Sometimes In Winter

The end to a sunny day. Pink, purple, orange and blue fill the sky as the sun begins to set. Food cooked outdoors. I stand at the ready, long fork in hand. From the gas grill comes the aroma of chicken, filling the air, along with my breath, because it's February and it's darn cold.

Ah yes, the perils of grilling in winter.

The rain had disappeared for a couple of days. The sun shined brightly and it was time to get outside and fix some vitamin D. We shopped, had lunch at a Hawaiian restaurant and absorbed some rays through the car windows. The afternoon moved on, the flame was lit and the chicken placed on the grill. And then I waited.

And waited. And waited some more.

What is an adequate supply of BTUs in the middle of summer was barely able to meet the demands of a Bellingham winter day. Sure, you can get the outside nicely done, but the inside...that's another matter. Have you ever tried to butterfly cut a chicken breast? Not an easy task.

Patience is a virtue, and eventually the chicken was done (to the proper internal temperature, of course). Baked beans, hot bread, baked potatoes, salad and grilled chicken. A little bit of summer on a plate.

No Time at All

Forty-nine. Half a century minus one. Where did the time go? Will Rogers said that "half of our life is spent trying to find something to do with the time we have rushed through life trying to save." Rushing through each day, looking for tomorrow...seems like a poor way to live a life. Rather than look for tomorrow, let's take a peek at yesterday. Think about people who were your current age when you were born. Those who were 49 in 1961 lived through:

• the sinking of the Titanic
• WWI
• the Great Depression
• Albert Einstein presenting the Theory of General Relativity
• Prohibition and the repeal of Prohibition
• the formal creation of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics
• the Scopes Monkey Trial
• The Jazz Singer debuting as first talking film
• the introduction of Mickey Mouse
• construction of the Hoover Dam and the Golden Gate Bridge
• the discovery of Pluto
• WWII
• the first use of Penicillin to successfully to treat a patient
• the creation of the State of Israel
• the Korean War
• Jonas Salk announcing the development of a vaccine for polio
• the opening of Disneyland
• the USSR launching Sputnik to officially begin the Space Race.

Heck, just consider the changes in technology they saw: electricity, telephones, automobiles, airplanes, machine guns and tanks, nuclear bombs...the list goes on. We're no slackers in that department either, as personal computers, cell phones, video players, DVDs, mp3s and color television are just a few of the what seems like a gazillion items to come along in the last 49 years. The minutes and hours in a day are constant and stay the same, and yet there are days when it feels time goes by so quickly and there are not enough hours in the day. I have learned the real issue is not that time went faster, but how the time was spent.

Scenes From An Italian Restaurant

Gnocchi di sugo. It may not roll off the tongue of the average American, but as a second-generation Italian-American, it does off mine.

Plus, it sounds better than potato dumplings and meat sauce.

Gnocchi di sugo is a traditional Northern Italian dish. While pasta and savoury doughs are staples in the south, the main dishes of the north revolve around rice, polenta (corn meal), and gnocchi. Gnocchi may also be eaten as as a first course, or placed in goulash-type casseroles and stews (particularly in north-east regions which border on Austria and Hungary).

The word gnocchi means "lumps", which is a good descriptor for how they look. It has been a traditional Italian pasta type since Roman times. Gnocchi can be made from semolina, ordinary wheat flour, potato, bread crumbs, or similar ingredients. While the potato was not introduced to Europe until the 16th century, it is the main ingredient in my grandmother's recipe.

For me, the true test of an Italian Restaurant is: do they serve gnocchi? Some do, but not many. And if so, how do they stack up against Nonna Jennie's version? That answer is almost always the same: not even close.

A kitchen full of women, piles of potatoes, tables covered with white cloth towels and dusted with flour. Making gnocchi was always a group activity at my Nonna's house, as it is not an easy job. It takes as long to prepare (and consume) as Thanksgiving dinner, so it is not for the faint of heart.

My grandmother taught Cindy how to make the gnocchi, and taught me how to make the sugo. I don't know if it was her plan or not, but neither of us know the exact recipe for the other half. For years at Harry & David, no one person knew the entire recipe for Fruitcake Confection, and the entire recipe was kept in a vault. Cindy and I don't lock away the recipes from each other, but rather we choose to continue the dance my grandmother set in motion: one of us leads the slow ballet of the sugo, the other leads the tarantella of the gnocchi.

Celluloid Heroes

I start the projector. Dust fills my nostrils as the reels move for the first time in who knows how long. I feed the film into the small slot, almost without thinking. It has been decades since I last threaded a projector, but it seems as if it were mere days instead of years. The film goes down and around, past a blinding projector bulb and out again onto a spool freely spinning at the back. I am mesmerized by the smell of the warm projector and the hypnotic clicking of the film as it passes over the sprockets of the movie projector.

Around the room, colored lights flicker and chase each other across the make-shift screen. The film shudders and shakes as uneven splices pass over the sprockets, but still the film moves along, from reel to reel. Images of people I used to know or resemble, showing life from a certain viewpoint with no pretense of objectivity. No synthesized drama, only the reality of the time, simply proudly completely presented.

The people on the screen do act like we did in everyday life. They act is if the camera is there, rather than act to deny its existence, egotistical and haphazard. An essential record of our past, they are among the most authoritative documentation of times gone by, the times in between the drama, where life is simply lived.

I see images from the past. It seems hard to believe that I was ever that young, with no or little idea of what was coming in life. But it’s not the future we’re looking at…it’s the past, warm and fuzzy, good memories and laughter. Maybe not at all as we remember it, but here it is, in celluloid, preserved for more years than I care to remember.

And then it ends. A white fuzzy rectangle of light appears. Dust and cat hair pass over the rectangle or stubbornly cling to the edge of the light. Clack clack clack clack clack clack. The plastic reel, full of memories, continues to roll as the end of the film flaps against it.

May we reflect upon the past with a clarity of vision that only age and wisdom can provide.

Come Saturday Morning

Saturday mornings are, of course, time well spent, regardless of how you use the time. Once upon a time I went places on Saturday with my Dad, and then with my wife Cindy, and then with our daughter Laura. My Dad is 1200 miles away, so I don't get many opportunities to spend a Saturday with him, Cindy prefers to sleep in, and Laura is bit old to go anywhere with me hand-in-hand (she saves that now for her boyfriend, Bryan).

Saturday morning now means time alone, enjoying the sunrise, writing, and often listening to The Vinyl Cafe, an hour-long radio variety show hosted by Stuart McLean. Sometimes the podcast isn't the whole show, but I'll take what I can get. Ironically, I could listen to the entire show on Jefferson Public Radio while we lived in Medford OR, but now that we are a scant 20 miles from Canada, I can't find it on the radio. Fortunately the podcast means I can listen to the show at my leisure, which usually means jammies, coffee and the occasional purring cat.

Stuart's melodic voice can make anyone feel good and listen attentively. I rank it right up there with Jimmy Stewart, Richard Burton, Orson Welles and Garrison Keillor. Each can grab your attention and drop you smack dab in the middle of the story they are telling, making you feel as if you are part of the tale.

In case you haven't figured it out, I am a fan of radio shows. I remember listening to the CBS Radio Mystery Theater on KNX 1070 radio from Los Angeles, it's 50,000 watt clear-channel signal blazing across the airwaves and reaching places like June Lake in the Sierra, where at the end of a day of fishing, we would sit around the campfire and listen to sounds of a creaking door and E.G. Marshall inviting us join in the night's adventure.

A ravenous reader, radio theater helped feed my imagination, adding sounds and voices to the stories wound inside my head. Don't get me wrong, I enjoy a movie as much as anyone. There are times, and I find them more often than before in my life, where I appreciate less visual bombardment and more thought-creating audio. Radio has the power to excite the imagination and involve the audience in the creative process, as we get to decide the design of the creaking door, the color of the speeding bus or the features of the main character.

Time for another cup of coffee.