is friend, and "biabia" is hair.
• The future tense is made by putting "go" before the verb, while the past tense uses "bin" or "dun".
• "Fo" seems to be short for "for", but it's the main preposition used. "Ah de go fo mocket" means I'm going to the market.

We Peace Corps types showed a range of skill levels with Pidgin, as you'd expect. Early on someone (I forget who) tried to barter for something in the Bamenda market in Pidgin, and the woman vendor told him "Ah no de heeya dat kine French tok" -- I don't speak French...

As for me, I got it, but I didn't really embrace it like I did French. Teachers were generally careful to only speak English to students, as a matter of educational pride, but I felt free (as an outsider) to mix a little Pidgin in for fun in the classroom. Instead of always using "That's right!" as an affirmative to a question, sometimes I'd say "Nah so!" with a smile, and get a laugh from everyone.

I get a little nostalgic from time to time about Cameroon, as you can tell. Let's just say "Ee bin be some obah-long time wey ah neba chop fufu an eru", and leave it at that...

Pat

From the Bleachers

I've spent hundreds of hours over the last 8 years or so watching my kids play sports, but my favorite moment (so far) involved someone else's kid, and a very good coach.

Fiona's first softball season was in 3rd grade, and her team was a good mix of St. A's classmates and girls from Evanston public schools. No one had much softball experience, so it was a learning year, with modest expectations. The team played about .500 ball, but you could see steady progress over the course of the season.

For most of the girls, anyway. It was clear early on that we had a range of athletic ability on the team, and softball was a real challenge for some -- there's nothing natural about hitting or throwing. That variety of players' skills has to be the hardest thing for youth sport coaches to deal with, I think. How do you challenge the good players and keep them interested, give the bad players the right opportunities and enough playing time, and win enough games overall to keep everyone encouraged and having fun? And keep all the parents at bay?

On that last point Coach Tom set the tone in the very first game, when some of our team's parents jeered the umpire for his balls-and-strikes calls. The coach called time out, came over to where we were all sitting, and said sternly, "Folks -- we're NOT doing that this year." He was a big guy, with a serious demeanor, and we all thought "Yes, Sir", even if we didn't say it. And that was that.

The worst player on the team was pretty clearly M., a quiet, chubby African-American girl. She just couldn't hit, and wound up striking out looking just about every time at bat. This went on for the better part of the season, and Tom never said a word to her when she came back to the bench. It seemed a little cold, but that was just his style of managing -- I'm sure he gave her plenty of instruction at the practices, but games were different. (I wonder: are kids really helped when you say "Nice try" or "Good swing"? Does it take the sting out of failure, or does it just lead them to mistrust or ignore what adults say?)

In one of the last games of the season M. was at bat in a late inning, and the parents in the stands all knew what was coming next, when she surprised everyone by swinging at a pitch and hitting a ground ball. The shortstop bobbled it, and she was safe at first -- her first "hit" of the season! The next batter made an out, ending the inning, which hardly mattered to her or any of us.

When she came back to the bench for her glove she got some congratulations from her teammates, of course. And as she started to trot out to her position in the field she was stopped by Coach Tom, who said to her (a little less sternly), "See, M.? Good things happen when you swing the bat, don't they?"

She beamed the biggest, most beatific smile you can imagine.

I wonder what she's up to now, 5 years later? I wonder what she'll grow up to be? But I have no doubt that she knows what accomplishment feels like, and approval from someone who matters to her, and that that experience will stick with her forever. It's for moments like those that I encourage my kids to stay involved in sports, and that keep me in the bleachers watching.

Pat