I drove out to New Town Square today to visit my great-aunt Anne. This is not the first time I’ve written about visiting her, as it is always a bittersweet experience. When I view my time with her from one angle, I can recognize what a lovely and fortunate thing is it that I have this opportunity to really know her. She is the last surviving member of her generation in my family and she is smart, funny, sarcastic, loving, insecure (who thought you could still be dealing with insecurity in your mid-80’s?) and a font of interesting stories.

However, there’s another angle from which I perceive her and this is the one of obligation. Sometimes it’s hard to make the time to drive 45 minutes to see her. She talks constantly of wanting to die and is so angry to have gotten so old and be stuck in a body that is falling apart. For the last year, every time I’ve gone to visit her, she has mentioned how she thinks about killing herself, but she doesn’t really know how to do it, so is still alive. Spending time with her requires a mental shift, a lower gear into which a sandwich takes an hour and a half to eat and walking 12 steps is enough to bring on exhaustion.

Today it was fairly easy to be with her. I called before I headed out, to ask if there was anything I could pick up for her along the way. She requested some Breyer’s Vanilla Fudge Ripple ice cream (and if I wasn’t able to find it than nothing at all, please). I picked up two half gallons, as well as her standard tuna on wheat from Wawa (I am always amazed at how much pleasure that simple sandwich brings her). We sat and talked for a couple of hours, about life and its purpose, about trees and how their beauty can be threatening during a windstorm, about how she wishes she had gotten married and, as always, about how she would like to die.

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The latest episode of Fork You is up (we’re just churning them out these days) and it’s a good one.  In it we blend the traditions of both Judaism and Christianity to bring you a little bit from the Easter table and a bit more from a Seder spread.  The ham comes first, followed by a apple matzoh kugel (think bread pudding) and charoset (finely cubed apple, chopped almonds, a little honey and lots of spices).

I managed to feed most of these leftovers to the itinerant bluegrass band that wandered through here last weekend, but I kept the charoset for myself, eating it for breakfast for several days.  It traditionally a Passover recipe, but it’s one of those things that’s really good all year round.

On Homelessness

by Leana McClellan

She is only five,
my child who stands rooted
watching the homeless man pace.
He shakes fists at the sky
howls curses that jolt her
though she doesn’t understand the words.
His clothes are torn to fringe
like a performer in a lunatic rodeo.

A mini voyeur in Cabbage Patch sweats
she looks for him everyday on our vacation.
He eats, arranges his cardboard boxes,
talks to people, and sleeps on the corner
of 19th and Chestnut Street
in full view of the world and my little girl.

She asks the important questions,
“Where is his mother?”
“Where does he go to the bathroom?”
“What does he do in the winter?”
“Why doesn’t he go home?”
I answer, “I don’t know, I don’t know,
I just don’t know, he doesn’t have one.”

Months later at home I say,
“Looks like it will turn cold tonight.”
At my words she rushes outside.
I watch through the window
as she lies on her back on the pavement
arms at her sides and closes her eyes.
Unmoving as a forgotten doll,
she samples sidewalk sleep.

This poem is my mother’s take on the Cardboard Box Man, who I wrote about yesterday.

The Philadelphia Film Festival has arrived and so I am going to see four movies in the next two days. Oh, how I love it!

1. The Girl With the Weight of the World in Her Hands, Indigo Girls (Nomads, Indians, Saints)
2. Heaven’s Here on Earth, Tracy Chapman (New Beginnings)
3. We Can Talk, The Band (Music from Big Pink)
4. Take Your Carriage Clock and Shove It, Belle and Sebastian (Push Barman to Open Old Wounds)
5. Song for the Asking, Simon and Garfunkel (The Essential Simon & Garfunkel)
6. Fine Fine Fine, Raina Rose (Despite the Crushing Weight of Gravity)
7. Every Waking Moment, Box Set (Live Duo 2)
8. Girlfriend, Benjamin Wagner (Morning Mix)
9. Solitary Man, Johnny Cash (American III: Solitary Man)
10. Oxford Town, Bob Dylan (The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan)

There’s really nothing I don’t like on the set today. I’m particularly fond of #1 and #6 (well, she is my sister, after all).

Have I mentioned that Raina is coming to town to perform? Oh really, I have? Well, they say that people learn best through repetition, so let me say again that she will be performing on Sunday, April 15th at 5 pm at the First Unitarian Church of Philadelphia. Be there or be square.

The Friday Random Ten crew:

Andrea
Autumn
Ben
Brian
Howard
Lauren
Rachel

Last week I wrote about the CVS at the corner of 19th and Chestnut and how I always imagined that that intersection would be the set for the play of my life. Here’s another piece of the story of why I am attached to that spot.

During my childhood, my mom would bring my sister and me to Philadelphia every summer to visit my grandparents. There was a homeless man who lived on the corner, just across the street from CVS, in front of a building that in they present day they are turning into yet another Starbucks.

Homelessness didn’t really exist in our Los Angeles neighborhood. It wasn’t something I was confronted with in my day to day life. So when I did see it, I found it fascinating. I would watch this man, who I named the Cardboard Box Man, because I was so curious about what it was like to live in full view of the whole world.

One summer during the mid eighties, the trash collectors went on strike in Philly and the streets overflowed with garbage. The CBM spent his time fashioning surplus garbage cans out of his boxes, carefully giving them structure with duct tape and lining them with black plastic, to hold the overflow. At the time I was impressed by his generousity and community-mindedness, although now my cynical side wonders if he wasn’t just trying to keep the refuse out of his living room, so to speak.

There was a night when we came home late from a family party in Plymouth Meeting. As we drove by his corner, I saw that he had a friend sitting with him on his stack of flattened cardboard. There were a couple of cups of coffee between them and a few crumbs from some pastry or doughnut. They were talking and laughing. I pointed it out to my mom and she said, “He’s entertaining a friend!”

I watched him for years without ever talking to him or approaching him in any way. When I was 11, my mom and I were browsing at Robin’s Books near closing time and saw him walk into the store and head for the back, where the bathrooms were. I stood there, agog at being so close to this figure from my childhood. My mom asked the clerk about him and he said, “Oh, you mean Robert? Yeah, we let him come in here when we’re closing up to use the bathroom and rest for a bit.” We got some bits and pieces of his story, including the fact that he had once lived a typical life, with a family, home and a job as an engineer.

Sometime soon after that, he disappeared. I’ve always intended to go over to Robin’s and ask about him, but I’m not sure they’d remember him now, since it’s been more than 15 years since I last saw him.

Thinking about the Robert/the CBM always reminds of the ways we touch the lives of others without ever being aware that we are doing it.

Five years ago today, my grandmother died. She was 86 years old and ready to go. She had lived through the deaths of her father, mother, one child, the aunt who raised her, a husband, a brother, a sister, multiple friends, assorted aunts/uncles/cousins and another husband. She was tired. But it was still hard to see her leave.

She got married for the first time when she was 21 to a man who she hardly knew. Thankfully, she picked well. He adored her and did everything he could to take care of her and make her happy. After the birth of their youngest, she went back to college at Temple, becoming the only mother on their suburban Philadelphia block to spend her days away from home. She eventually got her degree and became an English teacher at Ben Franklin High School.

There are still people in my building who remember her. Invariably, when I identify myself as her granddaughter, they say to me, “She was so beautiful and so smart.” And she was. She loved to read and was frequently found with a book in her hand and reading glasses perched on her nose. She wore falsh eyelashes everyday and was always perfectly adorned with gold pins and pearl necklaces.

More than her beauty or her smarts or her ability to survive, I remember her for her love. Love poured from her, bathing her family and friends in affection and appreciation. On the days when good or interesting or exciting things happen to me, I often feel a momentary pang, filled with the missing of her, that I can’t fill her in on the events of my life and bask in the love that would pour forth.

I wrote about her last year on April 4th as well.  If you want the story of the day she died, it is there.

Last Friday night I went to Tria with my friend Georgia, to help her spend a gift certificate that her boyfriend had given her. We had a couple of glasses of amazing wine, shared a salad and panini and talked for several hours straight. It was quite lovely.

The salad was baby arugula, beets, chevre, mellowed red onions and crushed toasted almonds. It was dressed with a balsamic vinagrette that more sweet than tart. I loved it so much that I’ve already blogged about it over at the Metblog. I was dertermined to recreate it at home.

I woke up this morning to the phone ringing. It was the front desk called up to say that maintenance was on their way to install my new dishwasher. This was a very exciting event, except that waking up and then leaping out of bed to get dressed enough to let someone into the apartment left me feeling funky. A little headachy and just not in a place where I could wrap my head around the day. I sat on the couch for a little while reading for class, before deciding that what I really needed to do was go out for a bit. I needed to run to the bank anyway.

Out in the world, I found myself headed in the direction of Sue’s Produce, which is my all-time favorite produce place in Philadelphia. Over the last few years they have slowly created a reputation for carrying a lot of organic, interesting, baby or othewise specialty produce. People come from all over Center City to shop there, so the veggies are always really fresh (and they are really good about marking down the stuff that has passed its prime but is still serviceable). They also have a refrigerated case of local yogurts, eggs, milk, salads and cheeses. It is basically a foodie’s platonic ideal of a produce market.

And there was, staring at me from the shelf. A bag of baby arugula. I did pause before buying, because it was $6 a pound, which is well above what I normally spend on salad greens. I lifted and tested each bag, trying to determine which was the lightest. At the checkout, it rang out at just over half a pound, which wasn’t so crazily expensive that that it would cause my head to explode.

Once I got home, I didn’t end up making exactly the salad I had had a Tria, mostly because I wasn’t up for waiting for beets to cook. But what I did make was delicious nonetheless. On top of a big bowl of arugula, I threw in sliced cucumber, a hard boiled egg (I’m still working my way through the eggs from the last Fork You), some gorganzola and red onion. A toasted nut or some dried cranberries would have been good too, but I just didn’t get that far. Over it all, I poured a little bit of balsamic vinagrette that I made a while back for a podcast that should be airing soon.

The best part? I still have enough baby arugula for at least two more salads. It is a happy thing.

I dropped mention of this into last night’s post, but the latest and greatest episode of Fork You is up.  Just in time for egg dying season, we get a question about how to hard boil eggs and share everything we know about the subject (in Scott’s case, that’s fairly minimal).

Later this week we’ll have another episode for you, this one combining the tastes of Easter and Passover into one anachronistic meal.

I wanted to write something more interesting tonight, but my brain is sapped and so this is all you get.  However, tomorrow night is my family’s Seder (although I seriously doubt if there will be any level of religious service involved) so hopefully there will be tales to tell.

Saturday morning, just after 11 am, my cellphone rang.  It was my sister, calling to say that she and Green Mountain Grass were leaving soon and would be driving up to Philly for the day.  The bus is still busted and is hanging out in Maryland being repaired, but the bass player’s very generous parent is giving them the lend of her SUV for the next 10 or so days so they can make their gigs (with rented trailer in tow).

Since I had no idea that they were even thinking of coming up to Philly, I was sort of surprised, but life flexed and made room for this unexpected treat.  It was so fun to see Raina and finally meet the band about which I had heard so much.  They pulled into town around 2 pm and I worked my magic (if you can call being repeatedly polite and friendly a magical act) to get them a parking spot in my building’s garage (without connections, parking an SUV with a trailer is not an easy thing to do in the city).  The band headed to Rittenhouse Square to do some busking while Raina went with me back to my apartment for a while to get something to eat and raid my closet.  She left full salad with avocado and hard boiled egg (check out the egg-themed Fork You), wearing boots, a dress, a black hooded sweater and a pair of sunglasses that moments before had been mine.

We headed over to the Square some time later and caught the tail end of their set.  They pulled Raina up to do one song, and I was taken aback by the transformation she undergoes when she’s on stage, even if that stage is nothing more than a chunk of the sidewalk that runs past Rittenhouse Square.  The occasionally-irritating sister I grew up with disappears and a confident, talented performer emerges.  No matter how many times I observe it, I am always slightly awed.

I parted ways with Raina and the bluegrass band a little before 6 pm, when the guy I’m dating and I headed to get some food.  We did see them briefly before they left town, though.  They reappeared at my apartment around 11:45 pm, to use the bathroom, sober up slightly and pick over the contents of my kitchen like locusts.  They did a great job of eating the remaining 4 pounds of ham I had left over from a Fork You filming on Thursday night (seriously, until they arrived, I didn’t know what I was going to do with that much ham.  Most of the time I don’t really even eat ham).  They also ate just about all the bread in the fridge, and took with them a popped bag of microwave popcorn and the majority of a large bag of peanut M&Ms.

Raina is going to be popping in and out of the blog a whole lot over the next couple of weeks as in about ten days she’s going to arrive and demand (well, I did tell her she could borrow it) the keys to my car so that she can get to some gigs.  She’s going to be in Philly for four days (April 15-18) and then she’s taking off in my green Subaru wagon for another round of gigging up and down the east coast.  Raina brings with her chaos, mild inconvenience and so, so much fun.  I can’t wait.