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

No Way!

I was an engineering intern ("co-op") at Procter and Gamble during college -- three terms in Cincinnati and one in Sherman, Texas. During one of my Cincinnati semesters I roomed with three young P&G engineers, two of whom had been in the same fraternity at MIT a few years before. This story is from them, and has stuck with me ever since...

The frat house was having a party on Saturday night. The guys were trying to talk their Monday-through-Friday cleaning lady into coming in on Sunday to clean up after the party. She knew better, and rejected all of their pleas using her less-than-perfect English, but they were being very persistent. She finally said, "No! You're barking up a dead wall!"

Writers and public speakers know how useful a good metaphor is, but that mixing two metaphors is the sign of a hack (or at least a sloppy writer). It's the rare author who can mix three metaphors, though, in such powerful fashion:

• Barking up the wrong tree
• Beating a dead horse
• Talking to a wall

It has a certain ridiculous charm, doesn't it? So the next time you want to say emphatically "No way!" feel free to say "You're barking up a dead wall!" instead, and see what happens. It worked for her, and they had to do the Sunday post-party cleanup themselves.

Pat

Naked Seoul

The downside of making several trips to Korea in the last few years was the flight: Almost 14 hours on Korean Air (direct) , or over 18 hours on United, connecting through Tokyo or San Francisco. After you've had a snack, done some reading, watched a movie, taken a nap, gotten some work done, listened to some music, had a meal, done a sudoku puzzle, and napped again, you look at the time -- and you've still got 4-6 hours left to go. Ouch.

The upside was getting to stay at the nicest hotel I've ever been in, the Shilla.

Part of the corporate hotel deal we had with the Shilla was limo service from the airport, included. So when you ooze out of the Seoul airport customs area, tired, blinking and aware of your own breath, you're met by a driver with your name on a sign, and he takes your bag and whisks you off to your limo (a very nice Hyundai Equus). During the pleasant one-hour ride he'll make a little small talk if he speaks a little English, and he always touches base with the hotel via cellphone when you're getting close.

As you pull up to the hotel you're then greeted at the curb by a front desk clerk and a bellhop: "Welcome back to the Shilla, Mr. Harrigan. I hope you had a good flight from Chicago." They take you and your bag straight through the lobby and up to your room, hand you your key, and check to see if you need anything special this time. No front desk stop for paperwork (it's already on file), just efficiency. Now that's how to arrive at a hotel.

The rooms are done in clean, understated Asian luxury, as is the whole hotel, but the real treat is the fitness center/health club. Working out in the morning really helps me function when I travel, especially if I'm jet-lagged and not getting a full night's sleep. And this place makes it worth getting up at 5 or 6 a.m.

Again with the service: you check in with your room key at the main health club desk, get a locker key from the friendly attendant, and by the time you get up the stairs and down the hallway the fitness center guy is out of his office to greet you: "Good morning, Mr. Harrigan. Can I help you with anything today?" Half of the fitness center usage is from hotel guests, the other half from local members: very successful Korean business executives in their 40's through 70's, by my estimate. (I'm sure membership is super-expensive.) The gym is very well-equipped, especially by hotel gym standards.

After the workout it's spa time, where it gets interesting culturally. For me the perfect ending to a workout is a heat treatment of some kind, and here I get to do the trifecta of steam room/sauna/whirlpool, with a few additional variations available (medium- and super-hot whirlpools, cold pool, wet sauna, etc.) Plus showers with amazing water pressure, and scrubbing cloths and brushes, and a variety of soaps and shampoos and such, and plush, thick towels. You're warm, relaxed and squeaky-clean when you leave.

But in a dozen mornings at the Shilla I don't think I ever saw another Westerner in the men's spa; just me and a bunch of late-career Korean executives.

Naked. Really naked.

I understand that the whole naked-spa thing is part of Korean culture, but it did take some getting used to. I'm in a foreign country, tired from working out, a little muzzy-headed from sleep deficit, and surrounded by naked Korean businessmen strolling, chatting, and doing the spa thing without a care in the world. Since I don't speak any Korean (just a couple of words) I have no idea what my naked brethren in the whirlpool were talking about, but it's hard not to be self-conscious and imagine they're talking about me:

• "Hmmph. I'm not impressed."
• "Look at him -- if he were any more white he'd be clear."
• "I hope he's not in the whirlpool just to fart."

They probably didn't really care that I was there, and I shouldn't imagine the worst of anyone, but still...

I'm happy to report that in a typical Korean business setting everyone wears clothes, all day long. (I'm pretty sure it wasn't just for my benefit.) And the Koreans were polite, on the ball, and generally a pleasure to do business with.

The project that took me to Seoul ended, so I won't go back there for a while. If I ever do I'll try to stay at the Shilla, rejoining my naked brethren each morning, emerging self-conscious but squeaky-clean, ready to start the day.

Pat

The Teal Ribbon

Rachel passed away a year ago today, as many of you recall. It seems like ten years ago, and yet yesterday. We were all shocked as things happened so quickly, but we adapted to do whatever we could to make things better for each other, in ways big and small. We wore the teal ovarian cancer ribbons in solidarity with Rachel, and then with her memory.


I've gotten many kind notes from people in the last couple of days, on top of the million and one kindnesses in the last year. Thank you, all of you.


The kids have done so well this past year. With the support of friends far and near, family, neighbors -- everyone -- there hasn't been a single real behavior problem or issue along the way. I was in touch with a grief counselor for the first few months post-Rachel, discussing every few weeks how the kids were getting along, and our joint decision each time was: they seem fine, so let's not force anything on them. And that's how the year played out.


One issue -- maybe -- was their total lack of reaction/recognition to what happened. They'll mention Mom in passing, comfortably, but don't talk about her or her death in depth -- ever. They rebuff any discussion I start on the subject. I think they've wanted so much just to blend back into their social fabric and not be "the kids whose Mom died".


The one time I took them to her grave was last October, on Rachel's birthday, to visit and leave some flowers. It was a total bust. I had to practically drag them there, and they wanted to leave immediately. At first I was pretty mad at their selfishness, but I came to appreciate that they just couldn't deal with it then, and I cooled off. (I've heard from adults who still can't visit their parents' graves.) When I say "they" I really mean "Fiona", as the boys just follow her lead. I won't take them all back to Calvary Cemetery until they ask me to.


St. A's 8:15am Mass was said in Rachel's name today, and I'd given the kids a heads-up that we'd be attending. I didn't get any guff from them in advance, nor did I this morning as we headed out. They were cooperative, but with little commentary, as usual. I thought: Does this day mean nothing to them? There was quite a crowd of friends and schoolmates in attendance as well, a great gesture.

While the whole day turned out to be harder and more emotional for me than I thought it would, the part that affected me most was when the four of us took the communion gifts up to the altar. As I walked behind the gang I noticed in Fiona's ponytail -- her teal ribbon. There was no fanfare, no planning, no "look at me" -- it was just her simple, perfect remembrance for the day. She seemed so mature, and she reminded me so much of...someone many of you knew.

What did I ever do to deserve such a wonderful daughter?

Pat

Green Sneakers

My general lawn care goal has always been: don’t have the worst lawn on the block. I think I’m currently coming up short against that goal.

Growing up we boys had lawn duty, from whatever age it was that we could pull-start the mower -- maybe 11 or 12? The mower was always a Toro, with a side-bag attachment to catch the clippings. We got a lot of pull-starting experience, as you’d have to stop and empty the bag pretty frequently.

At some point that attachment broke and we had to rake everything up, which was the ultimate tedious work. I figured out that I could minimize the raking by cutting in a spiral pattern towards the center of a section of lawn; the re-cutting and blowing would reduce the clippings to a much smaller area, although at some point you couldn’t plow the mower through, and it would stall, and you’d rake up what you had to. I’m guessing this wasn’t the best for either the lawn or the mower, but I don’t think my Dad cared, since his general lawn care goal was about the same as mine now.

The sides of our sneakers were stained grass-green all summer long, like those of every other kid in the neighborhood.

After about a 12-year break for college/Peace Corps/apartment living I had to buy a mower for our first house, on Grant Street. (I should mention that lawn duty for kids in Cameroon meant bending over at the waist 90 degrees and cutting by hand with a machete, making the ol’ Toro seem pretty convenient.) I chose a manual reel-type mower, as a) we had a small lawn, b) it was cheap and didn’t need gas, and c) it was eco-friendly.

The eco-friendliness would get me the occasional cheers from people driving by -- they’d wave and say “Way to go!” as I was cutting, missing the irony from their CO2-spewing internal combustion vehicles. Ahh, Evanston.

The reel mower worked pretty well, and I used it for quite a few years. It took some effort to push, but I didn’t mind the extra exercise, and loved the rythymic chk-chk-chk sound of the blades. It also took a little longer to do the lawn than a gas mower would, turning a 30-minute job into a 45-minute one -- not bad. The only major downside was when I let the grass get a little too long: then it was really hard to push, and there would be tufts of taller poorly-cut grass everywhere, making the lawn look like a kid’s head after a bad haircut.

When my Dad moved into a house without a lawn I inherited his gas mower -- a Toro, naturally, and one that mulched the clippings right into the lawn, eliminating the need to rake. After using it a few times I was reminded why these were so popular, and I relegated the reel mower to the back of the garage, with only a twinge of guilt. And so it has been, ever since.

The only other lawn care effort I make is to edge the sidewalk, which looks very tidy, and is easy to do. De-thatching, aerating, seeding, fertilizing, weed-killing? No thanks, or at least only rarely. And watering? “That’s God’s job,” as I like to say.

Yet I might have to break down and do some of this, or pay someone to do it, as my lawn is looking pretty ratty -- even with the neatly-edged sidewalks. I know someone has to have the worst lawn on the block, but I just don’t want it to be me.

Pat