These two names popped up in the news this week:
Joel Smallbone
David Pecker
Now, wouldn’t you love to see them form a law firm:
Smallbone and Pecker
* * * *
I don’t know if you’ve been following this 30 million cash heist in LA, where they can’t figure how it was done, who did it and why there wasn’t any real security to prevent it. Especially, how they broke into a massive safe to steal almost two tons of bills.
I had the sudden idea that maybe the cash just wasn’t in the safe when they broke in, that it had already been stashed in boxes for easy grabbing.
Well, obviously, one way or another, there was inside planning, but it would be much more clever if the safe-break was a false lead.
* * * *
A convoluted tale of broiled mushroom caps.
Over 30 years ago, Linda and I were friends with Goetz and Luci Mayer, an Austrian couple who married in 1941 and fled the Nazis to South Africa.
Goetz, then in his late 80s, had been a friend and roommate of playwright Bertolt Brecht in Paris during World War II, and wrote wonderful scattershot stories of his life for the Philadelphia Welcomat (while I was arts editor), that he called “Suitcase Memories.” Luci, then about 90, was one of the finest people I’ve ever met, a force of nature with an interest in almost everything, an interest that never waned.
They came to dine with us a few times when we lived on Baring St. Once, on whim, I decided to whip up broiled mushroom caps for dinner. I’d never dared this before, had no idea how to approach it, so, as usual, took a seat-of-the-pants culinary approach and added everything I could think of to the stuffing that might create a good mix. Somehow, the caps not only worked but were – by my and Linda’s and the Mayers’ telling – wholly delightful.
Thing was, I didn’t write down the “recipe.” Was I depending on my memory for later? Good god, I should have known better. Over the years, I’ve tried my ever-lovin’ best to duplicate those fungal wonders, but have never succeeded. Come close a couple times (including last week), but the perfect balance is lost to time.
Luci died of cancer in the late 1990s, one of the few times I’ve cried over a death. Goetz never admitted, to us, how heavily he was hit, after their close to 60 years together, but his health slid steadily with neuropathy and whatall else. He would sit across from us and say, simply, “Everything hurts.” He failed to wake up two years later, on the second anniversary of Luci’s death.
I don’t remember if I cried when Goetz died, but dammit, I still cry every time I fail to make the perfect broiled mushroom caps.
* * * *
The abbot was asking the gardener if he had seen the missing monk assigned to oversee evening prayers.
Replied the gardener,
“Oh, the monk? He wrapped his tail around the flagpole.”
* * * *
In Catholic elementary school (starting in fourth grade), we ended each school year doing not much in the classroom. Instead, we were asked to take our textbooks home and clean them up as a favor to the following year’s class – erase underlining, put on new dust jackets, that sort of thing.
This set fire to the obsessive-detail side of my pinched mind. Laying the books out on the kitchen table at home, I’d cut new dust jackets from paper shopping bags, and fold them over so that I could insert the hard-bound text covers. Egad! I was a nerd before the term was even invented.
And the underlining!
Did I underline texts myself in those days? Not that I can recall. Ever the neat freak, I’ve never liked underlining anything I’ll ever look at again, and lord how I cringed when I dribbled tea on Thomas Pynchon.
But many of the school books had not only simple pencil underlining, but deep-blue pen slashes. Determined to right all damage caused by Paper Mates and Parkers and Esterbrooks, I’d page through each text with a saucer of bleach at hand that I would apply to every last pen underline, using a matchstick, delighting as the illicit smudges vanished, or at least mellowed to a gentle pink.
I wonder now how the students of succeeding years reacted to books that disintegrated into isolated strips of text. Chlorine bleach is a remarkably active substance when applied to paper.
lickhaven 