Harrumph!

Hearing a friend tell a new story or reveal an unknown aspect is always a joy for me. Like a continually opening, expanding flower, the little extras delight me.

Perhaps it was being raised as a Southerner (more on New England in a few lines). Perhaps it’s simply my bent as a delayed gratifier. Either way, I find the relationships best that constantly increment.

I see a link to the candy-box philosophies of my sister and me. We had one distant grandmother, in Denver. She would send us presents, including from time to time a box of candies, usually a Whitman’s sampler — that big yellow box with some of this, some of that and some of the other.

While each of us had our own box (although we shared with the maternal unit), Pat and I differed in ingestion selection. She should immediately locate and begin to devour her favorites. It was as though somehow they would disappear or go bad or something. In contrast, I took my time, starting with the least desired lumps. I would work my way over the days to the dark chocolates with the chocolate fillings. We consumed the same, but she dribbled off in pleasure while I climbed.

Unlike Forest Gump’s mother’s platitude, you did know what you were going to get, at least if you looked at the legend on the box top or had memorized the shapes and decorations on the pieces over the years.

Friendships and marriages can seem like that. The small revelations can be as endearing as the inevitable evolution. Fully defined, immutable relationships are surely among the stalest, most boring possible.

So to New England, and particularly the Boston area, it’s everything on the table in the first seven minutes of meeting. This goes beyond candor and into the realm of challenge.

Up here, it’s what Southerners disdain as bragging on yourself. That’s the private schools and university, sports while there, the pedigree including any points of family fame, and career accomplishments. Think my résumé is longer than yours; so there!

The obvious points there are identifying yourself and even claiming superiority. In a deferential society descended from the British one, it is a logical expression. Oh, but how tediously that sets the tone for any on-going relationship. Everything they think worthwhile has already been revealed.

I think of several long-term friends who express surprised delight when I mention a new-to-them aspect. Not long ago, a chum of 30 years expressed pleased astonishment when I mentioned in a group conversation that I was born in Oklahoma. If I had engaged in that résumé display, there’d be no little treasures.

The spin conversation last week with the bartender in Cambridge reminded me of that. When she mentioned that she was taking spin classes to get in shape for a charity ride, I could easily and reasonably played my I-used-to-teach-spin card. At the time though, I figured that she’d be behind that bar where the four of us regularly visited again and again. There’d be an appropriate time to add that little flavor to the conversation. Meanwhile, it was her moment to talk about her ride and her exercise.

As it happened, two of the other guys expanded the topic immediately and mentioned that they were in my spin classes. That was not quite as delayed as I would normally have it, but even with that, the unfolding details are ever so much more pleasant than talking over someone else’s turn.

A few times, I have heard a New England sort defend a demonstration of family and personal credentials as honest and necessary. I see the cultural differences, but I still prefer my way. I like the little treats that come out of nowhere.

Tags: harrumph, harrumpher, surprises, relationships

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The legendary Martha lived in the air of Cambridge Common last week, in mentions of her previous life as a spin instructor. That amusing fitness subculture is a bit more obscure than yoga, but has it adherents.

Four of us were at the bar. It’s become a regular afternoon joint every week or two both because it always has a fine range of IPAs among its 30 taps and because its prices are good at a buck or sometimes two or even three less a pint.

The bartender said she was about to go on the Cape Cod MS charity bike ride with some girlfriends. She added that the first time has done the ride, she felt she might die, but she’d been taking spin classes, so she figured she was ready.

That was the cue for guys on adjacent bar stools to do what they so best — play the Greek chorus and make a harmonizing response. One noted that spin classes and road biking use muscles a little differently, that there’s no direct correspondence. Another acknowledged our fraternity here. Two of the other three had been in spin classes I led.

Leave a Puddle

They did what I think all spin instructors want to hear. They spoke of how tough I had been.

That was my turn to talk about my first spin instructor, Martha. She told her classes, “If you don’t leave a puddle under the bike, you’re dogging it.” We believed her for two reasons. First, if she figured you were using a lower resistance than she had told you for the given exercise, she’d get off her own bike-like object and crank up your dial. Second, she left a puddle. She worked at least as hard as any of us.

She subsequently went on to become a well known yogini here and then in San Jose. Along the way, she lost her h and became Marta and teaches exclusively yoga. When I knew her, I also took power yoga with her and learned that she taught step as well. She was exhausting classes three ways all day long. She probably was the fittest person in New England in the process.

I see from her new site, her former yoga boss, Rolf Gates, wrote a blurb — Marta brings all of herself to what she does and in so doing, expresses the essence of yoga with each step she takes. That’s what her spin classes were like too, plus she demanded the same of us.

Panting in Burlington

For the three of us on the stools, none was a kid when we started spin. Properly led, it’s damned tough. It did forge some bonds too, much like being on a sports team, I suppose.

We did our spin classes at the FitCorp in Burlington. When Martha dropped her classes there to focus on yoga, I carped mightily. The manager of the gym shut me up by saying there was Keiser Power Pacing training in a couple of weeks in Boston. If I wanted classes so badly, I should become an instructor. In other words, put up or shut up.

I put up and took the certification class from Kris Kory, the aging surfer type who literally wrote the Power Pacing book.  It’s certainly adolescent of me, but I have to say that style is much superior to the original, the trademarked, capital S Spinning®. The latter is by far the most common and it’s, well, kind of sissy. You might need a towel for your brow, but there’ll be no puddles.

I learned from the best. Kris was master of the theory and technique. He taught hard and snazzy stuff like slides that the other guys don’t. Before I even got to him though, I had learned what a real workout is.

We used to do spin three times a week. We got aerobic and anaerobic workouts unlike anything else I know.  I love my road biking, but it’s not as physically challenging. I’ve taken Spinning® classes as Y’s and other gyms too, to find that they are only a workout if I combine them with fast cycling to and from the gym.

A good class combines enough peer pressure to keep you pumping and a skilled enough instructor to make  you pray for the end of the hour. I think of another guy we used to work with who sometimes took Martha’s class. He was a lifter and quite strong, but wasn’t used to the relentlessness of it all. When she said to the class, “Remember to breathe,” Mike panted out, “That’s all I’m thinking about!”

Tags: harrumph, harrumpher, spin, Power Pacing, shared experience

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Good timing, Globe! A short feature today dovetails with my recent post on UU hand-wringing over lack of racial diversity.

After 378 years in Cambridge, MA, First Parish will have a Latina minister, Rev. Livia Cuervo. In a religious group striving to mix up its very, very white membership and very white ministry, that’s good. Unitarians founded and ran Harvard from the start, but has somehow fallen far behind in diversity efforts.

Cynics may ask:

• What took so long?
• How serious is this for adding her as an associate minister?
• How serious is this for hiring a 72-year-old?

Don’t sneer too long. The parent UUA most recently elected an Hispanic, Rev. Peter Morales, to its presidency.  Plus, the senior minister in Cambridge is Rev. Fred Small, who is also a hippy-dippy style folksinger (pretty good and pretty well known IMHO). I have no doubt he wants to build on this choice.

UUs are actively trying to diversify. They seem to be doing better in attracting and growing ministers of color than folks in the pews. See this chart from UU data with the maroon being they and the blue all US church goers by race in 2008.

Rev. Cuervo is coming in with a good attitude at least. The Globe’s Lisa Wangeness quotes her as, “This is really breaking the tradition — it’s big for everybody…I want to help them nurture the dream they have.”

From my experience in the UUA and in particularly with the Arlington Street Church, I’m looking to see whether this will translate into more Latinos coming to a not-necessarily-Christian and pretty white church.  I think back to over 20 years ago at the ASC when we replaced the standard UU minister (white, male, graybeard) with a young, very out lesbian adoptive mother, Rev. Kim Crawford Harvie.

She was already well known in the LGBT communities around here as the minister at the P-town church. Very few of our members feared her presence might turn the ASC into an all-gay church; truth be told, we already had the reputation as the UUA chapel for the number of ministers and staff from HQ who worshiped there and we were already welcoming to all.

However, we were quite surprised in her first year at how many lesbian couples her ministry attracted, many adoptive parents and quite a few from Somerville. Most of those turned out to be tire-kickers as they say in the sales biz. When we asked those who stopped coming why, we typically heard that they’d rather sit in a café with the papers on Sunday mornings or that the 12 mile drive or subway seemed too much or that the kid’s classrooms were not nice enough for their children.

Rev. Cuervo might pack folk in by virtue of being a dynamite preacher, if she is. She might attract non-Catholic Hispanic worshipers. She might be just another good UU minister. Regardless, the calling was good. The effect and longevity are to be determined.

Tags: harrumph, harrumpher, diversity, UUs, race, Cambridge, Lilia Cuerfo

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Try to find filé powder in Shaw’s or Stop & Shop. I tried, along with many other chain and oner groceries in and around Boston.

As always, my quest was successful…through my demented perseverance. In my decades in Boston, I have gone from harrumphing frustration to amusement and enjoyment of the sport of it all.

As the cook around here, I am relentless in pleasing my family and guests. It isn’t always easy in a less than cosmopolitan town. Locale has come to make the ingredient hunts events for small triumphs.

Some of this is my fault for having a wide and deep repertoire  in the kitchen. I have been known to guffaw and simultaneously wrinkle my many-furrowed brow when I mention that I am the family cook. Almost invariably the non-chefs and mere dabblers and meat burners outside ask, “Oh, what kind of food do you cook?,” as though that would be reasonable chitchat. Horse feathers! It would be far easier to list what I won’t, haven’t or can’t cook.

Moreover, having lived in many parts of the country (and Japan) growing up, I got used to a variety of cuisines, groceries, and regional specialties. Then as an adult, I lived a decade in the Village in New York, two blocks from the fabulous Balducci’s produce, cheese, meat and fish haven. In lower Manhattan, virtually any foodstuff and all ingredients are available…right then…right there.

Boston and Cambridge and the area are not like that. There are many styles of restaurants. For ingredients though, you damned well better know your neighborhoods as well as your towns if you are looking for something. That’s kind of cute and even endearing in a provincial way. It’s less wonderful when you want to make a dish you know or have recently gotten a recipe for making. The hunt is on!

In its extreme, I learned this the first year we moved from the apple to the bean. That was 30 years ago and Boston has become more urbane and cosmopolitan since, but as many foods as I’ve had to track down over the years, I have no doubt we remain way behind more integrated cities with less dependency on sub-neighborhoods and cultural niches.

My first shock was fittingly enough, bean-based in Beantown. I worked down on Commercial wharf at Inc. magazine, which was a nice walk from the half of a townhouse we rented from the food and beverage manager of the Ritz. Johnny Carter of Johnny and Bonnie was a serious foodie by passion as well as profession.

He said he had never eaten feijoada, the Brazilian national dish and I figured I’d serve that as a get-better-acquainted meal. I knew I could get the sausages and pig and cow parts in the North End on the way home. I had not accounted that the key, staple ingredient — black (turtle) beans — would be a huge deal. After all, I had the North End, the Haymarket and Stop & Shop on the way home.

Well, 30 years ago, we here were even more provincial than we are now. Store after store, whether Italian specialty or chain, most did not have black beans or had ever seen them. Nowadays they are common dried and canned, but not in early 1980.

Such safaris have recurred repeatedly since, but with far greater success. That evening of the feijoada meant substituting the much inferior kidney bean, which did not have the fullness and muskiness required. However, I have learned to plan farther out. I also know which neighborhoods and which stores are likely to have this or that ingredient.

Tracking down items that would be very common in Manhattan has become a real sport and pastime in Boston. Such it was with filé.

I had a couple bottles of powdered sassafras leaves, including one a friend who visited New Orleans brought me a few years ago. When I use it that is generally for gumbo and I don’t need a lot, perhaps a teaspoon or two at the most and putting some on the table for the Southerners to sprinkle on as they might with the various levels of hot sauce I provide.

I sussed out the new Hyde Park supermarket, part of the PriceRight chain.  Every week (starting Sunday and not the herd mentality of Friday), that store has specials, including a couple of loss-leader produce items. One week it might be 97¢-a-pound grapes and the next it might be and was 99¢ okra.

Those wicked green fingers were as flawless as any I had seen or my granddad ever grew and at a great price. So, I churned out a gumbo and used my next to last allotment of filé. Hence, I went looking for replenishment.

As a side note, I disdain those who say a gumbo needs either okra as a thickener or filé for that job and not both. I don’t know anyone from Louisiana or anywhere in the Deep South who agrees.  The word gumbo itself is from an African term for okra. You can be sure the namesake is essential. Filé though does more than thicken the broth. It has a distinctive flavor and aroma. We can taste and smell it. Gumbo is not real without both okra and filé, regardless of the fat used in the roux, the meat or fish simmered, or the broth base.

So with my absurdly, compulsively through process, I walked, biked or drove to store after store and called a few others. I learned a few things, such as:

• the wonderful Hi-Lo Latino market in JP’s Hyde Square has myriad herbs and spices in four places, with lots of Caribbean medicinal bags of leaves or roots, but no sassafras.
• likewise, America’s Food Basket on Hyde Park Avenue not only has a fine  selection of those ugly root vegetables, but it has a huge range of culinary and medicinal herbs and spices in three sections (no filé).
• also, that new PriceRight has a big selection in two places in bottles and bags, but no filé.

After two dozen stores, I was amused by it all. I returned to the internet and tried multiple versions of search terms. Finally with something like “(filé powder)  gumbo Boston Cajun ingredients”I saw the winner. On the fourth page of hits, a food chat site had a comment that included the highlighted phrase “for those in the Boston area”.

Sure enough, a decent bike ride or drive of 12-plus miles took me to the source — the wonderful Marty’s in Newton. Yeah, it’s a wine/booze/beer store, but they have great mustards, chocolates and other foodstuffs. I’m sorry the Allston one disappeared in a lease fight, but one is really all I need.

Marty’s private brands many herbs and spices in a great rack of clear bags. God bless ‘em. I returned with two sacks of filé. Come the next batch of perfect okra, I’m set. I make a totally pleasing gumbo.

Perhaps it’s  true that the worthwhile should be at least a little struggle so you appreciate it. I’m sure I was spoiled by the years in the Village and almost daily trips to Balducci’s. There I’d find exactly what I wanted and needed and then carry my treasures the whole two blocks north. It was satisfying without the thrill of the hunt.

Likewise, I know in Boston I have cataloged hundreds of items with their neighborhoods and stores for sources. I also know that a couple of times a year, I’ll don my virtual pith helmet and pick up my virtual net for the hunt.

Tags: harrumph, harrumpher, Boston, cooking, file powder, gumbo, shopping

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Is it a senior moment when I mis-date an event in the Google calendar? I did and shall follow up on the state of cycling in Boston as soon as the report appears on the city site.

Dumbly, I not only put the day for in-person delivery for this evening instead of last evening when it occurred. I also tweeted and Cinched that. I have removed those erroneous leads and apologize if I confused anyone.

As a relentless (and my sons say weather-foolish cyclist), I do keep tabs on the situation. I am pretty sure that there will be incremental improvement data and forecasts on the continuing addition of bike lanes, racks, bus racks and such. In addition, our city’s cycling goddess (a.k.a. bike coordinator) Nicole Freedman is after a bicycle-sharing program here.

Truth be told, I’m less sanguine about the future of the latter. I’ll cover that more in future posts.

If today’s bitter cold has you off your bike and in your TV chair, you can keep  your mind focused with two Left Ahead! oldies. A year ago, we chatted with Freedman and a few months before that with her Cambridge counterpart Cara Seiderman.

Otherwise, I offer mild redress for my error with previous related posts. Click on Cycling to the left or here for those.

Tags: harrumph, harrumpher, bikes, Boston, Seiderman, Freedman

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We people could used more RAM.  In common public activities — for this post, think walking, cycling and driving — there are a ton of data to analyze every second. Yet the human norm is to limit the input, to be overly selective in using our brains.

A fatal example occurred in Boston when an 84-year-old walked out into traffic on Friday. A cyclist knocked  him to the curb, where he hit his head. He died two days later in the hospital.

Like competing Greek choruses,  we immediately heard:

• The large subset of bicyclists are all monsters! String ‘im up.
• A very quiet repeating chant of make the roads safe for cars, walkers and pedalers.
• A small subset of grumblers about crazy pedestrians.

I have a stake in all the races here, being a multi-modal guy (add the subway or T as we call it here). Moreover, I have been hit by car drivers four times. The first, at age 6, was my fault; I ran across the street in front of a car with a green light. The second and extremely serious, at 19, was when another of the six students in my Greek class (yes, a third of the class was involved) wasn’t paying attention and flung me up and through his VW’s windshield. Twice as an adult cyclist in Boston,  I was hit by drivers who simply did not pay attention to the road and plowed into me when I had the right of way and was looking.

Yesterday’s fatality, Henry Haley, was elderly and according to the Globe not too healthy. Yet that was an unnecessary death and he might have had another decade or more of enjoyment and participation coming. The cyclist, identified by the Herald as 22-year-old Julian Paul Cavarlez-Flores of Randolph (probably a 15 to 18 mile bike ride), apparently had no chance to stop when Haley stepped into traffic against the light and not in a crosswalk.

The cyclist’s being legally in the right doesn’t bring Haley back any more than it will keep Cavarlez-Flores from forever replaying the panic and impotence at the appearance and impact. By the bye, he remained, tried to help and cooperated with police. Witnesses said it was Haley’s doing.

Here, I’m huge on multi-modal transportation. Search the cycling posts on this spot and at Marry in Massachusetts to find posts on Boston’s cycling defects and advances, on the Moving Together and Rail-Volution conferences, and on efforts to make ped/car/bike transit safe and inviting for all. Some of the ideas we are finally copying from Europe (think NYC’s separated walker and cyclist lanes) will make big leaps in that direction, but they will be a long time coming.

Let’s leave aside the wild-eyed get-off-my-road attitude of overly aggressive and overly entitled drivers. Think instead of the attention factor. Through what appears to be a combination of dull wits, low process capacity or perhaps just laziness, most us don’t make the effort to keep others on the road safe.

Try any American beltway or interstate to see this in action. A long and wide cascade of red tail lights, often with spots of squealing brakes and tires, occurs regularly. That’s no act of God. Instead, most of us drive right in front of our cars’ hoods. Were we looking a little farther and wider, we could see this truck cutting of that car, a sudden slowing a few hundred yards away, a state-police car off in the right shoulder, or drivers blocked up behind some slowpoke in the far left lane.

Ideally, there’d be no tailgating and no mass surprises…if drivers took in the horizon and looked up from their hoods. Yet, doing that requires brain power, of the type nearly all of us can perform if we choose. There are many ocular messages and a few aural ones involved. We can’t be twisting the CD player dial or reaching for a map or watching the GPS display. We actually have to pay attention and use our processing power all the time.

Cyclists should do that too and in self-preservation, most are better at it than drivers. The potentially fatal hazards — almost entirely from inattentive or hostile drivers or from pedestrians — are constant in the city.

Consider tinted windows, which I consider hazardous both to the driver and to those around the car. Drivers lose some visibility in any darkened condition. Far worse is the elimination of field of vision for those beside or behind in the constant turning or lane changing conditions. Many of those tints are just too deep for safety and an annoyance to fellow drivers.

For a cyclist, tinted windows can be super-dangerous. On streets, even those with painted bike lanes, there is a constant risk from gormless drivers suddenly flinging doors open into traffic. If they knock a cyclist into traffic or if the pedaler hits the door, it means serious injury and even death. Dooring is a far greater cause of death and injury to cyclists than collisions between bikes and pedestrians.

The self-defensive solution is for cyclists to process constantly. It is not the option most drivers consider in their metal cages. Every parked car may contain a driver or passenger about to throw the door open without looking (violation of state law, by the bye). That processing does not mean cyclists can take their eye off the road ahead or to either side. Instead of slowing to pass as legally required, many drivers blow the horn as though that suddenly will make the bicycle disappear.

As I go by various transit methods, I am pretty sure that city cycling has a similar effect as hard crosswords. Both (particularly cryptics in the latter group) make the brain process more information, keeping it sharp. Ideally, everyone would regularly be a driver, walker and cyclist too. Dealing with the spatial realities of each could give us both insight and empathy to the others.

Pity that Mr. Haley died from the collision. Yet, this is such a rare event that it got and likely will continue to get media coverage locally. In contrast, cyclists injured by drivers are not news and those killed by a car or truck driver tend to hit the neighborhood weekly only.

It’s too glib to note that the common-sense prevention is to watch where we walk, rdrive or bike, as well as obey those pesky laws and regulations about traffic lights, crosswalks and turns. Instead, some of us are compelled to extreme caution by the abandon of others. I think of River Street in Hyde Park from Cleary to Logan Squares. On this always busy road, pedestrians of all ages, with and without their children, stride suddenly between parked cars and traffic, with no attention to the nearby crosswalks. As a dad who drilled it into my three sons never to assume drivers are looking out for you, I remain astonished that parents would risk their kids’ lives constantly. I bike and drive that stretch cautiously.

Our behavior in many cities and most the nation being what it is, we end up adjusting the mechanics to cope as best possible. That’s why we have sidewalks and here a few inconvenient bike paths and increasing mileage of bike lanes. We have to protect people from each other far more than civility and reason would otherwise demand.

I don’t know that we’ll ever get to the fully separated and pretty safe car/ped/bike lanes here. Yet that is more likely to happen than that other solutions — hard traffic enforcement. If word got around that Boston’s blue boys charged drivers with running red lights, cutting off or j-hooking cyclists, threatening pedestrians in crosswalk chicken and such,  we’d see a very different transit environment.

Forget that.

Instead, the crowds have competing calls of blame for bad walkers and bad pedalers. The real problems are streets not yet set up for multi-modal transit and drivers creating a wild-west-style roadway. Here’s betting that we patch the signs, paint the lanes and separate travel areas long before we force drivers to behave.

Tags: harrumph, harrumpher, cycling, drivers, Boston, pedestrian, Henry Haley, bike lanes

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Blemished fruits and vegetables separate humans philosophically. Much like admiring a pretty woman or handsome man, even the plainest of us demands more of the objects of our voyeurism than we provide.

I am in my 30th year of shopping at Boston’s Haymarket, 32nd if you count college days when I lived in Cambridge for a bit. I absolutely adore the rickety stalls on Blackstone Street. Also, much like my family members, I have a broad view and make allowances.

Not all are so forgiving.

I recall my late mother-in-law tsk-tsking over my Saturday harvests when she was on one of her protracted visits. For example, I’d bring back a full flat (12 pints overflowing of strawberries) and separate and clean them. A few pints would have a couple of moldy berries.

Sylvia would give a loud and long, “What a shame!” with great sincerity. While I paid 30¢ or perhaps 50¢ per pint, she thought I would have been better off paying $2 or $3 a pint in the supermarket. True enough, there were unlikely to be any moldy fruit in those. Then again, they would be half white and as tasteless as packing peanuts.

It would be the same with those tomato-like objects supermarkets stock and sell, the more or less permanent things, hard and vaguely pink, with no scent or flavor. Yet, they too would be without blemish.

I thought of her again recently as a blogger acquaintance exchanged a few emails with me on the subject. One included:

Our biggest problem with Haymarket is quality.  The prices are fantastic but often we throw out more than we eat which makes us do two things: 1) question whether the low prices are truly economical and 2) feel like we are being incredibly wasteful consumers.  I would love to try the market again but am trying to find strategies that make it truly worth it.

 

I suspect I can do what he wants, but perhaps not exactly as cleanly as he wants. Among the overlapping issues there are:

• Some vendors specialize and there are the right places to buy fresh herbs or citrus or root veggies. I can help there.
• Some is frequency. The vendors know me by face after so many years and quite a few will warn me off something that isn’t that good on a particular weekend.  He’d have to show up and greet them as though he were French for awhile to get that.
• Some is watching, particularly the college students as summer help. Be sure to see that they take the product they sell in plain sight. When they bend out of sight to a hidden box, that’s often trouble. Hear how the Asian-American women yell at them if they try that.
• Accept that the cheapest is sometimes the riskiest. Most fruits and veggies and half or a quarter of supermarket prices. That written, it makes sense to scan the Thursday grocery fliers; sometimes the supers have a great loss leader like 77¢ a pound black grapes that you may not be able to top at the Haymarket. Mostly though if the green beans are 75¢ and gorgeous, don’t hold out for the 4 pounds for a dollar; you can be pretty sure the vendor dumping goods at absurd prices has stuff bad or about to go bad. Many would rather dump that, but a few will appeal to greedy shoppers.
• If you want to get serious about a trip, walk through the front and then the back of the market. After all, it’s one long block and two perpendicular short half-blocks. See what looks good and fix the prices for your favorites on the way. Then swing back through with the bags you remembered to bring (I use a huge messenger bad for most stuff).

Back to the philosophical part, my mother-in-law did not grow veggies and fruits for subsistence. My grandfather, William B. Michael, did and had since the Depression.  Granddad taught me many realities of vegetative matter.

By the bye, my mother said she, her brother and sister, and their mother really didn’t know there was a Depression. That is, they were not grossly ignorant, rather Granddad had them covered. He had a full-time job (48 years on the B&O). He sold Chevrolets on the weekend. He had a part-time dry cleaner and tailor shop next to the house. Then, there were those gigantic gardens.

By the time my grandmother (with neighbors, children and grandchildren) canned, the shelves lining the basement floor to ceiling has Ball jars galore and the huge freezer was full of bags of Lima beans, corn and more. Snap beans, tomatoes, pickles and…it never seemed to stop.

My mother also told of how embarrassed she had been to wear homemade clothes from her father. Then she went away to college and bought clothes off the rack. She be damned, they didn’t fit perfectly. She had worn tailored clothes until she was 18!

Many summers I worked with him from weeding through harvest on several acres. He was a great respecter of people, but also of vegetables and fruit. He taught me enjoyment of what we grew as well. If it was time for asparagus, we’d walk down one of the 100-foot rows, cutting the perfectly ripe spears. Lightly steamed minutes later, they were sublime.

I also learned to take beautifully ripe tomatoes, redolent with that slightly acrid sweetness, and if one of the gems had a spot of blight or mold, we’s cut that and direct it to a stew or other sauce. The taste and color were great. As with today, the “bad” tomatoes were far better used that way than any permanent supermarket food.

So that is another philosophic angle of food. From a man who waltzed his family through the Depression, Granddad avoided waste. He also knew sapid from insipid.  I refuse to fill my mouth with bland food as a result.

Many Haymarket fruits and vegetables are ripe and ready. The supermarkets don’t want that, regardless of the grand tastes and aromas. They need food that will ship around for a week and sit in the store for two more without showing blemishes or mold. That’s the sturdy, Styrofoam® stuff you find behind the salad bar sneeze guard.

None for me, thanks. I’ll take the lush and ready-to-eat stuff. I’ll toss the occasional really bad piece and make the most of those with minor flaws. I’m not perfect and don’t demand perfect appearance of every tomato and strawberry.

Tags: harrumph, harrumpher, vegetables, Haymarket, flexibility, philosophy

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Sing, Goddess. Sing the skill and glories of Quad Bikes.

Saturday, I had a second wonderful experience with them, or specifically with David. I fully expect a third of three next week.

Anyone who knows me understands how I love biking and how I can harrumph about typical bike-shop dealings. The people at Quad (on the Radcliffe quadrangle) have disarmed me. I have told drinking buddies and now expand my own song of praise.

A tip of the toupee has to go to the Weekly Dig, which published one of their typical quarter-assed guides in May. This was the briefest of sketches for a wee selection of area bike shops, comparing tune-up prices.  Quad stood out there with kind of a warning that went off for me — did their much cheaper price mean much lower quality?

I had reason to find out a couple of months later. Regular readers know I have been recovering from serious leg surgery. I’m slower than before I got an ankle-to-knee titanium tibia nail, but I kept hoping some of my diminished speed was the condition of my road bike.  So, I decided it was time to tune up the equipment as well as me and figured at $36, I wasn’t risking much. That’s about a third of what Wheelworks charges.

So, the answer to the warning is no, siree. Quad is as good, much faster and really understanding of customer relations.

Service or Serve Us

To my normal repair-shop rants, they are notorious for not meeting their promised dates, making mistakes, delivering less than you pay for, charging a lot, and far too often being arrogant or sullen or both.

In contrast, the non-profit gentlemen (no distaff staff in sight) are pleasant, even jolly, as well as highly competent. Perhaps being only in their 20s has so far inoculated them from the grumpiness of stereotypical bike-shop guys.

I could go on about the tune-up I got for my road bike. Suffice it to say it was excellent work at the best price I have seen in the past 20 years. Moreover, it was one-day service and they accurately said when it would be done.

Consider though my panic  last week. Since my operation, almost daily biking has been essential, physically and emotionally, to my leg rehabilitation as well as fitness and weight control. When my chain snapped Wednesday as I headed up the 12- to 15-degree grade hill heading home, I was a bit concerned. Then when I replaced the chain with its many thousands of miles, I was very concerned as the new one seemed fine…all except for serious skipping and slipping under load up hills. There are many hills to and from the Y, in addition to the killer alp I face whenever I want to get to my new home.

I had already arranged to bring by my over 20-year-old Schwinn Sierra (that brand’s original mountain bike, heavy and hard tail) for evaluation. So, I called to see whether they’d squeeze in a repair of my road bike as well, to find if I had goofed up the chain installation or the bike had worn components that limited me to flat land.

This was a Saturday and a typical bike shop might have said, “Sure. Get in line. We’ll give you a mechanic’s time after Labor Day.” Quad said to bring it over. Holiday weekend or not, they kept to the 1 to 6:30 hours.

I got two joys from them:

1. They diagnosed and fixed my road bike within the hour of my arrival.
2. They said my old, beaten-up mountain bike could be fixed enough to make it a useful commuter.

In honesty, my baleful countenance may have aided in the road-bike repair. David’s a great enough guy and at least as enthusiastic as I about cycling. He responded when I moaned. Rather than simply feel gratitude that they’d fix it before the end of the day,  I found that he offered to do the job immediately.

His diagnosis, which he showed me proof for, was that my old chain had married to the rear cassette cogs as it stretched and they wore down. The new chain, which I had apparently put on well and the proper length was too healthy and accurate. It slid right off the worn cogs.

Out of Service, Alas

That required a new cassette in the rear wheel. Not only did they have a compatible one in the store room, but he would do the job that day.

I asked if I should disappear for a few hours (thinking that Cambridge Common, a bar with a great selection of taps and low prices was two blocks away). David looked at me and either to keep me sober or more likely to keep my cycling vital said he’d do it within 15 minutes or so. I can’t imagine that service and responsiveness from Belmont Wheelworks or Ferris Wheels or other bike shops I’ve used.

Realistically, inserting that repair in the queue made a negligible difference to other customers but huge one to me. It counters what I had to do in one of my college jobs in a German deli. The owner there insisted in absolute FIFO service. Even if I had to wait for part of one customer’s order to grill, I wasn’t to switch to a single item for another. First come and all that…

At Quad, David did what he said. The bill was low — $40 and change for part and labor. I was road ready as well as placated.

For the Schwinn, it was my first mountain bike. It had been down a lot of hills, back when I used the downhill beast to go up hills, over boulders and down the other side. I am emotionally attached. I have given other cycles to Bikes Not Bombs and put my Girvin with the frame crack in the trash.  I’ve lugged this beaten-up buddy around. Its gears need serious adjustment and likely new cables for them and the brakes. The headset is a bit wobbly too.

David said he can get it into shape for my fall and winter riding, conditions too perilous for a road bike with 23 or 25mm tires. In the snow, that would be like walking in socks on a huge porcelain plate.

Quad, by the bye, has the rights to the many abandoned bikes on the Harvard and Cliffy campuses. Students and others lock and leave their losers rather than bother paying for help or fixing them. Quad takes those declared vagrant by the Harvard cops and repairs and sells, or if necessary, junks them. Their mechanics have lots of experience making the inert roll again. It seems my Schwinn is not as abused and neglected as many of those.

If you need a second or an inexpensive mountain or road bike, Quad is likely to have several choices. Particularly in the late fall or winter and spring, they reclaim quite a few and tend to sell them in the $100 to $250 range after rehabilitation. That’s a bargain as well as environmentally sound.

Having written for the management and business press for years before turning to tech writing, I see Quad as a big step above average customer service. Far too many companies, even little ones, seem to think customers are there for profit and convenience, not to serve and satisfy. In contrast, Quad staff grok customers’ needs. I have already told numerous people about the glories of these guys and shall continue to do so.

Not only does Quad keep me on the road, its staff give a damn about doing so.

Tags: harrumph, harrumpher, tune-up, cycling, Quad Bikes, Cambridge

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Public curses have their time. I place one now on the yellow-bag tosser. May he or she have perpetually clogged toilets and sinks.

Today, I experienced what we in my family drolly call a personal tragedy. That is in dual honor of Morse Peckham’s insightful Beyond the Tragic Vision as well as American hyperbolic self-pity.

Mine was a personal cycling tragedy.

After tooling to Davis Square and then stopping in Porter on the way to the bottom of Hyde Park looking for a specific book to give a friend, I did the wise cycling citizen thing and stopped next to two Cambridge motorcycle cops at a light by Lesley.

Apparently during the full, long light cycle, a flimsy yellow newspaper delivery bag blew onto one of the two pulley wheels in my rear deraillleur. Like some silent-movie slapstick guy I stomped the pedals leading the cops at the green. That didn’t last. My chain grabbed and the rear wheel froze, replete with thudding and tire complaints.

Dismounting, I found the damage. I had never heard of such an absurd bike problem, but I wasn’t going anywhere until I fixed it.

The fix was messy and long, about 35 minutes. The bag was thoroughly enmeshed into the pulley and related derailleur parts. It picked up and smeared about the wet lube from the gears and chain. It folded into the working of the derailleur and pulley itself.

As my fingers smeared with tenacious grease and accompanying road grime, I hacked, pulled, pushed, yanked and tore at the bag pieces. The pulley remained locked and strangled. I had my multi-tool, so I could use the straight-blade screw driver and two of the smaller Allen wrenches to help. Eventually, blackened strand by greasy strand, the bag yielded and the pulley turned.  I could then pick out the smallest pieces freezing the inner gear.

I’ve gotten flats from glass residue left by clever folk who smash bottles in the street. In fact that happened a couple of times next to the Northeastern police HQ, where it seems college louts think it fun to break beer bottles in cops’ territory. I learned to avoid those couple of blocks of Columbus when I was bike commuting to Ft. Point Channel. A ruined road bike tire and tube are in the nature of $60, so this was economically less painful.

Done in by a plastic bag is a first for me. Surely a grocery-weight one would not have caught in the gears. For this one, it’s very likely that someone carried the newspaper from front stoop to work or college or on the way to the T. All it took then was for the old cigarette-butt style toss or letting the bag sort of fly toward a trash can for it to become a weapon of personal tragedy on a windy morning.

I have many flaws, which I won’t reveal here and now. Littering is decidedly not among them. I even gathered the many, greasy shards from my bike repair and hobbled in my cleated bike shoes to the distant trash can to push the mess deep into the bin.

My curse reminds me of early, culturally slanted humor from some Bennett Cerf book of my mother’s. As I recall it, two Scotsmen were staggering home after a few drams. One would stop by a streetlight every so often, bend to the pavement and stand up abruptly, angry and muttering. Finally, his companion could take it no longer and asked what was happening.  The reply was, “If I ever catch that that rascal that spits like a quarter, I’ll do him in!”

My yellow-bag tosser curse carries at least that much animus.

Tags: harrumph, harrumpher, cycling, litter, curse

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You want green? How ’bout those green burials?

What, you say they’re illegal in Massachusetts, which is why we don’t have that option. You say wrong.

Cross-Post Note: This appears at Marry in Massachusetts.

The cemetery (public as well as private) and funeral businesses refuse to offer the choice. There is no law and in some places a simple, easily overturned local ordinance would be the only impediment.

Don’t take my word. Come to Cambridge to Mount Auburn Cemetery’s Story chapel. At 1 p.m., Mark Harris will talk about his research on and the status of green burials. He wrote Grave Matters: A journey Through the Funeral Industry to a Natural Way of Burial.

We can pretend that if we have an embalmed corpse, a metal casket, a cast liner, and then a durable gravestone, we provide some eternal presence. Of course, in our heart of hearts we know that at best those wasteful and expensive symbols for those still alive will last a hundred or maybe a thousand years. In Earth time, that wouldn’t be a single Cheerios in the cereal box of eternity.

The traditional form of nearly all cultures was to wrap the corpse and put it in the ground or a cave to dissolve, to return its elements. Really, the worms crawl in, the worms crawl out. That seems what we should all want.

My wife and I would like the idea of snuggling down into the earth. That was very real to me last week as I went into my first surgery and first general anesthesia. Hell, people die on the operating table!

We do no have the option citizens do in Maine, California, South Carolina and elsewhere. Hmm. Our advocates are the soft-spoken Funeral Consumers Alliance of Eastern Massachusetts.

They are nice folk, but we all have that limbo problem. There are no laws preventing green burials in the commonwealth. Individual cemeteries would have to offer or be started to offer them.

I suspect Harris will speak of the funeral biz’ tactics of saying terrible things will happen if they don’t pump poisons into our corpses and don’t bury is in the full armored vehicle of death. They even say without the concrete grave liner, it’s hard for the lawn-mowing crew. Somehow people managed on this planet for thousands of years and even learned such incredible engineering feats as piling extra dirt on top to allow for settling.

It appears we’re going to have to ask for the option. We’re going to have to say we don’t want to bury high-carbon footprint caskets and trappings, along with highly-toxic embalming fluid. We’re going to have to say we’d like to go out naturally.

I’ll be there on March 21st, likely still on crutches or walker.

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