Dumplings. Not.

It’s always all about the dumplings.

They’re flashier. Cuter. They are more naturally abundant and connote fun.

But for me, the food of my childhood—and culture—is far more mundane. It’s the food of peasants. In Cantonese, it’s called jook: a rice porridge not unlike oatmeal, but more watery. If jook were an item of clothing, it would be a giant, fluffy, terrycloth robe—totally unsexy and shapeless. Something for late nights, something for home.

But for me, jook has the capacity to comfort like nothing else. And when I went to China for my first and only visit twenty years ago, it was the jook that nearly brought me to my knees, a rapturous homecoming to a place I’d never been before.

But first, the backstory.

I grew up in Amish country, Ohio. The only other Chinese family in town actually ran a hand laundry, and the nearest Asian grocery was an hour away by car, in Cleveland. So I grew up eating a kind of Chinese American food made by my mother—a steady but unenthused cook—that reflected the world we lived in: pork chops with rice, stir-fried chicken with vegetables, spaghetti with bottled Ragu sauce, eaten with chopsticks.

At Thanksgiving, we had turkey, just the three of us, with all the leftover meat carefully sliced and saved for sandwiches. But the best part—the part that we waited for with even more anticipation than the Thanksgiving meal itself—was the jook the day after.

So, to whit:

Take the turkey carcass, and throw it in a big stock pot. Fill pot with water. Add a cup of raw rice. Bring the pot to boil, then turn the heat to simmer, stirring every now and then so the rice doesn’t stick. Keep this up for at least an hour. As the minutes pass, the rice will bloom and expand until it starts breaking down. The starch will start thickening the water, and the bones will gradually loosen, until the whole pot becomes a steaming, silken pool.

If we had been Jewish, this would have been our motzah ball soup.

We ladled the jook into the big, cheap Chinese bowls we’d bought in San Francisco’s Chinatown, the ones with orange and black roosters painted on the sides, the ones my parents still use. The first bowl could be slurped down, but the subsequent ones had to be eaten with more care, on the alert for the stray bone. But all was savory and soft and comfort.

Jook—by a number of names—is eaten all over Asia, with variations: seasoned with spices in India, crispy fried shallots in Indonesia, salmon roe in Japan, kimchi in Korea, pig tongue or brains in the Philippines, or spicy pickled radishes or salted dried pork in Thailand. In southern China or Hong Kong, jook is often eaten with sliced scallions and a long, unsweetened deep-fried cruller. In nearly all cases, it’s considered antidote for the unwell—perfect for the fevered, the convalescent from dental surgery—and perfect for a late-night snack after journeys, whether overland or by sea.

But in East Asia, jook is eaten for breakfast. And this brings me back to the part of when I was in China more than twenty years ago on a five-week tour sponsored by the geology department of the University of Hawaii.

We landed in Beijing and then transited across the landscape of the unexpected, visiting not so much the usual tourist spots as those geologically significant—we went to the plains of Inner Mongolia and took a night train far into the Western mountains, where we went to look at a dam. We traveled through central China, into the belching cities powered by the black-sooted coal industry. At every stop, there seemed to be a visit to a university where we listed to a colleague of our professor lecture about…sediment.

In the early part of the trip, when I was still eager and energetic, I would get up to run before the worst of the pollution had set in. In the moments just after dawn, people would be standing outside the front doors of their modest homes, brushing their teeth out of tin cups painted with red flowers. And on every street corner would be carts with vendors selling steaming bowls of jook.

Because in China, jook is the breakfast of champions, ladled out in huge steaming bowls and served with scallions or peanuts. Back at the hotels, we could get the Western breakfast, with the overly oily fried eggs, or the Chinese breakfast, with jook. It’s easy to guess which one I opted for morning after morning, a familiar taste that spoke of all I really knew of China, a homeland to which I’d never been before.

Six years after that trip to China, I moved to New York to write a novel, living the artist’s life of ramen and boiled eggs. I went to orphans’ Thanksgivings hosted by married friends in Jersey and, as we packed up the leftovers into Ziploc bags, I would ask, “Are you going to eat that turkey carcass?” The hosts were always more than happy to get rid of the thing, wrapping up the bones—with plenty of meat and stuffing still clinging to the sides—in layers of aluminum foil. I carried the carcass in a Duane Reade shopping bag across state lines and, the next day, would take out my stock pot for what was, for me, still the best part of Thanksgiving.

I was in my mid-twenties before I learned how to make dumplings. I was on a fellowship at the University of Hawaii, and my group befriended a class of Chinese journalists who were at the East West Center. It was 1991, and the participants were chosen not only because they were the brightest but also because they were married, their spouses left in China as hostages, after a fashion, to help ensure that they would all go home after their semesters at UH were done.

I was on a fellowship for American journalists, and our two groups would hang out together all the time. We’d gather at my friend’s Leslie’s apartment, and it was there that the Chinese students taught us how to make dumplings, or jiaozie, with ground pork, shrimp, scallions, napa cabbage, and ginger, seasoned with soy sauce and sesame oil. They taught us how to mix everything together in a big bowl and then spoon the filling into the store-bought round wrappers, pinching the edges shut with a precision not unlike origami. Pan fried or boiled, the dumplings were always a crowd pleaser.

Later, when I moved to New York in the early ’90s, I’d have dumpling parties, when I’d teach my friends to fold dozens of them en mass, making a pound of ground pork stretch on that artist’s life salary by adding a lot more cabbage and skipping the shrimp, spiking the soy dipping sauce with chili paste and rice vinegar.

I love dumplings. I make them still, now that I have somehow become a suburban Long Island matron and so-called stepmother and the director of a grassroots arts nonprofit. I put less cabbage in the filling and have added back the shrimp.

But what still brings me comfort beyond all else is to make a pot of jook. Sometimes it’s with a leftover baked chicken carcass, but more often than not I’ll buy whole fresh chicken parts. I make it for my partner’s sons, now 18 and 22, when they are sick or have had their tonsils removed. I slice up a whole piece of ginger for its healing properties. I know that all these white boys won’t know how to deal with all the bones, so I’ll pull out the chicken pieces, let them cool, then shred the meat and put it all back, completely danger free, adding fresh chopped scallions and cilantro on top. The boys will eat it all, quite gratefully, the jook going down their sore throats with no trouble at all.

I know these boys did not grow up with this, that it will not remind them of their young childhoods the way that their Austrian grandmother’s streudel and spaetzel will. But I make it for them and their father because I turn to it out of a deep, maternal instinct that I know is in my bones, steeped in a culture and land across a faraway sea and that somehow was transmitted to me, in part, by that pot of rice porridge.

Jook will not answer all of life’s challenges, but it will make things better, just for a while. It comes from thousands of years of best intentions and of making due, of feeding families during hardship when you had a pot of water and not much else. It speaks of early mornings and new beginnings, of a baby’s first solid food, and of late nights out with probably too much to drink.

Dumplings may be sexier, a food of celebrations, but for me, the humble rice porridge is what paces the every day, the true center of all that we are.

The ship at sea

Last evening I heard Mark Strand read in a living room by the Hudson River. This was happenstance. Not the river nor Strand--but my being there. I was working in the apartment; it's a job I've had for ten years now.


After hours, below stairs.


When I arrived, Mark Strand was already in the living room by the floor-to-ceiling windows--and there are floor-to-ceiling windows all around the apartment, with views of the water and the lights and the cars and all that is beautiful in the city. When viewed through glass, the city is always beautiful.


Mark Strand is imposing, immense, even in his frailty. His voice, once strong, is thin. He speaks as he moves: slowly, picking his way as though avoiding loose stones. He read like a ship at sea: steady onward, turning slowly, leaving all stirred in his wake.


When he read his new poems--which he does not call poems because they are written in prose, as sentences--he sat on the linen-colored sofa, a yellow lab at his side. [This dog, who lives in the apartment, knows instinctively which is the premier position in any setting.] There were hushed silences, nearly prayerful, supplicants at the feet of the knowing. His new book, to be released on 3 January 2012, is called Almost Invisible. The next, Strand says, will be called Invisible.


The dog slept.


This is a poem from twenty-one years ago that Strand wrote, but did not read.


The Idea

For us, too, there was a wish to possess

Something beyond the world we knew, beyond ourselves,

Beyond our power to imagine, something nevertheless

In which we might see ourselves; and this desire

Came always in passing, in waning light, and in such cold

That ice on the valley’s lakes cracked and rolled,

And blowing snow covered what earth we saw,

And scenes from the past, when they surfaced again,

Looked not as they had, but ghostly and white

Among false curves and hidden erasures;

And never once did we feel we were close

Until the night wind said, “Why do this,

Especially now? Go back to the place you belong;”

And there appeared , with its windows glowing, small,

In the distance, in the frozen reaches, a cabin;

And we stood before it, amazed at its being there,

And would have gone forward and opened the door,

And stepped into the glow and warmed ourselves there,

But that it was ours by not being ours,

And should remain empty. That was the idea.

[His voice is here.]


The dog slept until applause broke into the room, and then he sat up, assured that it was for him.

The Ferry from Tripoli

It has been a long time away. One could think of it as a kind of voyage, but it's really more a case of distraction, of not fully being present in any way.

I've been trying to follow the stories coming from the Middle East; my own awareness started with a Facebook post, a plea from a friend who asked, why was no American media reporting about Egypt? And, then, in a day, that changed, as every day began with DATELINE, CAIRO. 


Last week, I was transfixed with the story about the ferry that had been chartered by the United States to take its citizens and other foreigners to Malta. People had been fleeing all week; the airports were jammed. Tens of thousands of workers were boarding flights out of Libya. And yet, for me, it was the rough sea voyage that seemed to capture all that was mythic and horrifying. 


Two days waiting at port for the waters to calm down. An eight-hour journey across rough waters. Hundreds disembarking at a distant port, dragging their luggage, exhausted and triumphant and heartbroken. Each American interviewed said they would return to Libya as soon as possible.


There are so many other migrations, mostly undocumented, likely more dangerous. We only tend to hear about the Americans who lived and died; all others slip into history unknown. 


For me, the whole concept of flight, of fleeing, is deeply impressed upon me. It's an inheritance; it feels like a part of my body, like the particular shape of my fingers or the nature of my gait. Tao nan. To flee a calamity or a burden. I have friends who fled their homes, usually at night, often as children. Bundled into cars and then ships and then planes to faraway places that were not home when they woke up. My mother fled within her own country, which was vast enough to be another continent when she woke up one day and had stopped moving.


So the notion of a ferry sailing from a port in Tripoli--which instead sounds so poetic, like embarking on a love affair--is really another print made from a long-ago negative. People fleeing from madness and a firestorm, people setting off in the night into an unknown because all other, probably preferable, choices have been exhausted. Unlike most people who flee, the ones on the ferry from Tripoli will have options, and the place from which they fled was not their ancestral homeland. That landscape does not quite have the same imprint on the heart, and its vanishing does not evoke the same loss.

Desert

It' been raining all weekend: grim, gray, dire. The wind has been fierce; throughout the area, power lines are down, trees have been felled on cars, and the streets are scattered with the spidery corpses of umbrellas and the limbs of branches. Someone died. [That happened a few weeks ago as well: Someone was walking in Central Park and a tree branch, over-burdened with heavy snow, collapsed on him. Game over. God pressing the quick-recall button.]

And yet for me, all this cold wetness just evokes the desert. The mind playing tricks, a three-card-monty of memory and misfiring sensory perceptions. But what links the two is the wind, that force like a mythic serpent or lost spirit.

Mojacar is in Andalusia, on the southeast coast of Spain. The Moors once ruled here, and their influence can still be found in the patterns on pottery and the certain harsh sounds of the otherwise fluid Spanish speech. When the taxi dropped me off in Mojacar, I walked out onto the veranda of my room at the Fudacion Valparaiso, the artists' residency, and looked out into the dry landscape; a small herd of goats or sheep were bleating in the distance, their small voices somehow magnified in the vastness. The wind was blowing, but calmly, cool in the setting sun.

In the morning, I set out. There was a flat-topped hill like a small mountain next door, rumored to be haunted; a long-abandoned cistern was embedded at its summit, like at Masada. There were short tufts of grasses here and there, tenacious and darkly green. The ground was strewn with things that once had been living: branches, mysterious seed pods, the skeletons of small lizards. And everywhere were the tiny coils of snail shells, as though the entire desert had not so long ago been an immense ocean, teeming with undersea life. If one walked in the opposite direction and climbed another hill, suddenly the Mediterranean appeared, like a vision in blueness.

Day after day, I dragged in things from the desert. Long branches bleached from the sun, the dried hulls of pomegranates pecked open by birds. An entire dried tumbleweed, which I put out on the veranda and kept like a pet, listening to it roll around and around in the wind. And I wrote--for an entire month I wrote about a thunderstorm in Ohio because that's what one does in the desert in Spain. During my last week, I sent home a small parcel at quite an expense, filled with dried pomegranates and a few of the white bleached shells. They sit on my coffee table now, part of a still life of journeys.

On the night before I left, I could not sleep because of a horrible storm that was all wind and sound and fear. I was sure that I would be visited by the ghost on that final night, but if it came, I couldn't tell if it was the storm or the ghost or both. The building shook. The gusts were ferocious, and I thought that if I survived, then I might just go mad by morning from all the howling. But when dawn broke, the sun was bright, and all was still. 

I got up, walked out into the desert, and set the tumbleweed loose in the landscape.

Now, Voyager

When NASA launched the two Voyager spacecrafts in late summer of 1977, my parents and I were already living in Nairobi, Kenya, where my father has just embarked on a two-year assignment with the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Although we were living in a posh home with house help--in the manner of any expat, then or now--we didn't have a television. In the evenings, the three of us read in the living room. Listened to cassette tapes of Chopin and Mozart. Sometimes, we went to the drive-in, where we watched Star Wars on the big screen. In 1977, I was eleven and self-absorbed, making my way through Tolkien's Lord of the Rings and writing in a series of small, green, U.S. Goverment-issue notebooks.


So it doesn't surprise me that I was completely oblivious to the launching of the Voyagers and the two Golden Records encased on their sides, though I became aware of them later: this whole notion trying to explain ourselves to Other Beings at some point in the future through sounds and images. For Valentine's Day, NPR did a lovely and charming segment on how Carl Sagan and Ann Druyan met through the making of the Golden Records; embedded in the record is an hour-long recording of her brain waves, converted into sound. She was in love by then. The first of the two spacecraft was launched on 20 August 1977; two days later, Carl and Ann announced their engagement. They married in 1981 and were together until Carl's death in 1996. But the recording of her brain remains on the spacecrafts, now already far beyond the reaches of our solar system, nearly 17 billion km from Earth.


We can hear and see all the music and images that are on the records.  These were, at the time, thought to be the best representations of ourselves. Bach's Brandenburg concertos. Ambassadors from the United Nations saying hello in a multitude of languages. Australian Aborigne songs, Peruvian panpipes, Louis Armstrong performing "Melancholy Blues." There's a photo of the color spectrum, diagrams of basic mathematics and our solar system. A series of photographs meant to explain human conception and birth [which, surely, to any being that reproduces in any other way must be freakish and horrifying]. Images of peoples from around the world, including a Chinese family having dinner around a table with a lazy susan. There's a desert and an ocean, fish and dolphins and frogs and a dragonfly. Pictures of bridges and highways, trains and planes, people sitting in traffic and a clogged street in India. "This Is Planet Earth. Welcome, Friends," seems to be the message.


Perhaps, more than anything, the Golden Records are a time capsule for ourselves. The images are already dated, like finding a wrinkled copy of National Geographic lodged behind a radiator of home you've just moved into. This was a vision of our best, most advanced selves, with all we knew. It is the music, not surprisingly, that is timeless. But for every choice of what sound or image to include, the team made a hundred about what to leave out. How to convey the nature of our societies and relationships? There is the sound of a kiss--but how to explain that?--but no warmth of an embrace. There are no sonnets or novels, no paintings or sculptures except those models that tried to convey our world and life. The sounds and images on the Golden Records are wondrous and maddening all at once. 

But they are, if anything, hopeful. Hello, hello, hello . . . We are here. We are. We were.

Frankie's Keys

I realize that I still have the keys to Frankie's apartment in Williamsburg.

Frankie is gone now. She died twelve days ago at the Shirley Goodman and Himan Brown Hospice on East 95th Street, a very beautiful facility filled with a wonderful staff. In the final weeks, it was reassuring to know that she was being cared for so well. Her room was blue and always tidy, filled with light and flowers and the things that people either sent or left; these items were strange talismans from all aspects of Frankie's life: a book quotions from Bill W., an angel pressed into a silver coin, a Christmas tree ornament with her name on it, notes and cards from friends, an odd pillowed silk album with paintings of a house in wintertime. The room had a large balcony, which she would have loved to walk out on to had she ever been able to; through the window was the skyline of the Upper East Side of Manhattan, clouds, sunlight.

By the time Frankie was transferred here, she slept most of the time, or was in Oz, as I called it. It was hard to know where she was--merely in the land of dreams or in a morphine haze or just resting in preparation of the final journey from this mortal world. Sometimes, when I called out her name softly or would hold her hand or stroke her forearms, she would surface suddenly and briefly. "What time is it?!" she would say, her voice filled with urgency, as if she was late for an appointment and was stuck on the train. Usually, I was there late. "It's 9 p.m.," I'd say. I knew I was only confusing her more; late visitors probably only made her days even more perplexing. "Oh," she'd answer. "Don't you have to be at work?" And then, very often, she would slip away again. But in that brief period, she seemed to know who I was, or at least not be frightened. I think she knew that someone had come to see her, and that seemed to be of comfort.

My offerings to the room were decidedly unprofound. Two emery boards--because Jeff, her health care proxy, wanted to clip her nails but was afraid she would cut herself if he could not file down any sharp edges--and a small tube of medicated lip ointment. At the drug store, the lip ointment came in a small cardboard box with two tubes. I didn't know what to do. Should I leave both? How much lip balm does a dying person need? On my last visit with Frankie, I squeezed the ointment on her always-dry lips, and she surfaced for an instant, not really opening her eyes. "Hi, sweetheart," I said. "I hope this makes you more comfortable, ok? Can you press your lips together for me?" And she did, which seemed to be a miraculous act of coordination, given how little command she seemed to have over her movements. I smoothed lotion into her hands, arms and face, and wiped her eyes with a paper towel moistened with warm water. I was always amazed how small her hands were, and quite delicate. It was strange to see Frankie take on a certain gracefulness as she slept, her hands cupped on her chest, sometimes cradling the stuffed dog that I had brought her around Christmastime.

Frankie was admitted to the hospital sometime around Labor Day. I still have a series of messages from her on my answering machine, the first one high-pitched and desperate. The later ones were from calls she made in error. "Hi, it's me, the pest," she'd say. "I'm trying to find Jeff. There's something wrong with my phone. He says there's nothing wrong with my phone, but there is." It's really strange to listen to these voicemails from someone who is no longer alive. They really are these audio postcards from the past. I taped some of them with my iPhone and one night kept listening to them over and over again on my computer; even if Frankie's voice was weak, there was the unmistakable cadence that was hers. "Ok," she would say, "bye-bye."

After Frankie died, I hung up her keys on the bulletin board behind my desk. She had given them to me when I lived about ten minutes away from her in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. She wanted me to let myself in downstairs, because she was recovering from her chemotherapy and was too tired to walk down the two flights of stairs and then make her way back up. I still kept them after I moved away to Queens, to Astoria. Just in case, I suppose.

Our entire friendship was based on her illness, so it's strange that now Frankie is no longer ill, and I don't have the keys to where she is anymore. So often, I was angry about the decisions she made and the way she chose to spend her time. But they were her decisions, and it was her time so it was never for me to say. I will miss making those telephone calls to see how she is. Now, of course, I'd really like to make a call to see how it is wherever she might be. The mother of a graphic designer I work with died just a few hours before Frankie did. When I told this to a friend of mine, she said, "Oh, maybe Frankie and Linda's mother are on the train together." That made both of us smile. I hope their journey was a smooth one.

And, maybe one day, Frankie's keys will open an unexpected door.

Maybe dogs are right

New York is filled with funny dogs in all shapes and sizes, most of them a weird mini-me version of their owners. Little yip-yip dogs with Gucci collars and sitting in Louis Vuitton carriers, giant dogs like camels, undulating down the street as if there really wasn't anything at all strange about that. It's New York after all. There is always someone around who is way weirder than you are.

In the late afternoon, I sat out in the little park with my friend who has brain cancer. I'd bundled her up with her cane, signed the paper that said I was checking her out and was, by implication, responsible for her life. We crossed the street into the wrought-iron enclosure wedged into the triangle where Hudson Street diverged from Eighth Avenue in the West Village. There was a big iron statue of something heroic in the center, which, oddly, I cannot recall at all now. Was it a person? Some winged creature? An angel surrounded by doves? I have absolutely no memory of this thing, though I'm quite sure it wasn't a war general on horseback, that much I can be sure of.

We installed ourselves on a bench facing Hudson Street. It was 4:30, and the sun was starting its quick descent into the river, just on the other side of the Village Nursing Home. We looked at people and their dogs. A giant white poodle-ly thing sitting on a woman's lap as though it were a giant cat, a series of little dogs scurrying through the small park on their way to something far more important. A rush of children on scooters, and a father and young daughter in a pink hat and tiny knee-height boots, nursing a hot cocoa in a paper cup. My friend, a painter, looked up at the waning sun on the buildings and said, "I love this light."

It had been unseasonably warm today, 65 degrees in November. Now that the sun was slipping away, it was getting a little nippy. "Are you cold?" I asked. No, she was fine. It was the latest she's been out since Labor Day weekend, when all of this started, and she lost all control of her own time and movements. The lights were starting to twinkle in the dark.

Earlier, volunteers had brought dogs to the nursing home; they do it twice a month. Nice people come and visit, and they bring their dogs, and all the old and the sick who are into that sort of thing can go down to the common room and, for a few moments, feel the unbiased love of a creature who makes no judgment, especially when they are being adored. There was a black and white French bulldog who seemed without personality but submitted to the petting and cooing without comment. There was another little scamp of a dog, probably a happy mutt, who rushed up to my friend and seemed delighted to see her. He darted around, bright eyes like coal. The generosity of these people to take time to come to this public nursing home so that the residents could enjoy the healing presence of these animals was deeply moving.

But those dogs had gone home, and people were packing up their newspapers and books in the park. There were no more children, with or without scooters or hot cocoa. In the autumn, it's amazing how quickly the sun sets. There's little ceremony, no lingering periods of rapture. There is that lovely golden light--and then it's pitch dark. We got ourselves up and walked across the street into the shabby Thai restaurant and got an order of shrimp pad thai for my friend to take back to her a room, a single decision she gets to make in daily routine that is virtually without choice.

Inside the boiling hot nursing home, there was a pile up at the elevator lobby, two wheelchairs and ten people going up; the elevators move at a glacial rate. [The last time, I realize the doors open and close so slowly so that the old people are not crushed to death as they gradually maneuver themselves on and off.] My friend said she would see herself up; there was no need to wait for all this slow traffic. The door glided open as though on tranquilizers, and the white-haired wave was absorbed in.

I stepped out into the sudden night, where, quite suddenly, there seemed to be not a dog in sight. The air was crisp, and the traffic sounded like the sea. Light flooded from the tiny delis and from the closed shop windows, illuminating their displays of precious objects for all to covet. It all felt like a gift.

Waste Not

When I saw this show, "Waste Not," by Song Dong at the Museum of Modern Art in early September, I was overwhelmed by the obvious love that went into its creation: the love of a son who wanted to help his mother, whose dilapidated home was going to be bulldozed by the Chinese government; the love of the two together to sort and save the objects; the love of the volunteers around the world who carefully laid out each plastic bottle and old toothpaste tube as an object to be as worthy of contemplation and regard as any priceless work of art. The rows of tattered shoes, the tower of brown-gray soap dried in the sun and saved from the 1960s, the pieces of Styrofoam from electronic equipment, the bundles of chopsticks and old crayons, the paper shopping bags--it was seemingly endless. This was a woman's life, as well as her security against another period of want, and, perhaps most movingly, her physical scrapbook of a family's life.

The exhibition, which has been shown in Asia and Europe, was received well. Song Dong's mother, Zhao Ziangyuan, was happy to be a part of the show, taking visitors on tours through the space, explaining different objects. But she died in early 2009, after finally relocating to an apartment complex. Always a lover of living creatures, she saw a wounded bird in a tree and climbed up in a step ladder to free it--and then fell. In the New York Times review of the show, critic Holland Cotter intimated that perhaps, released of her worldly possessions and of her past, Zhao Ziangyuan was able to release herself as well.

The whole experience of making my way through the show was like a walking meditation, a kind of waking remembrance of my own family's habits and valuation of objects. The everyday item--the stub of a pencil, the chopstick without a mate--somehow is a potent symbol of potential and salvation. Lost in a flood? That chopstick could be the crucial item in lashing together a raft to safety. A flint of soap, a length of satin ribbon, a plastic lidded container once filled with yogurt--these were things you had for free that could save your life on a really bad day. Car break down? Roof leaking? Pipe burst? Toaster oven explode? You could have in your possession already the very thing that could put everything all right again.

There are special words for this kind of activity now. "Re-purposing" is probably my favorite. It may just be a nice way of saying that is one is choosing to re-use old crap. In our sudden awareness of our environment and the dim effects of climate change, it's suddenly trendy to practice this type of thrift, embraced with the thrill of extreme sports. But the reverence with which Song Dong chose to honor his mother's lifelong personal practice of conservation--a survivalist's response to deprivation--is more poignant and resonant.

The ambulance chaser

A week ago, Conde Nast announced that it is closing Gourmet magazine.

I am really, really not ok with this. Granted, in the last year, I have been a poor reader of the magazine, which arrived each month in its plastic wrap, a single luscious object on its cover, beautifully photographed: a green quince, a toasted cheese sandwich, a candied apple. I don't even like candied applies, but on the cover of Gourmet, the glistening red-lacquered sphere was spectacle of desire. Still, feeling overcommitted and overwhelmed, sometimes it felt like too much to boil a packet of ramen, let alone singe poblano peppers over a gas flame and peel. Reading Gourmet was no longer a refuge of culinary dreams but a reinforcing hammer blow to the skull: You are just too damned tired to do anything but watch another episode of Clean House on HGTV. At least at the end of that, someone's house is clean. After reading Gourmet, I was just hungry.

So now Gourmet is dead, and I have all these pristine issues in neat stacks all over the apartment, along with glossy shelter magazines [another mental oasis where the carpets are always white, there's never any dirty laundry, and the gardens are lushly immaculate], and my favorite Cheetos of all monthly periodicals--women's fashion magazines, which are purely and sublimely junk food for the brain. [I never worry how many pythons died so those clutch purses could live.] After I'm done with all the other magazines, I put stacks of them down in the laundry room, hoping someone else will read them. But I have all my Gourmets. When I lived in Williamsburg, I kept all ten years of them in cardboard folios and only under the panicked ruthlessness of moving was able to pitch them into the freight elevator and take them to the curb for recycling. Suddenly, the Gourmets are like museum objects, precious in their scarcity. I can go back and read the last two years, cycling through the seasons and pretending a new issue is arriving each month because I never read any of these to begin with.

Foodies everywhere mourned the end of an indulgent, often elitist practice. Julia Child had showed America how to love its food and take pleasure in the length and strenuousness of its preparation. We remembered how to value the raw ingredient; we wanted to read not only about how the flour was milled but also how the wheat was grown. Gourmet celebrated that love each month. It was the discipline and joy of performing a daily mundane act [cooking and eating] and discovering how it could be both art and worship.

***

The death of Gourmet only reinforces that a certain kind of journalistic craft and life is over as well. It's shocking to realize that moment when one has actually become the peevish whiner in the room: "Well, I remember when . . . "

Only now do I realize how privileged I was to have studied journalism when it was still considered an honorable profession. Each day, we labored over ethical decisions. When I was just starting out in the '80s, the newsroom still was populated by men and women in their sixties and even seventies--people who had worked on newspapers during World War II and who had started out as copy boys. The back composing room of the Akron Beacon Journal was staffed almost entirely by men who were deaf; it was the kind of work that a man with a handicap could get in those days with no impact on their ability to do a proper job, unaided. When I'd walk back there, you could see them bent over the composing table, smoothing down waxed sheets of type with little rollers and then signing to one another.

When, as a college student, I got my first tour of the press room running at full speed, it was a thrill I have to this day: the adrenaline rush of watching the miles of newsprint--fragile in your hands--flying through the rollers at incredible speeds. Even at that velocity, the print would be crisp and each photo had to be a perfect register. If you were lucky, you'd happen to pass by when they replaced one giant roll of paper with another, all without stopping the press at all, a feat of levers and sheer wonder.

I love the newsroom and that way of doing journalism, even though I left it. I know I will miss it as a fixture, like a beloved city building torn down in the name of progress or field of wheat that is paved over for a subdivision. It becomes part of a historical past that we can never quite believe is not with us anymore.

Hogs and heifers

Completely without irony, the pork loin sandwich stand at the Wayne County Fair in Ohio was next to the 4-H Swine barn. [Although I grew up in Wayne County, I never quite understood the difference between "pigs," "hogs," and "swine." There must be some technical differentiation that escapes me.] In any case, the Swine barn was filled with immaculately groomed pink pigs, rapturously sleeping in their pens. It was around 9 p.m., and the fair was still going strong; along the fairway, the kids were being swung around in hurl-inducing rides, the blue-pink cotton candy was still spinning, and the food carts were still pumping out sausage sandwiches, deep-fried onion flowers, and something called a walking taco, which involved putting toppings into a bag of Doritos sliced open on its side. [Sadly, I'm not making that up.]

In three days, all those market hogs, aged six months, would be sold at auction and most likely slaughtered. For the eight days they lived at the fair, they lived like the castrated young kings they were: lovingly bathed an brushed, sleeping on beds of sawdust, eating buckets of special feed that packed on the pounds. Most of them were four feet long and around 300 pounds, which is a lot of pig: about fifty pounds every six months. But this has never been the Manhattan-imagined version of organic eating, which magically occurs in a bloodless, dirtless world in which no one ever breaks a sweat or gets any shit on their Louboutins. I once wrote in an essay that the simple country life factored out always ends in death, and that's pretty much the truth. The grilled pork loin sandwiches served at the stand right outside the Swine barn were sublime: fresh, tender, juicy, and mighty tasty. And it was completely without irony that all of us admired those nice pigs and then would chow down on their brethren not twenty steps away, topped with bright red rounds of beefsteak tomatoes and a little salt and pepper. Praise the lord and pass the BBQ sauce.

Unlike a lot of things, the Wayne County Fair of my childhood has not changed. If anything, it's bigger, more vivid, and more amazing. The tractors have only grown in size, cost a quarter of a million dollars or more, and have mp3 player docks; they already had air conditioning twenty-five years ago. The rides weren't the rinky-dink merry-go-rounds like the kind set up in parking lots, but the real McCoy--with flashing colored lights and contraptions with no foot rests that flung people up and around through the air right over the propane gas vendor booth. If anything, this was the vigorous, prosperous heartland of America beloved by politicians nearly everywhere: white, Christian, hard-working, and carnivorous. This is the land of the giant pumpkin and the prize-winning stallion standing at stud.

It's also about as different as can possibly be from my current daily routine: packed subways, city grit, and vendors in greenmarkets selling wheatgrass. I work literally across the street from the United Nations and all its attendant bureaucrats, many in native dress, and actually occasionally buying a precious yellow heirloom tomato at peak season for five dollars a pound.

And yet, somehow, it all makes sense.