A DREAM DETOURED

This house on my street has always reminded me of Cape Cod. Even after I actually went to Cape Cod and didn't see a single house like it, it still reminds me of Cape Cod. Maybe it's the way it looks sort of sand-scoured, sort of sea-touched. Maybe it's the saltbox appearance from the front. Or the way it sits on its dunelike hill against the porcelain sky, suggesting blue waves beyond. Maybe it's because no one seems to live there, like its fair-weather occupants have all fled inland for the winter. Or maybe it's the forlorn bar next to it, in a 19th-century stone house, that inspires the feel of a shabby beachtown at the end of the season. Or maybe it's my imagination.

Whatever it is, as I was walking past it, I got a terrible craving for clam chowder.

And a terrible yearning to own the house, to restore it to some imagined glory, to brace it against November's gales, to scrub it from stem to stern, to make its windows sparkle, to throw some dazzling white paint on the clapboards and pickets, and to stock it with firewood and wool blankets and kerosene lamps.

Alas, the only yearning I could actually satisfy was for the chowder — one more fantasy playing itself out in food, one more lofty craving of the mind reduced to a lowly craving of the stomach.

So I searched for a recipe online, one that would be good for Kansas (i.e., would not require fresh clams, which I assumed you couldn't even get here — but I was wrong about that), and I found this:

The Cliff House Clam Chowder from The Cliff House in Ogunquit, Maine

On the menu since 1872.

Serves six.

INGREDIENTS:
1 slice hickory-smoked bacon, minced
1/2 teaspoon butter
1 cup onion, minced
1 medium garlic clove, minced
1 teaspoon The Cliff House Spice Blend (see below)
1 tablespoon all-purpose flour
1 can clams (6-1/2 ounces)
1 cup bottled clam juice
1-1/2 cups Half and Half
1/4 teaspoon white pepper
2 medium potatoes, boiled, peeled and diced

PREPARATION:
To Create The Cliff House Spice Blend, blend 4 tsps oregano, 4 tsps dried parsley, 2 tsps marjoram, 2 tsps dill, 4 tsps thyme, 4 tsps basil, 1 tsp sage, 4 tsps rosemary, 2 tsps tarragon, 1 tablespoon all-purpose flour, crushing in a mortar if possible.
Store in a resealable plastic bag to refrigerate.

In a heavy-bottomed, 4-pint soup kettle, sauté bacon, butter, onion, garlic and The Cliff House Spice Blend over low heat. Do not allow to brown. Drain clams and set aside, reserving the juice. Slowly stir the flour and clam juices in the sauté mixture. Bring to a boil; reduce heat. Add Half and Half and simmer 20 minutes. Add white pepper, potatoes and clams. Heat to serving temperature. Do not allow to boil, as this toughens the clams. Serve at once with crackers and warm cornbread.

I was a little dubious about a recipe from Maine that called for canned clams. What gives? And when I saw that you could actually buy fresh Littleneck clams here, $6.99 a pound at the co-op, $5.99 a pound at Hy-Vee, I entertained making it from scratch. The from-scratch recipe I came up with called for white wine, which intrigued me, and EIGHT POUNDS of fresh Cherrystone clams. That's a lot of clams — literally and figuratively, $48 or $56 depending on where you shop. Not that I deny myself little luxuries here and there, but that seemed sort of extravagant for a meal for one to be eaten in my sweatpants on my couch while watching reruns of "Weeds." It would be like buying a really fancy hooker for the five-minute commute home. So I decided I'd save the fresh-clam experience for entertaining; it will be more fun to boil the little buggers and pry them from the shell and strain New England's sand from the nectar in the company of Kansas friends — fellow chowder virgins, as it were.

So canned clams it was. I bought two large cans of whole baby clams and two smaller cans of chopped clams because I couldn't decide which ones to use. I ended up using the chopped clams because the can size — 6-1/2 oz. — was what the recipe called for. Dumb reason, I know, especially because I ended up defying the recipe (a technique I learned from Christy) and using both 6-1/2 oz. cans. It just didn't seem clammy enough with one, and it would bug me to have three cans of clams just sitting in my pantry. Two, yes. But three would seem like hoarding.

Some other modifications to the recipe: I used vegetarian bacon (go ahead, laugh), more clam juice than it called for (on account of opening that extra can of clams), and a half cup more Half and Half than it called for (on account of not wanting that leftover half cup from the pint to just go bad in my refrigerator). The result of these liquid additions is that my chowder was probably thinner than it should have been. The chowder I ate in New England was so thick you could turn your spoon upside down and have hardly a drop fall off.

Here is a picture of my chowder. It was pretty hardy, despite the broth being a little thin, and it had a very nice flavor, which I attribute to my doubling the amount of herbs it called for. One teaspoon! Please. What do you take me for? I like a lot of herbs. Especially after journeying to the bulk spice store and buying nine different herbs and mixing up the famous spice blend, I wasn't about to call it good at one tiny teaspoon. (By the way, the color of dried dill is breathtaking ... I mean, I use it fairly regularly in egg salads and broiled fish and such, and it always takes me by surprise. It is utterly GREEN. It is Ireland green. You think the parsley is green, and the tarragon, then you open the dill, and it stops your heart.) So mixing up the herbs was probably the most fun part of this recipe, because of the colors and smells, and also because you can pretend you're a drug dealer putting together a fabulous bag of ganja. I should have departed from the recipe and wrapped the herbs in a garni. I think the chowder would be more beautiful with less debris floating in it. I also used black pepper instead of white pepper because I prefer its taste.

The canned clams were a little too chewy — I'm willing to give the fresh ones a try — but, I have to say, my first chowder satisfied my craving quite nicely, although I'm still hungry for that fabulous house.

WET TOMATOES

Something just in from Rick, who has been a bit scarce lately:

With the relentless efforts of all the big chain stores and franchises, it is easy to feel that there is no point in going anywhere in this country because it is just going to look and taste like where you already are. The yummy photos in KC’s post about New England show that this is still a long ways from being true and, we can hope, always will be. I have no experience of New England outside of an airport that had been rendered homogenous by corporate dictates. So I’ll offer up instead a few more observations from the left end of our nation, which should at least provide some contrast.

To watch football games, my brother and I always go to the same sports bar. It is not the only one in town or even the nearest, but it is the biggest. And since its alter ego is a dance hall, the seating is all in the center of an open room with the walls covered in big screen TVs. This makes it easy to watch all the games at the same time. There are not too many Chiefs fans around here, but one guy is a regular. He used to live in the KC area, but has been out here for some time. Recently he finally finished his doctorate in statistics. So during Kansas City’s last woeful defeat, we sat and talked math. When he learned that my other stint in grad school was in philosophy, we talked political theory, too. Perhaps this was the only conversation in that bar that featured both abstract algebra and Rawls’ theory of justice. But it is a college town, so perhaps not.

It was a typically warm day and the doors were open. After watching people try to shoo the bugs off their food, our statistician announced that Davis has three seasons. The year starts with the wet season. This is true enough, but slightly misleading. January, and to a lesser extent February, features frequent low clouds and lots of fog in from the Bay and the river delta. It is more likely to drizzle than to really rain. The streets might be continuously wet for more than a week with all of a half inch total precipitation. So I would call it the damp season. And chilly. It will drop below freezing once a decade or so, but lows in the upper 30s are surprisingly common. The rain is all finished by April and we start to move into our next season, the hot season. This one is exactly right. For month after month, we have hot and usually calm days. Clouds are very rare and it never rains. My brother’s office sometimes has a pool to wager on the date of the first measurable precipitation. At least the air is quite dry, and since we are close to the delta, there is often a cool evening breeze. When the clouds finally start coming back and the temperatures drop a bit, we enter our third season: the fly season. Again, the term is apt as all the people in the bar with food could tell you. The reason for the flies is clear enough. All of your canned tomatoes and paste and juice, and all of your spaghetti and pizza sauce and catsup, and probably salsa, too, come from here. There are miles of tomato fields with canneries scattered about. And between field and cannery the trucks go back and forth. They all look alike: semi-tractors pulling two long flatbeds with open-topped hoppers that are dumped by flipping them on their sides. A friend once drove a truck for a season. She said that the company paid a thousand-dollar bonus if you drove the whole season without causing more than a thousand dollars of damage. Few drivers got their bonus. For whatever bizarre reason, the drivers had to do 70 or more hour weeks, and if you ever backed your truck into anything at all, you would cause more than a thousand dollars damage to the truck, what you hit, or probably both.

The tomatoes go to whichever cannery is ready for them or offering the highest price that day, so the trucks crisscross the region. They are piled as high as they can be, and every time the truck hits a bump, comes to a stop, or goes around a corner, tomatoes bounce out. At every rural intersection the corners have little piles of tomatoes. And since the trucks drive right through Sacramento on the interstate in their endless quest for the best deal, the highway has bright orange smears where the traffic squishes the tomatoes to mush. We think of the Midwest as the agricultural part of the country. But in the capital city of California, suburbanites might wash the farm off their car fenders every night.

I was thinking of another local distinction of late. Everybody knows that parts of California are at risk from earthquakes and wildfires and the mudslides that sometimes follow the fires. But after New Orleans, the city at most risk of massive damage from flooding is Sacramento. The city was founded at the confluence of the Sacramento and American rivers. Its early days saw frequent and large floods followed by spells of levee building. The construction was a hodgepodge of efforts that has now spanned more than a century. Some of the levees are as bad as you would expect 100-year-old levees to be. I just watched a TV program that is being passed around on DVD about a potential flood in the city. The scenario was that a large warm winter storm tracked in across the south coast of California and up into the mountains northeast of here. These storms, dubbed Pineapple Expresses, can be big, stable and long lasting. The massive flooding in 1997 that closed many highways for weeks was from such a storm. A Pineapple Express drops lots of rain over a week or two. Even worse, it is warm so the rain falling in the mountains melts snow and creates more runoff. In the TV show, the storm breached the levees in three places around the city. One of these was less than a mile from where a friend lives. This guy is a year or two from paying off his mortgage, after which he plans on buying the rest of his pension and retiring early. His house is small, but worth about a half million. He is far enough from the breach that his house wouldn’t be flattened with the wave of mud from the collapsing levee. But he is far too close to be able to evacuate. He would have about enough time to get his daughter and cat up on the roof to await rescue like all those people in New Orleans did.

After that, I think the similarities to New Orleans might end. Sacramento is a wealthy city in a wealthy state. California has a huge contingent in the U.S. House. Since Sacramento doesn’t meet the minimum standards of flood protection for the private system of insurance to work, the federal government is on the hook for insurance. So I’m sure that my friend will get rescued from his roof. And with the clout of this state, I’m sure he and his neighbors — with their equally or even more expensive houses — will get bailed out. And you, my friends, will do the bailing.

NEW ENGLAND

I just spent five days in New England with my best friend. We drove a lot and walked a lot and ate a lot and saw a lot.

We drove north from Boston to Bar Harbor, Maine, then south again through Portland all the way to the tip of Cape Cod and back up to Boston. We walked every day until our legs hurt. We ate seafood until we couldn't stand it (and now I am craving clams).

We planned a few cool things, like the Brownstone college club we lodged in a block from Boston's magnificent Public Garden, and just stumbled upon many others, like the zany "Women's Week" in Provincetown, Cape Cod (above).

We made a few mistakes, like getting sucked into the tourist hell of Salem and Plymouth, but we also lucked out in getting the last room at the best inn on Cape Cod and in discovering that the National Seashore was a million times more beautiful than our guidebook had suggested.

I haven't really digested the trip yet. I've been too stuck on negative feelings about going back to work! But here are a few pictures from our adventure. And I'd really love to hear about other people's experiences in New England. We only really saw Maine and Massachusetts. Vermont, New Hampshire, Connecticut and Rhode Island will have to wait for another autumn.

This is a decaying pier on the shore of Provincetown, Mass., where the Pilgrims first landed.



This is Marconi Beach on the National Seashore in Cape Cod, a federally protected area that is off limits to development.



The next three photos are also from the National Seashore. Cape Cod took my breath away. We walked for more than an hour on this stretch of beach, watching surfers and dogs and shifting dunes.







This is the Boston Public Library, the first public collection in the U.S. It was amazing: carved wood and marble and murals by John Singer Sargent. In this courtyard, Erin saw some dude reading a book and eating dog food by the handful. Boston has a very literate homeless population.



Here is an afternoon snack we had at the Harvest restaurant near Harvard Square in Cambridge. Our guidebook said it was a favorite of Harvard professors, and, sure enough, we were seated next to two codgers with elbow patches who were saying decidedly high-brow things about the genocide in Darfur and Paris in the 1940s.



This is Acadia National Park. Now I know what Anne Sexton meant when she wrote in "The Lost Ingredient" about "some slight need for Maine's coast." We played on the granite outcroppings like little kids.









This is the view from our hotel room in Cape Elizabeth, Maine, just south of Portland, a very lively, old city made of brick and stone. We got up at the crack of dawn to take a walk on the beach ... and got lost on the way back to the hotel.

TO CEASE TO FEEL RESENTMENT

I saw this church sign on the way to the grocery store. This conservative, hate-mongering house of worship has some dude who, every few days, rearranges the marquee letters on a cheap plastic sign to spell something that passes for clever and uplifting among the congregation. Like, in the dog days of summer, it will say something like "Feeling the heat? Hell is infinitely hotter."

Wit and threat are indistinguishable among fundamentalists, I've found.

Several churches around town have these signs: "No one luvs U like the Lord," etc. They're a combination of cheap sentiment, cliches and Internet shorthand. It's tempting to pull up beside one and append the letters LOL.

This particular church was a ringleader in adding an amendment to our state constitution that for the first time in history DENIED a civil right to a specific group of people — gays — in a public document whose only purpose is to GIVE rights. Gay marriage was already illegal by statute, of course, but that wasn't enough to "protect" heterosexual marriage. I guess next on the agenda will be amending the Ten Commandments to read "Thou shalt not lie with someone whose genitals look like yours."

Oh well. I digress. The gay issue is not the point. (Although, let me say this: I was just in Massachusetts for several days — stay tuned for travel pics — and I did not see any evidence that civilization had begun to crumble since the advent of gay marriage in the Bay State. Of course, three days does not provide a complete picture; to be fair, there could be scads of heterosexual couples whose marriages are crashing and burning directly as a result of gays being allowed to wed, but I did not personally witness that.)

Anyway, the sign at this church on the way to the grocery store read: "Forgive others as quickly as you forgive yourself."

And my first thought was not the usual "Oh, fuck you, you witless hypocrite." No. For once, I found the sign engaging. I even drove around the block to make sure I read it right. Maybe it really said "Forgive others only if their genitals do not look like yours." But no. It really said, "Forgive others as quickly as you forgive yourself."

And my next thought was, "But at that rate, I'd never forgive ANYONE!"

Then I started to panic. What is he trying to say? Is this just some spin on the "Do unto others" rule? Or is it more complex? What if you forgave yourself very quickly and others just as quickly? Like, what if you coveted your neighbor's wife one minute and forgave yourself the very next, then just as quickly you forgave your neighbor for coveting her neighbor's wife? Would that instant forgiveness really be a good foundation for a Christian community? Wouldn't that really promote a kind of laissez-faire attitude that would undermine our whole Judeo-Christian moral infrastructure? I mean, doesn't bearing a grudge have a legitimate place in civil society?

And flip the coin. What if everyone were like me and never forgave themselves anything? Then no one would ever forgive anyone else either. That can't be very Christian. I mean, I'm no expert, but it seems like mercy is pretty high up on the list of New Testament virtues. I can always forgive others more quickly than myself, but that would be disobeying the sign. Or is forgiving "more quickly" just as good as forgiving "as quickly"? Or does "more quickly" have an overtone of pride or some other deadly sin?

[A total aside: The other day, I heard an Ani DiFranco lyric where she compared music to mercy: "It gives what it is and has nothing to prove." That knocked my socks off. That is in a song that begins: "up up up up up up/points the spire of the steeple/but god's work isn't done by god/it's done by people."]

Anyway, does anyone have any insight on this forgiveness sign? Is there some biblical anecdote behind it? Is there a better rule? A better sign?

COMPARATIVELY LITTLE AIR

Elsewhere on this blog, the band WHAM! came in for some criticism. But, you know, I think WHAM! is only half bad. The Andrew Ridgeley half, to be specific.

(I had to look up that dude's name because I only remembered him as the one no one remembered.)

Start rolling your eyes, Rick, but golly gee, there is something about George Michael.

Sure, WHAM!'s breakthrough song, "Wake Me Up Before You Go Go," needed another go go through the typewriter, but you could see hints of genius:

You put the boom-boom into my heart
You send my soul sky high when your lovin' starts
Jitterbug into my brain
Goes a bang-bang-bang 'til my feet do the same

How can you listen to a grown man sing that and not feel something very primal, something very, I don't know, boom-boom in your brain?

And later in the song, when he says:

You take the grey skies out of my way
You make the sun shine brighter than Doris Day

How did they actually say that out loud and have millions of girls believe they were heterosexual?

How? Genius. That's how.

Anyway, the song speaks for itself. But I was reading today that George Michael got the idea for it when Andrew left him a note in their hotel room that said — of all things — "George: Wake me up before you go go."

Don't you love when someone takes something retarded off a cocktail napkin and parlays it into an international sensation?
That sort of thing impresses my socks off. I mean, you try it. Take some dumb note someone left you and try making millions and millions of dollars off it. It's not as easy at it looks. If you really put yourself into it, you might start a new literary movement, but global fame, I daresay, you'd find elusive.

So WHAM! is not half bad in my book.

I was at Borders today, and I bought my first George Michael CD. I was actually looking at the M's for Joni Mitchell. I bought "Blue" for Beth when we first started dating. And she took it with her when we stopped dating. I wanted to hear it again. Then I spotted George Michael's "Faith" next to it, and for some reason I had to have it.

I had to.

It's one of those albums that when it was popular you were ashamed to like it. You made fun of it for being poppy, light weight. If it came on the radio when someone was with you, you'd turn the station. If it came on when you were alone, you'd turn up the volume.

You know what I'm talking about.

Anyway, lyrics that once struck me as shallow now strike me as rather profound in their transparency, such as, from the title track "Faith":

Well I guess it would be nice
If I could touch your body
I know not everybody
Has got a body like you

And this, from the plainly titled "I Want Your Sex":

Sex is something that we should do
Sex is something for me and you

Gosh. That is how Mr. Rogers might try to seduce someone. Sex is something that we should do! And I kept listening to it. What does it mean? It means what it says. But what does it MEAN that it can be said so simply?

I thought of how rap music says the same thing, but it's more complicated; it's tinged with machismo and racism and politics and mood and meter. It's not just what it appears to be.

One of the definitions of "shallow" in my dictionary is "displacing comparatively little air," as in shallow breathing, and that's how I like to think of George Michael. Very little air is displaced, both in what he says and in how long you have to spend thinking about it. I'm not touting that as an exclusive artistic end, but there's something to be said for it, even if it's something that displaces comparatively little air.

Another way I was thinking about this is that George Michael puts the happy back in gay.

One song on this album, though, I need help with, because I can't believe it means what it says, and I don't even really know what it says.

That's all I wanted
Something special, something sacred
In your eyes
For just one moment
To be bold and naked
At your side

I will be your father figure
Put your tiny hand in mine
I will be your preacher teacher
Anything you have in mind
I will be your father figure
I have had enough of crime
I will be the one who loves you
Until the end of time

I thought it was sort of a gay anthem, something like: Your own dad, your natural protector, doesn't love you because you're gay, so I'll be your father figure and watch out for you; I'll love you until the end of time, just like your parent should.

But I don't think that was the popular reception of this song, and I think there's a lot more there. Anyone want to weigh in?