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About six months ago, the Sunday New York Times Styles section ran an article about a (supposed) trend in which adults were flocking to entertainments created for children. Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix had just been released, so of course there was a lot of verbiage dedicated to that, but there was also a run-through of Playstation games, young adult novels, cartoons, pop music and the amount of time spent enjoying this stuff, rather than pursuing adult pursuits like building retirement plans or meaningful relationships with other people.  There were interviews with fab young persons who embraced their Potterphilia with pride.  There were representatives from the other side of the coin, who found this sort of thing depressing at best and the death knell of enlightenment at worst.  Because this was the New York Times, which never fails to give a cheesy name to the supposed trends it supposedly spots (as witnessed 10 years ago, when it tried to rename the part of the Lower East Side that lay below Houston Street as BoHo; the next day, graffiti sprung up all over the neighborhood declaring THIS IS NOT BOHO), they found a pair of marketing consultants, who dubbed the people who followed these pursuits “rejuveniles.” I hated this tag on site, and asked myself once again if the pleasure of finding an old college friend’s wedding announcement was worth the pain of reading the rest of the Styles section every week.

Naturally, Plastic picked this story up, and the Potter fans, news nerds and inveterate trolls wasted no time in airing opinions.  I think my sole contribution to the dialogue was a confession that reading this article made me want to kick the marketing consultants in the head, but was afraid of being branded a rejuvenile delinquent, har de har har.  And I wonder why my karma is so low.  (For those not familiar with Plastic, posts can be rated by a floating band of randomly-chosen moderators, who can vote your posts up or down, thus awarding you “karma points.” I have been posting to Plastic since February 2001, two weeks after it went live, and all I can say is that I must be either dead obnoxious or dead boring, because every day some bright young thing creates a Plastic account, and within a week, his/her karma score gives mine a severe pantsing.  Not that I am obsessed with my karma in the least.  Heavens, no.)

I hate the whole idea of rejuvenilia, and the unspoken assumptions behind it, that we are all a bunch of overgrown children who refuse to move onto the more important things in life.  I hate the whole notion that we are a bundle of either/or impulses.  Either you like Queens of the Stone Age or you like Cole Porter.  Either you spend all your time in front of your Playstation, or you go outside and play with others.  Either you read Big Serious Adult Nonfiction or you read Stuff Aimed At 12-Year-Olds, and never the twain shall meet.  I blame this on Crossfire, with its not-so-subtle message that there are 2 sides to an issue, and they both involve a lot of shouting.  Of course, I could be taking this too personally, out of spiteful defensiveness, she-who-loves-Cartoon-Network-to-death.  Or it could be because even when I was younger, the question of kids’ stuff vs. grownups’ stuff was a false dichotomy.  I was lucky in that I was encouraged to read pretty much anything I was interested in.  There was the usual parental eye cast out for sex and violence, not by virtue of their being sex and violence, but because I might not understand the context in which the sex and violence took place, and thus might find it confusing or upsetting.  (I note, though, that at the tender age of 10, I was allowed to read The Cracker Factory by Joyce-Rebeta Burditt, which is full of sex and adult explorations of alcoholism and mental illness.  It was also very, very funny, which taught me that sometimes humor will let you get away with a lot.) Other than that, though, the only criterion was that if it looked interesting, it was fine to read.

This got me off to a good start in life, both as a precocious kid and a don’t-call-me-rejuvenile adult.  It meant that I was able to read some truly good books before I got to high school, when the desire to read them is usually beaten out of one.  And you don’t have to live in a snobby, rarefied or isolated environment to feed this enthusiasm early.  All you have to do is sit down next to your mother, who is watching Crime and Punishment on PBS, starring John Hurt as Raskolnikov, and you are so fascinated by the way he literally sweats fear and guilt and dread that you announce to no one in particular “I want to read that,” and hey presto, there it is under the Christmas tree, waiting for you.  Ditto The Count of Monte Cristo and Gone With the Wind, which was not nearly as good as the other two but was still a Really Big Book, which was impressive to the other kids when I lugged it around at school.  It was also fun to see my teachers freak out at the cover, which included an illustration of Vivian Leigh spilling out of the bodice of her gown, breasts almost completely exposed.  “Oh, gosh,” I’d say, “I didn’t realize that classic literature was inappropriate for the classroom,” and they would retreat, thinking they were not getting paid enough to deal with smartasses like me.  (My stepdad was a social studies teacher at the same school, so my teachers were his colleagues, which meant that my smart mouth eventually caught up with me.)

This latitude paid off in further dividends in my early 20’s, when I got a job as the children’s book buyer for Tower Books in Philadelphia.  This job meant that I had to read a lot of children’s books—picture books, chapter books, YA novels, nonfiction, the lot—and I had a blast.  I learned what a complicated dance a good children’s picture book was, that trying to tell a good story in 100 words was much harder than it looked, and how the best editor will raise the pairing of author and illustrator to an art form.  (Because there is a perception that “anyone can write stories for kids,” the market is flooded with ill-considered picture books like the truly awful The Adventures of Ralphie the Roach, co-written by Paulina Porizkova and illustrated by her stepson Adam Otcasek.  Pointless story.  Ugly, ugly illustrations.  This is what happens when children’s books are written by and for cynical adults with hollow senses of humor.) I learned that Mem Fox was the queen of picture books, and that Jon Scieszka and Lane Smith are the best friends of wacky children everywhere.  (Raise your hands if you have ever read a copy of The Stinky Cheese Man and Other Fairly Stupid Tales to a giggling 7-year-old.) I learned that Daniel Pinkwater can do it all, picture books, midgrade fiction and YA, and be hysterically funny in all genres.  For my money, the best YA novel ever written was Pinkwater’s Young Adult Novel, which is about a group of high-school Dadaists.  I don’t miss much about that job, not the general indignities of retail, nor the often-sociopathic mood among the store staff, certainly not the lousy pay, but I miss the books, and the sense of sheer unadulterated fun that came from reading them, picking out the best stuff for the store and helping baffled adults pick out something that their kids would just love to read.

It is in this spirit of happy enthusiasm, not don’t-call-it-rejuvenilia, that I am pleased to boast about some of the goodies I got for Christmas, and to recommend that you check them out if you love children’s books, or if you have pre-teens and young teenagers in your life.  I have been laughing myself stupid over Louise Rennison’s series of books about 14-year-old Georgia Nicolson:  Angus, Thongs and Full-Frontal Snogging; On the Bright Side, I’m Now the Girlfriend of a Sex God (published in the UK as It’s Okay, I’m Wearing Really Big Knickers) and Knocked Out by My Nunga-Nungas.  I’ve heard people compare Georgia to Bridget Jones, but that is just wrong, wrong, wrong.  Georgia has more in common with Adrian Mole, the hero of a series penned by Sue Townsend in the 1980’s.  I would have married Adrian years ago if he only he weren’t a fictional construct.  Like Adrian, Georgia is self-absorbed, brighter than she is given credit for, and a dab hand at funny observations.

I was also glad to pick up The Slippery Slope, Volume 10 in A Series of Unfortunate Events by Lemony Snicket.  (Trivia buffs may want to know that Lemony Snicket also trades under the name of Daniel Handler, author of The Basic Eight and Watch Your Mouth, and accordionist for the Magnetic Fields.) This series, which is about a trio of orphans tracking the truth about their parents’ deaths while trying to elude the evil, murderous, fortune-hunting Count Olaf, is my chapterbook wet dream:  hardbound (yet affordably priced), acid-free paper, notched signature, beautifully-drawn endpapers with a built-in Ex Libris plate; in short, books built for keeping.  The stories are dark, very dark, but although the Baudelaire siblings are in constant peril, they always manage to save themselves from almost-certain death at Count Olaf’s hands.  The editorial voice is a scream, filled with wry definitions of words and phrases, and includes useful information like how to make puttanesca sauce.  I have actually made puttanesca sauce following Snicket’s instructions in The Bad Beginning.  It works.  And I am nuts about the introductory paragraph to The Slippery Slope:

A man of my acquaintance once wrote a poem called “The Road Less Traveled,” describing a journey he took through the woods along a path most travelers never used.  The poet found that the road less traveled was peaceful but quite lonely, and he was probably a bit nervous as he went along, because if anything happened on the road less traveled, the other travelers would be on the road more frequently traveled and so couldn’t hear him as he cried for help.  Sure enough, that poet is now dead.

If I were a 9-to-12-year-old reading this book, I would be thrilled and flattered that Lemony Snicket found me smart enough to share this information with me.  It is the best author-reader relationship I have ever read, anywhere.  Rejuvenile, my ass.

Once again, the lethal cocktail of good intentions and obsessive compulsion has provided me with a hopper full of things to write about and a WordPad document full of unfinished, rambling essays.  I like to fancy myself as Laurence Sterne, the author of the great nonlinear lunatic classic The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman.  Since I was born on Sterne’s birthday, I tell myself that I am in good company, and that what looks like endless, incessant chatter actually has a purpose.  Unfortunately, the older I get, the more I suspect that I am not Laurence Sterne, but rather an underachiever with undiagnosed adult-onset ADHD.

While I try to make some sense of this mess, I will take a cue from aethele and Mike, and submit for your consideration, Bakerina’s List of New Year’s Resolutions for 2004.

Before starting, though, an observation:  It should be taken as boilerplate that every New Year’s resolution list includes a vow to get plenty of exercise.  Until last year, the resolution to lose weight was on my boilerplate every year.  I went on crazy-ass diets and was rewarded by gaining 50 pounds.  So I shifted my priorities a bit, and said “eh, I’ll just go to the gym and see what happens,” and managed to take off 37 of them.  So I started retooling my usual resolution list and replaced hoary old chestnuts with resolutions I know I can keep, sort of like the time I gave up the MX missile for Lent.

1.  Eat more cashews, particularly the spicy cashews from Kalustyan’s.  Unless you have fatal nut allergies, cashews are good for what ail you, and Kalustyan’s spicy cashews will take what ails you and peel the skin off of it.

2.  Come to think of it, spend more time at Kalustyan’s.  This year’s fruitcake would not have been possible without Kalustyan’s.  There are plenty of shops in the city for buying spices, dried fruit, candy, nuts, sea salts, 12 kinds of sugar, 40 kinds of rice, 60 kinds of beans, cooking implements and homemade condiments.  There may even be a few that make their own homemade lime pickle.  But only Kalustyan’s sits next door to Curry in a Hurry, which means that I can go to Kalustyan’s, breathe in the marvelous scent of the store, load up on goodies, head next door to C in a H, order an aloo paratha or an uttapam, and eat it at the counter while I review my purchases.

3.  Keep breathing those marvelous scents.  Normally I am much too highly-strung to hold much truck with holistic therapies.  I don’t doubt their efficacy for other, better, calmer, more mature people.  I, on the other hand, was pumped full of Dexedrine in utero thanks to my mom’s obstetrician, who had a horror of women gaining more than 20 pounds during pregnancy and wrote her a script for diet speed, and I have been a slave to the the pharma ever since.  I know it would be better for my migraines if I made some dietary changes, maybe get regular massages, but I’d much rather eat Excedrin like Pez.  That said, my mother gave me a bag of Herbes de Provence that she brought back from Paris, and I spent all of Christmas morning inhaling through the burlap, feeling my crispy New York City features smooth out.  (They tensed up a little when I caught a reflection of myself in a mirror and I realized how much I looked like Frank Booth.) A few days later we were shopping in Philadelphia.  I ducked into an Aveda store to buy some shampoo and ended up with a little bottle of citrussy-something-or-other that made me smile.  “You know,” said Lloyd, who noticed an instant change, “you just might benefit from a little aromatherapy.” My skeptic radar went right up, the urge to make a smartass comment was unmistakable, but I knew he was right.  Today I went out for some retail therapy in lower Manhattan, and I decided to walk through Chinatown, where I picked up some lemongrass, makrut lime leaves, green mangoes, jicama, fresh coriander with the roots still attached—the roots smell divine—and young ginger, the kind with a translucent ivory skin and bright magenta tips.  I cannot begin to encapsulate how wonderful all of this stuff smelled, and how I can just taste the weekend’s worth of Thai hot and sour soup I will be making.

4.  Indulge in frequent pop-music love. This is something I actually do quite often, but I don’t give it the attention or respect it deserves, and that’s just wrong.  On Monday I was in the locker room at the gym, listening to the hideous Beach Boys version of “Rock & Roll Music,” the kind that makes me mutter “fuckin’ Mike Love” under my breath, when the Beach Boys faded out and a vaguely familiar, hypnotic rhythm line took its place.  I realized that it was the great 1976 single by War, “Summer,” and even though I was late for work and needed a shower, I stayed put, rooted to the spot, sweaty and naked, and listened to the whole thing.  I’ve heard this song on the radio from time to time throughout my life, but I’d forgotten how warm and friendly and kind it was.  Even though it’s been a warm end-of-December, it’s still the end of December, but when I hear “Summer” I feel surrounded by warm and gentle breezes, soaked by sunshine.  Even the bits of the song that root it firmly in its time still feel timeless.  “Rapping on the CB radio in your van/Give a big 10-4 to the truckin’ man,” they sing, and the friendliness inherent in the delivery is so palpable that I just feel inexplicably, goofily happy, glad to be part of the same species that could come up with such a fine and generous sentiment.  Of course you know that I ran right to J&R Music World as soon as it opened, and snagged a copy of the War 2-disc set that Rhino released in July.  You know that I have played “Summer” about 4 times today, and I know that I will probably listen to “Why Can’t We Be Friends?” 4 times tomorrow.

5.  Write that culinary history of the use of eggs in baking that I know is in me. I know, I should probably start smaller, but I figure I need at least one oversized, crazy-ass resolution that I won’t be able to fulfill, but will produce interesting work in trying.  If nothing else, I will have interesting new dessert recipes to show for it, and I’m not above sharing the recipes.

6.  Be thankful for having so many interesting and beautiful friends, which I try to do every day, but this year my list has grown exponentially, and for that I am so grateful.  To those of you who are reading this, old friends, new friends, fellow bloggers, lurkers, sweethearts and well-wishers, happy 2004 to each and every one of you.  Knowing you all makes me want to buy a house, just so that I can get all of you in there, where we can keep the music playing all night long, where we can eat and drink ourselves into a state of bliss, drink a few cups of strong coffee and start all over again.

I had planned to get a jump on the inevitable New Year’s resolution yawping by contrasting last week’s bacchanal with this week’s austerity: the beef dripping-soaked Yorkshire pud replaced by chai soba and seaweed; no more cream in the coffee my mom brought back as a Christmas present for Lloyd; the metric ton of Christmas cookies I ate over the weekend replaced by three, count ‘em, three simultaneous cups of tea which are not doing the trick because I want some goddamn cookies already. (I decided to have a little fun with my tea, and made myself a cup of green tea, a cup of chamomile and a cup of Red Zinger. “Look,” I said to my friend E. “It’s like a stoplight.” She gave me a brilliant, frozen smile and backed away from my desk, muttering that old standby about she needs to get a new job because Jen has finally gone freakin’ insane.) I will probably yawp about these very things over the next few days - and no, I will not take offense if you decide to consider this as fair warning, and go somewhere else for a few days until I’m done talking about seaweed - but tonight, thanks to the lovely bunni, I am going to switch gears.

Bunni and I both received David Sedaris’s Live at Carnegie Hall for Christmas. The first reading is his story “Repeat After Me,” in which he mentions that his sister Lisa is convinced that anything can kill you. Because she retains the alarmist headlines from the local news, but none of the information in the actual broadcast, Lisa believes that applesauce can kill you, but she forgets that in order to do this, it must be injected intravenously. Bunni’s grandmother is cut from much the same cloth. So is mine. Or, at least, she was.

Neddie is my mother’s mother, the wife of my late and much-missed grandfather. Because she was young when my mom was born, and because Mom was young when I was born, we have had a lot of time together, and that time has been a lot of fun. When I came to visit her, we never had to ask each other twice if we wanted to go to the mall. She was not exactly a cook or a baker, but she had her dishes (pot roast, lasagne, a really fine dark chocolate cake with vanilla buttercream), and the dishes she had, she did well. She used to bicker with my grandpop, good-naturedly but bickering nonetheless, that was the best entertainment in town. (Once when I was about 7 or 8, they were having words because she was trying to get him to take his blood pressure medication while he was trying to play computer chess. “I don’t want you making mistakes with your medicine,” she said. “Mistakes? Let’s talk about mistakes,” said Daddy Joe. “I made the biggest mistake of my life on September 19, 1941.” There was silence from the kitchen. I recognized September 19 as their wedding anniversary, and I thought, oh god, she’s going to kill him. After a beat, she yelled back, “1942!”, which was, of course, their actual anniversary. I nearly laughed my iced tea out my nose.)

Neddie was fun. She was also a worrier. As my mom said, “Anything that was the least bit fun, she knew someone who had died from it.” Walking to the corner store. Hayrides at the apple orchard in Bucks County. Learning to ride a bike. Moving to New York. It was all fraught with peril for her.

In her defense, she had received an early, harsh lesson in the perils of life: when she was a child, one of her brothers had died at the age of 3. He had been ill, was hospitalized and apparently made a full recovery. Her parents were told, essentially, you can pick up your son at the hospital on Friday afternoon, and when they went to pick him up, he was dead, having suffered a sudden, violent relapse. I can’t imagine the kind of grief and shock that Neddie and her parents and other brother suffered, but because my great-grandparents were stoics, and didn’t believe in any form of psychiatric help or grief counseling at all, my grandmother was left believing that life was chaos, the world was chaos, and you fought chaos by controlling anything you could, and getting overwhelmingly frustrated by what you could not. This had repercussions, for my grandfather, for my mom and her brothers, and, eventually, for me, my brother and our cousins.

Knowing what I know about Grandmom’s little brother, I can feel sympathy for her, but her fretting still drove us nuts for years. “Make sure you don’t carry your bag on one shoulder like that,” she used to admonish me. “Cross it over to your other shoulder, so that robbers can’t steal your bag.” She told the same thing to my brother when he started carrying a briefcase with a shoulder strap. He told her that that just meant that a potential robber could still still his briefcase, with the added benefit of breaking his neck, and then she really worried. When I moved to New York, she told my mom, without a trace of irony, “I really think it would be safest if Jenny just didn’t leave her apartment after dark.” Mom nearly swallowed her own tongue, trying to contemplate telling a 21-year-old living in Manhattan, “your grandmom doesn’t want you out after dark.” I thought it was a great idea because it meant that in winter, I would have to leave my office at 3:30 in the afternoon.

When I moved to Philadelphia and acquired a live-in fiance, my mom (who was thrilled with this arrangement because she was nuts about Lloyd) phoned my grandmom. “How’s Jenny?” said Grandmom.

“Fine,” said my mother with trepidation. “Still in the same apartment. Uh, Lloyd has moved in with her.” She winced and waited for the outrage.

“Oh, thank God,” said Neddie. “I’ve been so worried about her, living alone in that city. Thank God she’s not living alone in that apartment.”

“WAIT A MINUTE!,” said Mom, who knew that if it had been her, shacking up outside of the bonds of matrimony, Neddie’s response would not have been “oh, thank God.”

“It’s Neddie logic,” said Aunt Nan, my mom’s best friend, who knew it well.

Neddie logic failed her at least once, though; of course, since it’s Neddie logic and only she can understand it, maybe it worked in some mysterious way that only she can see, the way my believer friends tell me that God works.  I am speaking specifically of September 11, 2001.  I will not rehash the specific horrors of that day, or of the days that followed.  I will just say that once the phone lines started to free up, I was on the phone for two solid days, with parents, friends in England, friends in New Zealand, friends all over the U.S., co-workers, corporate weasels from LuthorCorp who were surprised, and a little put out, to discover that I was not at my desk on September 12 (one of them had the nerve to tell me, “now, Jen, you know that a work-at-home day means just that").  After the 203rd phone call in two days to my mom, it hit me that I’d never called Grandmom to let her know that Lloyd and I were okay.  Oh, lord, I thought to myself, Neddie has to be going absolutely batshit.  I called Mom back immediately.

“I knew there was something I forgot to tell you,” Mom said.  “You’re going to love this.” It turns out that Neddie, who lived in front of CNN 24/7 at the time, saw everything, basically thought, “oh, how terrible,” as if she were watching footage of a distant plane wreck in the Russian steppes, and then drove to her local Genuardi’s to do groceries for the week.  Mom reached her on the phone when she got back.  It was obvious that Mom had been crying.  Neddie’s response was a surprised, “why, what are you so upset about?”

“Uh, Mom,” said my mom, “did you see the news?  Did you know there was a terrorist attack on the World Trade Center?  And on the Pentagon?”

“Oh, yes,” said Neddie.  “I saw that, and I thought, ‘oh, that’s terrible’ [which in Philadelphia-speak is pronounced ‘turble’], and then I went to Genuardi’s and did my shopping.”

“Mom,” said Mom patiently, “I’m sure there’s nothing to worry about, because they both work miles away, but I haven’t heard from Jenny or Lloyd yet.”

“Oh, well, when you do hear from them, just let me know.”

I am still trying to figure out the logic whereby living alone is a virtual death warrant, but being in Manhattan during a terrorist attack is no big shakes.  I really don’t care, though, because I laughed my first laugh in days when I heard that story.  I am laughing now at the thought of it.

Neddie now has mid-stage Alzheimer’s and lives in a locked Alzheimer’s ward in the retirement community she and Grandpop moved to after selling their house 10 years ago. She still worries, but because she has lost a lot of memory about who we all are, where we live and what we do, she worries less about us, and more about running out of money (she will not, thanks to my grandfather’s savvy investing), paying her bills (my mom takes care of the bills), and wondering why all of her mail has been forwarded to Mom’s house (so Mom can get the bills on time). Mom told her that she needs to stop making herself sick with worry, and Neddie replied, “I wouldn’t know what to do with myself if I didn’t worry about something.” This makes me heartsick, and it fills me with a seasonally-appropriate resolve: All of the worrying that I do, it is not an amusing personality quirk, it is a drain on my energy, and I have to cut it off at the knees.  Since Neddie could not, and still cannot, I will.

This is not so much an Xmess photo, but I’m posting it anyway so that you may know the heights (depths?) of my baking disorder.

I spent the last week of October and first week of November 2002 at a pair of professional breadbaking classes at the Baking Education Center at King Arthur Flour in Vermont.  On the weekend between classes, Ciril Hitz visited the school and taught a decorative bread sculpture class.  Chef Hitz teaches at Johnson & Wales, and was on the U.S. team at the last Coupe de Monde de la Boulangerie in Paris.  Studying deco bread with him is like studying figure sculpture with Rodin.  He is that good, and he is one of only a dozen people in the U.S. who specializes in this technique.

Under his tutelage we completed two projects:  a hanging platter made from a yeasted rye dough ("live dough") and a sculpture made from unyeasted rye dough ("dead dough").  The dead dough was lots of fun.  We dyed it different colors with coffee and chili powder and turmeric.  We ran it through the dough sheeter and made marbleized sheets.  We made braids and baskets and cornucopias.  For our sculpture, Chef Hitz passed out stencils of a rooster.  We were told that our sculpture had to include the rooster, but the rest of the sculpture was up to us.  I decided to mount the rooster onto a sunflower platform, glue the platform onto a tube made out of dough, then glue the tube to another platform.  For the platforms I made miniature representations of various breads:  pain au levain, pumpernickel loaves, baguettes, rye rolls, brioches, marble ryes.  I glued them to the platforms, then used coffee syrup to paint a cheesy ad slogan for my dream bakery, which has/had a working name of Baked Goods:  “Baked Goods.  They’re baked.  They’re good.” (My dad said, “ah, a bakery that the President can understand.” I said, “Dad, if the President understands this bakery, then I’ve done my job.") The finished sculpture was 20 inches high and a thing of beauty.

Miraculously, the sculpture survived the vagaries of FedEx—I’ve never used so much bubble wrap in my life—and arrived at my office intact, where it sat proudly on my desk for two months.  Then one day I decided to move it so that I could dust, and I discovered the effect of bone-dry office air on a bread sculpture.  Rooster broke in three places, and I could not glue it back together.  The tube split down the middle.  I bit my lip and threw the pieces in the trash.  But I could not bear to throw away the bread miniatures, so here they still sit, cheering me up as I toil for LuthorCorp.

My dear sweet friend Michelle saw this in a store and thought, “what a perfect thing for Jen!” She is right, but I’m afraid to open it, as I’m afraid my newfound puzzle skills will desert me, and I’ll never get Homer realigned properly again.