Slice of Life, #20

            When we first moved to our neighborhood years ago, there was a hole-in-the-wall eatery called Amir’s Falafel, run by a Lebanese family. Over the years it expanded into a little restaurant, but it was still mostly a take-out place. The falafel was terrific, and you could get a platter of falafel, hummus, and baba ghanhoush, with a small salad and of course pita.

            One of my favorite dishes was moujadarah: lentils on rice, topped with caramelized onions. The onions were the best part. Then new ownership came in, the moujadarah was gone, and even the fattoush salad acquired sour pickles, an unwelcome taste among the brightness of fresh tomato, cucumber, red onion, lettuce, and toasted pita chips.

           

            In one of my other lives I have been a journalism professor. One of my former students, Annia Ciezadlo, went to the Middle East to cover the Iraq war as a free-lance and ended up married to a Lebanese journalist. When they came back to the U.S., she wrote a book, Day of Honey: A Memoir of Food, Love, and War, complete with recipes. Heaven. The book has a recipe for Mjadara Hamra (transliterations can vary so widely), and I finally tried it tonight.

            Well, I adapted it quite a bit. What I really wanted to do was reproduce Amir’s dish, and Annia’s was somewhat different. First of all, Amir’s had rice, Annia’s had bulghur. Secondly, Amir’s onions were sliced, and Annia’s were finely diced. Finally, one of Annia’s instructions seemed dangerous to me: pour two cups of cold water on onions that have been cooking in one cup of oil? Just thinking about the splatters scares me.

            So I improvised. Cooked a cup of lentils in two and a half cups of water, with Annia’s spices (ground coriander, cumin, white pepper, cinnamon, ground cloves instead of allspice, cayenne instead of Aleppo pepper). Cooked a cup of rice. Sliced up two good-sized onions thin, heated maybe half a cup of olive oil and canola oil, and when it was hot, added the onions. Stirred frequently to keep some slices from getting too brown while others were still softening. Annia’s signal for when the onion is done was when they smell “bacony, almost burnt,” so I waited for that moment – and did not add any cold water. Mixed everything together, and had my Lebanese dinner. (I know, I should have taken a picture, but I haven't been Instragramed yet.)

P.S. It's the first day of spring and it snowed... what a bummer.

Slice of Life, #19

            Empty storefronts are never a good sign. On city streets, there will occasionally be one or two as  businesses close and new ones open up. A couple of years ago a card shop closed a block away, and in less than a year a healthy fast-food place, the Dig Inn Seasonal Market, opened, a definite plus.

            But lately vacant stores have surged in my neighborhood. Just around the corner, a children’s bookstore closed, but at least it was moving to another space five blocks away. However, in the same block a restaurant closed over a year ago, and a card and novelties store downsized, leaving a smaller empty space. Over a year ago, a bank branch burned on the far corner, and I haven’t noticed any reconstruction (the branch reopened across the street in space vacated by a copy shop). And next to the new branch is an opticians closed through retirement.

            When I delivered my compost to the local collection spot this morning, I saw three more stores also closed: a large fast-food café and two restaurants. There was a fire in one (a couple of weeks ago, apparently, but there are so many sirens on city streets it’s easy to ignore them), and damage from the fire affected the other one. But this is a college neighborhood, so that will make a big dent in the lives of many students, not to mention the people who used to work in those establishments.

            And I have mixed feelings about those empty stores: I want new businesses, but we don’t need another bank, drugstore, Starbucks, or phone shop. 

Slice of Life, #18

            Yesterday, through the wonders of the Internet, I watched about an hour of political commentary on Israeli TV, i24. I’d become interested in that country’s elections since Netanyahu used the U.S. Congress as a prop in his campaign, to divert Israeli voters from their economic problems and widening inequality.

            I don’t think often about being Jewish; I’m not religious, and while my parents tried to give me some Jewish culture, sending me to an after-school secular Yiddish shul, all I remember is what some of the letters look like. Periodically, I tried to understand the Middle East conflict, and sensed that settlements in land occupied after the 1967 war were not a good sign. In the 2000s I sometimes joined a Women in Black vigil in sympathy with the Jewish and Palestinian Women in Black and against the occupation.

            I’m not a Zionist either. My parents were leftists and not nationalist. The Jewish “homeland” my father told me about was Birobidzhan, an “autonomous region” the Soviets set aside for Jewish Communists in far eastern Siberia, bordering China. (Did the Russian Communists think they could solve their “Jewish problem” by getting all the Russian Jews to move as far away as possible?)

            Watching another country’s election is fascinating, especially when the system is so different from ours. The program on i24 had a woman host and four male pundits whose names didn’t register since I don’t really follow Israeli politics. Here’s what I learned from just that brief dip.

            1. Racism in Israel is complicated, not only Jews against Arabs but also Ashkenazi Jews (those from Europe) against Sephardim (those from the Middle East). Alas, it’s skin color again. Netanyahu blatantly appealed to the first kind when he said, on election day, that Arab Israelis were voting in hordes and his right wing was in danger. But some commentators thought Netanyahu’s opposition, Labor, with its Ashkenazi roots, had failed to be inclusive of Sephardim, and I find that very disquieting.

            2. Because Israel has a parliamentary system, there are multiple parties, 10 in fact. I was engrossed listening to the pundits add up the various possible combinations to form a coalition that the heads of the two parties with the most seats projected to win, but each far from a majority, would need. Would American politics be any less dysfunctional if there were separate parties for all the factions within our current Democrats and Republicans? Maybe, maybe not. 

Slice of Life, #17

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            Last night I went to the Big Words reading series. Founded by Stacey Kahn and Jess Martinez exactly three years ago, Big Words meets approximately once a month with readers writing to a theme chosen by the audience at the previous Big Words reading. Last night’s theme was All or Nothing.

            I was one of the readers (see Slice 11). When I started going to Big Words, it met in the back of CultureFix, a bar on the far Lower East Side, a long walk from any subway stops. Last summer it moved to Brooklyn, to a large upstairs event space at another bar, 61 Local, at 61 Bergen Street (this one has a kitchen, and a good one). I’d been to a couple of Big Words there and thought I knew the way. So I didn’t make a Google map. My mistake.

            Took the subway to the Barclay Center, but when I looked at the neighborhood map in the station, I couldn’t find Boerum Place, the street I usually walked down. But there was Bergen Street just a couple of blocks away, so that’s where I headed. But when I got to Bergen Street, the house numbers showed how far off I was. The first one I saw was 413. Oh, dear. And Brooklyn blocks are long. It took me 25 minutes to get to 61 Local -- but at least there was no wind, like Monday, it wasn’t very cold, and I could use the exercise. When my friend Stacie arrived, she explained that I should have gotten off at Borough Hall – oh, it was that B on the map that had thrown me off.

            My reading went well, there were many laughs, and I enjoyed my five minutes in the metaphorical spotlight (no mike either). Looking forward to the next Big Words, whose theme is Stories from Abroad.

Slice of Life, #16

            I visited to a new bookstore today, Book Culture on Columbus. It's the third branch of Book Culture (which is in the Columbia University neighborhood, used to be Labyrinth Books until one owner bought out the others, who took over the New Haven store still named Labyrinth). The New York owner called his “new” old store Book Culture. (The second branch was also in former bookstore space, what used to be Papyrus Books, which closed years ago, then became Morningside Books, until Book Culture took over the lease in 2009.)

            The newest store also used to be a bookstore, but before that it was on the ground floor of the Endicott Hotel. Originally built in 1889, the Endicott had been a majestic building with a palm court and such residents as the gangster Dutch Schultz. By the 1960s, however, it had become an SRO, housing people on the lowest  economic rungs. I lived around the corner from it then, and on Saturday nights we would sometimes hear screams or drunken shouts. On weekdays mornings as I headed to work, I'd pass half a dozen men sitting on the Endicott stoop, already drinking, but they recognized me from the block and greeted me good-naturedly. A police precinct was built next door, and the Endicott was converted to a luxury co-op in 1981, with a large bookstore also called the Endicott. It was a lovely bookstore, with a large selection of fiction ranging from literary to commercial, and thoughtful nonfiction as well. Then it closed, in 1995.*

            I was happy to hear that Book Culture was opening there, and today I had a chance to go in. It's the same expansive, airy space, with lots and lots of books,  and also lots of imaginative sidelines (bookseller jargon for anything that isn't a book): besides the usual Moleskin notebooks and note cards, there are, in the cookbook section, colorful ceramic teapots, plates, and bowls, as well as tote bags and an odd collection of colored spoons – or maybe that was just a table decoration. Even though I have more books than I have time to read, I bought the second volume of John Lewis's graphic memoir, March 2, and a recycled Decomposition notebook.
*[Blogger is making me look like a complete layout dunce, arbitrarily changing fonts and sizes and not allowing me to correct such design mistakes. Any Blogger users out there who can help?] 

 

Slice of Life, #15

            My mother kept a small (it’s only 1¾”x2½”) framed photo in her bag. It’s from my father’s 70th birthday party.

From left, it shows my daughter, Christie; my sister, Carla; my father’s sister, Helen; (in front) Carla’s daughter Emily; me; my father; and my mother.

            In 1987 my parents had been divorced for about three years; he’d moved to San Diego, and she’d stayed in south Florida. It was an amiable parting, at her instigation, and they remained close friends, because physically distant. Carla was also divorced, from her first husband, and had not yet met her second one. Helen was widowed for the second time; the first was when her children were young and she was a single mother for many years. My husband hadn’t come all the way across country for this party; he wasn’t much for family reunions, his or mine, in those days.

            Emily was just eight, looking oddly formal and solemn in cotton skirt and blouse. I don’t recall her being like that. Christie was 15 and seemed to be enjoying her teenage self at this gathering of family and friends.

            Who was taking the picture? My brother? Possibly. He also lived in California. How had our family settled with the men on the West Coast and the women on the East? That sounds like a Disney sit-com, and while my family may have been a sit-com (whose isn't?), it wouldn’t have been a Disney one.

            Four of those in this picture are now dead – but their smiles remain, cheerful as long as the photo exists. 

Slice of Life, #14 (technically even if the time stamp says otherwise)

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            Out tonight to see a play written and produced by an old college friend, about difference (racial, ethnic, gender) and the varying ways people find to make sense of reality and the often incompatibility of these ways: scientific, religious, capitalist, hedonistic, childish. It was allegorical rather than realistic, with a Greek chorus who, in the end, play “God,” with some funny bits, much to think about, and excellent performances.

            It was in an off-off Broadway venue, I learned today that whether something is Broadway, off-Broadway, or off-off Broadway is determined by the number of seats: off-off is under 100 seats, off- is 100 up to 499 seats, and Broadway is 500 seats or more (there are many “Broadway” theaters that are not on or even that close to Broadway). The play tonight was in a former loft building on 14th Street, up two steep flights of stairs (the freight elevator only ran during business hours). There might have been 50 seats, or maybe only 40.

            Afterwards, the friends I was with went out for drinks and dessert and ended up talking about race and how difficult it is to talk about with each other and with people of other "races." ("Race" isn't the same as skin color, I think, since colors come in all shades, and "race" as racists define it is supposed to have clear-cut boundaries. Perception, self-perception, a very long conversation.) We were all white and over 60, but a table near us of six consisted of at least three different colors and they were all young. If we don’t destroy the planet in the next 100 years, maybe there will be hope of burying racism – and I think that was the message of my friend’s play.

Slice of Life, #13

            Last December my daughter and I went on a tour of India, seven cities in two weeks. We hit the high spots – the Taj Mahal, Mumbai, etc. – including Cochin in the south. There, in a neighborhood called “Jewtown” (seriously, it’s where Jewish people have lived for 2,000 years), we went to the Spice Market, with burlap bags of spices outside

and dozens of jars of spices inside 

Among the many spices we bought was a jar of tandoori spice powder, and tonight I made tandoori chicken.

            Last night I mixed the spice powder with yogurt, minced garlic and ginger, olive oil, and lime juice to make a paste. Put skinless drumsticks and thighs in a large ziploc bag, added the paste, and massaged the paste into the chicken pieces. Squeezed most of the air out of the bag and stuck it in the refrigerator. A couple of times today, I took out the bag and squeezed the paste around the pieces to make sure they were marinating well. Tonight, I put the chicken pieces on a rack in a roasting pan, roasted for 35 minutes, turned over and roasted another 15 minutes, then turned off the oven and let the chicken rest for another 30 minutes.* Served with rice and Indian spiced green beans, and I was almost back in India. (Interestingly, neither the tandoori chicken we ate in New Delhi nor the chicken I made had the characteristic red color I associate with tandoori dishes I’ve had in New York.)

            And here is a culinary poem inspired by dinner last night, with apologies to the B. Kliban cartoon:

            Love to eat them parsnips

            Parsnips what I love to eat

            Cut they little hearts out

            Nibble on they fleshy meat.

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* If you’d like a more exact recipe, e-mail me privately.

Slice of Life, #12

            Dana’s post on the Slice of Life blog this morning about writing not what you see but what you hear, taste, smell, feel was inspiring. I’m a very visual person, learning mostly through my eyes, so this is a particular challenge for me. When I went out for errands this afternoon, I thought I’d try it.

            It was sunny, but windy. Wind gusts broke like surf, and I buried my face in my scarf. It buffeted me both front and back, especially as I crossed the streets that led toward Riverside Park. But it wasn’t cutting, as it is when the temperature is much colder. When the wind ebbed, the air was almost balmy, especially when I walked through small areas of sun. Stopping in a new bookstore, I was wrapped in warmth and quiet.

             Outside, car and truck engines grumbled and churned as they idled at red lights or turned off of or onto Broadway. Rich meat aroma from a halal food truck parked curbside enveloped me, rousing my olfactory tastebuds.

            A three-year-old girl with her hand in her mother’s was not happy about the weather. “Mommy, I want to go home,” she repeated many times, as they followed me for a couple of blocks. Another small child just cried. Wisps of voices from people passing in the opposite direction brought sound but no coherent sentences, except from one couple arguing. At least, she was yelling, “You got yours,” as they passed me, while he was silent.

Slice of Life, #11

I'm taking part in a reading series called Big Words, where the audience chooses the theme for the following gathering. This month's theme is "All or Nothing," and here is my contribution. (Does this qualify as a "slice of life"?)


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All or Nothing

When I was 15, I wanted to know everything there was to know in the universe.
If I couldn't know all of it, then I didn't want to know anything.
If I couldn't have all A's, just give me all F's.
If my hair couldn't be blonde and wavy, I’d rather be bald.
If my eyes couldn’t be blue, I’d rather be blind.
If I couldn't be the star of the junior play, I’d rather sit in the back of the audience.
If I couldn't be class president, I might as well leave town.
If I couldn't dance all night, I’d rather be deaf.
If I couldn't be queen of the prom, I might as well stay home.
If I couldn't play the piano like Dave Brubeck, I’d rather lose my fingers.
If I couldn't sing like Nina Simone, I’d rather be mute.
If I couldn't write like Virginia Woolf, I might as well lose my mind.
If I couldn't grow a prize-winning orchid, I’d rather plow under the garden.
If I couldn’t cook like Julia Child, I’d rather go hungry.
If I couldn't win the hundred-yard dash, I might as well lose my feet.
If I couldn't find a cure for cancer, I might as well die.

Then I got all C’s in college.

I dropped out, and had more fun.

Now I’m past 70.

I know I’ll never know everything there is to know in the universe.
And I know that no one else ever will either.
I can’t play the piano like Dave Brubeck, but I can play well enough for me.
I can’t write like Virginia Woolf, because I can only write like me.
I didn’t become an actress, but I can stand up here and read my own words.
I was never queen of the prom, but I can still dance all night.
My hair is now exactly the way I want it, and if I change my mind, I can change my hair.
I can cook like Julia Child when I follow her cookbook, or I can cook anything else I want.
I’ll never find a cure for cancer, but I have helped women activists in Eastern Europe,
My name is known in those circles.
Everything I have is all,
Until I die,
When it will be nothing.

There are hundreds more slices of life over at the Two Writing Teachers' blog. Check them out.

Slice of Life, #10

            It’s taken me most of my life to realize that almost nothing is all good (well, maybe orgasms) or all bad (okay, slavery, genocide, serial killers). Most everything else has something both good and bad about it.

            Take retirement. While too many are forced into it by a layoff, or a mandatory retirement age, or illness or disability, retirement is usually seen as freely choosing not to work full-time, and that’s what I decided to do two years ago. Since then I have noted the pros and the cons.

            I am not a morning person. It can take up to an hour for my brain to clear and I can have a reasonably coherent conversation and feel like I am truly awake. So retirement was freedom from the tyranny of the alarm, the need to have breakfast, run out of the door, and get to the office on time to get my work done. Taken to its extreme, though, freedom can feel oppressive.
            I’ve taken to setting my alarm so I won’t sleep away too much of the morning. Take today:

• --radio goes on at 8:30
• --not really awake until almost 9
• --out of bed shortlt after 9
• --reading about Joseph Roth in a magazine in the bathroom until 9:45
• --stretch on bed (for spinal stenosis) while continuing to read about Roth until 9:58
• --start to read about Syria in the same magazine, return magazine to bathroom, remove J.’s bench from the bathtub, fold up clothes from drier and put them away, finished by 10:15
• --make bed, shower, dress by 10:35
• --eat breakfast, read the paper, to 11:35

            I'm not ready to "do" anything until almost noon. I don’t feel happy about this. Yes, I can lie in bed and doze on and off while listening to Morning Edition. Yes, I can read as much of the New York Times as I want to. Yes, I can read a magazine article that strikes my fancy, when it strikes my fancy. But there’s so much more I want to do (writing, reading, going to movies and museums, etc.) and need to do (errands, exercise, filing insurance claims, etc.). Even in retirement, there’s never enough time.

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            Is this a privileged whine? I know I am fortunate compared to many, especially those forced to retire and unable to find work they want and need. Maybe this “whine” will kick me into using my literally free time more productively.

Slice of Life, #9

            It was in the 50s today, and the sun was spring cleaning. The sidewalks looked like the inside of an old-fashioned freezer being defrosted. As the pavement warmed, snow mounds began to melt from underneath (I feel the need to apologize for the litter of cigarette butts, even though none are mine) as well as angular frozen piles softening on exposed surfaces.*

Isolated snow piles resembled icebergs.

Some tree wells were still filled with snow, while in others the snow had melted fast.

One shop owner jump-started the softening process with a hose, 

while around the corner others attacked the frozen piles with shovels.

 

The warmer day with its heaps of dirty snow evokes my inner five-year-old. I crunch the edges of a snowbank with my shoe and watch it crumble. I kick a chunk of snow down the sidewalk like it's a soccer ball. I wish I had a little shovel so I could dig out my own snow cave. 

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* March 9: I must apologize for the confusing placement of the photos. Blogger's editor is clearly not WYSIWYG -- the pictures are supposed to be in  pairs. I must have chosen a very poor template for mixing text and visuals. At least now I know what I need for a template with the most flexibility. 

** March 31: I found a way to create a layout that displays these photos somewhat the way I wanted them. Much, much better.

Slice of Life, #8.5*

J. and I were watching a spring training game on TV between the Mets and the Red Sox. Gary Cohen, was one announcer, a longtime sportscaster for the Mets. The other voice was new, yet sounded vaguely familiar.

Around the fifth inning, two outfielders came too close to each other, leading Cohen and his associate to reminisce about a time 10 years ago when Mike Cameron and Carlos Beltran did collide while each dived for a ball neither caught. Beltran had a concussion, and Cameron had numerous facial injuries and was never the same player again. The unknown announcer remembered seeing the collision from left field -- and immediately, I knew he was Cliff Floyd, one of the Mets' better left fielders. When I said it, J. remembered that he'd read that Cliff Floyd was going to do some sportscasting for the Mets this year.

I'm a big baseball fan, but not one of those obsessives who can name every lineup for my team back to its beginnings. Every now and then, though, a trivia fact will surface, and I will know something I didn't know I knew. It was fun.

*I've already posted to the Slice of Life Writing Challenge, but this was something I wanted to write about today, as well.

Slice of Life, #8

             J. walked outside today, the first time in five days. (Background: my husband fell on the ice over a year ago, and isn’t fully recovered yet – broken arm, complications from blood thinner, three months in the hospital and rehab, and a long-lasting neuropathy randomly causing his feet to feel like they’re on springs.) Walking outside in snow or ice, or even slush, is impossible, so the past week, with three snowfalls and below freezing temperatures. have made him feel imprisoned. Today, the streets are clear, it’s 50 degrees, so he was ready to give it a try.

            We live on a side street in Morningside Heights, in Manhattan, and the wind sweeps up off of the river, especially in winter. J. is still using a cane, and wind makes him  feel even unsteadier than his feet do. As we walked up toward Broadway, the wind was at our back and not too strong. We slowly got to Broadway, where there weren’t many people. The only obstacle he had to watch out for was a pink balloon at eye level tied to a storefront and bouncing erratically from air currents when the store door opened.

            When we turned at the next corner, the wind was in our faces. J. walked a short distance until he felt the wind more an enemy than a zephyr – and we retraced our steps. I’m glad he decided not to forge ahead; walking slowly is hard on my back.  When we were first together, I was the slow walker, and I often had to run to catch up; now he is the one pulling at my coat to slow down. I’m also glad it’s March, because it has to get warmer, and soon J. will be walking outside every day, and by himself.

Slice of Life, #7

            Today I spent a few hours at MoMA as part of the Art+Feminism Edit-a-Thon to upgrade Wikipedia’s quantity and quality of entries on women generally and women artists specifically. The Wikipedia world is arcane and complicated Beneath its veneer of populism, Wikipedia, founded in 2011, is run largely, 84%-92%, by men, and its entries largely reflect these men's interests and range of knowledge.

            We were given a half-hour training, in which we were introduced to the structure of a Wikipedia page, the purpose of the various tabs, how to create our user profile (and how to use Wiki markup, a simplified html), how to make an edit, how to add a citation or new text, how to communicate with other Wikipedians. Then we were allowed to start working, either by finding some women artists’ entries to add citations or new information to or, if we had more time, to try to create a new article entirely. Most important, we were told about the Wikipedia guidelines: (1) be objective (and avoid conflict of interest); (2) articles must be verifiable through reliable, published sources; and (3) entries had to be notable, notability being shown by having at least three different references from major publications in the field.

           Notability, to me, is the elephant in the Wikipedia universe. Since women are still often overlooked in mainstream culture and history, how will they pass the standard of notability? I never got a good answer to this question.

            I tried to create a new article, and immediately ran into the problem of finding enough outside sources online to meet “notability” guidelines.  Next, I found the director of an organization I helped start, but her entry was in Polish. I learned how I could translate it into English using Google Translate, edit it into idiomatic English, and reformat the footnotes. But the conflict of interest question arose, and I will need to do more research.

            While I didn’t make any changes to Wikipedia, I did meet some very interesting women: Debra Harris, who runs hip-hop tours for tourists to New York; Lady K, a hip-hop artist; a journalist who’s had to turn to corporate work as it’s harder than ever to make a living in journalism; and the various Wikipedia editors both female and male who were so helpful. It was a fun and exciting afternoon, and I hope to keep trying to get more women and better citations, and writing, into Wikipedia.

Slice of Life, #6

            My mother died five years ago. She was a pack rat. I have pack rat tendencies. One of the things of hers I’ve saved is her address book, a black six-ring pseudo-leather “Made in China Rolodex” notebook.

            Why have I kept it? I don’t know most of the people in it, other than family members, but certain items bring up memories. An envelope postmarked May 27, 1997 (a month after her sister died), from Lois Toby, the postmistress of the Vermont village where my aunt had lived. Several pages from my mother’s passport of her visas to China and Hong Kong (Apil 10, 1975; October 4, October 17, October 25, 1978). A page listing all the organizations she donated to in 2008; as they continued to solicit her in 2010 and 2011, I informed them all that she had died, using the collection of stamps she had amassed in her zeal for commemoratives – there was about $75 worth of them.

            One woman I never heard of, Vivien Horowitz, has the note: Plays Canasta. I learn that my mother had phone numbers for Florida Atlantic University’s Holocaust & Judaic Studies, the School of Arts/Museum, and Friends of Yiddish (which may no longer exist, as a search of FAU’s Web site today turns up links no more recent than 2007).

            Few of my mother’s interests are mine, but I miss her talking about them or telling me the latest U.S.-China People’s Friendship Association news or controversy, or about learning to play mah-jongg in her 80s. I want to tell her about the video of Leonard Nimoy talking about growing up speaking Yiddish. I want to keep our conversation going, and I’m sad that her end of it no longer exists. Only her address book is still here.

Slice of Life, #5

            A Delta flight landing at LaGuardia Airport this morning skidded off the runway and into an embankment and fence. With only a few minor injuries, all passengers were evacuated by chute. Immediately New York’s broadcast channels went into all news mode, with reporters reporting every tiny piece of information, as well as speculation, and misdescribing the video of we were watching. Once the TV news directors had decided to cover this “Breaking News,” voices had to fill the air.

            All of which reminded my husband, J., a former New York City reporter, of the following story. In the 1970s, J.’s newspaper assigned him to find out about a story an editor had heard about a charter plane carrying 40-some U.N. diplomats off for a retreat that had crashed in Pennsylvania. He called the F.A.A., whose spokesman said they had no information about a missing plane or crash, but J. was the third person who had asked about it, so they would look into it. J. called the U.N., and they didn’t know about any retreat, but they were also getting inquiries, and said they’d get back to him. No airport had any information about a charter plane departing its space. He continued to make calls, and to hear that other news organizations were also making calls, so he wrote a story about what he knew, which was mostly speculation, and the story was typeset and ready to go.

            Until just before the next edition, J. was told to keep working the story, but the news editor was not running with it yet, because it was just so “iffy.” And as J. continued to make his phone calls, it all evaporated. There was no plane crash, there was no plane, there was no U.N. retreat – there was nothing.

            J. was never able to trace the source of this nonexistent story. But in today’s world of “citizen journalism,” when everyone can have a blog or a Twitter account, rumors, misinformation, any information spreads quickly. Even when something unequivocally happens, like this airplane accident at LaGuardia, it’s far better for the sake of truth to not fill the air with words (like the ABC anchor saying that passengers were leaving the plane by walking on the wings, when those watching the video could clearly see they were sliding down a chute). Wait until you know something for sure, wait for confirmation from at least two sources, before repeating the latest “I just heard about...” 

Slice of Life, #4

             After days of sorting through receipts and documents last week and two hours today, my income taxes are filed! I went to H&R Block for the first time (long story), and my tax preparer was a former lawyer, a little heavyset, spotty gray mustache, wearing a green oxford shirt and striped tie of black, blue, and silver. He was chatty, too, becoming inquisitive when he saw our TIAA-CREF 1099-Rs, and asked where and what we’d taught. I explained my teaching saga – editing and journalism at NYU – and he inveighed against the poor writing of most young people today. But not his daughters, he hastened to add; they went to Brearley, which emphasized writing, so its students were at least adequate writers, and at best superior ones. Then he let me know that his younger daughter was in Turkey for her junior year and really loved the country, even though most tourists didn’t go there, preferring Paris or London. I chimed in that my daughter had gone to Turkey a few years ago and also loved it.

            Then he told me that his older daughter was in her second year of Teach for America in an inner-city school in St. Louis, and that now she understood how privileged she had been. The district she’d been assigned to had lost its accreditation, and in its reorganization, her high school had been designated college-prep STEM. But the school had no language teachers. Since she was a French teacher, she became the head of the language department of one, until the school hired an experienced Spanish teacher.

            His daughter isn’t going to make a career of teaching, but she’s become very interested in education policy, a trajectory too many Teach for America participants take. Does it really help schools that most need good, committed teachers to bring in recent college graduates for two years, then have them leave to be replaced by another cohort of two-year teachers? There is so much more I would have liked to know about this young woman’s experience, besides her learning that teaching is really hard. But my tax time was up and other clients were waiting.