alexandra alger

Ghoulish Fun

Not bad, eh? “Traditional,” my daughter commented. I didn’t pay her any mind. It’s the best carved pumpkin we’ve probably ever had! My husband Dan deserves the credit for the carving (based on a drawing we found online under “pumpkin faces.” Thank you, internet!). Somehow I was able to cajole him into doing it, while I stood by and watched. Is this ever the way to go–carving that baby the weekend before! So much more enjoyable than the the routine established after the kids lost interest in the pumpkin (and Halloween decorating in general): I’d put off the carving until Halloween day, until about, oh–an hour before the trick-or-treaters were due to arrive. The pumpkin, after a few weeks’ on the stoop, would be old and tough and resistant to the tiny saw from the pumpkin carving kit.  I’d default to the most basic pumpkin happy face, the one with triangle eyes and the gaping grin. Then I’d rush, rush, rush to throw a witch’s wig on, spread black makeup on my face (if I have time, black wax on my teeth–it really freaks kids out) and dump the candy into the big ceramic bowl that only comes out on Halloween. I sound like a pathetic whiner and procrastinator, don’t I? No more whining, from this day forward. Because now my talent husband’s in charge of the pumpkin. “Honey, you did such a good job last year, you have to do it again,” I’ll say this time next year. And he’ll have to agree.

Into the Woods

I spent the last two days and two nights without wifi or cell-phone service (or land-line service, either).

You’re wincing, aren’t you? You’re trying to imagine being out of range for one day; half a day; a few hours. I was the same way. I was really kind of dreading this trip. I was sure something terrible was doing to happen, and I wouldn’t be able to get help in time.

Where exactly was I? My husband Dan and I stayed in a hunting lodge on a lake in the Adirondacks. On a pristine body of water called Boreas Pond. The property is part of a 161,000-acre tract that the Nature Conservancy purchased from a local paper company and is in the process of selling to the state of New York as protected public land.

Dan is head of the board of the New York State chapter of the Nature Conservancy. That’s the kind of volunteer job that leads to a chance to spend two days magnificently alone in the Adirondack wilderness with your wife. Alone in this case meaning seven miles of dirt road away from other humans (and cell-phone service).

I was awed at the thought of such isolation, even as it gave me acute anxiety. I was channeling Woody Allen. There I was, marveling at the beauty of the lake—in color nearly black, from tannins—and at the same time having visions of disaster, principally: Dan having a heart attack on a trail. A bear, mauling him. A strange upstate bug giving him a serious allergy attack (He gets horrifically large bug bites). I can’t tell you my relief when a TNC staffer showed me the satellite phone and and a kind of emergency pager connecting us to rangers who would descent on us like ants on a picnic.

So we’d be all right. We had life lines. But what about bears? Moose? Snakes? Mike Carr,
head of TNC’s Adirondacks chapter, assuaged my fears. Bears—he couldn’t remember the last time he’d seen one. Moose—not interested in humans. Snakes—no poisonous ones, anyway. I started to relax. A little. Then a bit more.

After a turkey sandwich and a Shiner Bock on the front porch, clouds rolled in. When the rain began, our choice was clear. We stretched out on the leathery hunting-lodge couch and napped. It was delightful. I can’t remember the last time I took a nap in the afternoon. Who has time? There, we did.

We had the time to paddle on the lake and consider that we were the only humans there. I imagined I were a native American, surveying the forest where I would late hunt white-tailed deer. The Last of Mohicans, with Daniel-Day Lewis, was filmed in the Adirondacks. Remember how DDL ran in the woods, swiftly, gorgeously, his hair flowing behind him? The film crew had to have bushwhacked a path for him. There’s just no way he could’ve run in these woods. We didn’t even try to walk in them. The pines and aspens and fir trees (and others) compete for how closely they can grow together, and whatever space remains is clogged with dead branches and stumps. (Kudos to the hunters, who come in the fall to shoot deer. I don’t know how they get through the thicket. I’m not sure how the deer do, either.) We hiked up a dirt road that was once used as a logging route, wondering what creatures might be hearing or seeing us. We saw moose and deer tracks, but the creatures themselves kept their distance.

When did more reading than we usually do. Dan inched closer to finishing David Foster Wallace’s behemoth, Infinite Jest. I devoured two 1950s paperback westerns I’d picked up for 50 cents each at a local store. We talked—or didn’t. When you have all kinds of time to talk, you find you don’t always need to. We made burgers and drank beer and struggled to stay awake long enough to see the stars in a sky without any ambient light. (We missed out; a night haze obscured the stars.) When we rolled onto the paved road and the bars on my phone appeared, I felt a pang of regret. A life without the unending buzz of texts and calls and emails: It was wonderful.

Summer Ease

I had fresh corn for the first time this week. Heaven. I live for fresh corn. I can’t get enough of it. I gorge on it all summer, and then suddenly, just as the air grows chillier and the corn kernels harden, I find I can’t stand one more ear. I’m ready for turnips and cauliflower.

I haven’t posted a recipe in a while–just haven’t been inspired in recent months–but the arrival of corn at my local markets has gotten me fired up to share this incredibly easy, fast and delicious tilapia recipe, served with steamed corn and collard greens stir-fried with garlic and olive oil.

Sheila Lukins’ Tilapia (from cookstr.com, slightly amended)

Yield: Serves 4

Ingredients:

Spice mixture:
1 tsp. salt
1 tsp. sweet paprika
½ tsp. ground cumin
¼ tsp. Old Bay Seasoning (I’m not entirely convinced you need this)
¼ tsp. garlic powder
¼ tsp. dried thyme
¼ tsp. dried oregano
¼ tsp. dry mustard (I don’t use if I don’t have)
¼ tsp. freshly ground black pepper
¼ tsp. cayenne pepper (I don’t always use this, either)
Pam cooking spray
4 tilapia fillets (about 6 ounces each)
4 lime halves, for garnish

1. Preheat oven to 400 degrees

2. Prepare the spice mixture, combining all the ingredients in a small bowl.

3. Coat pan with Pam spray.

4. Spread fillets with the spice mixture on both sides. Spray top of then fish with Pam.

5. Bake for 1-12 minutes, until the fish flakes.

6. Serve immediately, garnished with lime halves.

I have to share this recipe, too, because it’s the dessert equivalent of the Tilapia dish–no, it’s even easier you don’t have to worry about whether you have Old Bay seasoning or if you remembered to buy dried mustard. As long as you have a pint or two of blueberries around, or a few fresh plums–both so plentiful in the summer–you can make this last minute. It’s so easy you won’t believe it actually tastes good. The fruit melts into a crusty, buttery cake. It’s even better for breakfast the next day. My friend Ellen Newman, a Cobble Hill, Brooklyn, neighbor, is the genius behind it.

Ellen Newman’s Fruit Tort

Ingredients:

I cup flour

I cup sugar

1 stick of salted butter, melted

1 tsp. baking powder

2 eggs

Pinch of salt

A couple of plums, peeled and sliced; or two pints of raspberries; or one-two pints of blueberries.

You’re wondering about milk, aren’t you? Nope. There’s no milk involved. No other liquid–just go with it!

1. Preheat oven to 350 degrees

2. Mix together everything but the fruit in a greased and floured springform pan.

3. Gently put fruit on top.

4. Bake for 45 minutes to an hour, until the top is golden.

Write me if you try this. I need to know that despite your reservations about how this could possibly turn out, it did, and you were thrilled.

Je Suis Charlie, Toujours

I’ve been reading up on how the PEN gala in New York went down last Tuesday, and am pleased that it seemed to have gone smoothly, with a standing ovation for the surviving members of Charlie Hebdo.

And three of my heroes—the writers and graphic-novelists Neil Gaiman, Alison Bechdel and Art Spiegelman—agreed to host the tables relinquished by writers protesting PEN’s decision to honor CH.

Splendid writers—Francine Prose, Peter Carey, Michael Ondaatje, Teju Cole, Rachel Kushner and Taiye Selasi, and many others—who came to a strangely wrongheaded view that CH is racist.

I applaud what Michael Moynihan wrote in the Daily Beast on May 5:

“Should you trust the judgments of newly minted French satire experts, most of whom don’t speak French and have never held a copy of the newspaper? Or should you trust Dominique Sopo, the Togolese-French president of SOS-Racisme, France’s most celebrated anti-racism organization, who made the obvious point that Charlie Hebdo was the ‘most anti-racist newspaper’ in the country? Those accusing his murdered friends of supporting the very things they so passionately opposed, Sopo said, were either motivated by ‘stupidity or intellectual dishonesty…Every week in Charlie Hebdo—every week—half of it was against racism, against anti-Semitism, against anti-Muslim hatred.’”

Vegas!

Nope. I didn’t see the Down Unders.

Or Tyson. He’s sure looking good (he’s 44 now! How did that happen?).

I also didn’t gamble.

Before you think I’m utterly lame, listen to what I did do, on a girls’ weekend with three college friends:

—Got tattoos: an arm band and a dragon tramp stamp. Okay, not real: decals. But it’s the idea that counts.

—Saw David Copperfield. Yes, he’s still alive and performing two shows a day–and three times on Saturdays–at the MGM Grand. He can be dazzling–he made a vintage Cadillac appear out of nowhere! And a massive mechanical T-rex!–and so cheesy you can’t believe it. One of his acts involved a tiny blue “Martian” that needed the audience to help him get back to his home planet. A six-year-old might’ve liked this act, maybe, but Copperfield’s audience has more sixty year olds than six year olds (not to mention lots of tourists with a tenuous grasp of English; they must’ve been wishing DC would just get back to making things disappear).

—Checked out the Venetian’s fake canal, with warbling gondoliers, its fake cerulean sky overhead, and people eating in an “outside” Italian tratteria; the Luxor’s soaring pyramid and fabulous Sphinx (see selfie below); and the Bellagio, which was not so impressive. Maybe that’s because we didn’t get to see the Picasso paintings for which Bellagio is renowned. Oddly, they’re hung in a restaurant, which wasn’t open during the day (weird, surely?).

What was glorious–and eventually exhausting–about Vegas were the voluminous crowds. Where is everyone? They’re in Vegas! There were moments when I thought that the broadest diversity of humanity anywhere in the world had to be right there with us on this five-mile strip. All kinds of people, young and old, from all walks of life. Even toddlers. Yes, we saw families with toddlers, strolling through the slot machines–the air stinking of cigarettes and booze–as if they were in a beautiful park somewhere. And untold numbers of young women on bachelorette weekends in stilettos and skin-tight barely crouching covering outfits. Every bride-to-be had an identifying sash or hat. One group was wearing T-shirts that said, “Look like Jackie, act like Audrey, party like Gatsby.” Only the last reference makes any sense in the context of Vegas.

I’d been meaning to try a slot machine, at least. I could not figure out how to work the damn things! There’s a slot for a credit card, I guess, but no way to know how much money you’re putting in, and then what in earth to do to play the game. But all these old people are playing away, losing their money–how hard can it be? Finally, I got my chance. At the airport, where the lame slot machines go (there was about dogs, for instance). I asked the young woman what the deal was. She showed me a dollar machine and said, “It really isn’t that hard. It’s just a question of how much money you want to spend. The more you spend, the better your odds are.” She must’ve thought I was the dumbest person on the face of the earth to ask that question.

I slipped a dollar into a dollar machine called Triple Diamond. The machine coughed and spat my dollar out. I tried again. Same thing happened. Well, then. I slipped my dollar back into my wallet.

Clearly, I wasn’t meant to gamble in Vegas. Not this time, anyway.

Of Chocolate Eggs and Boiled Eggs

For our family, as for many unobservant Christians we know, Easter is all about hunting for colored eggs and inhaling vast quantities of egg- or bunny-shaped candy. Eggs and bunnies are symbols of spring and fertility from ancient times, various internet sources tell me—and of course, have nothing to do with the resurrection of Christ. (In a 2012 article, The Huff Post says Easter eggs were made out of chocolate starting in the 19th century.) And neither does the serving of ham at Easter lunch, which harkens back to a time when pork was an abundant source of meat in early spring.

I love an occasion to gorge on jelly beans and chocolate eggs. I certainly do. But now that the kids are older, and we’re not having Easter-egg hunts anymore, and I’m buying jelly beans and chocolate eggs mainly for MOI—whose aging body really could do without them—I’m starting to feel envious of my Jewish friends. Passover is a holiday with rituals that are meaningful for the observant and non-observant alike. Years ago, a work friend invited me to a women’s Seder she hosted at her place. It was a revelation to have a meal imbued with such meaning. I now have to admit I don’t remember much. But wait—a memory of hard-boiled eggs is coming back. Jews don’t color the eggs and display them, they actually eat them! The eating of a hard-boiled egg (dipped in salt water and consumed at the beginning of the holiday meal) represents a traditional offering brought to the Holy Temple in ancient times, and is also a symbol of mourning over the loss of the destruction of the temple—or two temples, depending on which website you consult. (I’ve resorted to the internet because my most learned Jewish friends, my best source of information on Jewish traditions, are in Tel Aviv. If anyone reading this can correct me, please do!)

Our Easter will be a family event, a small one. I’m having my mother over for lunch. We’re having fish. I’m going to bake a few whole sea breams. I’ve never done it before, cooked a whole fish. I figure I can’t really mess up—as far as my mother is concerned, there’s no such thing as fish that’s been overcooked. We will not be celebrating the resurrection of Christ, but we will welcome spring—which really might at last have arrived—and all the possibilities of change and growth that spring promises.

What a Plunge!

Serendipitous events: I went to a Q&A with author Michael Cunningham (at the Brooklyn Academy of Music) not long before my daughter began reading Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse, not long before I found a copy of Cunningham’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Hours (1998)—an homage to Virginia Woolf—at the lodge where I am now staying in Jackson, Wyoming.

So it seemed like fate: I was meant to reread The Hours.

This was a novel that everyone read and raved about, as I recall—it was The Goldfinch of 1998-99. But all I really remembered was that Virginia Woolf was a character. I’d forgotten why she was a character; I’d forgotten everything, in fact. Until I started reading, and I began to remember. One of the main characters is Cunningham’s version of Clarissa Dalloway, who, in the first chapter, is going off to buy flowers for a party. Later Woolf herself sits down to write the famous first line: “Mrs. Dalloway said she’d get the flowers herself.”

It’s one of few first lines I have never forgotten in all the years since reading Mrs. Dalloway in high school. It’s so simple, and at the same time so distinctive and yes, unforgettable.

In a very funny article Cunningham wrote in the New York Times in 2003 after The Hours was turned into a movie (remember Nicole Kidman with the fake honker, playing Woolf? And then winning the Oscar?), he describes talks about Mrs. Dalloway this way: “Woolf’s novel takes place in one day, during which Clarissa Dalloway, a 52-year-old London society hostess, shops, sees the man she might have married but did not, takes a nap, and gives a rather dull party. However, because it is an ordinary day in the life of an ordinary person as rendered by a genius, by the book’s end we understand that Mrs. Dalloway not only stands with the heroes of world literature but, by extension, that every one of us might stand so, if only a brilliant writer would look at us with sufficient depth and penetration.”

Cunningham makes me think I should be going back to his source of inspiration, but I’m happy to have The Hours in front of me. When his Clarissa centers herself in the moment, in her life, it seems like just right thing to be reading, as the spring we’re all longing for teeters on the edge of being.

“Outside the narrow kitchen window the city sails and rumbles. Lovers argue; cashiers ring up; young men and women shop for new clothes as the woman standing under the Washington Square Arch sings iiiii and you snip the end off a rose and put it in a vase full of hot water. You try to hold the moment, just here, in the kitchen with the flowers. You try to inhabit it, to love it, because it is yours….”