Category: essays

This is something I posted on my own website four years ago. Just re-read it and thought I’d post it here.

I read an article on Salon a few years ago: “Is Michael Pollan a Sexist Pig?” by a writer named Emily Matchar. The title is, of course, very tongue in cheek; the article is about the omnivore/ locavore/ femivore movements, and about the myths we make up about the past. In this case, the past in question is the good ol’ days of cookery from the writers’ childhoods, and how much better everything was in the days before feminism led us to processed food.

Now, all things being equal I like to make my food from scratch, I love the farmer’s market, I do read labels, and I attempt not to buy things that I can make myself. But I do these things because I’d just as soon know what I’m eating, because I have family members with nasty allergies. I don’t do them as a political statement. I’m fortunate that I can afford to buy organic at least some of the time, that I have the time and the leisure to cook the way I prefer to. And oh yeah: I like to cook. Not everyone does. Not everyone likes to eat, for that matter. There are people who regard food as fuel, something they have to be prodded to remember. (I know: bizarre, right?)

Full disclosure: for a potluck at the time I made a chocolate tart with gingersnap crust, and a jam tart, and (possibly) some truffles made with leftover ganache. Because I am insane, but also because doing this stuff is fun. For me. As it is for many people in the “femivore” movement, which started out about making food (or raising chickens, or gardening or baking bread) as craft or art. But an awful lot of the omnivore/locavore/femivore rhetoric is distinctly anti-Feminist (seriously, go read the article, particularly the quotes from the like of Barbara Kingsolver, Michael Pollan, and Marguerite Manteau-Rao). In looking for a more “authentic” diet are these writers valorizing a time that never was?

Look at many of the cookbooks from the 30s, 40s, and 50s (never mind the 60s, when I, and many of the writers, were kids) and they’re full of short-cuts: use canned soup, top your casserole with deep-fried onion strings, use prepared ketchup or mayonnaise or Jell-O™ or corn flakes or instant oats. Use instant pudding. Use frozen spinach (or, even scarier, canned spinach. Have you ever had canned spinach? It’s like eating soggy green tissues). A decade before Betty Friedan put pen to paper to discuss the feminine mystique, ads in womens’ magazines touted wash-day miracles and labor-saving devices and wonderful, wonderful processed food. Because doing this stuff wasn’t a creative outlet. It was work.

There used to be a rhyme that outlined a woman’s work week: Monday (when you were rested up from your day of rest and going to church on Sunday) was laundry day. Laundry was a brutal task, involving boiling and stirring or wringing and hanging of an entire household’s clothes and linens. Tuesday was ironing day (yes, you put the iron on the stove to heat it, or on the coals of your fire if you didn’t have a stove, and yes, those irons were made of iron and weighed a young ton). Wednesday: sewing day, making your own clothes and clothes for your family, repairing, darning, stitching new sheets (yes, women hemmed and darned their sheets). Thursday: marketing, getting all the things that you couldn’t make, to last you a week. Friday: cleaning. Scrubbing on your hands and knees, polishing, beating rugs, dusting, scouring. Finally, Saturday, baking–for the week. All those pies and cake and breads–which explains a lot of recipes using “stale bread,” since by the end of the week whatever bread was left was likely to be rock-hard. And Sunday, like every day, three times a day: feed the family.

Whatever the rhetoric of feminism, women didn’t want frozen food, store-bought bread, and labor-saving devices because feminism told them they were being oppressed. They wanted these things because their work was really, really difficult and time consuming and exhausting. If these things freed some women up to do other things–run Hewlett Packard or become Secretary of State or write science fiction, that wasn’t the point. The point was to get out from under all that backbreaking, repetitive work.

Valorization of a better, simpler, more wholesome time drives me nuts. Because it’s fantasy. I love the gorgeous, candy-colored rendition of small-town turn of the last century Iowa in The Music Man, but I don’t confuse that with real life, which included diptheria, weevil-ly flour, bedbugs, and food that often teetered on the edge of spoiled. Taking on some of the tasks of yesterday, while using some of the tools of today to avoid the nastier work, and disdaining people who cannot or don’t want to do the same, is a mug’s game. It makes it all about aesthetics, when what most people 100 years ago, and many people today, are worrying about is survival.

Eat what you love, eat what is healthy, eat what you can afford and what you feel good about. Cook or eat out or call for a pizza. Grow tomatoes, spin flax, make poetry or pottery or raise llamas for the wool. It’s all good. But don’t blame Betty Friedan if you don’t like what’s for dinner.

My father would be 106 today, if he were still with us. It’s also Friday the thirteenth and in fact he was born on a Friday the thirteenth. I looked it up once just in case this was just one of those family stories, and found it was true.

My parents also got married on a Friday the thirteenth.  I looked that one up, too. It was our family joke – Friday the thirteenth was our lucky day.

Given that in this, the wealthiest country in the world, a place full of supposedly educated people, hotels (and possibly many other tall buildings) do not include a thirteenth floor, deciding that Friday the thirteenth is your lucky day is a small rebellion. Or a small statement of sanity.

Or, at least, out of step. My family was always a little out of step.

There is always at least one Friday the thirteenth in a given year, according to math wizards. 1918, when my father was born, had two, though the year my parents got married only had one. Every once in awhile there are three.

So obviously a reasonable number of people are born on a Friday the thirteenth – probably about the same number as are born on a Friday the first or any other day of the month (except 29, 30, and 31, since there are fewer of those in a year).

I suspect fewer get married on Friday the thirteenth for the same reason that tall buildings label the thirteenth floor the fourteenth. Continue reading “It’s Friday the Thirteenth!”…

I wrote about public health a couple of weeks ago: specifically how I became fascinated by the people who do the detective work of tracking infections and threats to the public weal to their sources. In doing so I was reminded of Typhoid Mary Mallon. She was an interesting and rather tragic character. And stubborn as hell.

Mary Mallon emigrated to the US from County Tyrone, Ireland, when she was 15 years old. She stayed with family for a while, but for most of her professional life she “lived in” as a domestic worker, almost always as a cook. And she was an asymptomatic carrier of typhoid, which is not a quality you want in someone involved in food prep. It is possible that she was infected in utero: that her mother had typhoid when she was pregnant. But Mary was, initially at least, unaware. And cooking was what she knew.

In 1900 Mary started working in Mamaroneck, a suburb of New York City. Within a couple of weeks people there fell ill.  She left that job and went to the city. At her first post there several people became ill with fevers and diarrhea; she moved to another job soon after, and seven of the eight people in this new household became sick. In 1904 she went to work for the Gilsey family, where, once again, people became ill (no one in the family itself–Mary was cooking for the house staff). Once again Mary decamped, and got a job in Tuxedo Park, NY (yes, where the tuxedo was created). Within two weeks a member of the household staff came down with typhoid and was hospitalized. This time the staff member died, and again, Mary departed ahead of inquiry. Eventually, Mary wound up in toney Oyster Bay, Long Island, working for banker Charles Warren in a rented summer cottage. When more than half the people in the family came down with typhoid, the property’s owner became involved. Aside from the awfulness of the illness itself, the outbreak brought down the property value: typhoid was considered, at the time, to be a disease that only poor people in squalid circumstances got. Worrying that potential renters would believe he had a “sick” house, the owner had the pipes tested, looking for the possibility that the property itself was the culprit. The pipe and house came up clean. They had to look elsewhere.

So the owner of that Oyster Bay property hired an investigator, George Soper, to figure out how disease had come to his house in Oyster Bay. Backtracking, Soper could find only one person, an Irish cook who fitted a specific physical description, who had been at the site of all the outbreaks; Mary changed her name from job to job, but her accent and her description made her fairly easy to trace. Eventually Soper tracked her to  the city, working for a family on Park Avenue.

Their meeting did not go well.

We forget, these days, that when Mary Mallon was told that she was a carrier, many people didn’t believe in germ theory. The idea that there were little thingies in your body which could not only cause disease but could somehow leap to other people’s bodies and make them sick, was fantastic. Mary Mallon certainly didn’t believe it: she threatened Soper with a carving fork. She refused to give urine or stool samples. Without Mary’s cooperation Soper had to establish an airtight history, and he did it. Over five years, members of seven out of the eight families Mary Mallon had worked for had contracted typhoid. Mary, her livelihood imperiled, denied any possible involvement: typhoid was everywhere, the food must have been contaminated by someone else, this was a plot to implicate her, a poor, innocent domestic worker… and Irish to boot. (Anti-Irish prejudice was still a thing at the beginning of the 20th century.)

Having no luck trying to deal with Mary Mallon, Soper went to the department of Public Health. They went all in and arrested her: she was forced into an ambulance by five policeman and a female doctor (who had to sit on her). At the hospital she was forced to give samples. They were found to be teeming with typhoid bacteria.

Public Health was a new thing in 1907, and I don’t think there had ever been a case like Mary Mallon’s before to establish precedent. Mallon made it clear she didn’t believe she was a carrier and would not cooperate; when doctors decided that the likeliest reservoir of bacteria in her system was her gallbladder, and suggested having it removed could solve the problem, Mallon refused.* The DPH and the legal system was convinced she posed a danger to the community, and she was sentenced to quarantine on an island in the East River. There she lived, giving stool and urine samples three times a week (perhaps someone thought she might magically test negative some day? In any event, it did not happen). Mallon could not do the work she did best (apparently she was a very good cook) and was living on the verge of poverty when George Soper visited and suggested that he would write a book about her case and give her half the proceeds. Rather than seeing this as a unique business opportunity, Mary locked herself in the bathroom until he left: understandably she detested being called Typhoid Mary.

In 1910 Mary was released from quarantine on the condition that she never work again as a cook, and that she take pains to avoid communication of disease to others (it is reported that Mary Mallon didn’t see much point in washing her hands until she thought they were dirty… and they didn’t look dirty after she used the toilet, so why wash then?). Quarantine had been hard on her: she was used as a guinea pig with trials of various medications, and non-typhoid illness was ignored. I suspect she would have promised anything to get off the island and back to something like a normal life. Once back in the city Mary found work as a laundress, but it paid only half of what she could make as  a cook, and she didn’t like the work. After a year or so she started cooking again, using assumed names. Staffing agencies wouldn’t hire her, so she went directly to the kitchens of hotels and restaurants, and predictably, sadly, everywhere she worked there were typhoid outbreaks.

In 1915 Mallon went to work in the kitchen of the Sloane Hospital for Women. Patients got sick. Two died. George Soper, Ace Typhoid Investigator, identified Mary Mallon. She was again arrested, and again sentenced to quarantine on North Brother Island, where she stayed for the next 23 years. She was given a cottage to live in, and wound up working in a laboratory on the island as a technician.

Public opinion, which had initially seen Mary Mallon as a villain–not just disease, but that carving fork! the swearing and fighting back!–later reversed, and there was some sympathy for a woman who, through no fault of her own,  found herself a public danger and unable to do the one thing she was demonstrably good at. Mary Mallon had a stroke in 1932 and died in 1938 at the age of 69. The nickname she hated is still in use, associated with recklessness, callousness, and the spreading of disease. Poor Mary.

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*gallbladder surgery was not the commonplace is is now. Mallon could legitimately have feared that she would die on the table.

I wrote this post a dozen years ago, just re-read it, and find I liked it enough to post again.

I have just finished reading Emma Thompson’s screenplay of Sense and Sensibility (which is to say, the final shooting script–Thompson wrote dozens of versions of the screenplay before it was acquired and put into production) and her diary from the shoot*.  She is uniformly witty and down to earth (her comments about zits, hangovers, and feeling like a talentless hack are not only reassuring to the rest of the world–which is to say, to me–but are funny in their own right) and endlessly appreciative of her colleagues on camera and behind the scenes.  I wish I’d been a gofer on that film.

Reading the diary, in particular, reminded me of the extent to which the production of an historical film of good intent (meaning, one that wants to get it right) relies on experts: the horse wrangler who teaches Willoughby how to drive a curricle (the sportscar of its day); the costumers and designers; the dance teachers; and Jane Gibson, “movement duenna and expert on all manners historical,” who taught bearing and manners and the reverence.  By which I mean bowing and curtseying.

During my brief career studying ballet as a kid the first thing Miss Dear (honest to God, it was her name) taught us was the “reverence,” a deep bow which was to be given to her at the beginning and end of each class.  Her class of 7-year-olds mostly teetered and tried not to fall over.  Later, when I took some classes in historic dance, I learned several different reverences: it wasn’t until some time in the 17th century, I believe, that bowing and curtseying split off into sex-differentiated motions.  According to Wikipedia, that font of all wisdom, the curtsey is a gesture of respect from an inferior to a superior.  Hence all those bobbing Victorian maids in the movies (“yes, m’lady.”  **bob**).  Per Thompson:

“We learn the root and meaning of the bows and curtsies–or reverences, as Jane calls them.  As you enter a room you ‘cast a gladdened eye’ about you.  Beautiful phrase….

The bow is the gift of the head and heart.  The curtsy (which is of course a bastardisation of the word ‘courtesy’) a lowering in status for a moment, followed by recovery.”

I had always understood the “lowering in status” part of the reverence, and that a superior may nod or bow less deeply to an inferior, either in dismissal or acknowledgment.  You would bow very deeply–abase yourself–to a King, less deeply to a baron, acknowledging their superior status.  My 21st century feminist self gets the status thing, even if she doesn’t believe in it, but was always troubled by the fact that a gentlewoman curtseyed to a gentleman (I believe in practice shewas supposed to curtsey to him, then he would respond with a bow).  The idea of a recovery from that lowering of status pleases me.  “I submit to your authority,” the curtsey says.  Or maybe, “I acknowledge that society places a higher value on your gender than on my own.”  And then the recovery: “But I submit only so far.”  And then the bow, acknowledgement and “gift of the head and the heart”.

It’s easy for me to want to read a taking back of authority in the recovery from a curtsey: I love the past, but I am firmly a creature of now.  One of the great tasks of writing then is to remember that Sarah Tolerance has no Gloria Steinem or Betty Friedan or Ms. Magazine in her background; that however independent she is, she’s still a woman of her time, and while she might not feel that the man she’s curtseying to is worthy of her respect, she would still go through the proper forms.  It’s her age, and not mine, that I am playing in.

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*I once read excerpts of Thompson’s diary from the movie Junior, with Arnold Schwarzenegger, in which she mentions that he was still so muscle-bound that it was difficult for him to tie his own tie–the muscles literally got in the way.  I was then editing comics, and made sure to mention this to those artists who seemed to think that moving like a gymnast and being built like a fireplug were not incompatible…

I think I was 12 when I encountered Berton Roueché. I encountered his work (considerably abridged) in the science-class version of My Weekly Reader that we received in 7th grade science. Rather than listen to the class (because who does that in 7th grade?) I read an article about a family whose members, after dinner, showed up at the local hospital with a range of frightening symptoms: blurred vision, hemispheric paralysis of the face, increasing trouble breathing, paralysis and–in a couple of cases–death. A sudden onslaught of something like this causes public health officials to sit up and take notice (as they did) lest this be a contagion and only the tip of the iceburg. In the end, they determined that home-canned mushrooms (with a ride-along by botulism) had been the culprit.* The fact that I remember this 58 years later gives you an idea of the impact the article had on me.

From 1946 Roueché began a column for The New Yorker: Annals of Medicine. Each column featured a medical mystery: what made that family so sick that several of them died? How did eleven homeless men turn up in hospitals all over New York City all in the same week, all horribly sick, and all sky blue? How did an HVAC technician who never went near livestock come down with anthrax?

These mysteries and many others were solved by public health officials, doctors who combined the shoe leather and deduction of Hollywood gumshoes with science. And because the series started in the 1940s, in the movie in my head the doctors all look like a combination of Robert Mitchum and Richard Widmark, hats pushed back on their heads, ties askew, sleeves rolled up, bent over typewriters or medical records, working to solve mysteries and make sure that threats to the public are contained.

For example (and I’m working from memory here) there’s a case where a few people from different neighborhoods in Manhattan show up with typhoid. Typhoid is borne by fecal contamination–usually from apparently healthy people who don’t know they’re carriers (or a few who do: Typhoid Mary Mallon was a carrier, working as a cook. Her employers kept getting sick and Mary kept moving on from one household to another, until finally she was identified as the source. She refused to believe it, continued to work as a cook–even attacking the doctors who went to talk to her–and finally she was forcibly quarantined as a menace to public health. Mary Mallon is a whole post on her own). Because of the way typhoid is communicated, you don’t generally see one case here, one case there, with no apparent link between them. After a lot of shoe leather and asking questions the public health officials determined what had happened: a known carrier (blameless) lived in a building with bad plumbing. There was a fruit and vegetable stand on the first floor. Pipes leaked just enough so that a few apples were contaminated. People from the neighborhood–and in one case from far outside the neighborhood–bought an apple and came down with typhoid. The canvassing and legwork and deduction this took is both mind-boggling and inspiring.

Aside from the fascination of these stories (some of which were used, decades later, as the source for episodes of House M.D.) and a healthy regard for proper hand-washing, safety equipment, and home canning protocol, Berton Roueché’s essays inspired in me a life-long admiration for the professionals who work in public health. The first answer isn’t always right: as a matter of fact, I can recall at least one essay where the doctor telling the story admits that he thought he was pretty smart about figuring something out–only to realize that he hadn’t in fact figured it out at all, and had to go back to the beginning. That, I realized (sitting there in 7th grade science class) is what science is: looking for answers and, if a promising one doesn’t work, looking for the one that will solve the mystery.

A couple of years ago, as you may recall, Public Health officials had a moment in the sun–immediately followed by a lot of abuse from people who didn’t like the news they were giving. Representatives of the CDC and other Public Health organizations made mis-steps–largely because in the first year or so of the pandemic there were others breathing down their backs insisting that the news they give be Happy! News! that would distract people from body bags and long COVID. Even so, doctors and scientists and technicians were working the problem, using tools much more sophisticated than those used by the scientists Roueché wrote about. But the impulse, the chore, was the same: to solve the problem, to limit the damage, to make sure that the health of the public is being safeguarded.

What’s not to love?

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* You can bet that, among other things, my home canning protocol since then has been as spotless as I can make it.

A toy can be used in any number of ways, according to the imagination of the player.

• I have seen kids who were not allowed to own toy guns pick up a twig and start shooting with it: Pew! Pew! Pew! (I understand the impulse to keep toy guns out of the hands of children, but I’ve never seen it attain its objective.)
• Regardless of what Mattel might have believed, for some of us Barbie wasn’t an aspirational toy. I used my Barbies to populate the elaborate cities and houses I constructed out of blocks and other toy box flotsam, and to serve as models for my inept attempts at clothing design. 
• A friend’s daughter repurposed the highly detailed and elaborate play kitchen her grandparents gave her to be a library, with herself as the librarian (this is a child after my own heart). 

Where am I going with this? Well, after three years I have succumbed, and spent a week watching all three seasons of Bridgerton. I had been told repeatedly that I would love it: since I started out as a writer publishing Regency romances–Bridgerton, which is set in an alternate version of the English Regency, should be right up my road, right? Kinda? Maybe? No?

Well, kinda, in the sense that Bridgerton is entertaining. But also no, because I was left wondering why, out of all the toys available to them, the show’s creators decided to play with the English Regency. Continue reading “Toys, or The Adjacency Romance”…

The chickens came home to roost. A man who built a political career around stoking violence became the target of it.

I immediately thought of the attempt to kill George Wallace in 1972. Another man who stoked violence suddenly became a victim of it. The shooters in both cases sound similar.

Wallace spent the rest of his life in a wheelchair. He also repented of at least some of his racist actions. Being shot might have made him reflect on himself.

I don’t expect such reflection from the grifting felon that the Republicans are preparing to nominate. I wouldn’t expect it even if he’d been more badly injured. I don’t think he has the capacity to examine himself.

The Wallace shooting provided some of the material for Martin Scorcese’s brilliant movie Taxi Driver, a movie I saw when it first came out in 1976 and am not willing to ever watch again. I left that movie in shock – I still remember how I felt – because it so perfectly encapsulated the violence in our society and the thin line between someone seen as a good guy and someone seen as evil incarnate.

(If you’ve never seen it, you should watch it, but make sure you watch it with friends you can discuss it with afterwards.)

As I recall, the guy who shot at Ronald Reagan (and did more harm to his press secretary, Jim Brady) was obsessed with that movie and with Jodie Foster, who was in it. These things all connect.

Our politics has been intertwined with violence for most of our history. I am old enough to have been shocked to my core by the assassination of John F. Kennedy. The murders later in the 1960s of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert Kennedy made me fully aware of how off the rails things were.

The mass shootings we are so familiar with start about that time, too, with Charles Whitman climbing to the top of the University of Texas tower in 1967 and shooting so many people.

Nowadays, school shootings and similar violent attacks in dance halls, at concerts, even in churches, are now such common news that the response is more numbness than shock. Continue reading “A Violent Country”…

Warning: approaching elderhood conversation ahead. You’ve been warned.

One of the things I have become… well, not anxious about, exactly, but vigilant about, is my hearing. I know that a certain amount of degradation of my original acuity is to be expected, but I by-god want to know if I’m beginning to lose a meaningful amount of hearing. Because I’m convinced that, while loss of hearing doesn’t cause dementia, it’s a big contributor to the speed with which it can take over. So once a year I get my ears tested, and the minute it’s indicated, I want hearing aids.

Why? Aside from the obvious–I don’t want to be a person who trails around conversations saying “huh? Will you repeat that?” if I can avoid it–sound, and particularly speech, is one of the things that keeps me moored to the world. There are now a budget of studies that indicate that there’s a strong correlation between hearing loss and cognitive decline. Studies of older adults with hearing loss found that they had mental decline 30%-40% faster, on average, than those whose hearing remained intact.

Why? There are a number of theories. 1) Hearing loss increases isolation, which decreases stimulation. 2) When you experience hearing loss, more of your brain is put to work trying to process the sounds you do hear and make sense of it. And 3) there’s a sort of diminishing loop between the ears and the brain: if your ears don’t pick up as much sound, the auditory nerves send fewer signals to the brain, and the brain declines.

I have spent the last eight years or so watching my beloved aunt’s succumb to dementia. Among other things, by the time anyone really noticed the decline in her hearing and hearing aids were acquired, they were not a habit: someone else had to remind her to use them, they annoyed her, so she didn’t use them. As I write (sitting in my aunt’s room while she dozes nearby) I can see the hearing aids in their case–the batteries probably in dire need of recharging. I cannot think of a single time I’ve seen hear use them since they came home with her–it’s just not a thing that became routine (when she was still able to form routines). Whereas she will put on her reading glasses to spend time with the newspaper. Reading–and those glasses–define something for her about who she is, even now. The hearing aids do not.

So if, as seems likely, I will eventually need hearing aids, I want them early enough that putting them in becomes part of my routine. Also–I learned this from watching my father-in-law– once you have hearing aids you can deploy them to manage your surroundings. More than once when there was a family squabble, I saw him, smiling seraphically, reach up and turn his hearing aids off. Family strife? No problem, just tune out. I’d like to think I won’t do that, but having the ability to do it is kind of appealing.