I’m a darn good bread baker, but my early works could have passed for geologic specimens. Not soft sandstones or limestones either. These were metamorphics, loaves of the Grand Canyon’s Precambrian, nourishment that could break your teeth. The problem was I didn’t believe in the delicate properties of yeast, or its shelf life—or recipes, for that matter. I...
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It turns out Henry VIII was not a very nice guy. Living in the dark ages of human history that preceded Tweeting, his version of the short and nasty was to chop off your head. Or eviscerate you. Or burn you at the stake. He is remembered most of all as an inveterate ladies’ man, but scratch the surface and you find a narcissist, an irascible whiner, a boy...
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Imagine my fourth-grade classroom. A shelf of math books and stacks of Weekly Readers. The smell of cedar shavings and nose-wrinkling disinfectant. Pale green walls covered with maps of Marco Polo’s travels along the Silk Road. Two high windows looking out across the East River at the foreign kingdom of Queens. A dark December day outside but inside, on...
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Years ago, Tillie Olsen published a slim volume of short stories called Tell Me A Riddle. In one of her best-known stories, “I Stand Here Ironing,” she paints a picture of the regrets and realities of a sometimes single, working class mother of the 1950s. At the risk of conflating narrator and author, I’ll venture that this modest record of the life of a...
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My friend—I’ll call her P—came here from a warmer continent and has no winter clothes. When I first met her a week before school began, she had no place to live, no one here previously known to her and no work. She had no bed, no dresser, no towels, sheets, blankets or pillows. We shared a pot of tea and a sandwich that day in my kitchen while she told me...
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