The Tiger’s Wife by Tea Obreht
The Tiger’s Wife was the perfect book to get me from Pensacola to Seattle, and through the Atlanta airport, full of bustle on a Sunday, packed flights, no quiet, no privacy. Thank God for a good, engrossing book, that takes you totally out of where you are to a world where things are not always what they seem.
The book is set in an unnamed country in East Europe which has just come out of a war, and the main character and her best friend are en route across a border which did not exist before the war, on an aid mission to immunize children who were once neighbors, and are now in a different country.
The primary relationship in the book is the bond between a young girl and her grandfather, and the stories he tells her as they walk up to the zoo, the Jungle Book he reads to her as they visit the animals, and the stories she finds for herself as she participates in the post-war rebuilding. It is a fascinating book because what she is writing about is not always what she is really writing about; the stories and legends and experiences are metaphors for another reality and a life lesson.
I don’t want you to think that this is one of the mindless airport books I sometimes tell you about. If it were, I would tell you “this is not great literature; this is an airport read.” Not this book. This book is literature. This book has meaning, and events you will think about and talk over with other readers long after you have finished the book.
In the back of The Tiger’s Wife is an interview in which one of my favorite new authors, Jennifer Egan (A Visit From the Good Squad) interviews Tea Obreht about her writing process, her life, her vision, etc. Fascinating reading, too, and also reader’s guide questions help you see things you might need to see and might otherwise miss.
Boss Oyster in Apalachicola
Many years ago, Boss Oyster was our favorite place to go in Apalachicola. One time we went there and just ate oysters. Oyster stew, a whole variety of raw and steamed oysters, then some fried oysters. That was lunch. When dinner came, we didn’t even want any dinner, oysters are so rich.
This time, we didn’t pig out. 🙂 And we still love Boss Oyster 🙂
I don’t know any word to describe it but funky. It isn’t all modern and it is not pristine. It’s funky. It has character. It has charm. Some people would hate it, some would turn up their noses at it. Not us. We love Boss Oyster.
This is our table:
And here is what I ordered this time: Gouda Gouda Oysters. Oh Yummm.
I barely remembered to take a picture of the oysters. I totally forgot to photograph anything else. Sorry! We just got carried away having a good time!
The Day I Might Have Died
“I have a photo you might want.” my Mom said, rummaging under the bed in the office, where I am sleeping while I have a working holiday here in Seattle, running errands and helping her with things she can no longer do easily for herself. I have two sisters living here who take good care of Mom, and I want to do some small part, too.
She pulled out an envelope and looked through it.
“No, not this one, but you might want this one,” and she handed me this photo.
I know to you it looks like a very strange photo; it looks like a very strange photo to me, too. Old photo, probably taken with some kind of brownie box camera, you cannot tell anything, it looks misty and indistinct.
It was taken at an airport ‘lake,’ like a water retention pond, in Juneau, Alaska, when I was around three. In Juneau, the lakes and ponds might stay very cold the entire summer, but these man-made lakes were fairly shallow, and might warm up a little when the temperatures reached the 70’s (F), like in July or August.
What I remember is dropping off, but not being afraid. I was under water, but my eyes were open, and the colors were beautiful and I was just watching the play of color and light, and I just kind of bobbed along.
My aunt tells me that she saw me drop out of sight and not return. She ran out into the water, found me, and pulled me to the shore. She saved my life. Later, when I was grown, she told me the old Chinese adage that if you save a person’s life you are responsible for them as long as you – or they – live. I always felt a special connection to that sweet aunt.
I wonder now if my memory is as I have always remembered it? I can still see the green and gold flickering, just as clearly as when it was happening. I can remember the shock of being grabbed, and hustled to shore, and fussed over, as everyone wanted to make sure I was OK. I remember having to stay on the blanket for what seemed like a lifetime, and then only being allowed to play in the very shallow water. And I wonder if I remember it all, or if I have heard the story so many times that I just think I remember it?
I love this photo. I love the indistinct nature, and mistiness. It is a metaphor for my memory of that day, and I am delighted that a photo exists.
Flying Out of Pensacola International Airport
No. No, there are not any flights to any cities outside the United States. I thought there was a rule! I remember other small airports that called themselves “international” but they always had at least one flight like to Mexico, or some Caribbean island . . . I didn’t know you could name an airport Pensacola INTERNATIONAL Airport just because you thought it sounded cool. Guess the joke is on me.
(Have you noticed how much more dominant blue bulbs are now? They used to just fade into obscurity, but now they are brilliant. These trees decorate Pensacola International Airport.)
So as I check in – at the curbside, YES! I am appreciating how much easier flying is when you are not flying to Kuwait or Qatar, or even Germany. You can drop your luggage right at the curb, you already have your boarding passes; you checked in and printed them at home (none of this is possible if you are flying to the Middle East) so you can go straight to your gate . . . oh yeh, forgot, you still have to go through security.
There is a LONG line and I overhear one of the security guards say to a Pensacola friend “Yeh, you can’t just get here an hour before your flight any more and expect to catch your flight . . . ” and I am thinking “Holy Smokes! I thought getting there an hour before your flight was overkill in Pensacola!”
As soon as I get through security (no more ‘special’ treatment, now that I am not flying to Kuwait or Qatar, no more pat downs, no more extra questions) I get to my flight, which is already boarding, and both my flights, early early on a Sunday morning are PACKED, every seat is booked. I cannot imagine.
The good news is that every flight leaves on time, lands on time, and the flights are uneventful. I love ‘uneventful.’
I find that I don’t get as much reading done as I used to when I was flying two, three, four times a year from the Middle East to Seattle. I used to be able to read three or four books in each direction, now I am down to one book and maybe a little Sudoku.
Beautiful flight:
When we get near Seattle, you can see five mountains in a row, from Mount Rainier looking south, including the remains of Mount Saint Helens. The weather in Seattle is cool and brisk, my car is waiting and the roads out Edmonds are clear and dry, Wooo HOOOOO!
Deb Roy: The Birth of a Word
Come back when you have some time – you’ll need about twenty minutes to watch this TED video about communication. I love this – but then you know I am a word nerd, and I love the way concepts are born and grow.
Computers have aided language analysis and taken it to lengths that were previously inconceivable. First, Deb Roy shows – with videos, graphs and cloud analysis – how his son learned to speak his first word.
He goes from there to what I would call “buzz analysis”, taking program content from cable television and correlating it to comments on public media – blogs, FaceBook, all kinds of public forums. The results are astonishing, and a great tool to understand the national psyche and how we think and process. This is amazing stuff.
The Travellers’ Dilemma
The restaurants were full this Saturday in Pensacola, all the nice restaurants; there is a Beth Moore conference in town and all the ladies are out to lunch. We were lucky, we walked in just before the crowd and snagged a table at one of our favorite Pensacola restaurants, The Fish House. Great meal, great service, great conversation, and we were out in under an hour. Wooo HOOO.
Have you noticed many of the good restaurants don’t take reservations these days, not unless you are a large group, like six or more? Maybe as the economy starts to lift again, that will change. It’s just odd.
Meanwhile, I have a couple flights tomorrow, and now that I am not flying overnight, or half the world, and now that we are retired, I am flying sardine class. And the airlines don’t serve food. If you buy food in the airport, your choices are limited, and expensive, and it can be messy.
So I’ve been thinking about what to take. I need something nutritious. I need something that tastes good. I need something that can be eaten sort of subtly; now that there is not a real meal time, you might be eating with people who don’t have anything. So you also need something you can share.
It can’t have an offensive smell. We love those Japanese crackers, but in a confined space, all of a sudden you notice how FISHY they smell. Ditto sushi, LOL. Can’t eat Wasabi peas, either, because they are also odor causing, in their own way. No garlic; some people cannot abide garlic or onions.
It can’t be something that might leak in my carry on. It can’t be something that needs a utensil. It can’t be too salty, or carry too many calories. It can’t be loudly crunchy, like carrots or celery.
Do you see the problem?
AdventureMan says “You worry about things like that?” He is genuinely puzzled. But yeh, I think about these things, and try to anticipate a problem so that there ISN’T a problem.
I finally decided on some Chex Mix, and some trail mix (nuts and fruits). You can eat a little at a time, you can share.
I figure I can pick up some coffee at the airport where I change flights. I love the seasonal Peppermint Mochas, Gingerbread Lattes, etc. It’s a most wonderful time of the year 🙂
What do you take on a long flight when you will not be provided a meal?
Feeding the Goats
The Happy Toddler’s other grandfather is always full of hilarious ideas. After breakfast, he said “let’s go feed the goats!”
We had NO idea. Like we thought we’d walk down a little road to some place where someone had two or three goats.
No. We got in cars and drove about five minutes, and when we stopped, at an abandoned factory, there were something like a couple hundred goats, all sizes, including one female who started birthing a baby goat as we watched (in horror!)
Happy Toddler didn’t even notice. He had a bucket of corn to feed the goats, and he made every grain count – the goats were so aggressive!
We all got to feed the goats. They would eat right out of your hand. They also had big bales of hay or grain of some kind, but they sure loved the corn!
My Life in France by Julia Child with Alex Prud’homme
I wish I had more self-discipline, and read more heavy weight books, but what I find is that when I read heavy non-fiction these days, it falls over when I fall asleep. Mostly, I read the New Yorker, or catch up with my news online, while listening to NPR.
I don’t know how I got My Life in France, if I ordered it or if I bought it in B&N. I’ve had it for a while. We’ve always loved Julia Child; her programs were a hoot, and she was an accomplished woman who never took herself too seriously. I will never forget one time I saw her on a Martha Stewart Christmas Special; they were doing a tall Croquembouche, and at one point, Julia was not throwing on the caramelized sugar strings the way Martha wanted her to and she grabbed the little thrower-thing out of Julia’s hand to show her how. I gasped! That is like grabbing a spoon from the Queen of England, no! No! You can’t grab a spoon from Julia Childs! You can’t show Julia Childs how to do it, Martha, you BOW to Julia Childs!
Julia Childs, classy woman that she was, just watched Martha with fascination and never showed an ounce of annoyance.
The book is hilarious. While alive, she worked with her grandson, Alex Prud-homme, gathering correspondence – she was a copious letter writer, and people in those days kept their snail mail to refer back to, the way we keep e-mails. They sat in her sunny garden, and he would ask her a few questions, and off she would go, regaling him with stories of people, places, occasions, parties, and especially FOODS.
Julia Childs worked for the OSS in World War II, the forerunner to the CIA. Stationed in India, she met her husband, and after the war ended, they married. Stifled in her California life, and and Paul jumped at a chance to live overseas. Imagine – Paris! She had to adapt to a totally different way of life, totally different living space, a totally different way of shopping for food, and she had to learn to cook. Since she was in Paris, and because she is the woman she is, she signed up for cooking classes at the Cordon Bleu, where she worked hard to master the techniques to successfully produce the sauces and delicate flavors which makes French cuisine so delicious.
She also moves to Marseilles, to post-war Germany, and to Norway, and manages to produce two books, each of which took, literally, years to finalize, because of her attention to detail, and wanting to make sure that women using her books could understand exactly what to do, and when to do it.
This is a really fun book. I would have loved to know this adventurous, courageous woman, who meticulously tested every recipe for Mastering the Art of French Cooking and changed the lives of serious cooks in America. No, I have never cooked from her book. No, I don’t have her book. I have a Larousse Gastronomique, from which she worked to get the ‘true’ Frenchness of French cooking, but I don’t have any cook books by Julia. I have put out a hint, though, and I am hoping to get one for Christmas. 🙂 Not just for me – AdventureMan is making serious inroads into adventurous cooking. He has mastered blackened fish tacos, and seared tuna, woo hoooo! He is working on the ultimate cornbread. Just wait until I get him started on the quintessential French Onion Soup, or even – maybe – French bread!
Cajun Country Swamp Tours
The Cajun Country Swamp Tour out of Breaux Bridge, LA, was such a highlight of our trip that we did it twice, once at sunset, and then again in full daylight the next day. The first night, we were with Butch, the owner, and the next day with Shaun, his son. Both were great trips.
Now here is the thing – there is more than one swamp tour company, and you have to be sure to get the right one (this one is the right one.) It’s not like Florida, where you look for the sign. When you get to Lake Martin, where this tour takes place, there is no kiosk, nothing except a tour boat coming in, but even this boat doesn’t have a sign on it. You have to know who you are looking for.
These people were so helpful in getting us booked. We really wanted to be with an eco-tour kind of exploration; some of the swamp tours are purely awful, and exploitive, hard on the animals, disruptive of the environment. We read the reviews; Cajun Country Swamp Tours is the group we wanted to be with. Our sunset cruise was delightful, just us, Butch, who is a wealth of information, and a family of five, the youngest of whom fell asleep almost as soon as the boat left the tie-up. The second day we took a private tour, and they gave us a good price. We like being able to watch the birds, watch the light change, wait for the right shot – it’s worth it to us.
Lake Martin is beautiful, in a lowlands kind of way (it looks a lot like parts of Pensacola.) Taking photos was fun, and also a challenge. Here is the challenge; sometimes the camera doesn’t really understand what it is supposed to focus on, so you think you are shooting a heron, and the camera is busy focusing on the tree two feet behind the heron. Sometimes you want to capture this exact light, but the camera sees ‘this exact light’ a little differently than you do.
This is what the tour boat looks like – very shallow, so it can get into very shallow places, and so it can drift over logs in the swampy areas:
Focus examples:
Now, just settle back in your seat and enjoy the swamp and bayous with us on St. Martin’s Lake:
This is a special bird, the Black Crowned Night Heron, only rarely at St. Martin’s Lake:
Lots of gators, soaking up sun before their long winter’s hibernation:
You might think this is a stump, but you would be wrong. This is Shaun’s duck hide; he built it himself:
This little anhinga lost one wing, probably to an alligator, but has figured out how to climb this tree and then plunge down when he sees a fish. He can’t really fly anymore, but he is managing:
Thousands of birds perched in these trees, the ‘rookery:’
Avery Island and Tabasco Sauce
Sometimes it’s funny why people make the choices they do. We knew one of the first things we wanted to do on this trip was to visit Avery Island. There are a lot of little reasons. First, was that when AdventureMan was young, he was sent to a far away country, Vietnam, to fight for his country. Most of his time was spent out in the jungle, and they carried most of their food on their backs. They ate something called C-rations, little meals, like with cans of food, and the Avery/McIlhenny Tobasco company made little tiny bottles of tabasco sauce to include with each meal package. It’s a small thing, but those little bottles of tabasco sauce made a difference to those soldiers.
Later, as we flew in and out of the Middle East, Delta had a special short feature on Avery Island. Long story short, we’ve always wanted to visit there, and now we had the opportunity.
(You have to see this mosquito statue to appreciate it; it must be about 5 feet long and 4 feet high, and there are several of them. )
It was a beautiful morning, and the drive was beautiful, too, cool and lovely. Avery island is surrounded by a kind of river/moat, so it really is an island that once used to be a sugar cane plantation. As soon as we opened our car doors, the mosquitos came at me; I am a mosquito magnet.
The tour of the factory had already started, so I scooted over to the country store, which is a really run place. Who would think there could be so many products devoted to Tabasco Sauce?
Oops! Time to get back over to the factory for our tour, which is like 5 minutes, then a 10 minute movie. Just before the movie starts, the guide (who also works in the gift shop while the movie is running) gives each person tiny sample bottles of several Tabasco products – cool!
After the movie, we get to tour alongside the factory and go into the museum. Very cool. Thousands and thousands of tobasco bottles being filled, and each day they post which country(ies) they are sending this batch to. Today is Ireland.
Tabasco is made with a secret formula of specially grown tabasco peppers, vinegar and salt. Lucky for them, they have their own salt mine on the property. Just about everything they need to make tabasco sauce, right at their fingertips. This was a fun tour to take, and one of our dreams was fulfilled.
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