The countryside and the train had subsided to a gentle roll, and she could see nothing but pastureland and black cows from window to horizon. She wondered why she had never thought her country beautiful. -Harper Lee (Go Set a Watchman)I can’t place it exactly, but it was one of those long summers in college,…
Greetings from the land of the sick. Although I'm not the kind to go to the doctor--a fear of being poked and prodded makes me more than a little reluctant--this time I started to sense that something wasn't quite right: no decongestants were working, too many tissues had been used and, although I had done…
“If there is a hell to which disputatious, uncivil, vituperative lawyers go, let it be one in which the damned are eternally locked in discovery disputes with other lawyers of equally repugnant attributes.” Dahl v. City of Huntington Beach, 84 F.3d 363, 364 (9th Cir. 1996) (quoting Krueger v. Pelican Prod. Corp., No. CIV-87-2385-A (W.D.…
On a blustery day back in early December, a friend and I went into the hills for a lecture on masala chai (literally, spice tea) at the Berkeley Botanical Gardens. While chai may seem fairly self-explanatory, I was intrigued because the lecture included a tasting of a few different kinds of chai, information about its…
The path to paradise begins in hell. -Dante AlighieriEach time I go to Greece it's as if I fall under a magical spell. It's a place of pristine blue skies, endless sunshine and food that fills both my heart and my belly with nothing but joy. I feel like myself, as well as a better,…
I'll be the first to admit that, when it comes to food, I'm terribly susceptible to kicks. In my third year of graduate school, when I taught the horrible 8-9 a.m. section of a reading and writing class, I used to get up at 5:54 a.m. everyday to make myself stove-top oatmeal with banana and…
An old Chinese proverb has it, "To eat well requires an adventurous spirit." -John Thorne (foreword to An Omelette and a Glass of Wine)Sometimes you come across recipes that you really believe in. For me, oddly enough, this recipe for parsley juice is one of those recipes. I don't know why I'm so taken with…
In May they had finally made up their minds to go. But summer came and went as usual, with preparations for winter, the cooking of preserves, the bottling of apples, pears and cherries. By the end of August they wrote to say it was too late again. They were still stuck at home, too…
Still, what I want in my life is to be willing to be dazzled--to cast aside the weight of facts and maybe even to float a little above this difficult world. -Mary OliverA small but important fact about me is that, while I'm not at all a picky eater, there are three things that I'm…
“In time,” the philosopher Schopenhauer put it, “each moment is, only in so far as it has effaced its father the preceding moment, to be again effaced just as quickly itself. Past and future (…) are as empty and unreal as any dream; but present is only the boundary between the two, having neither extension…
Dining with Dostoevsky 