Kevin

My uncle Kevin was a great many things to a great many people.  He was a husband, a father, a grandfather, a brother, an uncle, a cousin.  He was a chef, a baker, a businessman.  He was a writer, an artist, a musician.  He was a mentor and a teacher.  He was a Jeep owner and a weight lifter and a collector of old things.  He was a friend.

One of my earliest memories of Kevin is when I was 5 or 6, and I desperately wanted a toy telephone from the Rea and Derek drug store. I'd pestered everyone in the family to buy it for me, and Kevin said, “We'll see."  Now, as an adult, I have come to understand that "we'll see" really means "not likely" and I never did get that toy telephone.  But I am still grateful to Kevin for letting me down gently.  I think that's one of the things we all loved about Kevin - he was kind-hearted, even to pesky little kids.

Kevin was a thinker and a philosopher.  Earlier this year, he wrote on Facebook that "Intelligence, wealth, social standing, political affiliation - none of these define human worth."  But although he could be a serious man, he didn't take himself too seriously.  Once in a local restaurant where he was the chef and I waited tables, I lifted the lid on a dish from the kitchen to find an enormous fish head with a cigarette in its mouth and a sign asking "Got a light?"

Kevin made people feel special.  So many people commented online and in person that he made them welcome when they stopped in the bakery, and that his laugh could light up a room.  That he was a vital part of the area, and that he brightened the town with his presence.  That he was a backbone of the community.  And that feeling was mutual: Kevin said not long ago that while the bakery had given him and his family many things, the most important of these were the people who came through the door.

Kevin had a creative soul.  In high school said that "Everyone has to find art for himself, in any medium imagineable."  And so he created things - in just about every medium imagineable - in photographs of old cabins, in a stained glass window in his bedroom at his parents house, in a novel about working in kitchens, in magazine articles about local farmers and museums.  In a canvas that he used to clean his brushes and then later sold to his brother as a piece of abstract art, for an undisclosed sum.  And of course, he worked prolifically and proficiently in everyone's favourite medium, food, constantly experimenting and honing his skills, learning new techniques and inventing new edibles - peasant bread, and a cross between a ciabatta and a brioche. His bagels, which he resisted making at first as being too hard to get right, were truly the best I've had anywhere, ever.

Kevin was a mentor and a teacher.  Through the courses he taught at local trade and night schools, through his instructions to the people (including me) who worked with him in kitchens all over the Poconos, and to those who dropped by the back room of the Daily Bread, he opened countless minds to the joy of creating something greater than the sum of its parts - a fragrant pot of cassoulet warming a grey winter's afternoon, or a loaf of sourdough bringing a fragmented and distracted family back together at mealtimes. There is a beautiful photo of Kevin teaching his great-nephew Liam to form a loaf from a lump of dough which I think exemplifies this about him. 

He taught me a lot about cooking when I worked for him, and when the power went out and we peeled baby carrots by candlelight and cooked prime rib on a gas grill, he taught me about problem solving and about the value of honouring your commitments despite the circumstances.  Even as an adult, I'm struck by the number of recipes and techniques that he shared with me in our emails over the years, although because his recipes were industrial-sized, I learned that the quantities had to be adjusted slightly: 2 quarts of corn syrup and a gallon of Franks hot sauce cover a LOT of wings.

Kevin had vision - he saw the beauty in things that others didn’t; in rusty tubas and sea shells and mustard pumps and a Ouija board.  He preferred vinyl albums over digital CDs. He saw both the sentimental and functional value in a 90 year old Hobart mixer salvaged from the smouldering wreckage of the Pine Knob Inn, the first kitchen that he’d called his own.  He collected the things that he found beautiful or useful or both, and he cared for them and curated them in his unique way that created a feeling of warmth and a sense of place, of home.

Kevin dreamed big.  In 1979 he saw a cozy little dress shop with beautiful mullioned windows on route 390 and knew that it _wanted_ to be bakery; in fact he and Traci took to calling it "the bakery" even when it was just a derelict building. And he had the will to execute on his dreams; with hard work and sacrifice, he and Traci made that building into a bakery.  And they stuck with that dream, together, through fortune’s ups and downs; and together they made that bakery into something more than a building; they built it into an institution that made people in the community feel that they were home, whether they stopped in or not.  They made it place that gave people not just croissants and cream puffs, but joy.

While we may separately label Kevin based on what he was to each of us individually - father, husband, writer, baker - and he really was all of those things, ultimately those individual things don't really measure his worth, because he wasn’t a baker or an artist or even a father or a husband. He was Kevin.  He was human.  He was neither any less nor any more flawed and self-doubting than the rest of us. And like all of us, he was greater than the sum of his parts.

So, if those labels don’t define his worth, what DOES?  Maybe human worth is measured by how much we love, and by how much we are loved. And we loved Kevin: for showing compassion.  For being kind-hearted.  For helping us to grow.  For being unafraid to see and think and believe and behave differently from others.  For dreaming big and for realizing some of those dreams.  For loving us.

We may define him according to the roles we knew him in, but we must measure his human worth - anyone’s worth - in love’s currency.  And on that basis, Kevin’s worth truly is immeasurable.

Beauty

I've been on holiday this week in Ocean City, New Jersey with Michele's family.  Her parents have been hiring a holiday house in OC for the past 15 years, and it's been wonderful to watch our kids reunite with their cousins each year, and to see them all growing up.  The eldest will be off to university next year, no idea where that time went.  The long sandy days on the beach, and the simmering nights on the boardwalk will surely be things they remember about their grandparents in years to come.

In recent years, I've taken to getting up early - around 5, but sometimes earlier - to stretch, walk on the beach, maybe take a dip before anyone else is in.  These solitary moments give me time to reflect, clear my head, and appreciate the beauty around me.  I've clogged my Instagram feed with an assortment of clouds, flowers, sand, and birds - basically anything that at least at the time makes me feel positive and happy.

One thing I am really finding difficult to see the beauty in, though, is the horseshoe crab.

I mean really, this has got to be among the ugliest creatures alive.  It's not even a crab; it's a relative of the spider.  Its anatomy has been largely unchanged over that past half a billion years. It's got 9 eyes and blue blood.  Its shell has a set of pointed spines that resemble two rows of teeth.  Its tail looks as if it could put a hole in your foot the size of a nickle.  If one is looking for evidence that life on earth was seeded by aliens, one could do worse than to consider this horror, (along with pretty much anything that finds its way into your camper van in Australia).

It's a protected species here in New Jersey, not for its own intrinsic value, but because some other endangered species feeds on its eggs. Now that's a second class citizen if ever there was one.

And yet, these repulsive creatures are gentle, giving things.  They don't sting or bite.  They exist mainly as a food source for other animals.  Their blood produces an agent that is used to ensure that bacteria hasn't contaminated intravenous drugs during production.  Without it, turtles and birds would go hungry on their migratory journeys, and pharmaceuticals would kill people.

So it seems that you really can't judge a book by its cover, or the value of a creature by its appearance.  Consider that the next time you encounter something repulsive.

Moments

We have a collection of watches that, over the years, have stopped working. Some were inexpensive and a few weren’t, but they all stopped for the same reason: their batteries ran out. Power failure will get us all in the end.  I brought them to a watch repair shop up on the Strand that seems to have been there since the days of George V; now they’re all alive and ticking.

Their sudden transplantation from just before whatever moment they almost saw, straight into July 31 2019, 3:45 pm, made me think of this blog and the last moment I touched it, back in 2013.

Some of the words that were transplanted across that gap seem strange to me.  They're someone else’s stories, written in someone else’s words.  I honestly don’t remember who it was that showed me their third nipple, nor when, nor where.  But others seemed just as familiar to me today as they did in those moments when I wrote them.

So that got me wondering: if we could preserve a moment - a child’s birth, a first kiss, any moment of pure joy whatever its origin - would we recognise it when we looked back on it in later years? Would it feel just as it did when we first experienced it, or would it seem unfamiliar, like someone else's memory?

I went for a curry with my friend Richard tonight, to a restaurant near Canary Wharf where we used to work. I realized that I’ve been visiting the Tale of India since my first trip to London in 1999. It’s changed some over the years - a bit of new paint, an updated menu about 8 years ago - but some of the same people have been there all along. They always remember me and greet me as a regular, even though I haven’t worked in the Wharf since before my last post here, and although I now only visit maybe once or twice a year.  Every time I go, though, it’s like I never left. I'm part of its story, and it's part of mine.

If we could preserve a moment forever, leave it untouched and ready to be examined on demand, should we?  Wouldn't that distance it from us, make it strange and unrecognizable?  And would we preserve only the good ones?  What about the awful ones - don't they bear revisiting and examination too, as a catalyst for growth?  Maybe our moments - whether of sublime joy or of abject despair or anything in between - shouldn’t be preserved at all.  Maybe we should carry them around with us instead, not as baggage, but as an integral part of ourselves; each one an atom that, when taken together, make us who we are.  

Maybe it’s from all those joyful, painful moments that we’re really constructed, and maybe it's only by consciously embracing them, by integrating them rather than keeping them as separate things, that we can experience them continuously.

Ellipses

For reasons I'm not entirely sure of, I find myself adding ellipses (...) in many of my emails. Now, you might think that I'd be a bit more fastidious in my use of punctuation, considering that I'm the guy who surreptitiously rubs out incorrectly used apostrophes on pub chalkboards, but I just seem to keep misusing, or at least overusing the damned things.

What fascinates me is that I'm not even sure what I mean by them. Take, for example, a mail that I sent to my friend Richard tonight. I hadn't seen Richard in a while, and at the end of the mail, I wrote "good to see you..." Why did I do that?

To be honest, apart from implying that the thought preceeding them (it?) will be continued at some undefined point, I'm not even sure what the correct use of an ellipsis is supposed to be. Nor am I certain of the correct form to use. Them? It?

I guess my intent in using them is to show that I may have more to say, and although I haven't said it, I reserve the right to do so whenever the mood strikes me. Actually, that's probably overstating it. I really think that it's sheet laziness on my part. By inserting an ellipsis in a relatively short email, I'm effectively saying that I've more to say, but the reader can fill in the blanks for himself.

That's a pretty good cop out...

Night Train to Rome

I have always been a train geek. While the other kids in Cresco (the odd name of my home town is attributed to an unknown 19th century typesetter whose misspelling in a railway timetable altered forever the course of history for the town of Fresco, Pennsylvania) played football or shot holes in road signs, I sat under the ruined roof of the disused railway station and imagined great steam trains rumbling in to my little town, impatient engines belching steam and smoke while tourists from New York and Philadelphia streamed from the carriages and into the resort cabs.

When Steamtown, USA moved its collection of historical trains from Bellows Falls, Vermont to Scranton and the town honoured their arrival with that most American monument - a shopping mall - I trespassed in the trainyard at night, clambering through ancient Pullmans and onto rusty tankers like some middle class teenaged hobo.  As an adult, it was mostly the joy of travelling by train that made my three hour commutes from Downingtown to New York bearable.

So when my friend Clive informed me that he and a friend were going Interrailing in February, I was jealous. The idea of travelling around Europe by train, bumping and clanking through the meadows and mountains of the Continent was so appealing that I got to thinking - why not do the same? After all, the kids are just about old enough to make long stretches of inactivity bearable, the rail network in Europe is reasonably well-run, if not entirely profitable, and there are many places I'd lik to see.

Clive suggested that I let the kids plan the trip. Caroline's keen, but Michael shows little interest apart from swiping around the rail map on the iPad. We spent a good part of last weekend working out an itinerary (Caroline's been an active participant throughout, although I must admit that I've done most of the deciding).

Our general plan is to take the Eurostar to Paris on the Thursday before Easter and an overnight train from Paris to Rome.  We'll spend Easter weekend in Rome (and hopefully meet up with our friends the Becks who are sailing their yacht Moxie around the world - if they can ever tear themselves away from the sun-drenched Mediterranean) and then dawdle our way for two weeks along the coast, heading in the general direction of Spain.  We'll stop at a few places along the way (Cinque Terre for sure, maybe Nice).  Our only real obligation is to get to Barcelona in time to catch another overnight train back to Paris and from there back to London, school and work.

I'm unreasonably excited about this trip.  My commutes (by train, of course) these days are spent reading travel books about Provence and the Ligurian Coast, and squinting at endless columns of 6 point Times New Roman in the European Rail Timetable.  I'll let you know how it all works out.

Details

I was in a pub last week with a bunch of guys, some I'd known for ages and others whom I'd just met. One of the just-mets showed us his third nipple. Just like that.

At the risk of offending all bearers of superfluous nipples, i think that little show defines the term 'too much information', at least from someone I'd known for only a few hours. I generally like to get to know a person a bit before I go showing them my body parts, extraneous or otherwise.

Don't get me wrong - I wasn't offended or disgusted by this. Well, maybe vaguely disgusted. The issue for me was that I'd have preferred to have had a choice in the matter. Generally such a choice would involve having the opportunity to decide whether I like a person enough to want to spend more time with them - to at least have a foundation of a relationship before I have dirty laundry or spare nipples thrust full in my face.

I realize this probably sounds shallow, and maybe it is. We're told that we should accept (or not) people for who they are, warts or extra nipples and all. I agree with this. But I like to start slow. I will happily sit for hours and talk with you about a painful childhood or a difficult divorce, but before we get to that, I'd like to know a bit about how you think, how you see the world, whether we have something in common. Otherwise you're just dumping your shit on me and I'm not so interested, thanks very much.

I wonder, though, am I unusual in this regard? Do 'normal' people share every detail of their lives and bodies with everyone they meet? Has the relentless progression of social networking caused a permanent northward shift in the 'normal' level of sharing?

I have some 'friends' on Facebook that I rather wish I hadn't. If you use Facebook, you probably have some, too. They're the ones you accepted friend requests from without thinking, back in the early days, when you were trying to get the numbers up. The people you knew a long time ago, the people who share every detail of their life with no attempt to make these details interesting, humorous, or even particularly relevant.

Why do I not take the same liberty and tell these people to keep their details to themselves? I suppose I'm sort of lazy, for one thing. Moreover, though, I won't do that for the same reason that I didn't tell the guy with the extra nipple that he'd shared too much, too soon. Because I'm polite. Too polite, really, something I must change, I think.

So if someday, you find this post and realize, "Hey, I'm not connected to him on Facebook anymore," let me say that I'm sorry. Sorry that I didn't have it in me to tell you personally that I'm just not that interested in your weekly visits to the grocery store, your endless whining about being tired, or your griping about your family.

OK, 'unfriending' people from one's youth not really much of a step, but it's a step. "But wait," you say, "if you cut out everyone who slings more detail at you than you really care for, will there be anyone left?" Yes. Because if I genuinely like you, if I've gotten to know you and you me, no amount of detail is too much - bring it on.

See you on the other side.

Resolution

I've resolved to write more in 2013. I don't know what 'more' means in this context, since I've written almost nothing in the past 18 months, so the bar's set pretty low.

I also don't have a specific notion of what constitutes 'writing'. There's this blog, certainly, languishing in a corner since last year. It will receive some attention; but there are also three stories that I'd started work on, one as long ago as 2010. Maybe 2013 is the year those will see daylight.

The trouble, you see, is that I have both a very short attention span and a low tolerance for mediocrity, at least in my own work. Combined, these two traits make it nearly impossible to finish a first draft of anything longer than a paragraph, since a first draft is by definition rough and imperfect. The numerous typos and grammatical errors I make when I get in full flow drive me nuts, but correcting them while I write distracts me from the act of writing. I can't write longhand either - I don't think the same way with a pen in my hand as I do in front of a keyboard.

Another challenge is that I don't always have something to write about. Like today, for example. The only subject I have to write about today is how I'm going to do more writing. How interesting is that? Not particularly, not even for me, and if I'm not interested, it's a good bet that no one else will be, either.

A third - or fourth, I've lost track - difficulty is finding the time to write. Given my short attention span, writing for me is an all-consuming avtivity. My thoughts are increasingly slippery and when I lose my grip on one, it swims away quickly, lost forever in a flow - or more accurately, a trickle - of other less interesting thoughts. I can't tell you the number of Really Good Ideas that have escaped over the years by blending in with others. Writing, like fishing, requires all of the patience and attention I can gather. I don't catch many fish, because the requirements for doing so are at odds both with my own predisposition for distractedness and with the rhythms of a young family. The kids just don't seem to get that I need to be left alone when I'm writing, and to tell the truth, as grumpy as I get when they interrupt me ("Dad? Dad? Daddy? Daddaddaddaddad!" "What?" "Hi!"), I can't bring myself to tell them to get lost. Writing is, after all, a wholly discretionary activity. It doesn't feed us or clothe us, and I'd really rather spend time with them than do just about anything else. Besides, let's face it, they're going to have to support me when I'm old so I'd better be nice to them now before I forget who they are.

Finally, there's the thorny issue of subject matter sensitivity. There are topics I'd like to write about, topics that would make for funny reading, but I can't because it would be impossible to sufficiently disguise the people involved. They would instantly recognize themselves in the material, and that would be bad for everyone. (If you're wondering right now whether you're one of these people, you've made my point for me.)

Maybe I should revise my resolution: I'll write more when I have an inoffensive subject, when I have enough time, and when the ideas leap like spawning salmon into the jaws of a cleverly-placed bear. In other words, I'll write in 2013 about as often as I wrote in 2012.