Who's driving my car now?

Driving with the windows open past the blinking yellow lights and 42-wheel tractor-trailers of Detroit’s morning rush hour, gaping at muscular stepped-back Art Deco skyscrapers decorated with multicolored brickwork and grandiose iconography (cadeuci, swastikas, treasure chests and shrieking cherubs) - and seriously bush-league graffiti - I hear a guy hollering out for the bus. Hold up for him, man – I bet it gets pretty lonely down here waiting for the next one to come.

It’s 9:14 AM in downtown Detroit.



A stinking homeless man brushes past me – six lanes of street and a sidewalk twenty feet wide, why are you so close to me? - mumbling, “Have a blessed one,” and the only reason I don’t snap back, “Have a pestilent one – you and your little god too!” (I'm also having trouble finding coffee) is because I’m pretty sure we’re headed for the same place. The public library.

Sure enough. The Skillman Branch of the DPL is high-ceilinged, built-in bookcased, under-librarianed and seemingly (but probably not) over-security-guarded, and they have hot and cold running wi-fi, electrical outlets, and excellent old-fashioned oak case tables and chairs. Their graphic novel collection, however, labeled “Manga,” is filed by title, and has color-coded age labels that are alarmingly inaccurate. Sure, Bone is for everyone, but Emiko Superstar is definitely Young Adult.



Back on the street, driving, 11 AM, I veer impulsively down a side street. Too late – aagh – One Way! I pull over and freeze, trying to figure out what to do, as a man on the sidewalk bats not even one eye. Slowly I realize that nobody’s coming, there are no other cars as far as the eye can see, and none on the cross street. People here make no-look mid-block U-turns like basketball stars showing off their passing, and they treat red lights with a nonchalance bordering on contempt.

Maybe, despite all indications to the contrary, they really do need to get somewhere in a hurry – there are clocks just above street level on the corners of half the buildings here, and half of those even work.



Once you get where you’re going in Detroit, everyone wants you to park. Parking is big here. Valet parking is offered in front of the merest deli and pharmacy, and giant signs and arrows advertise enormous garages and lots. Parking. Let me say this: parking is the last thing you have to worry about in Detroit. Hell yeah there’s parking – it’s a fucking steppe out here. Half the buildings are completely empty, a quarter have a wig shop at street level and are otherwise empty, and the rest? I think the owners let the tenants stay there for free.



The Fisher Building, for example – one of the most ornate secular buildings I’ve ever seen, with gilt and mosaics and seventy kinds of marble and twelve-foot-tall hanging light fixtures and painted groined vaulted ceilings, ahhh! - is tenanted entirely by nonprofits and government agencies. None of those people actually pay rent, I bet. It’s all got to be subsidized, I’m sure by the city, so that such a landmark doesn’t go empty and fall into disrepair.

Taking pictures in the nave of that building, people who work in it kept pausing to look up with me. “It’s beautiful, isn’t it?” “It sure is.” “No building like it in the world, is there?” “No ma’am. You’re fortunate to work here.”

It’s actually Fisher that’s fortunate. It may be the most fabulous building in Detroit, but it’s by no means the only one. Many of those empty skyscrapers (some easily 40 stories), built in the 1920’s, when money floated around like puffy white clouds here, would in any other city be considered jewels of the built landscape. Detroit is where decorative architecture spewed its last, explosive jets of tile insets and stained glass and cathedral-quality stonework... and then crawled off to slump in the corner and convert to strict functionalism out of sheer exhaustion.



The central branch of the library, another shining temple of a building, doesn't open until noon on weekdays. They've had a freeze on hiring professionals for two years and there are rumors of corruption at the management level; the vinyl chairs in the business section are twenty years old and cracked, but the murals on the third floor are fifty years old and glowing. Ok, that's Detroit. The average age of a librarian is 56.

But while every other big building I've been in here echoes like a marble tomb, this place is buzzing with people - lots and lots of people flowing in and out, using the computers, checking out books, attending programs. The librarians smile. Damn it. In an economically depressed area, library services are the last thing that should be underfunded.



The library is the anomaly, though. Everywhere else it's the same: an environment built for armies – armies of auto workers stamping and bending metal to make Mercury Sables and Ford Tauri, armies of suits marshalling their comings and their goings, and circling them, armies of prosperous, sharp, no-reason-not-to-be-optimistic feeders on this industry: admen, commodities brokers, labor brokers, hell, even parking brokers - has been simply left behind. There was not enough residual energy to demolish it before they left, or even to board it up. The Packard plant (above), where cars were built from 1907 until the 1950's, consists of 74 linked buildings on 80 acres. Nobody even bothers to break the glass anymore.

This had to have been a place that hummed. Danced. Harmonized. I would like to have seen it, but I have to admit, I love it empty. I took a lot of pictures.

She's doing the Lagos Jump

In no particular order, some recent photos, partly to explain why I haven't been blogging much lately.

Flying A, originally uploaded by your neighborhood librarian.

This is the big happy Baby A flying through the sky at the pool. I think maybe some airline should adopt this picture as their logo.



My men at the pool.



How much does this seven-year-old love reading? This summer he has charged through almost a book a day. He's reading books that I call Second Chapter Books - the ones you read after Magic Tree House is too easy and before you start reading morbid 300 page novels. Secrets of Dripping Fang, An Awfully Beastly Business, How to Train Your Dragon, and Dragonbreathare his favorites this summer.



I have nothing to say about this picture except my god, how beautiful is this child? It's kind of frightening.



Here's Rabbit reading to his friends Zee, Legolas, Mao and Zhou. In case you're interested, that's The Dunderheads by Paul Fleischman, illustrated by my secret husband David Roberts.



Quality parenting. Kid has a boo-boo, apply a cold National Boh to injured area and rub his back. Well done, me.



This is my husband casting a suspicious eye on, I believe, our older son, who may or may not be antagonizing children who wish to pass in front of the swingset. Lest you think my husband is being unduly vigilant (as parents can get sometimes, usually due to years of bitter experience), you can see that, behind him, Joel's Spider-sense has also been activated.



I'm going to come up with my own version of the game Clue. And in it, one possible solution will be: BODY LOTION JOHN, in the ALLEY, with the MARGARITA PITCHER.



Last but not least, I finally got my children inked onto my body. This was a drawing that Zhou did of himself and his brother when he was four. I saved it because I loved the stick figures with their GIANT hands. I was explaining it to a friend the other day, saying, "Don't you love it? With GIANT hands, you could do ANYTHING!" when Zhou piped up from the corner of the room, where he had been quietly using LEGO to build Bucky balls or design new viruses or whatever: "Except sew!"

"Ok, yes, sewing would be difficult with GIANT hands."
Mao looks up from his book, "And dialing a cell phone."
"Granted, darling, you'd have to get a special cell phone."
"Also knitting!"
"Guys! It was a metaphor, ok? Plus, besides, you could totally knit with giant hands."

Hope your summer is just as grand as ours has been. Now I'm off to the doc in the box so they can look at a suspicious rash on a kid. Whee!

You pull back the curtains, and the sun burns into your eyes

Have you looked at your calendar today? Did you realize that today is Milestone Day?

Item 1: Today at the pool, Mao, Legolas and Prosper each passed the diving board test. Swim across the deep end and back, tread water for two minutes. Piece of cake! Wet cake, but still. And THEN, Prosper came back and passed the BIG deep water test - swim the length of the pool, tread water for whatever long, float on your back for two minutes. GO Prosper! Mao failed it, I never taught him how to float.

Item 2: Dances With Chickens got engaged! When her fiancee (ooh, fancy!) gave her the ring, she was too preoccupied with dancing it around like a little puppet and cooing "Shiny!" to remember to say yes. Dances With Chickens funny.




Item 3: This morning, Zhou pulled out this book, sat down, and read it to me, cover to cover, sounding out the words. I didn't know he knew how to read. When I said, "I didn't know you knew how to read!" he said, "Neither did I!" We are so proud, and so is he. When I asked him what he wanted to read next, he instantly responded, "Percy Jackson and the Olympians". I don't put it past him.

In all fairness, I did hear him sort of struggle through Time to Pee! last night with his dad, but I was half-asleep and literally thought I had dreamt it.

What do you hear in your dreams? If it's not a six-year-old reading Mo Willems, you're doing it wrong.

So cut out the morbid verse / I know you'll make it work

I love stormtroopers, originally uploaded by your neighborhood librarian.

Oh! Freedom!

A zig-zag knit sweater with a circle zipper pull. A piano that's busted, so you can paint it white and then draw all over it. A bread truck with no doors rattling along the highway at 80 miles an hour!

I recently turned in an article that had taken a lot longer to research and write than I'd anticipated. Before that, it seemed like every waking moment was spent painting this house and putting it back to rights. Remember that? Oh, those were FUN blog posts.

Now. Now, after I drop the kids off at day camp, I open all the windows and turn off the book on tape (although Tim Curry reading Lemony Snicket is pretty inspiring. I don't even hear the words, I'm so busy concentrating on the syrupy, hoarse, wet, dry, raspy, silky, papery lisping chortling VOCAL RANGE that's coming out of the speakers). I hurtle down the interstate like a flare shot out of a gun into humid summer sky. I let my mind wander.

I love humans. Humans think, and make things, and, as far as I know, they are the only species that consciously tells jokes. I love the different things humans do when they have time between the eating and sleeping and shitting and daily-bread-earning. They play guitar, or they build a treehouse. They read science fiction novels until their brains run out their ears. My girlie Constance looks at all the beautiful beads and scraps of paper and stuff she's collected, and lets her brain tell her hands how to put them together into something gorgeous and unexpected.

Tim Curry probably sits around and experiments with all the different ways you can say the word 'speculum'.

Penn Jillette and genius juggler Michael Moschen grew up together. Penn once said they they "practiced juggling with the focus that can only be attained by young boys who have not yet discovered masturbation." I paraphrase. I can't find the interview. I think it was in Smithsonian, and whatever else you think of Penn, you have got to give the man props for getting a masturbation reference into the official organ of our national museum system.

I don't juggle. When I read books aloud I cannot muster the spit and gravel that Tim Curry can. And I'm not much of a maker of objects.

I like looking at a vine surging slothlike up a telephone pole and thinking about the future. I like remembering the day they brought a giant squid into the museum of natural history, and how in that instant I saw a cryptid switch teams.

There's a corn truck up by camp, manned by a milky-eyed old farmer with square fingers and a stoop. The truck always parks at a bend in the road that makes me think of the one in Close Encounters of the Third Kind: there's a drop-off and a tremendous view on the other side. Just corn fields and sky, but maybe I'll go early and sit with him for a while, watch the weather.

My Life With the Thrill Kill Kult

Camp. Camp is summer, summer is camp. Drama camp, sleepover camp, orienteering. Art camp, nature camp, G&T camp (for those of us who were truly stymied by the outdoors as children). My kids are in the middle of the two weeks of day camp they get this summer, and they've been coming home every day tired, and filthy, and happy. Makes me smile.



Makes them smile.

We picked this particular camp because of its idyllic wooded location, its all-outdoors all-day programming, and, erm, because it's only insanely expensive, and not mind-explodingly expensive. Seriously, some of this shit is like Montessori on the pocketbook.

So when I found out last year that this camp, which has a (nominal) Native American theme, teaches the kids archery and "riflery" (BB guns), I took a deep breath. The kids were thrilled. The safety precautions are thorough. I figured that they'd be taught that Native Americans hunted for food, and I'm good with activities that encourage thought about food and where it comes from.

Yes. I am aware that I overthink. Leave me alone. In my world, I call it 'rationalizing.'

Wednesday afternoon, Zhou was complaining that he didn't do so well at BB guns this week. He said, "The safety glasses got in the way so I couldn't look through the rear sight and through the front sight and see the lady."

"That's weird," I thought.
"What lady, [Zhou]?" I said.
"The Native lady on the paper," he explained.

Huh. I figured I wasn't understanding this right, or that he misinterpreted the picture on the target. So I asked Mao.

"What were they using for a target in BB guns this week?" God I love talking to a seven year old. You can just say what you mean, you don't have to think of coming up with words that he'll understand, or subterfuge - ok sometimes subterfuge.

"It was a picture of a Native woman."

Great. These idiots at this camp, whose "Indian lore" is as accurate as a tipi standing next to a totem pole, have finally figured out that the best way to refer to the indigenous peoples of North America is "Native," and they do so when they are encouraging children to SHOOT at them. You can't go around calling them "Indians" and at the same time pretend that you're all about respecting the red man. Sherman Alexie's gonna show up and beat your ass.

That afternoon, when I came to pick them up, I asked the hairless teen who was signing them out what they were using for targets during BB guns. Guilelessly, he replied, "Oh, it was a cartoon of an Indian."

Sort of nodding, my jaw locked and my eyes bulging, I growled, "I'd like to speak to the person whose decision that was." Kid took one look at my, I am sure, completely deranged face, and hustled off.

Only to return with another extremely youthful person, a British girl, as it happens. I think I managed to say, "Hi," before I waded in.

"The targets in BB guns this week: how did you decide to use a picture of a person as a target?"

"Oh!" Flail, taken off guard, backpedal. "We used a cartoon of an Indian..."

"Yes I heard that. In what context is it ok to aim a gun at a human being?"

"Well, it was Cowboy Week, so we figured, since the cowboys fought the Indians..."

"Cowboys did not, by and large, 'fight Indians.' COWBOYS, by and large, herded CATTLE. It was the U.S. government that fought Indians, and for the most part, we now consider that to have been a CRIME. Much like every other time that a person aims a gun at another human being."

"Oh, er, um," more flail.

"What do you teach these guys that guns are for?"

"Oh, well, hunting mostly..."

"And what do you teach them that hunting is for?"

"Well, for food..."

"So were you all planning to CONSUME the Native Americans you shot?"

"Well, no, of course not."

"Listen, will you not use those targets again?"

"No, we won't. We weren't thinking..."

"Do you promise? Because it's a long ride up here and I've had a lot of time to think about this. I could go all night."

And I have to hand it to that kid, it was only at this point that she looked at me with true alarm. I think it finally crossed her mind that she had an extremely verbal, old, tattooed punk hippie liberal standing before her, epically pissed off, and, she was beginning to suspect, enjoying herself just a little.

"No, yeh, I mean obviously, you know more about this than I do..." she babbled.

"Yes. I imagine any number of people know more about this than you do. You might consider consulting one of them next time." I smiled. "As long as you promise not to use those targets, we're done here." I looked at her expectantly.

So she promised, and I thanked her, and she wandered back into the lodge building looking a little like a frog that has just endured a session with a tenth-grade biology class, I'm sure to seek out the bottle of bourbon that every camp director I've ever known has had stashed in his/her office, despite strenuous camp policy prohibiting alcohol on camp grounds. They need it, people - don't begrudge.

The other counselor kids, who had been vociferous in their attempts to ignore the entire confrontation, scattered. It was rather wonderful - I felt like the drop of soap in the metal filings experiment.

I snagged the kids, including Prosper, our neighbor, and drove home. On the way I called Bob and related the conversation to him. I love cell phones - the kids thought I was talking to them, despite the fact that I'd already turned on their audiobook (Sea Monsters and other Delicacies, read by the GRREAT Gerard Doyle). They responded to what I was saying to Bob, and I took the opportunity to ask them what they had learned guns were for.

"For killing people!" was the zesty response from Zhou.
"What are they really for?" I asked.
"Shooting targets!" "Hunting!" said the other two boys.
"And what is shooting targets for?" I asked.
"Getting better at shooting!"
"And what is hunting for?" I asked.
"For food!"
"What kinds of animals do we eat?" I asked.
"Chickens!" "Deer!" "Ducks!" "Fish!" "Bears!" "If you're a velociraptor, iguanadons!"
"Humans?" I asked.
"If you're an ogre you eat humans," answered Zhou.
"Yeah but ogres don't use guns, right?" I replied. "Ogres just RRIIIP you LIIMB from LLLIIMB and gobble you up."
"Hobgoblins... hobgoblins use weapons..." "Criminals shoot guns at people..." "Murderers!"
"Yeah well it would be one thing if we were sending you to criminal camp. I'm sure at criminal camp they teach you how to shoot at people. At your camp, there's no reason for a human being to be the target."

When we got home, I walked Prosper up to his house. I thought his parents would get a kick out of the classic Liberal Arts Major Gets Her Shout On scenario. We all shook our heads and giggled about it, and then I remembered that the counselor told me they'd ridden horses today, and there should be a photo in each kid's backpack. So Chris and Peter rummaged through the backpack, and found the picture of Prosper sitting proudly on a very patient horse (it was the same horse in all the pictures).

They also found this:



It's the target.

I had been picturing a cartoon Injun like out of a Yosemite Sam cartoon - angular, mean-looking, brandishing a bow and arrow. I assumed that my kids had identified the target picture as female because the figure had long hair.

But this.

1. Clearly unarmed
2. Possibly female
3. Quite a bit childlike, in fact

The three of us sat quietly for a moment, trying to comprehend the train of thought that would, at the end of its journey, pull into Let's Have Kids Shoot at This Picture Station. Peter recovered first. "Well," he said. "At least he shot the bitch in the face."

If you look closely, Prosper in fact shot her three times in the face. Well done, son!

It eats you starting with your bottom

Jonathan: You learned the entire Klingon Dictionary in two and a half weeks.
Andrew: That had much clearer transitive and intransitive rules, OK?

I've been thinking about verbs today. Verbs. Sunday night I sat at the bar at the Hamilton Tavern and ate a pulled-duck barbecue sandwich, straight through, no stopping, because it was the most heartrendingly delicious thing, with the cole slaw and all? Oh. MAGAD. And after I did that, Bob asked me a few times whether I wanted dessert. The third time he asked, I bloatedly gasped, "I continue to be unable to think about eating another thing," meaning - if you offer me a wafer-thin mint, I will not be responsible for the offal dripping from the chandelier.

Also, geeking out a little bit lately, hence the Monty Python reference. The Buffy quotes, for me, don't even count as geeking out.

So. "Continue to be unable". That is the present perfect progressive negative infinitive of "can". In Greek, this would get its own word:

...

uh...

Trust me. It would. But I have lost my undergraduate Classics-major chops to such an extent that even Mr. Internet cannot help me discover what that word would be.

Here is where my friend Jaime The Former Linguistics Major leaps in and tells me that not only have I mis-labeled that verb tense up above, but that my usage was incorrect in the first place. To which I can only say - hey! today I looked up all the Tarzan movies from the 1930's and 1940's to see if a villain named something like 'Ratarak' was in one of them. Also, I came up with at least 4 works of historical fiction for young people dismayed at this particular summer reading assignment, and I kind of got those kids excited about those books. And I have two broken toes. I think it counts that I would even try to parse that verb phrase.

My point? My point is that I was safely writing a list of young adult audio books that would not make a grownup want to drive into a bridge abutment, and I was going to use "Paradise by the dashboard light" as a title, and I somehow didn't manage to save, and I continue to be chagrined at the shittiness of Blogger.

You know I'm retired from hero work.
As am I Robert... as am I. And yet - here we
are.

Wo der Unbekannte thronet

I've been thinking about Andy Goldsworthy today. It started when I admired my friend Aleph's pants and we started talking about outlet malls that we have known and loved. You see? The banal has its place. When I sang my paean to the Woodberry outlet mall in New York and said we used to stop there on the way back from Storm King, I then had to explain Storm King, which led to pulling up a picture of one of the coolest things I have ever seen: Andy's wall. I explained that it was dry-stone masonry, and so not only is it visually and compositionally spectacular, but a technical masterpiece as well.



Looking at the picture, Aleph said: "It's funny to think that if people two hundred years ago saw this thing, they'd be baffled that someone would build something so pointless." I looked again and tried to figure out what I wanted to say. I told Aleph that... I THINK that anyone looking at that wall - from space, from history, from childhood, from a position of utter ignorance about art - IF they understood that it was made by the hand of man (and the Goldsworthy stuff does have kind of an unfortunate possibly-constructed-by-fairies thing to it), that viewer would understand that the person who built that wall wanted to see a stone wall snaking through the woods and disappearing into the pond, and there was no stone wall snaking through the woods and disappearing into the pond, and so that person built that stone wall. So that he could see it.

I've been in a position to explain art too many times. (Not that Aleph needed me to explain anything - no. It's just that it's so difficult to do, I have to start from scratch and explain art to myself every now and then.) I don't like trying to explain art, because I have very little faith in my ability to do it, and because it's likely that I am wrong. But sometimes it's unavoidable. Sometimes I have to review a book about art for kids, and I have to compare the author's explanation to the way I understand art. Makes my head hurt.



Or sometimes somebody will ask something like, "Magdalena Abakanowicz what? How Magdalena Abakanowicz? And why?" and I kind of get sucked into answering. I'm a librarian - we answer questions. And I really do understand not understanding. Like, it took me a while to understand the composition of music. In fact, it basically took Immortal Beloved for me to understand the composition of music. I never understood that these crazy music-writing fuckers hear music in their heads, and would like to hear that music with their ears, so they write the music. Philip Glass also helped me understand that. You never heard anything like Philip Glass before Philip Glass started writing music, and apparently Philip Glass never did either, and he wanted to. And Koyaanisqatsi. Watching that movie, you can imagine the filmmaker looking at traffic and imagining what it would look like sped up, slowed down, pulsed, given rhythm and meaning. So then he did it. So that he could see it.

In other examples: Frank Miller and Geof Darrow wanted to see a picture of a man stopping a car with his foot:



This guy wanted to see a woman's head turned into a flower:



Yinka Shonibare needs to see Africa's relationship to European culture expressed through the medium of my dining room curtains. I love Yinka Shonibare.


How to Blow up Two Heads at Once (Ladies), 2006

Here's another one, because I love Yinka Shonibare so much:


Three Graces, 2001

But I would really like to meet the person who needed to see this chair:



I would like to kick him in the shin.

STAY HUNGRY - Pull my pork

I'm making pulled pork for the 4th of July. I know, I know, it's Vegetarian Summer, but from the beginning we sold the kids on the concept by saying that we'd be FLEXIBLE vegetarians. Flexitarians, as a book we have at my library would have it.

Now, this is about the 5th time I've made this particular kind of North Carolina style pork (Eastern North Carolina style if you want to be specific, and one of the things I really like about the 2nd grade teacher is the fact that when I said I was making NC-style pork barbecue, she asked what kind?), and I've had to look up the base recipe every time, so I guess it's time to write your mother down.

EASTERN North Carolina-style pulled pork involves vinegar, and red pepper, and a little mustard. No tomatoes, no ketchup, no barbecue sauce. That's the difference between Western NC, Georgia-style, Virginia, and, Christ knows, Northwestern Kentucky-style. Every pork-eating place on earth seems to have a way of braising pork, and ALL of the ones I've come across have been worthy of a faraway look and a sigh.

My friend Sac' tells me Johnny Depp once wrote an essay about Jean-Michel Basquiat "under the influence of pork." I buy that. Pork can have the same effect on me as Johnny Depp can sometimes. Sigh.

.....

Really. Sigh. Good pork.




Doesn't look like much though, right? This isn't even the recipe I'm making, but it does show my big pan, and pork.

I started with this guy's recipe. Credit where it's due. But the recipe has undergone major Paulafications since I've started making it. "Paulafications". That's what my husband calls what I do to recipes. Hee!

First, run the flame up high under your biggest widest pot. I put my big hunk of pork in there and sear it on all sides, salting and peppering each side as it comes up. No oil or anything, the pork begins to put off fat pretty quickly.

While the pig is making all that noise in the pot, I slice up onions. About 6 for an 8-lb piece of pork. Add them to the pot as soon as they're sliced, along with 3 bay leaves and about 10 cloves of garlic, coarsely chopped (swear while you're cutting them, that's pretty coarse).

Now, while the onions are browning, mix up your braising liquid.

2 cups white vinegar
4T brown sugar
more Worcestershire sauce than you'd expect (mine has the plastic dropper top still in the neck of the bottle, so rather than measuring, I count to six 5 times while I'm shaking it out) (sorry if that's not all that helpful)
1 T dry mustard
1 T thyme
2 t celery seed

And then there's your red. If your kitchen is like my kitchen, you have several different options when it comes to red pepper. There's the cayenne, paprika, and red pepper flakes you get from the supermarket, then there's Hungarian paprika, Indian red chilli powder, the dark chili powder you use for making chili, and possibly the dried chili pepper flakes left over from the last time you made hot sauce (and yeah I got that recipe up too).

I put in about 2 T of the Indian chilli powder and about 2 of the Hungarian paprika. You're really going to have to judge for yourself how much hotness your guests can stand. Remember, you can always shake on some hot sauce individually.

So, mix that up with a fork and when the onions have gotten a bit brown, pour it in over the pork. There will be some sugar and stuff at the bottom of your bowl - rinse it out with another half-cup of vinegar and pour it in the pot too.

Now put the heat on low, clap a lid on that sucker and go do some laundry. Or go screw around on Facebook. Screw around with your lovah, even. Go yell at the kids - boy I tell you today my seven year old stood there and lied to my face. I was so angry I was shaking. "You tell me - what do YOU want to do when somebody lies to you??!!" I shouted. Defiant and crying, he yelled, "I want to smack them!" "Oh yeah?" says I, "Well that's another thing we have in common!" He just looked at me, and then he cracked up. It's a good thing we have the same sense of humor too.

Many hours will pass. Overnight, could be. Turn the meat over every hour or so. Turn off the flame when you go to bed. When the stuff is really falling apart every time you touch it (could be as little as 4 hours), it is ready to be shredded.

Pause. Evaluate.

1) Is there a lot of fat on top? There will be. Use a ladle to skim it off. Last time I did this I had near on a cup of rendered pork fat that I put in an old okra pickle jar and set in the fridge. "Vegetarian summer" my ass. I know it was my idea, but zucchini tastes SOOO much better sauteed in pork fat.

2) Is there a bone in your meat? Shut up. It's a legitimate question. If there is, turn out the flame and let the stuff cool so you can fish out the bones.

3) If no bone, get two forks and, using a crosswise motion, start shredding the news. You're leaving today. You want to be a part of it, and I don't blame you. Standing there shredding all that pork takes FOREVER. Especially when all you want to be doing is shoving it down your gullet. But it is TOO HOT. Resist! Or, god, why not. You've got like 6 or 8 or 12 pounds of pork there, go nuts.

Once it is shredded, pause once again. How's the consistency? Too dry? Hm I don't know what to do about too dry. You fucked up. Too wet though, you can turn that flame on a little bit and evaporate off some of the liquid. Or refrigerate the whole thing and when the fat solidifies (there will still be fat even after you skim) take it off. But remember, you'll be using a slotted spoon to dish it out, so you can let it drain at serving time as well.

We serve this with hamburger buns, cole slaw, and hot sauce. People make their own sandwiches. Put out mustard and mayo too, but hide the ketchup and the barbecue sauce. I'm sorry, but people who want to put that stuff on YOUR AWESOME PORK are just insulting you. And your piggie.

Ingredient list:

1 8-pound pork shoulder (any pork roast will do)
4 to 6 white or yellow onions, sliced
10 cloves garlic, coarsely chopped
3 bay leaves
2 cups white vinegar
4T brown sugar
Worcestershire sauce
red pepper / paprika / chili powder / red pepper flakes
1 T dry mustard
1 T thyme
2 t celery seed

Back of my neck gettin' dirty and gritty

Little beauties, originally uploaded by your neighborhood librarian.

We got crabs this weekend. My husband and I, and my mom and dad, even our kids. And if you live in Baltimore you know that this didn't entail some kind of creepy Roman orgy situation - it entailed... well, I took pictures. SFW, really.

I'm not too sure what came over me Saturday afternoon. Maybe it was the Baltimore Facebook phenomenon of somebody changing their status to "CRABS TONIGHT!" and two dozen friends leaping in to comment, "Where are you getting them?" "How much for #1 males?" "Is the truck on Rte 97 still there?" I swear, you'd think it was code for really good marijuana. Huh. Maybe it is. I've always been a little slow about drugs.

We have recently decided that this summer is Vegetarian Summer. Why not? We don't eat a whole lot of meat anyway, I think the kids should see what it's like. Oh but they are pissed. I am not sure why - I'm not sure they can accurately identify what in their diet is meat in the first place. So we placated them somewhat. We assured them they they could have burgers on the 4th of July, hot dogs at the pool, and ribs whenever anyone offered them some.

Also, we explained to them that we would, of course, be following the dietary regime known as "Baltimore Vegetarianism." We learned about that one night out with Bob's brother Joe, a lifelong vegetarian who was experiencing a major attack of the wavers when confronted with the spectacular, cannonball-sized crab cakes at the restaurant around the corner. Baltimore Vegetarian is similar to Baltimore Kosher. Crabs don't count. In our case, fish don't count either.



This is the crab truck near the pool. Bob pointed it out last year, commenting, "I guess that's one of your no-no's." (I have rigorous and complicated rules about where food should come from. The Peruvian rotisserie chicken on the streetcorners in our old neighborhood in Brooklyn was an Absolutely Not.) I surprised him when I gave it an appraising glance and said, "Actually I bet that's a good place to get crabs." Live crabs and corn. Buy them off a truck.



Live crabs. You can buy cooked crabs from a store, usually one called "Captain (Insert-Salty-Sounding-Name-Here)". But it's nothing to cook them at home, and you get to have live, slightly dangerous invertebrates in your house.

Mao peeked in at these, a bushel of jimmies (males), with their sharp claws and carapaces, and when they did a big convulsive clacking squirm he jumped a little and grabbed my hand. He denies it. He's almost eight and I bet that's the last time he'll ever grab my hand like that.





The crab guy showed them both how to hold a crab. I have never done such a thing with my bare hand, and Bob, who is from the Cleveland suburbs, nearly fainted. My dad likes to tell a story about how a crab speared his uncle right through the thumbnail with one of those claws. When a crab has clenched its claw, separating the claw from the crab has no effect. You have to bash the two pincers apart with a hammer. Freaky little alien beasts. Yeeeuch.

We bought two dozen and got a few for free (to my Baltimore friends - the truck at the corner of Woodbourne and Perring Parkway, $40/dozen for large males, 2 dozen for $74) and met my parents at my house. They brought their crab pot, but any extremely large pot will do, you just need to make a platform at the bottom so that the crabs don't get wet. In the pot goes about 8 cups of liquid, mostly water, a couple cups of vinegar if you like, some people swear by beer.



In Florida, I have heard, they BOIL crabs. Let us not speak of it again.



Despite having lived in Baltimore for, oh, 7 years now, we haven't had crabs that often. Having little kids put the kibosh on eating crabs for a long time - you cannot tend a baby when your hands are completely encrusted with Old Bay. That shit is mostly salt and cayenne pepper. The last place it should end up is on a baby's face. Or, god help him, inside his diaper.

Old Bay is the crab spice that everyone knows about, but purists make their own spice mix, and philistines like me pay the guy at the crab truck a buck for a bag of miscellaneous red-orange dust. Some crab spice mixes have more black pepper, some have more cayenne and paprika. You just have to give it a sniff to see if it's to your taste. And you have to really load it on. Plus rock salt.



Twenty minutes should do, during which time the boys can shuck the corn. In our family, there is always some discussion about "what else" we should have, because "nobody fills up on crabs". Most everyone agrees with corn. You can eat it with your hands and it's a vegetable. Some people believe in tomato wedges, for scraping the steamed spice mix up from the outside of the crabs, oh yeah, that is GOOD to eat... and if you're at a restaurant eating crabs there may be french fries or something. But in my opinion, "what else" is - more crabs.



We also had time to slick up Zhou's mohawk for his grandparents' benefit, and to demonstrate the Time Warp. My kids are 6 and 7, and I am here to tell you, there is nothing inherently dirty about the pelvic thrust. It's the cutest thing you've ever seen, in fact.



This is the point at which I stopped taking pictures for a while, because I got all crab-gooky. Please note, however, who is first at the table, mallet at the ready.



Not to be outdone, his brother, at the age of six, not only uses tools to get at crabmeat (I myself am strictly a hands-and-teeth hunter-gatherer), but has also inherited his grandfather's tendency to brag. "Look at this! Is this the backfin?! It's so big!" Both the kids ate, must have been, four crabs apiece, stayed at the table until the last claws were excavated, asked for more. I admire that commitment. They would have been the members of the tribe to have tried oysters for the first time.



My dad accepted a beer (or four) from our cooler and observed, "Since when have you two (referring to my husband and myself, noted beer snobs) started drinking Miller Lite? In cans?" Hm. Yes. Well, the answer is: Bob's lost a bunch of weight working out, and one day he just sort of realized that he might reach his weight loss goal a little faster if he tried drinking light beer. I gave it a try when I realized that "blue beer" (we kind of can't bring ourselves to call it "Miller Lite") has way less alcohol than fancy beer. I love me a Dogfish Head 60-minute IPA, but one of those and I am no good for the rest of the morning. Plus? The recycling? So much lighter and less clanky!



Zhou, gazing over my shoulder right now, sighed, "I wish that picture could come alive... so I could have those crabs, those delicious crabs."

Happy solstice, from Baltimore.