The Rake Magazine

Category: Columns

  • Chalk & Cheese

    When you buy a farm, said the Roman agricultural writer Palladius, you need to look at the people who live in the area. If they seem a sturdy lot, you can invest with confidence, but if they are podgy and pasty faced (that is a free translation of the Latin), then keep away. The local people, no less than the cheese and wine they produce, are autochthonous, sprung from the local soil.

    Until last week, I thought that the origin of the expression “as different as chalk and cheese” also lay in the soil—that the distinction was not between the substances themselves but between the chalk uplands of southern England, traditionally good for grazing sheep, and the region’s lush, damp valleys, where cows produce milk creamy enough to make Stilton and Cheshire. Now I find, from a quick blink at John Gower’s Confessio Amantis, that there were people as far back as the fourteenth century dim enough to confuse actual pieces of cheese with lumps of calcareous limestone. But I still prefer my own theory. The school I went to in my teens was surrounded by chalk downs, no longer sheep-runs but acres of open arable, thickly coated in nitrate of potash. Not only did that land look quite different from the little meadows in the vale a few miles to the south, but the folk who farmed it were different as well. Terroir tells.

    The crumbliest, most chalk-like of English cheeses actually come not from the vales of the south but from granite country in Wales and the north, where the last Ice Age scraped the easy surface off the landscape and left what passes in Britain for mountains. Caerphilly, a sharp white cheese from Wales, hails from hills where they quarry granite that people polish and turn into kitchen counters—the sort guaranteed to shatter any wine glass dropped on it. Similarly, Wensleydale cheese is made among the northern Pennines (James Herriot territory). Not long ago, a faceless quango—“quasi-autonomous national governmental organization”—tried to close the creamery and move production to an industrial suburb of Liverpool. A management buyout prevented it and Wensleydale is still made by the strong, silent men of the Yorkshire Dales, as it has been since the twelfth century, when the Cistercian monks first came to tame this wet and gritty land.

    The wine that goes best with such sharp, crumbly cheese, however, comes from the sun-dappled valley of the river Loire in western France, distinctly chalk-and-limestone country. Splendid Sauvignon Blanc like Pouilly-Fumé and Sancerre has often lain in cool, dry, limestone caves. Thus cheese and chalk may in a sense bury the hatchet. Crumble some Wensleydale into a green salad, add fresh thyme from the garden, sip one of these dry white wines, and somehow the sharpnesses coalesce.

    However, it is not the famous Sauvignon wines from the Loire that we celebrate this month, but rather one whose grapes grow in a land whose spectacular and complex geology defies summary description—though we saw plenty of it masquerading as Middle Earth in the Lord of the Rings films. The House of Nobilo’s 2005 Sauvignon Blanc (available locally for about thirteen dollars) comes from the Marlborough region at the north end of the South Island of New Zealand. This is about as far south as Minnesota or the Rhone valley is north, that is, say, about forty-two degrees of latitude, but the Pacific Ocean makes the climate a good deal milder than ours.

    The white Sauvignon grape has been grown here for a century, but it has only become big business in the last thirty years, particularly since England joined the Common Market and New Zealand had to find new markets (and sometimes new products) to replace agricultural exports, like lamb, that had previously gone to Britain. These days the price of land is rising in the Marlborough area as erstwhile pastures are turned over to grapes.

    The results of all this industry are fresh, delightful, and now famous. The 2005 Nobilo has a good bright color and a good bright taste, crisp with a hint of a fizz on first acquaintance. It is not as dry as, say, Sancerre (but then the Loire is a good deal farther from the Equator); there is a roundness more reminiscent perhaps of kiwi fruit than of anything citrus. Drink it at lunchtime with a summer salad (don’t forget the cheese) and it will put a spring into your afternoon.

  • Minnesota Dreamin'

    A few weeks ago, when the Powerball was around $300 million, one of the chefs at my day job took up a collection among the employees at five bucks a head to buy as many tickets as he could. “Remember the Lunch Ladies!” he said. And so almost everybody pitched in for her share, and we had one of the best workdays ever. The driving force was the series of great, spotty conversations we had throughout the day as each of us considered what we’d do with our multi-million-dollar cut. I guess that’s what you’re really paying for when you buy a ticket. The dream.

    Some of us knew right away what we’d do. For others it was a fantastic exercise in imagining a Donald Trump-style, full-tilt boogie cash wallow. For those folks, it wasn’t a matter of if they’d quit their day jobs or whom they would sever ties with. It was a matter of how they would do those things. One guy spoke wistfully of paying his mother-in-law a monthly stipend if she’d say things to him like, “You’re right!” and “I’m so glad my daughter married you!” for the rest of their natural lives. He guessed it probably would cost him about five hundred dollars a month, a bargain.

    Later, I asked my husband what he would do with a few extra mil, and he said that he might quit his job. He wouldn’t make a big production out of it; there would be no rebel yells or end-zone strutting. He’d just come in, announce that it was his last day, and knock one item off every desk he passed on his way out.

    “Of course I wouldn’t be selfish about it,” he said. “I’d probably buy the freedom of one of my fellow slaves, my best friend. My best friend would be determined on the spot by a talent competition. Break dancing, yodeling, whatever people felt comfortable with.”

    I’ve never been rich, but once when I was in my mid-twenties, I had about forty thousand in the bank, cash. I don’t exactly remember what happened to it, although according to my journals from that time, it looks like I spent it all on eyeliner and beer. You don’t have to tell me what happens when money comes before breeding.

    I know money can’t buy happiness. What it can buy are things, and sometimes things can make people very happy. Let’s say that someone in your field of vision parades his new thing in front of you. You can go out and purchase a bigger, newer thing to assuage your deep-seated fear of irrelevancy. The same feeling of satisfaction can be had whether you’re on Lake Street shopping the Jacklyn Smith collection under the Blue Light or off on safari in a $2,500 Ralph Lauren khaki camisole, hunting the magic goose that craps Fabergé eggs.

    But if I came into a sudden fortune, I’d want to make sure it bought an experience, some form of change. That’s why I think I’d buy a congressman. The idea came to me when I learned that Rep. Randall “Duke” Cunningham kept an actual price list for bribes, noting how much defense lobbyists would have to slip him in order to win multi-million-dollar Pentagon contracts. “Duke” is in the slammer now, after pleading guilty to tax evasion, conspiracy to commit bribery, and a raft of other charges. I wonder if he has a new bribe menu posted in his prison cell. “1 pack Camels = 10 mins. of ‘personal services.’”

    I know just the congressman I’d buy. That guy from Texas’ 22nd District, Tom DeLay. As the money man for the Republican Congress these last six years, he understands the role that moolah plays in politics, so I wouldn’t have to spell it out for him. Also, I expect he’d come pretty cheap right now, since, after being indicted on felony money-laundering and conspiracy charges, he announced his plans to retire from Congress. News reports say he’s down to the last $1.3 million in his legal-defense fund, so it’s a buyer’s market.

    Once I had The Hammer in hand, I’d make him vote against all of his current positions. It would be fun to force him to make a stirring farewell speech calling for universal health care, lobbying reform, and a stop to the gerrymandering of political districts. I’d keep him on retainer for life, so even if Fox News hired him as a commentator, I could order him to advocate for clean government, the separation of church and state, and bipartisan cooperation. That would drive him crazy!

    Finally, if he’s convicted, I’d make The Exterminator serve his full term without any wussy pleading for a pardon or assignment to a country club prison. I’d have him ask to go to a real hellhole where he could apply his experience with rats and cockroaches. Not only could he contribute there, he could grow. As the new guy on the cellblock he would learn to forge alliances and earn influence without corrupt outlays of cash and expensive gifts. He might find that a little tenderness goes a long way.

    Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m cleaning out my change jar and heading over to the gas station.

  • The Pictures to Prove It

    Ratting out someone, even a creep who really deserves the exposure, is not usually done before an adoring throng, but furtively, behind closed doors—because people generally despise snitches. When Vanity Fair magazine revealed former FBI agent Mark Felt as “Deep Throat” last fall, old passions flared anew. Virtually everyone, even those who defended Richard Nixon to the bitter end, conceded that Felt did the country a service by helping expose serious lawbreaking at the highest levels of government. Yet many of the same people cannot bring themselves to call Felt a hero, because he snitched.

    Our collective aversion to snitching explains why Minneapolitans reacted with palpable resentment to “photo cops”—cameras placed at intersections notorious for red-light running—and cheered when Hennepin County District Court Judge Mark Wernick, in City of Minneapolis v. Daniel Kuhlman, said that Minneapolis failed to use them legally. Kuhlman, who received a photo cop ticket for running a red light, hired attorney Howard Bass to fight it because, according to Kuhlman, he was not driving his car at the time.

    When photo cops were installed last summer, many of us railed against them as another Big Brother encroachment on our right to ride anonymously along life’s freeways. No one seriously disputes that the photo cops have significantly reduced red-light running—according to some reports, by close to twenty percent—at the dozen or so intersections where they were installed. And, in these dire, budget-crunched times, the photo cops helped generate close to a million dollars in revenue for cash-strapped Minneapolis. But what mattered, and what ticked off so many people, was that the photo cops never blinked. They were invariably right, and just like a true snitch, they hid behind the protective cloak of anonymity.

    While the technology behind the photo cop is state of the art, the concept was simple and logical. Cars running lights were photographed; the driver was identified by license plate number and received a ticket in the mail along with “the evidence”—a series of photographs showing the car in its compromising position. The ticketee was presumed guilty and typically fined $164 for the violation, unless he could prove (1) he no longer owned the car; (2) the car was stolen at the time of the violation; or (3) he was not driving the car at the time of the violation—in which case he must “nominate” (i.e. rat out) the actual driver.

    According to Judge Wernick, the problem with the Minneapolis ordinance was that it took the presumption of innocence that girds our criminal justice system and turned it on its head. Instead of the government having to prove that someone actually committed the alleged crime, it was up to the person accused to prove that he did not do it. Minnesotans accused of running a red light anywhere else in the state—even in Minneapolis, in cases where a photo cop did not do the ticketing—did not start their cases against the government in such a deep procedural hole.

    Did Daniel Kuhlman run a red light on August 17, 2005? The answer to that question turns out to be irrelevant. What is really at stake in the City of Minneapolis v. Daniel Kuhlman is reaffirming who has the burden of proving the answer to that question beyond a reasonable doubt. Judge Wernick got it absolutely right: Minneapolis cannot dump that responsibility on the accused. At the same time, Wernick was careful not to unilaterally condemn this sort of law enforcement tool. Photo cops can and do work effectively and legally in places like Oregon and Delaware. Drivers snapped in those states are not charged with crimes. Instead, they pay civil fines, which usually do not place their drivers’ licenses at risk, nor leave them with the consequences of a criminal conviction—like the potential loss of one’s license and higher insurance rates.

    No one likes to get caught doing things he knows are wrong. And very few people like snitches, be they human or electronic, even when they save us from our own stupidity. However, we are far less likely to resent—and may even come to grudgingly accept—electronic surveillance like photo cops if the government, in its zeal to encourage us to do the right thing, does not do it by gutting our constitutional right to be presumed innocent until proven guilty.

  • Drink to Forgiveness

    What, a student asked the other day, was the last place to be ruled by the Romans? Nowhere in Italy, that’s for certain; the last Roman emperor I know to have set foot on mainland Italy with the purpose of exercising political power was Constans II in 662. The Holy Roman Empire, begun by Charlemagne and destroyed by Napoleon, we agreed did not count, being notoriously neither holy nor Roman nor an empire. “How about Constantinople, New Rome on the Bosporus, not captured by the Ottoman Turks ‘til May 29, 1453?” the young man suggested. I was able to raise him eight years. At the southeast corner of the Black Sea is the port city of Trebizond, modern Turkish Trabzon, and this pleasant place was ruled by its own local Christian Roman emperors until 1461.

    Those who have heard of Trebizond at all probably know it from Rose MacAulay’s The Towers of Trebizond, an endearing novel published in 1956 that stars a spiky Anglican parson, a suffragette, a camel, and a lady whose behavior was, shall we say, no better than it ought to be. It is a witty tale evoking a more generous, less litigious world. Not long after MacAulay’s visit to Trebizond, the local Muslim congregation, which had been worshipping for centuries in the former coronation church of the Roman emperors, magnanimously allowed their mosque to be turned into a museum so that its Christian paintings could be uncovered, studied, and restored. (You have never seen such a flutter of angels’ wings as under that dome.) Until the international treaties of 1922, in fact, a substantial Orthodox Christian minority lived alongside the Trebizond Muslims, but the Orthodox were then sent to Greece as part of an exchange of populations—ethnicity in that part of the world then being defined by religion. A tiny Roman Catholic congregation survived, served by Capuchin friars. Trebizond has always had a reputation for kindness and a mild maritime climate.

    One Sunday afternoon in February, modern passions smashed the city’s peace. The priest who cared for the dozen or so Roman Catholics in Trebizond, Father Andrea Santoro, was shot dead while praying in the church. The killer was a teenager, enraged by insults to his faith. The priest was no proselytizer; evangelism, even the wearing of religious dress in public, is illegal in Turkey, a secular state which is ninety-eight percent Muslim. Fr. Andrea lived there as a quiet witness to a force more positive even than tolerance. “Silence, humility, the simple life … clear and defenseless witness and the conscious offering of one’s life can rehabilitate the Middle East,” he told a friend. The bishop who buried him back home in Italy called him a martyr; he reported that the priest’s mother feels great pain for the young man who killed her son. No true Muslim, said a minister of the Turkish government, would kill a man of God in the house of God. “We must,” said the poet W.H. Auden, “love one another or die.”

    They drink wine in Trebizond, but they do not grow it. Turkish wine is very good, but the beverage that comes from the wooded valleys of the Black Sea coast is Turkish tea. Grapevines and tea bushes are seldom horticultural bedfellows. It is frothy coffee that one associates with the Capuchin Friars, Fr. Santoro’s order. Cappuccino gets its name from the color of their habits. But he, in fact, came from Rome, and the volcanic hills south and east of the city produce good dry white wine which refreshes countless Romans who drive out from the capital to have dinner in the Castelli Romani on hot summer evenings.

    The wine from Frascati, made by Fontana Candida (Italian for “white fountain”), is an old favorite, remarkably consistent over the years and at less than ten dollars very affordable. It is made mostly from the Trebbiano grape, the most widely grown grape in Italy, mixed with two types of Malvasia. The color is so yellow it is almost green; the nose recalls brewer’s yeast more than the wild flowers alluded to on the label, but there is a good bitter acid scrunch at the center of its taste, followed by a long pleasing flavor redolent of watermelons. This Frascati goes (of course) with fish and also with lemon chicken; it would complement a leg of lamb, roasted with lots of rosemary. It is a glass of this that I shall raise at Easter to honor the memory of a martyr, a brave man called home, a witness to the hope made possible by the practice of forgiveness.

  • A New Game For Milton Bradley

    I was hanging out with a group of buddies the other day and several conversations were going on all at once. During a lull in the chatter, I heard my friend Mike describe someone he had known all of his life as a guy who was once a world-class adventurer, but who wound up “a housepainter with hepatitis C.” Now, it doesn’t really matter what led up to this statement. What I found interesting was that no matter how many accomplishments, experiences, and successes this guy had enjoyed previously in his life, Mike had reduced his current existence to a menial job and a physical condition.

    It was a twisted variation on that game where you create your stripper name by using your house pet’s name and the street where you lived as a child. In that case I would be “Fritzie Duluth,” though Mike might add, “that waitress from Mickey’s Diner with crabs.”

    I shared this pin-the-personality-on-the-person idea with my husband, who was appropriately stunned to realize that he was “Tiger Burns, the Whirlpool washer assemblyman with Bell’s palsy.”

    Of course, Milton Bradley could never market such a game. People are too protective of their personal myths. Deep down, we’re all terrified that not only are we frauds, but that we stink too—as in the case of my best friend, “Spooky Arcade,” who happens to be a successful stockbroker but once worked as “a school janitor with chronic halitosis.” (Spooky sez: Don’t forget to brush your tongue.)

    I was reminded of our natural inclination to secretly reduce ourselves and not so secretly reduce others to the worst possible bottom line. Recently, on the telephone with my mom, the tension was running high; she was upset about something I’d done. Now, I appreciate that I couldn’t have been an easy child to raise, seeing as I spent a number of my teenage years as “a high-school dropout welfare mother with a pot-smoking problem.” Nor were my mistakes limited to youthful indiscretions. My two children were born out of wedlock by separate fathers. My first house went into foreclosure. My first marriage was a fiery train wreck; I was shacking up with my second husband before either of us was officially divorced. Yes, all this and crabs, too.

    Later that day, I expressed the sadness I felt at upsetting my mother to my dear pal, “Grizzly Pinecourt,” a former “warehouse grocery packer with oral gonorrhea.” He said to me, “You know, Fritzie, sometimes I feel that to my mother I will always be the sixteen-year-old who ran away from home and ended up in the psych ward in a hospital two towns away. I get frustrated and depressed because I feel like she can’t see the best parts of me, because the bad parts for her outweigh everything else. But the serious, Hallmark Card truth of it is that I wouldn’t have arrived at the best parts of who I am without all the sketchy parts.”

    I have a human-anatomy textbook with a series of transparency pages that build a whole person from the blood vessels out. As you lay each transparency down, you get the bones, organs, muscles, and skin. All parts working together to create a whole.

    His sentiment and the images in that book followed me a couple of days later when I took my daughter to get her lip pierced. She was five months away from her eighteenth birthday, and I signed the permission slip. When she initially told me she wanted a piercing, she held my hand over the fire. She said coolly, “I have a friend who does piercings, so I can get it done without your permission. I’m just telling you, I’d rather get it done with your permission.” Weeeeeell. My administration doesn’t like to truck with terrorism, so I countered with a potential freezing of assets and a cell phone embargo. This amounted to pointless political posturing on my part since, for most of her senior year, she has been operating as a sovereign nation with her own income and resources.

    I caved despite my misgivings and before I knew it we were standing in the waiting room of Saint Sabrina’s. My daughter was absolutely giddy with excitement and admitted to being nervous. I said lamely, “Uh, well, you know you don’t have to get this done.” A sweet gentleman with nostril grommets ushered my baby into a private room. I didn’t hear her cry out, though my heart was pounding. She came out smiling. “Bones Wabasha, the babysitter with a lip ring.”

  • Who are you calling an “underperformer”?

    Close your eyes for a minute and picture a typical academically challenged, underperforming student. If you are really honest with yourself, you probably see one of the “boyz from the hood”—in other words, a black, brown, or Latino male raised in bad circumstances and going nowhere fast.

    For many years, the desire to avoid students like the “boyz” fueled what came to be known as “white flight.” Here in Minnesota, whites ran to the suburbs with just as much enthusiasm as their fellow citizens in other parts of the country. Why? Because for many whites, the unspoken assumption was that the phrases “great schools” and “high minority student population” could not co-exist in the same sentence.

    So why are whites leaving the well-regarded public schools in Cupertino, California, home to Apple Computer and Silicon Valley’s ground zero? According to a recent Wall Street Journal article, the proportion of whites at Monta Vista High School, which boasts some of the highest test scores in California, has dropped to twenty-five percent of the student body—in a town that is nearly half white. No one disputes the quality at Monta Vista or at Lynbrook High, a school with a similar percentage of whites in nearby San Jose. Both routinely send students on to Stanford and the Ivies. They also have a burgeoning population of Asian students, and, as the article attested, it’s the fear of having their children out-performed by these students that is leading many white parents to abandon these schools.

    In Silicon Valley, the kids at the back of the bus, academically speaking, are very often white males. The Cupertino superintendent pointed out the racial composition on two different floors at one of his schools. White faces dominated the first floor, which housed the math class for slow learners; among the kids on the second floor, who were primarily advanced-placement students, whites were an underwhelming presence.

    This stark reality was not lost on the students. Many of them, both white and Asian, simply assumed the Asian kids were smarter, especially in science and math—an assumption that of course aligns neatly with stereotypes about Asians. Even Cupertino’s superintendent said there is a “white boy syndrome” which he characterizes as a kid who feels that he is part of “a distinct minority against a majority culture.”

    In both Cupertino and Minnesota, groups of kids are battling stereotypically based perceptions that they are either human computers or “underperforming” losers. In California, the whizzes are Asian and the “unteachable ones” are white, mostly male, and largely affluent. Here in Minnesota, the academically competent are white and the academically challenged are primarily children of color, male and poor.

    One key difference, and it is a big one, is that white parents in Silicon Valley have the resources to place their kids in environments where the parents perceive their kids are valued and not as academically and culturally threatened. In a word, they are increasingly choosing to segregate them.

    I do not for a minute think that is the answer—either for those affluent kids in California or, assuming we had the resources, for poor minority students here in Minnesota. Some African-American parents have eagerly jumped on the “Afro-centric” school bandwagon. They believe that an ethnically homogenous environment is most likely to lead to academic success for African-American students, and they point to the huge success of historically black colleges, which still produce a majority of this country’s black doctors, lawyers, and engineers, as proof.

    I believe that this approach takes our country’s educational system off the hook for failing to adequately educate all of our students. Beyond that, ethnically segregated schools deprive students of the opportunity to learn from—and learn to get along with—people from different backgrounds.

    Stereotyping usually springs from bigoted assumptions and fear—which makes it a stupid and damaging basis for making decisions about our educating our students. Moreover, it is just as damaging for the haves as for the have-nots. That’s because, for better and for worse—as kids in both Cupertino and Minneapolis can personally attest—perceptions and expectations often do become reality.

  • Strine Wine

    When I was home in England over Christmas, I caught a liver specialist from (appropriately enough) Liverpool being interviewed on the wireless. He was talking about cirrhosis, that very nasty condition in which the liver turns into little yellowish granules, and eventually packs up completely. When he began in the liver business years ago, he said, this was the disease of older men, brought on by a lifetime’s application to the bottle. Nowadays, though, he frequently found the beds in his ward filled with young women who had managed to achieve the same effect in an altogether shorter time. The young people of Liverpool, he averred, do drink an awful lot these days.

    Archaeological evidence suggests this phenomenon is not confined to Liverpool. As the spring thaw sets in each year along fraternity row in Minneapolis, bottles emerge to view in the snow banks on the boulevard, mostly bearing the names of undistinguished vintages or popular brands of beer. As the melt proceeds, they dribble down into the gutter, where they pose a hazard to cyclists (credite experto … ). The historian Edward Gibbon, writing about Oxford during the eighteenth century, felt that the deep potations of those who were supposed to be teaching him Latin and Greek excused “the brisk intemperance of youth.” I can forgive a good deal of brisk intemperance, but a puncture in my front tire makes me livid (a very nasty condition in which the face goes pale purple with rage).

    In Gibbon’s time, the British government tried to use stiff excise duties to control alcoholic intake. Avoiding these penalties became something like the national sport. The stakes were high; you could get hanged for smuggling, but evading the exciseman appealed to a certain spirit of adventure, as those fortunate enough to have had J. Meade Falkner’s novel Moonfleet read to them in their youth can certainly agree.

    The most unlikely recruit to the government team must surely have been Rabbie Burns, the Scots national poet. This is a man who wrote lines like “Freedom an’ whisky gang thegither,” as well as one of the world’s great drinking songs, “O Willie Brew’d a Peck o’ Maut” (chorus: “We are na fou, we’re nae that fou, but just a drapee in our e’e … ”). Yet he spent the last half-dozen years of his short life (he died of heart trouble, not of drink) chasing down smugglers and illicit distillers in the deep valleys of Dumfries and Galloway. Not that it seems to have cramped his style. One of his wildest poems is a rant about the party put on in a town where the local exciseman had been carried away to hell by the devil; Burns is said to have composed it while waiting on the beach for reinforcements so he could search a smuggling ship that had gone aground on the treacherous sands of the Solway Firth.

    With a reputation like that, it is scarcely surprising that “Bobbie Burns” should have given his name to a vineyard in the Australian State of Victoria (the bottom right-hand corner) founded by a Scots gold prospector called John Campbell. Campbells Wines produced their first vintage in 1870, and their Bobbie Burns Shiraz 1998 (available hereabouts for less than $17) is a worthy scion. The Shiraz grape, widely grown in Australia, is the same as that which the French call the “Syrah,” the variety from which most of the great red wines of the Rhône Valley are made. It has, alas, no historical connection with the Persian city of the same name, home of the Persian national poet Hafiz, a bard altogether more refined than “owr Rabbie,” and one who wrote about wine, it seems, merely as a metaphor for spiritual experience.

    There is nothing immaterial about this good-hearted red. It has little nose, but plenty of fruit and alcohol, as one might expect from grapes which have reached ripeness over a long, warm autumn. The tannins are more spicy than redolent of the oak barrels in which the wine matured. This would make a cheering companion to any red meat, a pork roast say, or even haggis, the great chieftain of the pudding race. Come to that, the tannins suggest it has time still on its side. Buy some now to drink later. But best make sure you like it; sample some now as well, and call to mind Paul’s advice to Timothy: “Drink no longer water, but use a little wine for thy stomach’s sake.” A little wine—no poet (or hepatologist) could have said it better.

  • A Tale of Two Tales

    I just saw Memoirs of a Geisha. In the movie, there’s a scene where the geishas play a drinking game with their clients. Somebody tells two stories, and then everybody else has to guess which is true. With that idea in mind, I have two stories for you this month.

    Story #1 goes like this. Some gals send their fellas off to work with a sweet note in their lunch pail. I’m a little more extreme. It started out innocently enough. My guy forwarded me a dinner invitation from a couple we know. He’d added a flirty line at the bottom of the email asking me to be his date.

    I thought … well. I thought, you know what? It’s going to be a busy week for the both of us. We won’t have too much time to spend together, but I can stoke the fire and make him wish he was able to spend more time with me. So I wrote him a dirty email. The filthiest, as in Specialty Magazine Filthy. I can’t even begin to tell you all the sordid details. Just take the raunchiest thing you can think of, multiply it by ten, and pretend you’re tailoring it uniquely to your lover’s eccentricities. Just take a moment and do that. Get the pictures in your head. That’s what I wrote. It wasn’t just a short paragraph, either. Nuh-uh. It was a full page in brilliant, widescreen, black-and-white sleaze-o-vision.

    Screeching and giggling at my own audacity, I read my “scene delicate” over once, and, before I could lose my nerve, hit “Send.” I discovered later that I’d hit “Reply All” and sent the note not only to our prospective host and hostess, but to the entire e-chain of dinner-party invitees.

    Now I find myself considering what to bring as a hostess gift. I’ve got it narrowed down to either a Barry White CD or a block of sno-cap lard and a shower curtain.

    And here’s Story #2. I got into an argument with my husband. This argument was in no way related to the dirty-email story. It’s just that we’re married, and sometimes we argue.

    So, we were in this stupid argument, but we both had to go to work. I had an evening class until 9:00 p.m. and since I had the car, I was supposed to pick up my husband from his office at 10:30 p.m. After class, I decided to take myself out for a glass of wine during my free hour and a half. I chose a place that I’d heard of but never been to before. A nightclubby kind of place.

    It was a weeknight, so the club was a total ghost town. The atmosphere was more than a little bizarre because even though the place was empty, they still had the thumpa music blaring and full disco lights swirling around. I sat at the bar, pulled out a magazine, and ordered a glass of red. Within ten minutes, a woman sat next to me. Before I could even get out a hello, she blurted out her entire life story to me. All the while, the music thumped and the lights swirled. It took almost an hour, and was quite fascinating. After she ran out of gas, she begged me not to tell anyone what she’d just confided. She was absolutely manic about it. I assured her that I wouldn’t tell a soul, that her story was so outlandish, who would believe me? She flashed a mean smile, and threatened to curse me with a poltergeist if I breathed a word of it to anyone. Those were her words. She said, “I will send a poltergeist to you if you so much as breathe a word of this to anyone.”

    I motioned to the bartender for my tab. The woman sitting next to me insisted on taking care of it, because I’d been such a good listener. She pulled out a clean, one-inch-thick bank stack of two-dollar bills. A bank stack. Like in the movies, with a paper band around it. She cracked the band, peeled off five bills for the bartender, and handed one to me without a word. I took it and scooted out of there as quickly as I could. I picked up my husband from work.

    The next day, he asked for a couple of bucks to take the bus to work. I gave him the two-dollar bill. He said, “Where’d you get this?” I told him, “You wouldn’t believe me if I told you.”

  • A Valentine Across the Fence

    Before I understood what “wild oats” were, my parents—especially my mother—warned me to stay away from white women. Both came of age in the pre-Emmett Till South, where black men got lynched for so much as flirting with white girls. For my mother and father, however, avoiding “playing in the snow” was more about racial pride than physical safety. I can still hear my mother telling me that there was no need to “cross the fence” because we had every shade of color imaginable on our side, from “dark as midnight” to “high yaller.” “Have some pride,” she said. “If you and your friends don’t stay within the race, girls like your sisters will not have decent men to marry.” She meant that the male portion of W.E.B. Du Bois’ “talented tenth” had a duty—which they failed to meet because of slavery and its aftermath—to protect black women and take their rightful place as head of the family. To marry “out of the fold” was to once again abandon black women.

    I did not openly question this obligation, but I did surreptitiously date white girls. In college, when I dated a white girl, my father believed it was simply a misguided attempt to dis my parents’ values. Meanwhile, my mother prayed for my black soul. I called my parents hypocrites for marching for freedom in the 1960s while castigating me for embracing freedom in my choice of romantic partners. I saw myself as carrying out Dr. King’s dream—that people should be judged by the content of their character and not the color of their skin.

    Before and between marriages, I dated women with light, dark, and red hair, but relatively few with dark skin; I’m now married to a woman with blond hair and blue eyes. I used to rationalize my choices as a search for smart women, skin color be damned. And when I did admit, to close male friends, that I found blonds and redheads especially appealing, I was always quick to point out black women who also tripped my trigger, such as Halle Berry and Vanessa Williams. Interestingly, they were in many ways the “high yaller” version of what I found attractive in white women. Did I truly have a preference but lack the guts to admit it? Was it just physical—I gravitated toward whites over blacks the way other men go for model-thin waifs over their more zaftig sisters? Or was it something deeper? I have to wonder if years of living in white neighborhoods and attending an Establishment bastion like Harvard created confusion about my racial identity—and maybe that confusion led me to what could be taken as a symbolic abandonment of black women.

    One of my best friends, who resembles a slightly wizened, middle-aged Kunta Kinte, has followed a similar path; his spouse is a statuesque blond with blue eyes whose family hails from Northern Europe. He is proud of his blackness and rails with gusto against the injustices that whites have inflicted upon African-Americans. He says the only criteria for his partner is that she be “pretty, nice, and let me be the man.” The ethnic identities of his paramours over the years suggest he does not believe African-American women fit the bill. He told me that, living in Minnesota, his choices were strictly a result of “supply and demand,” but I wasn’t really convinced. Truth be told, I have always felt that we two were playing a little game of hypocrisy in energetically proclaiming our love for black people but not sharing our love with black women.

    Now my teenage sons are introducing me to their girlfriends, and it appears the apple has fallen close to the tree. Until recently, I said nothing. After all, I taught them to look past color. Yet I also taught them never to forget their racial heritage. I still very much believe what Dr. King preached, but I worry that, through my choices, I have unwittingly told my sons they should look primarily to non-African-American women for romance.

    Ironically, my mother has come to terms with “crossing the fence.” And I have become more empathetic to her underlying fear, that my dating and marrying women who did not look like her was somehow a rejection of her and her values. Since women have historically been the ones to pass on cultural traditions from one generation to the next, my stepping outside the racial box meant that my children might not be as connected to our African-American roots as I had been. This is a scary prospect for a proud African-American like my mother. And I owe it to my sons to make sure they consider that possibility as they make their romantic choices.

  • A Winter Warmer

    These winter mornings, the sunshine shows things as they are. I was recently in Devon, the corner of southwest England where I was brought up, which was covered with a fine coating of frost that imparts sharpness to every detail of the landscape. “Proper rimey,” said my neighbor there, a man who lives in the house where he was born and has been digging the graves in the village churchyard for nigh on forty years. The frost (a.k.a. rime) gives each blade of grass a thin, sharp edge with the patina of brushed steel. A little warmth from the sun strikes the tousled twigs of the willows down by the stream and rows of water drops form orderly queues along the underside of each wooden wisp. All this ambient moisture freezes the fingers and, seemingly, each individual capillary within each finger. Thirty degrees Fahrenheit in Devon feels something like thirty degrees colder than it does in Minnesota.

    If the morning sun shows things as they are, it is the pale, slanting light of late afternoon that is the joy of the historian, for it shows things as they were. This narrow valley has become a palimpsest, a surface like a medieval sheepskin manuscript that has been written over by one scribe after another to record successive lives. Oblique light reveals the slightest lump or line in the landscape left behind by an old lane or hedgebank or by the walls of a building long since disappeared. Sunset has an ultraviolet feel.

    Nowadays, the stream, one of the little brawling brooks which eventually empties itself into the River Exe, runs straight through pasture into an ornamental garden. But a couple of hundred years ago, trenches and tributaries, long since dry but now apparent in the weak winter sunshine, ran in and out of it. These were excavated in order to irrigate orchards growing apples with names like Kingston Black, Sweet Alford, and Slack My Girdle, the fruit that made the fearsomely alcoholic farmhouse cider for which Devon used to be famous. I have known tough Scotch matelots, well acquainted with the strong waters of their own country, who have come ashore from their ships at Plymouth and found Devon cider to be more than they could handle.

    Underneath the vanished sylvan landscape of the apples is another—noisier, malodorous, industrial. Seven hundred years ago, mills here were fulling and bleaching woolen cloth, their wheels driven by the water power of leats laboriously dug out by hand and visible now as the merest shadows in the field-grass. These are not the product of the fey fancies that some folk associate with so-called ley lines. They were dug by hard graft to serve a serious business; like many modern developing nations, medieval Devon made its first efforts at industrialization by manufacturing textiles. One of the fields on the side of this valley is called Long Bolham; the name is that of a weaver, Nicholas de Bolleham, who on the eleventh of September, 1337, took on a lifetime lease of the land and mills from the Lord of the Manor—you can read the document in the Harvard Law Library. His industry has left little enough impression on the sedgy grass of these pastures. In the four centuries that succeeded him, however, the long, slow growth of the West Country cloth trade powered the enterprise of intrepid Devon seafarers such as Sir Walter Raleigh and Sir Francis Drake, not to mention the brave folk who sailed from Plymouth in the Mayflower in 1620 and thus made a mark on a wider world.

    Teasing ghosts out of the frosty fields is a fine occupation for the dark time of the year, but it is chilly work. Too much contemplation makes one pale. You could put warmth back into your extremities with the 2001 vintage of a fine red Rhône from Domaine Sainte-Anne (Appellation Côtes-du-Rhône-Villages Contrôlée). True, the wine comes from near Saint-Gervais in the hill country west of the Rhône, so the vines that grow its grapes (principally Grenache and Syrah) are no strangers to cold. But lemon trees and the Mediterranean are within reach.

    This is wine with a good red color, strong, toothsome tannins, and fruity flavors reminiscent of cherries, neither flimsy (like bad Beaujolais) nor seriously weighty (like great Châteauneuf du Pape). Nor is it excessively expensive in Minnesota, at around $15 a bottle. And, as a vegetarian friend recently said to me, “Rhône goes with everything.” This would certainly be fine with all sorts of food, from hummus dip to roast pheasant. It is the kind of warming wine that inspires confidence. Maybe it could set 2006 in a somewhat rosier light.