A Journal of My Mid-Life Crisis

24 January 1999 - An Everything Bagel With Nothing On It

I saw Barry for the first time since I've been back (at a Bards meeting that was moved to a night that didn't conflict with his Chinese class) and the title of this entry is something he overheard at a bagel shop one morning and I found amusing. I've really missed him, both for his sense of humor and the wisdom that is often behind it. He and Kathy are adopting a child from China (part of the reason for his studying the language) and I think he will be a wonderful father.

Anyway, just about anything can trigger a story for me, so let's see where the idea of an everything bagel takes me. Hmmm, an everything bagel has poppy seeds, sesame seeds, onion, garlic and salt, right?

Garlic is easy. Garlic is my mother's favorite seasoning. No self-respecting vampire would have come within a mile our our house. When I was in college, somebody taught me the trick of making salad dressing from mayonnaise, ketchup and garlic. Okay, it isn't exactly much of a culinary trick, but Mom made salad dressing by opening up a bottle of Wishbone. I passed along the recipe to her one vacation and her take on it has led me to comment that she is the only person in the world who uses garlic as a thickening ingredient.

There's also a great Jewish folktale about garlic. A man once came to a town where they didn't have any onions. He came back there with a bag of onions and introduced them to this wonderful food and they gave him a bag of gold. When he got home, he thought "if they don't have onions, they probably don't have garlic either" and figured that since garlic was so much more wonderful even than onions they would give him twice the gold. So he returned with a bag of garlic. They gave him two heavy bags, which he took home. When he opened the bags, he saw they had given him something even more precious than gold. They had given him two bags full of onions!

I guess that qualifies as an onion story too. But to add another onion vignette from my undergraduate days, a friend had once invited me to dinner. She and her roommate created a menu that included onion soup, onion rolls, and chicken with onions. In fact, every course except dessert included onions. When I arrived, my friend turned to her roommate and said, "oh, no, I just remembered! Miriam's allergic to onions!" I'm not, but it was hysterically funny to see the roommate's reaction.

Poppy seeds remind me of a standing argument my parents had. The Yiddish word for poppy seeds is "mun." If you're wondering how to pronounce that, well, that's just what the argument was about. My mother, whose family is from the area around Bialystok, made it sound like "moon". While my father was from Lithuania and used a schwa for the vowel sound, as "muhn." The linguistic argument was really an argument about class and correctness, a shorthand for Dad's annoyance with things like Mom's compulsive bargain hunting ("why should you wear rummage sale clothes when I can afford to buy you dresses from Rita's Boutique?") and her generally lowbrow tastes. It was a far gentler subject to argue about than the real issue. Which is worth my remembering whenever I get fed up with Mom for watching junk like Court TV. Instead of pulling out the intellectual snobbishness, I should just go to the bakery and bring her some poppy seed cake and argue about the "moon."

My first thought about sesame seeds is of those sesame seed candies, sort of sesame brittle, that come wrapped in individual bits of cellophane and are sold in the international candy bins in stores. They're my very favorite candy in the world, but I hardly ever eat them. I doubt that I buy them more than once every couple of years and I only buy a few pieces when I do. (Actually, I buy exactly 8 pieces; this is a compulsive thing that has to do with even numbers. Don't ask.) And I don't think I know a single other person in the world who likes them at all.

My second thought about sesame seeds is of the phrase "open sesame" from Ali Baba and the 40 Thieves. I'd dearly love to find a reasonably priced set of Burton's translation of the Arabian Nights tales. I know they're different than the children's versions I grew up with. And Sir Richard Francis Burton fascinates me as a character. I first heard of him in Philip Jose Farmer's Riverworld books, which may be proof that genre literature isn't useless. (Along those lines, it was L. Sprague de Camp and Fletcher Pratt's The Compleat Enchanter which got me interested in the Roland/Orlando myth, which is something else I'd like to do more reading about if I ever found time to.)

Finally, salt immediately makes me think of the sea. I've always lived near the ocean. The previous apartment I lived in was the furthest from the ocean that I've ever lived in my life - about 5 miles. I'm instantly soothed by watching waves and smelling sea air. There's a limitlessness I associate with not being able to see across the water, a sense of complete freedom.

Now that I am done with the random rambling, I suppose the most significant thing that happened this week was having to deal with the wonders of modern technology. I had a video teleconference at 6:30 a.m. Tuesday and actually made it into the office in time. At first we managed to connect to Boulder and were having trouble getting Albuquerque on the line. We finally got them on and within 3 minutes our link crashed. We got reconnected and, again, managed just a few minutes on line. So the whole thing was a total waste of time. The ironic part of it was that every time the system crashed we got to see the Sprint logo with their slogan - "a better way to make meetings work."

Then, on Wednesday I got into the office to discover a transformer had blown on Tuesday night and we wouldn't have any power until at least noon. It was a good excuse for adventures in telecommuting, as I went home to try to work on a memo that has been hanging over my head for far too long. It turns out that they didn't repair the transformer but hooked up a temporary generator. On Friday, we got email that the generator was running too hot and we should turn off any unnecessary appliances. The general consensus was that the printers are definitely nonessential, most of the computers are nonessential. But the coffee pot cannot be shut off without rioting in the hallways.

Oh, by the way, I updated the Journal FAQ. If there is something you are wondering about that isn't explained there, just send me email and all will be made clear.