365 Memories

I remember one evening in Chicago. This is when I was there as an adult, on my own. I was living in the Streeterville neighborhood, working at Edelman Public Relations. I still had my car, which was a liability downtown and not at all needed. I walked to work, but even if I hadn't, the public transit system is good enough to make owning your own wheels completely unnecessary. I would part with the car eventually, but for the moment, I was heading up Lake Shore Drive with a boyfriend in the passenger seat. He was visiting from out of town. We'd had an instant attraction at a friend's wedding, then started writing to each other, calling, and then he sent me cassettes (yes, they were still in use; that dates me!). He was a musician, a small-town guy, smart but hindered by an incomplete education and a general lack of exposure to anything beyond his backyard. His music didn't suffer for it—he wrote clever lyrics, composed catchy guitar riffs—but his emotional health did. ...

A memory from early teen years. I was in Los Angeles, and it was the summer between freshman and sophomore year of high school. During the academic months, I was attending North Carolina School of the Arts, boarding there, chasing the passion—the obsession—of professional dance; of ballet. It was a profession with strong skin-color barriers, preaching an aesthetic, for women more than men, that did not embrace dark skin. Who could imagine a bronzed Odette? At that time, no one it seemed. In Tchaikovsky's masterpiece, even the Black Swan with her thirty-two fouettés was always white. Insulting (and I suspect largely unchanged, with mostly segregated dance companies)—and yet I didn't overthink it at the time. Now, remembering all the things it seemed permissible for the ballet teachers to say to us students, I am surprised that no one mentioned explicitly that we should stay out of the sun. That particular summer, though, it wouldn't have mattered. I remember going to the...

During the summer when I was eleven (maybe twelve) and living in Los Angeles in the early 1980s, I had my first taste of The Industry, which of course out there means acting. For two summers running, my parents enrolled me in the summer camp program at the Santa Monica Playhouse , which is still going strong, still under the ownership of Evelyn Rudie and Chris DeCarlo . Back then, the place felt as homey as it was professionally run; now, their Web site (even the fact that they have one—but of course they would, we all have moved into another century!) seems so far removed from my impressions of the place; they have expanded tremendously. I am glad for them, but I like holding on to my simpler memories. I remember sitting on the ground with other kids in the courtyard on sunny days, learning lines and completing writing exercises where we'd "get into the minds of the characters." I remember seeking refuge from the sun, too, inside the cool, dark theater, where we practice...

My first memory of reading out of pure obligation and not deriving any form of pleasure from it is linked to the start of middle school. I was in California, where it's typical for middle school to consist of seventh and eighth grades only. I'd graduated from my public elementary school and had gained admittance to a private prep school. Heading into the summer before that seventh-grade year, incoming students were given a reading list. Apparently all the books were mandatory. I only remember a single one—though probably there were books on that list that formed a much more lasting impression, I just don't associate their titles with the marching orders I received in the summer of 1981. Until this time, I read voraciously, and I read everything I wanted (including Judy Blume books banned by my elementary school teacher) and nothing I didn't want. I mean, yes, certainly there were other school assignments, probably other summer reading lists, but if any of them were les...

Three . . . Two . . . One . . . Ready or not, here I come! My friend's voice traveled down the hallway of her family's large, Los Angeles house. We were playing Hide and Seek: my friend, her older sister, and I. The girls went to my elementary school (we were in our last years), and they lived just down the canyon road from where I did. I remember being at their house fairly often, and also some kind of occasional car pool our moms had worked out. I remember that breakfast for them was often of the powdered sugar donut variety. Did I wish for the same, instead of my hard boiled egg and toast? Maybe, but not with conviction. Overall, I accepted (and now am very thankful for) my mother's firm belief in breakfast being the most important meal of the day and therefore her insistence that it be nutritious. I am now debating how to relate the next bit of info in a way that will not sound uncharitable. My intention is just to describe a fact, not a judgment, but, well, there aren...

In 1931, one year before my mother was born, a fifty-four-year-old woman named Irma Rombauer predated the current DIY approach to book publishing and self-published a collection of recipes and kitchen knowledge for $3,000*. That book, once commercialized, would go on to become the American cooking classic, the Joy of Cooking . More than fifty years later, I would cook the first meal I remember making completely on my own from this book: at age thirteen or fourteen, I used my mother's yellowing edition (the fourth from the top in this post's photograph; the aqua colored one with no dust jacket and a bright red ribbon to mark your place, which I think was the sixth edition that appeared in 1962) to prepare a special breakfast of "German Apple Pancake" for my family. We were living in Los Angeles (or my parents were—I don't recall whether I made this dish before going to a boarding school for the arts in North Carolina, or if I made it during a vacation), in a two-...

The worst kind of prejudice is the kind that slips under the radar. It's too subtle to cause a stir (and if you point it out, you'll usually get a sideways look: you're the one making too much of nothing), but its corrosive message nevertheless seeps in—subliminally, insidiously—beating down the spirit of the group it belittles or excludes. I am blessed to have been raised by two parents who were sensitive to prejudicial undercurrents; they fought against them in their own distinct ways through the tumultuous 1960s, and into the 70s and 80s as I was growing up. And it seems, thinking about it now, that they never missed a good learning moment with me: we often discussed issues of bias, prejudice, stereotype, and their harmful effects. This week, images in some of my kindergartener's reading books gave me pause. And in wrestling with how to handle these, I remembered something I hadn't thought of in many years: the library at the Brentwood Science Magnet School in ...

I have to say: my son has a wonderful P.E. teacher, and he (my son) is only in kindergarten. Unless there's a big hole in my memory, I did not have a coach or a P.E. class until I was in middle school. Kindergarten was kind of like a one-room schoolhouse, without much of a curriculum other than learning how to "get along." The two elementary schools I attended—one a private school in Chicago, the other a public school in L.A.—did not have physical education classes, or really any organized sports activities at all. We had recess, though in Chicago I remember watching the older kids practice field hockey. The school in Chicago was K-12, so there were junior varsity and varsity teams, but as I was only there from first through fourth grades, I knew nothing about these. The kids our age just ran around outside playing tag. In the fifth and sixth grades (still considered elementary school in L.A.), same thing. There was recess. There was lunch. There were games of four-square...

The first time I heard someone singing opera in live performance was not in a theater as you might expect. In the 1980s I was living with my parents in Los Angeles, but they did not take me to the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion for opera. No, the first time I heard the passion of, specifically, Italian opera was while eating a plate of pasta at a restaurant on Wilshire Boulevard in Santa Monica called Verdi: ristorante di musica. Verdi opened twenty-six years ago, in 1983, and it quickly became one of my family's favorite places. We were regulars and got to know the manager, a man probably close to seven feet tall, who was a singer himself, I believe, or had been—I remember thinking it interesting that his first and last names were really both first names: Chuck Frank. (How do I remember that?) The food was fabulous. I ordered classic Italian standbys such as angel hair pasta pomodoro (the pasta was fresh and deliciously eggy, the tomatoes pleasantly acidic and sweet), sometimes veal s...

Today I made a fresh strawberry pie. Maybe it's the wishful thinking of a transitional season: it's spring officially, but you don't quite feel it yet, at least not in New York. Making a fruit pie can't force sunny spring weather to come any quicker, but it still tastes good, and the color of the pie, glazed with a fruit/sugar/cornstarch reduction, is a cheerful anecdote for the often rainy and gray sky in early April. I used to have my paternal grandmother's recipe, but looking for it this afternoon, I couldn't find it. I ended up substituting a recipe from another trusted Southerner, Lee Bailey, whose Southern Desserts cookbook has been on my shelf from the time I first had my own kitchen. The pie came out great—actually, it was better than my grandmother's version (or my misfired attempts at her version, should I be the one at fault). But all this thinking about, making, now writing about pie has brought up another landmark of memory: Polly's Pies in...

Another experience to come out of my father's L.A. years with Playboy was involvement with a private, membership-based Beverly Hills supper club called Touch. The connections are fuzzy in my mind. I always want to say that the club was backed financially by Playboy Enterprises, but I'm not sure this is accurate. It may have just been that one of the club's owners belonged to Hefner's entourage—being one of the many who made it their business to stop by the Playboy mansion on a regular basis. Or perhaps he (I forget his name, despite having heard it regularly at one point in my life) was a salaried employee of the company, linked somehow to club/casino operations? However it came into being, the Touch Club opened in the early 1980s (perhaps it was the year 1980; it was eventually sold in 1986), and we dined there sometimes, my parents and I; this was always a special occasion I got to dress up for. I don't remember the menu, but based on the intended clientele, I...

Then there are the books that shock you. Really shock you. There's a book like this for me, a book by Shel Silverstein . It wouldn't shock me as an adult, and especially not now that I myself am a writer: I understand the desire to make sometimes drastic departures from your best-known material. (Plus, sometimes your best-known material doesn't even represent your best self, though I'm not saying one way or the other with respect to Silverstein .) We all have many facets to our personalities, many wells to draw from in our quest for creative expression. Today, I'm sure I'd love this large-format, coffee table book of drawings—or if not love it, then at least really appreciate it—and I hope my parents still have it in their personal library. I'm guessing that they do. But when I saw this book for the first time, I wasn't an adult. I was around ten or eleven years old, and the book in question, despite Silverstein's huge contributions to the world of...

Although I am an only child, I paraded through childhood with a group of kids who felt very much like family—they even lived in my house. They were fictional characters, but no less real to me. Actually, while I was growing up, they often seemed more real to me than real people did. That is, they were much more honest. They didn't try to stuff you with platitudes or false optimism when things weren't going well, but they gave it to you straight . . . including giving you the knowledge that you'd make it through whatever it was, intact. These characters most often were the brainchildren of one or the other of two classic children's book authors: Beverly Cleary and Judy Blume . (In fact, they're so classic that I almost worry it's cliché to remember them here.) While living in Chicago, I started out with Beverly Cleary and her neighborhood of kids on Klikitat Street. Ramona may have been a "pest" to her sister Beezus —and as a parent, I tend to agre...

Sometimes a restaurant location is simply doomed. No matter the change in management or ownership, no matter the various menu concepts and decor overhauls, no matter how much promotion, nothing makes it in this spot. (There's also the converse: the gold-mine location that will make even the most unworthy kitchen profitable. I'm not sure which scenario is more pitiful.) There's a restaurant I remember from the early 1980s in Los Angeles, and since that time it seems to have disappeared leaving almost no trace, or anyway not in cyberland . Perhaps it was just one in a string of restaurants in just such a bad location. Wanting to verify the name, to see if I really could have remembered it correctly, I did a Google search, and I didn't come up with much: some steak houses around the country (not the right cuisine); a link that looked promising, but once clicked routed me to a very unexpected pornographic site that made me want to pour Purell over my keyboard; finally, one...

Besides singing or watching traffic on the 405—or the other auto entertainment in Los Angeles, spotting outrageous vanity plates (there were never so many in comparatively straitlaced Chicago)—when stuck in the car for long stretches of time, my mom and I also played something we called the Introduction Game. I'm not sure if we invented it ourselves. It was an alphabet-related memory game, a pretend scenario in which we took turns being the host of a party, responsible for introductions as each new guest arrived. I think I loved the game in part because as the fictional guests showed up, I actually imagined the party scene unfolding. I was at an age when I thought that the most grown-up thing I could do was host a dinner party, or a cocktail party (though I had much less idea what that was actually like). It seemed such a glamorous challenge, being responsible for everyone's comfort and good time. Sometimes I imagined a sophisticated gathering of interesting, witty people. Othe...

Until I began to approach the middle school years, I didn't really listen to the radio. I listened to albums (yes, vinyl), on a turntable that was very juvenile in style but got the job done. Mostly I listened to Rodgers and Hammerstein, and to this day I can sing almost all the songs, even the more obscure ones, from their classic Broadway musicals. The radio was on in the car sometimes, but one of my parents set the dial or else I spun aimlessly through the stations, scanning for anything that sounded good despite not really knowing the songs. But, even in the car, the radio took second place to conversation or our own singing. All this changed sometime when I was around eleven, definitely by the time I turned twelve. In fact, I think it might've been some girls at a week-long (two-week?) sleepover camp for the horsey set who turned me on to the "coolness" of radio, the necessity for knowing the most recent hits. They, plus friends at school, were my introduction t...

Somewhere in the later years of elementary school, say the fifth or sixth grade, divorce became an important topic of conversation on the playground during recess and lunch. I had at least one friend whose parents either were divorcing or had already completed the process. Prior to this time, I'm sure the word "divorce" had come up—I mean, I knew what the word meant and knew that some portion of my classmates' families were "broken" (which was often the word that accompanied divorce back in the 1970s and early 1980s, despite being linguistically judgmental and rather inconsiderate of the families in question)—but it had nothing whatsoever to do with my family. I remember sitting outside with my friend, in some more secluded spot on the school grounds, not far from the "bungalows" that served as our classrooms. We sat on a cement ledge, I think, facing a couple of trees, and this I remember, too: we'd eat pomegranates and sunchokes , foods that ...

OK, the zip code was different—90024—but it was as close to Beverly Hills as I'll ever live. I was in the eighth grade, and we were still in L.A., moving from a house in Brentwood to a condominium in Westwood , right near the Mormon Temple (on Eastborne Avenue, off Santa Monica Boulevard). But the condominium was being renovated, and as with just about any renovation, the job was behind schedule. The house closed, our things went into storage somewhere, and we shacked up at an all-suite hotel for what turned out to be some number of months. Of course this was not your average "shack." To me, at the time, it was just a transient hotel—nothing remarkable other than a heated pool and a friendly staff who let me have the run of the place. But in fact, it was the Beverly Comstock Hotel at 10300 Wilshire Boulevard at Comstock , situated between Westwood Village and Century City. (It is now under new ownership, has been made significantly more posh, and is called the Beverl...