EDDIE IN MEXICO

JIM, YOU ARE NOT THE ONLY HERBERT TO GO TO MEXICO

boobs and byes

We are leaving tomorrow night for Ireland... I can't wait to share all my pictures when I return, and hopefully lots of great stories.

I had to make one last post though, to tell you to stare at the boob!

Click the above link to head to the League of Maternal Justice site and find out how you can support a woman's right to breastfeed. And not just that, but breastfeed where ever her baby needs to eat. And to tell Facebook that they suck for allowing pro-ana (as in Pro-Anorexia) sites, half-clothed teens, and pedophiles.... but deleting womens' pictures of them breastfeeding their children. Seems like some priorities are skewed there.

In any case, click the boob!

Ciao!!

wedding pictures

All pictures can be viewed here, at a lower quality... but here are some of my favs (click pictures to see full sized).

Sorry these are so blurry... they are legible if you make them big... the lighting was perfect for setting the mood, but not so great for capturing wording! :-)

Taekwon-do Tourney

On Saturday, Ethan participated in his first regional TKD tournament since he earned his black belt. He is a first degree black belt. Here is a pic of him doing a black belt pattern for which he received second place in his division.
His first sparring bout was with a 4th degree national champion! This champion has had 3 times more experience than Ethan. (gulp) Although he did not win, he did defend himself well and got in an offensive shot or two. His next sparring bout was with a second degree black belt. By that time, he was fired up - having lived through his first match - and creamed the guy! All in all, it was a good day.

Negroes

I wish I could remember the precise date when I and everybody else I knew stopped using the word Negro. I am pretty sure it was after Ted and I graduated from high school in 1966, though it’s hard to know for sure because there were no Negroes in Forty Fort, Pennsylvania. It’s hard now to even reconstruct for myself that world where the word Negro was commonly used.

I didn’t really meet my first Negro until 1961, when I started attending Neptune Junior High School in Ocean Grove, New Jersey. We lived in Shark River Hills and before that in Hamilton Gardens, and there were no Negroes in either neighborhood. All neighborhoods were racially segregated back then. It was illegal, but the neighborhoods were red-lined, which meant that whites simply did not sell their houses to Negroes. Neptune Township was divided
right down the center by Route 33, and that was the de facto racial boundary. Negroes lived on Ridge Avenue and in Whitesville, which we only knew about because Dad was the principal there. Whitesville Elementary School had one white student, Don Erwin, who went to school there because his family was very poor.

I’m sure Dad took that job because becoming a principal of any school was a good career opportunity for a young phys ed teacher, but I think he was afraid of Negroes. I can’t recall him ever saying anything overtly racist, but I think he was struggling to overcome the deep-seated prejudices he had grown up with. He actually made a point of saying how smart and kind Negroes were, but it’s almost like he said it too often and in a way that made you think he was constantly surprised by this fact. I remember Dad telling me once that Negroes got sunburned just like us. He found this interesting, and I think amusing.

Dad’s favorite Negro was Ernest Jones. Ernest Jones was smart and successful. He was a physicist. I believe he worked at Camp Evans, over in Wall Township. He had a daughter our age, Geneva Jones, who we heard about long before actually meeting her. We heard that she was beautiful and light-skinned and very smart, and all of this turned out to be true. But we knew about her mostly because Ernest and his wife had broken the real estate red-lining barrier. They lived in The Gables, which was on the other side of Route 33 but white, until the Joneses moved in. I recall that they experienced some harassment, but nothing that we would call a hate crime today. At least I don’t think so.

Upon entering 7th grade, all students in the Neptune Township elementary schools, white and Negro, went to the same junior high school, so that is where many of us white kids actually met our first Negroes. Although the school was officially integrated, students were “tracked” academically, and there were very few Negroes in the best classes. Geneva was in our class, and so was Bob Silva. Dad liked Bob Silva, I guess because he was smart and middle-class. I remember later, when Dad was principal of the junior high school, he would take us to the school on holidays and snow days and let us play basketball in the gym while he worked. Sometime Bob Silva would be there. I’m not sure why he was there, but we became fairly friendly with him.

There was a lot of racial tension at the junior high school and later at the high school. Every so often word would spread in the corridors that there was to be a fight after school, and it was almost always between a Negro boy and an Italian boy. Negroes and Italians hated each other, most likely because their fathers were competing for the same jobs. I rarely saw these fights, but I heard of them. It was the first I heard of brass knuckles, and I remember trying to imagine what it would be like to get hit in the face with brass knuckles. One that I did witness took place in the school itself, which was uncommon. It was in the boy’s lavatory, and it was between Bobby Jones, a shy Negro boy I knew a little, and an Italian boy whose name I can’t recall now. It was rough and bloody but didn’t last long. Someone had tipped off Mr. Altschuler, the 7th grade English teacher, who broke it up. Bobby Jones was suspended for a week, and the Italian boy went unpunished. It was an awakening for me, realizing that Mr. Altshuler was a racist. He would later be fired for embezzling money from the school coffers.

When we got to high school, whites and Negroes were still segregated academically, but the most perplexing segregation was in the cafeteria. This we did ourselves. In biology class I would sit next to Geneva Jones and in English class I would joke with Bob Silva, but every day at noon we divided up and ate with our own. Then we would integrate again for history class. We also played on the same sports teams, though there were not a lot of Negro wrestlers, only Dennis White at 95 pounds and Dennis Wilson at heavyweight. Bob Silva played on the basketball team, and was quite good. I guess he had honed his skills on those snow days at the junior high school gym. Bob would eventually go to Moravian College at the same time I was at Lehigh, and we ran into each other on the streets of Bethlehem a couple times. Then we lost touch.

A few years ago, I took Ian, Brendan and Morgan to Neptune for a visit. The junior high school in Ocean Grove was boarded up. I took them by my old house on Prospect Avenue in Shark River Hills, and there was a Black family living there. Being at the house reminded me of an early encounter with a Negro, way before junior high school. Although no Negroes were allowed to live in the neighborhood back then, we would occasionally see Negroes working there. I remember vividly this Negro man, probably in his 20s, who came by our house to haul some debris away. My memory is vivid because this Negro had red hair, and I remember Mom commenting on that after he left. She also told me that he had to be very careful working in a wooded area like ours, because he was highly allergic to poison ivy and especially to bee stings. If he got a bee sting he could die.

Jessica's place

Love the macro

Here is a pic Drew took with the new Fugi camera's macro lens. Look for spider #2.

new camera

I got a new camera recently, in anticipation (can anyone say that word without doing it Rocky Horror style? sorry... tangent) of our trip to Ireland at the end of September. We wanted a better camera with a better zoom, and more options. We settled on the Fuji FinePix S700, the same camera that mom and dad got. So far I'm really happy with it.

So far most of my favorite shots are macro (although I do have two zoom shots here), just because there are so many power lines and ugly houses where I live that it's hard to find something great to shoot that's far away!! Click on the pictures to see them bigger.









On a random note, that picture of my eye is very cropped... because honestly no one should ever see my pores that close up. It was scary. :-) As you can see, I actually have brown and green/grey eyes.

Also, I downloaded these by sticking the memory card into my old camera and downloading them from there since the new camera requires a software download from a CD and our CD drive is currently broken... so they might have looked even better if I had downloaded them the proper way. Hopefully we'll be figuring that out shortly.

Okay, enough rambling. Enjoy the pics.

xoxo

The Circus

I was thinking back to the time when we first moved into Hamilton Gardens, on the shore. I was probably 4 and Ted 5, so Maggie was a newborn. The Cape Cod we bought at 211 Elm Drive wasn't ready because of construction delays, so we stayed for that first summer in another identical Cape Cod, also on Elm Drive but a couple blocks away. When we moved into 211, our across-the-street neighbors were the Speakmans, but for that summer our across-the-street neighbors were the Gordons. The Gordons had a son and a daughter, and the son was a few years older than Ted. Dad and Mr. Gordon were friendly and we spent a fair amount of time with the Gordons that summer. I remember going on long hikes back through the swamps and over to a highway that was under construction; it may have been the Garden State, which ran close by. That was the halfway point of the hike, and we always ate sandwiches made of ground bologna and sweet pickles on white bread. Then we would hike back. It seems to me these hikes took all day, and I can remember being really tired, though I would not have given up a moment of this time. I remember Dad's brown canvas shoes. One day we heard that the Ringling Brothers Barnum & Bailey Circus was coming to town, and Ted and I begged Dad to take us to the circus. He said that he wasn't able to take us to the circus, but that he had something even better in mind. The next morning he woke us up when it was still dark, and piled us into the station wagon, where Mr. Gordon and his kids joined us. We drove down town and parked. We were still half asleep when the circus trucks and trailers started rolling by, each one full of some wild animal. I was mesmerized. My memory is a bit gauzy now, but I believe we saw the elephants go by, and also zebras and lions and lots of equipment. Dawn was breaking about this time, and it was all very magical. Even at 4 I suspected that this was not really better than the real circus, but by the time I figured out that we were too poor for tickets, I was old enough to love the fact that Dad tried to turn what would have been disappointment into something special for us.

That was 1952, and Dad was 28. He would have been 83 today.

The Menu

My memory of dinnertime growing up is that it consisted of four meals: slumgullion, ri-kid-me-on, meatloaf, and Michigan. We always ate them in that order--slumgullion, ri-kid-me-on, meatloaf, Michigan--then started over again with slumgullion. There was no variation. These meals were meant to take a small amount of meat and stretch it out with lots of carbohydates so they could feed a family. With one exception, the meat was always hamburger. I later referred disdainfully to this menu as Great Depression Cuisine, but the truth is I loved all these meals as a child.


The exception to the hamburger rule was slumgullion. Slumgullion was a watery soup made primarily of potatoes, onions and water, with just a little milk. The meat wasLibby's Corned Beef, which came in unusual tapered cans. Nothing else came in such cans, and they also came with their own little key soldered on the bottom. I was intrigued by this for some reason, and always wanted to open the can with the little key, which wasn't as easy as it would seem. The tapered rectangular shape made it possible to remove the whole piece of canned corned beef, which Mom then broke into chunks and mixed in with the potatoes and onion and water and milk. That was it. No herbs, no spices. Very bland, but I don't recall anyone complaining about that. It was a family favorite.

I thought the word slumgullion was a part of Herbert family lore, but it is not. If you look it up, it is a generic name for any watery soup made from vegetables and meat. Some recipes include stewed tomatoes, some have mushrooms, some celery, and so forth. And most actually do use hamburger rather than Libby's canned corned beef. The source of the word slumgullion is apparently Herman Melville: He uses the the word slobgullion in Moby Dick and his other whaling novels to refer to the slimy gurry that whalers used to scrape off the backs of right whales. Slum also is an old word for the muddy sluice from coal mines, and gullion is gaelic for mud, which means slumgullion roughly translates to muddy mud.

The word ri-kid-me-on might have been a Herbert invention, but I'm not sure. It's an abbreviation for its four ingredients: rice, kidney beans, meat, onion. It was a soupy casserole. The liquid came from the Del Monte canned kidney beans, and as with the slumgullion there were no herbs or spices other than a single bay leaf. That was also true of Michigan, which consisted of potatoes and onion and tomatoes, and of course hamburger. The name is a mystery to me, but I'm guessing it came from the Congdon side of the family, since they were the only family to live in Michigan, after they returned from China. This was Jimmy's favorite meal for a long time. Meatloaf is meatloaf. Ours actually had large pieces of stale bread in it, not bread crumbs, and sometimes it was moistened and flavored with slices of bacon that cooked on top. It was always served with mashed potatoes and peas, which I made into one side dish on my plate.

Some years ago I read an article in The Atlantic Monthly that changed the way I thought about the Herbert menu--and about cooking in general. It was by Corby Cummer, and must have come out in the late 60s or early 70s because Richard Nixon was president. Nixon's popularity was plummeting and the press was relentless in making fun of his odd personal habits. At one point he mentioned to some journalist that his favorite lunch (his only lunch really, which he ate every day) was cottage cheese and ketchup. His critics thought this was hilarious, one more indicator of what a social nincompoop he was. Cummer, who was the food writer for the Atlantic, came to his defense. He pointed out that, while putting ketchup on cottage cheese might be a plebian and tacky variation, it was in fact a variation of the classical tradition of combining tomatoes and soft cheese with oil and vinegar. A more sophisticated diner might want fresh mozzarella and heirloom tomatoes and fine virgin olive oil, but the concept was the same. Variations appear in many different cultures.

I left home in 1966, so when I read this article I was completely disdainful of just about everything about my upbringing, including the Great Depression Cuisine. Cummer's defense did not change my opinion of Nixon, but it did make me rethink food, including slumgullion, ri-kid-me-on, meatloaf and Michigan. I was just getting interested in cooking, and I started rethinking these meals and their ingredients. I started making a variation of ri-kid-me-on that is not unlike Cuban rice and beans, sometimes subbing black beans for Del Monte kidney beans (though I still like those as well) and some cut of steak for hamburger. A little cumin in the beans, some mint and garlic and good olive oil, and it's ri-kid-me-on redux. Slumgullion, similarly, can be made into something like a minestrone, or pistou, and Susie makes a wonderful beef stew which is basically Michigan without the mysterious name.

I never became disdainful of meatloaf. Some traditions really are sacred. And I always serve meatloaf with mashed potatoes and peas, which I make into one side dish on my plate.