365 Memories

Animal crackers, now red licorice. Not sure why the return to sweet treats from childhood—must be some escapist compulsions (which I tend to get whenever I have to pay bills)—but sometimes it's better to not ask why and to just enjoy, even if only in a bout of nostalgia. In a prior post, I wrote about black licorice and its unlikely pairing with wasabi . Today, I remember a love of red licorice. It's nothing I'd eat now, because it generally tastes much more artificial to me, or else (depending on the brand) just sweeter—none of the spice I crave in my sweets today. But I used to eat it often. Frequently in the form of Twizzlers candy, and then most often at the movies with my parents. We'd get popcorn, of course, and sometimes Goobers or Raisinettes , but I often loved the licorice twists, the cherry taste of them, the texture of tough and chewy, and the way the outer spiral pattern would form what looked like a star pattern if you looked from the bitten-off end of...

It's hot and very, very humid. I am fifteen and standing with my mother outside at the Department of Motor Vehicles in Miami, Florida. Miami, fabulous as it might be in the dead of winter, is not where you want to be in June, July, and August. And if you do find yourself there in the summertime, for heaven's sake, stay inside with the air conditioning where it's possible to breathe. If you do have to go outside—because who am I kidding? you have to go out eventually—then the next best strategy is to stay away from the DMV . But when you're fifteen, all you want is that most cherished badge of dawning independence: a driver's permit. You can't drive alone yet, but the day is coming, and it's imperative to get that permit so that in another year, you'll be ready for the real thing (or not, but you'll be behind the wheel anyway; clear the sidewalks!). For weeks I had been studying for the written test: questions from the obvious (What does a red octagon...

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...

As this first week of June winds down, so does the graduation season. Many commencement ceremonies have taken place already in the city, releasing hoards of job seekers and setting adrift the "what next?" crowd. It's an exciting time, a milestone—one you want to record for posterity. And it's pretty safe to say that when you record it, you want to do so without background interference. What follows is a significant confession. Consider it also an apology to countless high school graduates from the year of, I think, 1985. We don't know what came over us; we just couldn't help ourselves. I remember that it started as an accident. My mother and I were in New York City, at Lincoln Center. I don't think we'd seen any performances—perhaps we'd come from the library branch there that focuses on the performing arts—but anyway we were there around lunchtime. The weather was lovely, perfect for sitting in the seasonal cafe that in those days was always set u...

Although St. Louis was not a particularly good fit for me—I needed to be where the streets downtown weren't deserted after 5:00 PM, where there were throngs of people who moved quickly and jaywalked against the light, where nobody asked where I'd gone to high school as if it made a difference once you were out of college—still, as I've said in earlier posts, I had the good fortune to meet and work with some fabulous people while I was there. People with great energy and creativity, supervisors who mentored me with kindness and generosity. And, craving the weird, it's not as if some oddball things didn't happen there, too. Let me ask: when was the last time you saw a group of skydiving Elvis impersonators, complete with Vegas-style jumpsuits (jeweled, wide-collared, bell-bottomed) and black pompadour wigs, parachute into a canyon of glass-walled, high-rise commercial buildings? Sixteen years ago this week, the marketing agency where I worked was a hive of activity, ...

One thing I have always known and will always remember about my mother is that she is a voracious reader. I see her now in my mind's eye, sitting at my parents' long dining room table, a stack of newspapers and magazines piled up to one side. Here are the publications I remember her reading over the years, most of them simultaneously: the New York Times , the Wall Street Journal , the New York Post , USA Today , the New Yorker , People ,  Time , Money ,  Newsweek ,  BusinessWeek , Inc ., and the  Economist , along with assorted trade magazines and investment newsletters. I'm not sure I ever saw her flipping idly through, say, Vogue or Cosmo —sometimes Vanity Fair , for Annie Liebowitz's photos—but occasionally she did pull a copy of the National Enquirer from the rack in supermarket checkout line, add it to our groceries, and absorb its sordid content in the privacy of our home. This, mind you, is a list of just the periodicals—and I know I am missing some important ...

Imagine you have just taught a writing workshop to a group of a dozen women (more or less) at the YWCA in Greenwich, Connecticut. It's probably around 8:30 at night, maybe closer to 9:00, and you leave the classroom with a few others who've stayed behind to talk to you about the evening's work. You head out through the building's back doors, into the cool spring air. You say good night and find your car in the spacious parking lot. It's dark already at this time of year, though the days are lengthening at last. You get into the driver's seat, lock the car doors out of street-smart habit, and sit for a moment to write some notes on the workshop before you forget. The others have left by the time you turn the key in the ignition. You slowly roll the width of the building toward Putnam Avenue, the main artery connecting this privileged town to its neighbors: on one side, a sub-community of means, and on the other, a poor cousin just past the New York State border. ...

When my family lived in Southport , Connecticut, we would go on occasion to an Indian restaurant in Fairfield . I can still see in my mind's eye the dark green awning with white lettering that spelled . . . something. Or maybe I'm confusing the awning with a different Indian place; that's possible. Anyway, I can't remember the name of the restaurant, though probably my parents do. I'll have to ask them. I'm pretty sure that this was the only Indian cuisine available in Fairfield at that particular time (late 1980s), and it was lucky for us that the food was good. Quite good. The people who owned the restaurant were nice, too; the kind of people you wish to succeed. I have the feeling that the restaurant closed eventually, though—after my parents had already moved away and Fairfield in general turned into a consignment store haven. At the restaurant, we always ordered the same dishes, the ubiquitous items that have assimilated best into the American "ethni...

(a farce in three acts, with epilogue) It's a rainy Monday in New York, and my head's in a foggy, transitional space. Having flown back from Toronto on Friday and having passed the weekend in, well, weekend activities, today's the first day of the back-to-work routine. Maybe, then, what with the rain and travel and a dose of escapism on my mind (which always comes when I'm processing monthly bills), it makes sense that the memory arising now is a legendary—and very watery—family story from our New York/Pan Am days. Go back in time to the mid-1980s. I can't get a better fix on the year than to say it was probably in the 1984-85 range. There's been some dispute as to whether, at the time of this story, we were living in a New York apartment (a company owned one-bedroom at Museum Towers on West 53rd Street) or whether our farcical round-trip airport excursion was made from a NYC hotel (which I think would have been the InterContinental ). In any event, my parents a...

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...

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...

It being Friday the 13 th tonight, I have been doing some thinking about "super" things--superstitions and the supernatural in particular. And somehow, this track of thought has led me back to the "tween" days of BFFs (though back then, of course, no one used these terms); to those goofy, giggly, just-starting-to-cop-an-attitude years, when it suddenly became clear that friends were infinitely more important than family. Back then, the most coveted of all invitations for a Friday night was the slumber party. If it was a birthday party, too, so much the better. We would have pizza and cake; we'd strain for the best view of the birthday girl opening presents, making our mental notes (who gave the coolest gift?); we'd spend long moments haggling over where our sleeping bags would go, who'd sleep next to whom (this would invariably provoke friendly accusations of drooling, snoring, talking in your sleep, and so forth); there would be a pillow fight, a game...

When we wanted to get out of Los Angeles on a last-minute weekend trip, we would occasionally go to the desert—to Palm Springs, to Desert Hot Springs. It was more of the same, only much more of it: more sun, more hours by the pool, many more palm trees, drier climate. The only thing there was less of, thankfully, was the city's smog (which you forgot about while living in it on a daily basis, but that you saw unmistakably from the sky if you were flying into LAX on the way home from someplace else). We would take the car, because we were always in our car out there, it's unavoidable, and we'd drive east from L.A. on Interstate 10—excuse me, "on the 10." I don't know which season it was, though probably it was not summer. In my experience, the seasons were always confounded in Southern California due to the weather, which didn't qualify as weather at all as far as I was concerned. After having lived in Michigan, Connecticut, New York, and Chicago, it was ha...

When I was five, we were living in Chicago. I went to a kindergarten called Camelot, though I do not particularly remember this as a fairy tale place. Truthfully, I don't remember much about it at all. Only three things: One was that my teacher's name was Miss Kathy. The second thing was that I was not allowed to bring a lunch from home (which pretty much wrecked me, since I was a very picky eater at that age, and "sloppy joe" was definitely not in my culinary repertoire) and the exit from the cafeteria was barred by "lunch monitors," whose job it was to inspect the trays you were returning when the mealtime was over. I don't recall anyone ever forcing me to turn around, sit back down, and eat whatever had displeased me—I don't recall what they actually did about the kids who hadn't eaten whatever the food of the day happened to be—but I do remember dreading that moment of egress, when I could see up the steps leading to freedom outside, but had ...

I didn't drink coffee in high school, nor did I drink soda—morning joe straight through until noon, Diet Coke the rest of the day were the fuel of my mid-twenties. But I do remember a caffeine buzz in teen years nonetheless, which took the form of a product called Vivarin, which I'm pretty sure came in a yellow box (the packaging was subsequently given a face-lift) and was sold in drug stores along with a competing brand, NoDoz. Marketing for this OTC stimulant was the key to its true pronunciation: "Revive with Vivarin" . . . but for some reason, I insisted on pronouncing "Viv-" as though it rhymed with "give," a short i sound. Now that I think of it, I'm not sure if the box was yellow, or if it was just the tablets themselves; maybe both. Anyway, the pills tasted horrible, chalky and bitter. I swilled them down with orange juice and cereal for dinner once the scheduled day was done, at least once in a quantity that was close to overdose stren...

Ireland, 1998. It had been three years since my previous visit to the Emerald Isle. Having crossed the Atlantic, and having endured an additional five hours of northbound transport courtesy of Bus Eireann , the fatigue of travel caught up with me at last in Sligo , drugging me to sleep in my hotel on Douglas Hyde Bridge at 6:00 PM. When I awoke, the light was partial, a hint of sun in an overcast sky—a typical morning; it fit with my memories of Irish weather. I looked at my watch: 8:00. When was the last time I'd slept for fourteen hours? It suited my exhaustion. I still felt groggy, but I got up, showered, changed my clothes. I took my morning medication (daily dose of Synthroid , plus a multivitamin) and headed to the lobby, asking at the reception desk what time breakfast was served. They told me from 8:00 to 10:00. As I rounded a turn that led to the restaurant, I glanced out the glass front doors. The streetlights were still on, and the sidewalks quite populated. The streetli...

On Thursdays in first or second grade, maybe both—every Thursday, mind you—I donned an olive green calico print dress and asked for my hair to be parted down the middle and braided in two long, low pigtails. There's nothing remarkable about this, but let's not forget the finishing touch: I insisted that my mom use her brown eyeliner to pencil a sprinkling of "freckles" on my cheeks. They looked real enough to me, though I'm sure I was the only one who thought so. What was I playing at? Well . . . Every Thursday evening, beginning on September 11, 1974 (that date now seems to strike hard at the heart of what an innocent life I led then!), the one-hour television drama series  Little House on the Prairie  aired on NBC. My parents were strict about limiting television exposure (hours and content), but this was a show with strong values and good topics for discussion, so we watched it together every week. The morning dress-up routine was just one way to build anticipa...

I don't know who told me this, or why I believed it. I was in high school, and someone said that if you took a regular nickel and pounded around the rim of it long enough, the center would fall out and you would have made a ring. I don't know if the pounding was supposed to be done with a metal spoon, or if that was my own odd touch, but sure enough, I started carrying around a nickel and a metal spoon, pilfered from the school cafeteria; I had them with me everywhere. I would tap, tap, tap on the edge of the nickel whenever I had a spare moment. Did it annoy the people around me? If it did, no one said so. I remember thinking that I was probably falling for some stupid trick, and yet . . . it's true that the rim of the nickel started getting beautifully smooth and nicely raised, definitely a ring in the making. I don't know how long I carried around the nickel and the spoon, and who knows how many taps I must've given it (one good thing: keeping both hands busy me...