A Short Visit to Wheaton

Rain again Sunday night, to add to the slosh on the ground left by Saturday’s downpours. No doubt about it, the weekend was wet. Here’s the view of the water from my car on Saturday, as I waited in a shopping center parking lot.

April 30, 2016Wheaton’s a prosperous suburb and the county seat of DuPage County, Ill., and easily accessible from where we live by surface streets. We used to go there with some frequency to visit the small but pleasant Cosley Zoo, which is operated by the Wheaton Park District, especially before recessionary pressures (apparently) inspired a new admission fee for non-Wheatonites, ca. 2010. These days there’s less demand among the younger residents of the house, who aren’t so young any more, for zoo visits.

We’d mulled going further afield on Saturday, but the persistent rain and cool temps nixed the idea of any outdoor destinations, so we headed to Wheaton. Not to the zoo, but to see the DuPage County Historical Museum, which we’ve passed by but never visited.

But first things first: lunch. I’m happy to report that the diminutive Mai Thai Cafe at Main St. and Wesley St. is still in business, and still services good Thai food at popular prices. Spicier than some other North American Thai joints, too, enough that there’s a sign posted at the restaurant warning customers to think twice about ordering the spiciest versions of its dishes.

Not far to the west on Wesley St., in Wheaton’s pleasant shopping district, we spotted a post-accident scene of the kind that makes you wonder, how did that happen, exactly? (Like this one.)

Wesley St. Wheaton April 30, 2016The car on the sidewalk’s clearly been smacked from behind, but it doesn’t look like it plowed through any of the planters on the sidewalk to get there. Maybe it jumped onto the sidewalk just so, narrowly missing the planters. Or did it back up onto the sidewalk somehow? If so, why, after being rear-ended? I didn’t inspect the scene closely, so I’m certainly missing an essential piece of the puzzle.

I took the shot from about a half block away, under an awning, because it was raining. Three or four other people were taking pictures from there as well. That’s the early 21st century for you: an era of easy photography that often doesn’t clarify anything.

A Little More Rockford

The gardens outside the Nicholas Conservatory in Rockford would be worth a trip back in a month or two, when they’re in full flower. On Saturday, the floral exuberance of spring was just beginning. Even so, there were a few other things to see, such as a statue of a man taking a picture."Sight Seeing"And, at that moment, an actual man taking pictures.

Nicholas Conservatory & GardenThe statue, by the way, is by Seward Johnson, whose work I’ve seen elsewhere. This one is called “Sight Seeing,” and dates from 1991. The camera depicted would have been old fashioned even then. I have an inkling that Johnson isn’t popular among art theory specialists, for being shockingly derivative, or not smashing any paradigms, or something.

After the conservatory, we repaired to the Stockholm Inn, an enormous restaurant in Rockford. Word is — relayed by the Internet — that it too is very popular, though its offering of superb yet standard Swedish food at reasonable prices might put off some foodies.
Stockholm Inn, RockfordAfter all, the place doesn’t offer farm-to-table fair-traded locally sourced artisanal Swede-tastic regional cuisine, guaranteed to be authentic, massaged and sublimated to gastro-perfection. Try the Nordic fusion gravlax tacos; they’re to die for.

No, the thing to order — the thing that I ordered — are the Swedish pancakes, a close cousin of the humble crêpe, infused with butter, vivified by syrup. Thin, smooth, sweet, wonderful. What they had for breakfast in the mead halls of yore, since one has to eat as well as drink.

The Manliest Vegetable

Today was one of the days that should be warm, but isn’t. Winter doesn’t want to let go. It even snowed a little, with cold rain predicted for the rest of the week. Bah.

I don’t have what it takes to be a drinking man, but I did visit a large liquor store not long ago, along with my brother Jay. That’s where I learned that potatoes are the manliest of all vegetables. Who knew? That’s a promotion for the humble spud, I think. Jay documented the evidence with his phone.
Total Wine & More San AntonioDeutsch Family Wine & Spirits imports the vodka into the United States, and its web site says: “Luksusowa Vodka (pronounced LOOK-SOO-SO-VAH) was created in 1928 in Poland. Luksusowa means ‘Luxurious’ in Polish… A smooth, rich, high-quality imported vodka that beats the competition in terms of flavor, mouthfeel & price.”

Mouthfeel? I’ve never heard of that before, but it’s one of those words that instantly explains itself.

All My Eye and Betty Martin, Thursday Edition

Sure enough, more snow yesterday. But not much more, and most of it melted today. The snowfall didn’t even mess up the roads very much. Or my driveway. If you don’t have to shovel it, you can’t say it really snowed.

Been reading more by the chattering classes than usual lately, maybe because they’re chattering a lot now. With some reason. There’s also a sizable share of hyperventilating Chicken Little-ism about the political rise the short-fingered vulgarian. He’s going to be the end of Republican party! Of movement conservatism! Of American democracy! Of truth, justice and the American way!

I have to be skeptical on all counts. Of course, I could be wrong, and I’ll be the first to admit it as soon as goons come to take me to one of the detention camps of the new order.

This is some hard candy Yuriko brought back from Japan last month. Or rather, these are images of the Gold Coin of the Meiji Era tin, front and back. We’ve almost finished the candy inside.

Gold Coin of the Meiji EraGold Coin of the Meiji EraThe candy, which is roundish and yellow, is pretty good, but I like the name best of all. The coin pictured on the tin isn’t some fanciful latter-day re-creation, but an image of an actual gold coin of the Meiji era, just like this one, dated 1870 (Meiji 3). Except that the one on the tin is a 20-yen piece, rather than two yen.

Quite a bit of money at the time, and a coin of great beauty, from the looks of the photo. I wouldn’t mind having one, but it isn’t something I want to spend big bucks for. I’ll settle for the Meiji-era copper two-sen coin that I do have, which only cost a few modern dollars.

One more thing along these lines: We cast pearls before swine. The Japanese give gold coins to cats: 猫に小判 (neko ni koban).

And one more coffee cup currently on our shelf.

Oh ShitLilly got that from a friend of hers for Christmas this year. Ha-ha. It reminds me that adults should not use that word. In fact, anyone older than about six or seven should steer clear of it. Certain words should be confined to little children, and that’s one of them. Yet I’ve seen poop used in more-or-less serious writing by people whom I assume are grown. Knock it off.

Coffee Makes Me Crap would be the slogan for short-fingered vulgarians, maybe. Funnier would be Decaf Makes Me Defecate. I don’t drink coffee anyway. Better for me would be Tea Makes Me Pee. True indeed.

Bulldogs Grill, Wauconda

If I were writing professionally about Bulldogs Grill, a hamburgery in Wauconda, Ill., I might characterize it as a “diner for Millennials,” even though I’ve heard just as much as I need to about that vague generational grouping (if you chug beer each time you hear “Millennial” during a commercial real estate conference, you’ll get soused fast). Still, the point would be that Bulldogs takes an old form, the diner — with its short-order items and eclectic wall decor and chrome-trimmed stools and that deep-fry smell — and infuses it with elaborations on the basic formula.

Fortunately, the joint also retains the diner tradition of food at fairly modest prices. If it were in Brooklyn or San Francisco or Seattle or Cambridge, Mass., instead of northwest suburban Wauconda, in the heart of Lake County, that might not be the case.
Bulldogs Grill Feb 2016So the place serves not just burgers, but varieties of burgers mostly unknown to diners before the 21st century. Not just fries, but creative variations on the basic model. Not just a blue plate special, but the likes of handheld wraps formed by tortillas, naan or sourdough, and “street food” that includes baja fish tacos, “Chinese chicken quesadillas,” and pulled pork nachos.

None of that would be important if the food were bad. But it isn’t. Bulldogs Grill cooks up some wonderful food, including the best burger and fries that I’ve had in months, probably since Krazy Jim’s Blimpy Burger in Ann Arbor. The burgers have whimsical names to go along with their various ingredients, such as the Double D, Hangover, Slap Yo’ Mama, Scarlet Johansson, Zombie Apocalypse, Gettin’ Piggy With It, Bob Marley, Bedlam, Bluenoon Rising, and Area 51, among others (a full list and descriptions are here). I had the Slap Yo’ Mama, which featured bacon, grilled onions, cheddar cheese and apple barbecue sauce. That sounded like a winning combo to me, and it was.

We also ordered regular fries and a portion of Pig Fries for all to enjoy. The Pig Fries included pulled pork, cole slaw, bacon, barbecue sauce and ranch dressing, all mixed up with fresh-cut French fried potatoes. Wow. The food nags say this kind of thing is bad for you. Maybe so. I’ll just have to take my chances from time to time.

“Happy Birthday” Has 13 Letters

For her 13th birthday, Ann wanted a simple cake without “thick icing.” So we got a round yellow cake — yellow icing topping a yellow cake, with a modicum of decoration — at a grocery store we know that has a good bakery.

Ann and Cake, Feb 6, 2106I found the candles by chance at the same store. As it happens, there are 13 letters in Happy Birthday, a fitting number.

Birthday CakeI might use them for my own birthday. Each candle would stand for about four years and three months of my lifetime. Also, I’m glad to report that however the cake looked, it tasted good too.

Liebling for the New Year

On January 1, I picked up A.J. Liebling’s Between Meals, subtitled “An Appetite for Paris,” which is a 1959 collection of essays about his eating experiences in that city and other parts of France, which were vast and diverse, beginning in the 1920s. It’s an immensely charming work, not just about the food and drink he encountered, but also with bits about other gastronomes, life as an expat, technically as a student in Paris, boxing — he wrote a lot about that elsewhere — and other asides.

It’s a somewhat different expat-Paris-in-the-20s than Hemingway’s. For Liebling, eating and drinking were the point, and not just in the context of hanging out with other expats (Liebling seemed to eat alone a lot). Hemingway drank a lot, of course, because That’s What Men Do, but for Liebling his “feeding” — his term — was purely aesthetic. In France he found a lifelong devotion to being a gastronome, and by the time he died in 1963, at 59, it had made him very fat.

I doubt that he regretted it. In Between Meals he writes: “Mens sano in corpore sano is a contradiction in terms, the fantasy of a Mr. Have-your-cake-and-eat-it. No sane man can afford to dispense with the debilitating pleasures; no ascetic can be considered reliably sane. Hitler was the archetype of the abstemious man. When the other krauts saw him drinking water in the Beer Hall they should have known he was not to be trusted.”

You’d thinking eating to excess in Jazz Age Paris would be enough for any man, but Liebling asserts that Belle Époque gastronomes had it better: “In the heroic age before the First World War, there were men and women who ate, in addition to a whacking lunch and a glorious dinner, a voluminous souper after the theater or the other amusements of the evening. I have known some of the survivors, octogenarians of unblemished appetite and unfailing good humor — spry, wry, and free of the ulcers that come from worrying about a balanced diet….

“One of the last of the great round-the-clock gastronomes of France was Yves Mirande, a small, merry author of farces and musical comedy books [1875-1957]. In 1955… Mirande would dazzle his juniors, French and American, by dispatching a lunch of raw Bayonne ham and fresh figs, a hot sausage in crust, spindles of filleted pike in a rich rose sauce Nantua, a leg of lamb larded with anchovies, artichokes on a pedestal of foie gras, and four or five kinds of cheese, with a good bottle of Borbeaux and one of champagne, after which he would call for the Armagnac and remind Madame to have ready for dinner the larks and ortolans she had promised him, with a few langoustes and a turbot — and, of course, a fine civet made from marcassin, or young wild boar, that the lover of the young leading lady in his current production had sent up from his estate in the Sologne…”

Liebling also touched on another puzzling phenomenon, in the context of eating, but which applies to other things. Namely, why wealth often seems to narrow, rather than broaden, experience: “A man who is rich in his adolescence is almost doomed to be a dilettante at table. This is not because all millionaires are stupid but because they are not impelled to experiment. In learning to eat, as in psychoanalysis, the customer, in order to profit, must be sensible of the cost.”

Thanksgiving & The Days After ’15

On the whole, Thanksgiving outside was gray and rainy, but pleasantly warm for this time of the year. The days afterward were drier but much chillier, though not quite freezing.

Pictured: an all-too-common meal snapshot, in this case most of my Thanksgiving dinner. Note the artless presentation. I did that myself. I don’t remember what the plastic fork was doing there, but I will assert that we used metal utensils.
Thanksgiving chow '15The ham came from a warehouse store, while Lilly prepared the various starches, with Ann’s assistance. She combined four or five different cheeses for the macaroni and cheese. It isn’t Thanksgiving without that, she said, and it was the star attraction of the plate. For those who fret about such things, there was a green item on the menu, too: green beans, which didn’t make into the picture, but did make it into my stomach.

Once again, Martinelli’s sparkling cider was the main drink — original and cranberry/apple — though we also opened a bottle of wine we bought at a winery near Traverse City in 2007. I’d post the name of the wine, but that would involve going out to the refrigerator in the garage, where it’s now stored, and reading the label. It was a pretty good Riesling.

Some people shop on the Friday after Thanksgiving. That’s never been my ambition. My ambition is to do as close to nothing that day as possible. Days like that are very rare. This year I almost achieved it. Almost, but not quite.

Which reminds me of this exchange in Office Space.

Michael Bolton: You were supposed to come in on Saturday. What were you doing?

Peter Gibbons: Michael, I did nothing. I did absolutely nothing, and it was everything that I thought it could be.

On Saturday, we watched Vancouver Asahi, a Japanese movie on TV about the baseball team of that name, composed of Japanese-Canadian players during its heyday in the 1930s, when there used to be a Japantown in Vancouver. Not bad on the whole, though about 30 minutes too long. It also had the virtue of being about something I’d never heard of before.

After the movie ended, at about 11:30 in the evening, I went out on the deck and could see Orion to the south, parading across a nice clear sky. Never mind the solstice. Winter’s here.

Lilly at 18

It’s that time of year again.

Cake!Why the green flower? she asked. I’d had a green, yellow and red flower put into the design. I made up a metaphor on the spot: the traffic light metaphor of life. Some things you should absolutely do: green. Some things absolutely not: red. Some things you need to use your judgment and take into account circumstance and so on: yellow.

We added candles to the cake. The string of candles Lilly’s holding.

Ann & Lilly 11.19.15The string was made of some kind of flash paper. When you lit one end, the paper would be consumed quickly, leaving all of the candles burning. Nice effect.

Post-Thanksgiving Days of a Previous Decade

Sunday, Nov 22, 2015

Most years the first snow’s a light dusting, but this year full-blown winter precipitation started falling late on Friday and well into Saturday, leaving us with about a foot of wet, heavy snow. Wet probably because it was barely cold enough to freeze, but it did stick to every tree and bush. Turns out the official amount on Saturday — 11.2 inches at O’Hare, where the NWS takes its Chicago-area measurement — was the most for a November snowfall since 1895.

Nov 21, 2015Friday, Nov 24, 2006

Another major holiday come and gone. Now it’s Buy Nothing Day. So far, I’ve bought nothing today, unless you count electricity, natural gas, phone service, etc. I don’t think even the most dyed-in-the-wool believer in the “America as World Pig” model of global economics would shut off his utilities for the day after Thanksgiving.

I’m no purist when it comes to Buy Nothing Day, since I have a strong suspicion I’m going to invest in fried poultry in a few hours, to feed the whelps and my nephew Sam, who’s visiting from Cincinnati. No whelp he, since he’s 23.

Yesterday’s feast was reasonably conventional: big bird, smashed spuds, various breads, even that all-North American berry, cranberries. The only peculiarities involved Sam, who is peculiar in his eating habits and ate a species of Polish sausage instead of bird meat; and our choice of dessert: a pie of no sort, but instead cream puffs.

Lilly, who just turned 9, ate as heartily as the rest of us, but at about 9 pm last night threw everything up in the vicinity of the downstairs toilet. No one else here was afflicted in the same way, not yet. Such are the stuff of special holiday memories. She felt better this morning, fortunately. [But the virus wasn’t through with us.]

Wednesday, Nov 29, 2006

Early this morning, after I’d woken up once to hear the rain on the roof, I returned to the imaginal realm and dreamed of flying – not too common a variety of dream for me, but it happens occasionally. Flying as if I were a kite, tethered to a moving train far, far below through a broad prairie landscape. That was only a part of an elaborate, vivid dream, the likes of which I only have a few times a year. I have plenty of other dreams, of course, pleasant or anxious, but more pedestrian. (The Japanese verb associated with dreaming translates as “see.” I like that. I saw a dream last night.)

Friday, Dec 1, 2006

A foot of snow today, and you’d think that would quiet things down outside. It did, for a while, since the blanket of snow muffled the streets and closed the airports beginning a little after midnight. I was up briefly at 3 am or so and wished I could leave the windows open, since the traffic noise was gone. But as soon as the sun came up this morning, rrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr went the snowblowers. And traffic started again.