a little red hen

PBS video on hunger recalls my own life at the edge

After keeping this a few days to watch later, finally watched this video.

Today...when there's nothing in my life but easy access to things to eat--

Yesterday's mushroom soup filled with fresh vegetables...

  Baked wholewheat sourdough bread (with pricey, locally milled flour from Tabor Bread)...

A short drive later for Moroccan salad ingredients for Monday's potluck.

I have it all...Never, ever have to think about it.  Thanks to PBS News and Hunger Free Colorado, who asked women to "take aim at hunger with cameras," I saw unexpected faces-- neighbors who always have to think about their next meal.

There was a brief time when I knew a different reality-- months of unemployment in New York City-- "The Great Newspaper Strike of 1962-63."  Fired from Jersey City Redevelopment Agency (another story), it was difficult to find a new public relations job. Went from office to office as a Kelly Girl. Desperate, I sublet my upper westside apartment with its great view of the Hudson River and moved to a rooming house with bathroom down the hall. Grim, very grim yet always could manage the next meal.

Feel I'm not doing enough about food deprivation even with regular support to Oregon Food Bank** and Meals on Wheels.  Jewish guilt and discomfort with privilege run very deep.

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*In going for this link, I learn something new "...all or part of your tax refund...simply enter code 25 on line 66a of the Charitable Checkoff Donations section in Form 40 (Line 84a on Form 40N or 40P)."  Another household conversation.

 

 

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Happy Cup Coffee @ Portland's City Hall

Keeping up with the growing life of Happy Cup Coffee, our daughter Rachel's roast-with-a-mission, has been breath-taking for us old people.  On top of all the food markets where it sit on the shelves--Whole Foods, New Seasons, Zupan's--Happy Cup is on the menu at all sizes of cafes and restaurants in Portland.  Even our special favorite, Fressen Bakery.  All this in two years. 

January 2014 marked the latest addition:  the first coffee cafe in Portland's venerable City Hall.  Hanna Neuschwander gave the details of the moment in a great online article at Sprudge with fine pictures (above).  Why Happy Cup when there are over 50 roasters (not a typo) in Portland?  Spokesperson for the City: 

“Selecting Happy Cup was a natural nexus that allows the City to support a local business, provide a convenient amenity to the building, and support vocational training services at the same time.”

And for the workers from Full Life, whose disabilities limit employment in the regular job market, working at the City Hall Cafe adds to their skills-- traveling independently to get to the job and learning to interact with a broad range of the public--transferable to other work.  This week, the Facebook page for Happy Cup Roasting featured one of them, Nick, pleased to be there.   

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Moment of heartfelt timeliness + sourdough oatmeal bread

What a week!  Two cardboard robots arrived from Tin Toy Arcade, reliable source of my wind-up robots.  Could not resist @$6/each-- a Valentine gesture.

Very intrigued with robots, intending to write about this fascination.  It has many parts both personal and political.  Earlier in the week Ron decided he wanted to make a pork roast at Rachel's, took a robot there.  Zoe and Ellie delighted--each wanted in her room as a night light.  Their Dad suggested taking turns; will find out how that turned out.

This afternoon I'm introducing the one that I have kept to people who live on my floor.  We have a lounge that's seriously underused--and offers a view of Mt. Hood, often gloriously visible.  Someone else will bring cookies leftover from a snowed-out event last weekend.

Earlier in the week had succes with Sourdough Oatmeal Bread from 1980 Sourdough Cookery by Rita Davenport. After shaping loaves, took overnight to rise!  Small dense, very delicious.  Think I'll take couple of slices for the girls when we go to babysit tonight.  Ellie liked last one--sourdough rye.

About to begin making a second starter.  Had two when we lived in Baltimore.  That was rye, this time I'm trying wholewheat. Inspired by a longform Facebook post on Mother Jones.  There's a Bread Lab at Washington State University.  "Could this baker solve the gluten mystery?" was filled with much to read--whole grain starter instructions, sourdough recipe and links to others.  Internet's Valentine to me!   

Maxine Kumin, American Poet & Feminist, 1925-2014

Saturday has always been my favorite of the week for the New York Times.  I read the obits with almost religiously.  In the past few years the women and men seem to be closer to my own age.  Margalit Fox who writes the literary obits wrote a beautiful one Saturday for Maxine Kumin, a contemporary of Adrienne Rich.

"Prize-Winning Poet with a Naturalist's Precision" was long enough to have many nuggets--her close friendship with Anne Sexton when both were students in a 1950s poetry workshop in the Boston suburbs.  And the advice she gave students when later she taught poetry,  drew on her own feminist consciousness about why it was imperative to memorize 30 or 40 lines a week:

...to give them an internal library to draw on when they are taken political prisoner.  For many this is an unthinkable concept; they simply do not believe in anything fervently enought to go to jail for it."

Several Kumin poems are included... "A Game of Monopoly in the Chevannes" 

His lower lip trembles, this luxury of a child

who burst naked into our lives, like luck. ...

I will deed him the Reading Railroad, the Water Works,

the Electric Company, my hotel on Park Place.

All that I have is his, under separate cover,

and we are the mortgaged nub of all that he has.

Soon enough he will learn, buying long, selling short,

his ultimate task is to stay to usher us out.

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Snow in Portland = no New York Times!

http://www.alittleredhen.com/a_little_red_hen/2013/12/bread-posting-me-and-fressen-friends.htmlA colder than usual day outdoors noted yesterday morning.  It's been a mild winter till now. Watching the big snow in New York, I recall how ridiculous it was for 1950 working women in Manhattan's storms.  Of course we could not wear anything but skirts to the office.

Carrying a change of high heel shoes and the proscribed skirt through two feet of snow, up and down subway stairs-- while wearing slacks and unremebered flat-soled shoes.  Hoping not to encounter vice presidents of the company (my most vivid memory comes from "assistant editor" job at Association of National Advertisers, 1957).  Dart into cublicle in ladies' room.  Struggle to change, keep layers from falling on the floor.

Bet you did not see this on Mad Men. Because the City is always a mess for everyday workers--women, of course, take bigger hit.

Fortunate old lady, I live in a milder climate, travel by auto. After another doctor appointment, on to Fressen, favored bakery.  Noted a free spirit had tossed several bread pretzels onto horns over kitchen entrance.  Next to our New Seasons for groceries. Around eleven we sensed something changing.

Staff were talking about who could cover for whom because Portland was about to be visited by much snow.  Started on Mt. Hood earlier in the week.  It's still hard to take snow in portland seriously after all the years in New York and Baltimore--earlier in icy St. Louis winters.  But we had been here for a BIG one in 2008.  

At checkout, Ron and I noted that always cheerful, New Seasons' checkers if we'd pack our own groceries.  Ron went for the car.  I had to buy flowers--on sale  for $5/bunch--met him on the sidewalk.

Ooh, colder than two hours earlier. Today schools closed...bigger snowfalls predicted.  Will the show go on tonight  for West Coast premiere of "A Kaddish for Bernie Madoff"?

 

 

December 2013 in sunny San Diego...

Many things are puzzling in families-- mine included. One in ours: why didn't we travel to Los Angeles sooner once we moved to Oregon?  A plan had been made by our NYC branch to meet in southern California over Xmas... beaches, marine museum and zoo would entertain the children. We flew to LA earlier for a visit with Ron's cousin Rosita.

Turned out to be the very best opening to the West. The short version of the complex story. Rosita's father, brother to Ron's mother Becky, left Europe too late in the 1920s to come to U.S.  He ended up in Argentina, where he made a life as furrier.  Rosita, the younger of his two children, in 1950 left Buenos Aires, she was 18, and came to Becky's house in Brighton Beach Brooklyn to figure out how she would make her way in America.

How would she and Ron, two years younger, communicate?  She did not speak English; he did not know Spanish.  Yiddish was the language they had in common, the household language of the Blooms, Ron's first.  Through some push and pull the family managed to get Rosita into the local high school where she quickly became an English-speaker.  [All the above links are to earlier blogposts, include lovely old photos of my late in-laws.]  The two of them spent many hours walking the boardwalk, exchanging adolescent thoughts.

Rosita moved to Los Angeles, married, had two children--just like us and Ron's two sisters, a boy and a girl.  She also became a potter; we have taken good care of her lovely vase, wedding present in 1966.  Last saw her  when she visited the east coast in 1988.   Tova, Rosita's daughter was on the sidewalk with her mother to greet us as we arrived-- and stayed on to add to our animated exchanges.

Lunch included champagne and a loaf of my latest very sour, sourdough rye carried on the flight.  [Do you know they usher old people into short line, shoes kept on, no laptop exam? Nice.]

The kitchen, the entire house was alive with craft.  Rosita's puppet collection like this cat over the stove.

 

 

Ron brought
along some of his tapestries.  Rosita hung hers immediately. And another for Tova.  In the evening we met up with two more family members, Lee and Cathy, son and daughter in law, for dinner in an Indian restaurant.  Back the next day, more talk, admire Rosita's cactus
collection...

Reluctantly leave with our 

farewell oranges--amazing--from her tree.  Oh, I want to go back.  Had forgotten why I had this photo of orange pieces in my photo file.  Of course!  My was a wish to hold onto being with Rosita and her family as I ate the last orange.