Busy

My latest and last residency of the year began this past week. I’m teaching personal narrative to four classes at a high school: two 9th grades, one 11th grade, one twelfth grade. Having taught only 7th and 8th graders so far, this was a new experience.
The school is in a temporary home near the heart of downtown Buffalo. The building itself is fascinating; it’s an old foundry, and in the basement halls the old rails that carts ran on are still embedded in the flooring. The demographics are more mixed than the other schools I’ve taught at—though as I write that, it strikes me that above a certain level, there’s an absence of students of color, and male students of color. In the senior class there are at least two girls with children.
Their writing is better than at the junior high school level, which is a huge relief. Some of it is frankly impressive. I’ve been encouraging them to write about someone they know. Some hide behind silence and outright resistance, but with a little prodding they each still manage to produce a few sentences. It isn’t the quantity that I’m after anyway; it’s the personal quality. Even if they’re writing about a friend or a parent or a boyfriend or someone else in the class, they are still expressing themselves through written language. Several of the kids, though young, have been touched by real life, and not simply in the form of a pregnancy carried to term. One of the juniors lost his mother only very recently; the best friend of one of the freshmen was recently murdered. They write of siblings or friends who drink too much; they write of sisters who have become pregnant.
This all makes me very grateful for the relative simplicity of my own high school years. My mother always said she and her sisters and friends were not the most popular, not the prettiest, not the wealthiest, but had the most laughs and the most fun. She tried to pass that on to me and my siblings. Looking back, I had a lot of fun in high school. It was later that life got real, got challenging.

The benefit I’ve been organizing for my brother’s company is two weeks away. I will be so glad when it’s all over. We have done a lot of work, and are quite ahead of schedule in terms of planning. I’d like there to be about 50 more reservations than we have right now, however; we’re somewhere in the vicinity of 75 to 100. We discovered yesterday that between the caterers, the bartenders, and the performers, we will have about 45 people on staff that night in various capacities. So the venue is going to be full, which is good. I just would like there to be about 50 more people, preferably with deep pockets. I’ve enjoyed the work involved but don’t know that it’s something I could do all the time. Once a year or twice a year at the most. It’s good, productive work and I enjoy bringing my experience in the hospitality business to the meetings. And I have enjoyed the chance to get to know the larger Buffalo community as a result.

Grill Meets Boy

Two summers ago, my brother Bill bought the gas grill which now sits in the backyard here in Williamsville. He bought it and assembled it in what seemed like a matter of minutes. I have since become intimately familiar with his tendency to do things lickety-split; Bill doesn’t like to pause to think, whereas I sometimes tend to think too much.

We used the grill that first night. I was a little skeptical: gas? How tacky. But that was my Northern California mesquite-wood snobbery; I was thinking like a character from Cyra McFadden’s The Serial. The food—I don’t remember what we grilled—tasted just fine. And now I stand on the other side of a calendar year, having used the grill all last summer and well into the fall. The grill has since received a couple of solid dentings from branches falling in bad weather or high winds (there are so many trees on this property, that during a high wind last fall, the whole family moved down to the living room to sleep, afraid that one would come crashing down in the middle of the night; it didn’t, but everyone caught cold from sleeping in the draft). The grill sat outside under the snow all winter, waiting, waiting. Susie said that Bill sometimes used the grill in the winter, but he didn’t do so this season.

A week ago I bought some pork chops and decided to do them on the grill. I bought them with the bone in; I’ve decided that is the best and only way to get the flavor I’m looking for. I brushed them with olive oil and sprinkled them with salt and pepper; as I liberally salt the meat, I inevitably think of Diana Trilling, who taught me how to salt. When I started to work for her, I was coming off years of low-sodium and no-sodium cooking that started back home. It took a couple summers of cooking with and for her to learn that salt was indispensable for flavoring. Anyway, I seasoned those pork chops and put them on the grill and seared them at a high temperature, turned them, then lowered the temperature and the grill’s lid. They came out a little dry, but better than last year. So I decided to try some thick-cut ribs. I asked the man at the meat counter what he suggested, and he said to use the uppermost rack and grill them for 45 minutes to an hour.

The grill has two racks: the topmost one pivots—I guess you could use it for smoking—so I seasoned the ribs and put them on the top rack. I turned the meat when I could see a bit of pink, about fifteen minutes at 350 (the grill has a handy temperature gauge). After fifteen minutes on that side I turned and rotated the ribs, moving the ones on the inside to the outside, and so on, and basted them once with Asian barbeque sauce. Fifteen minutes later, I did the other side. At an hour, I took them off the grill; I probably could have done them a little less. Still, they were juicier than any ribs I did all last summer. I’m looking forward to a long season of ribs done exactly the same way.

Sprung

A friend and I just came back from a few hours outside on this, the first truly glorious day of spring here. We went down to Elmwood Avenue, the commercial district which has a fun, hipsterish vibe. It’s like Seventh Avenue in Park Slope, Brooklyn. Boutiques and jewelry stores and galleries and restaurants and bars and residences and apartment buildings and churches line the street from Delaware Park south to the downtown area. The part of the avenue that one could consider “Elmwood” in this Jane Jacobs-sense is about two miles long and fairly flat. While it’s possible to walk from one end of the entire commercial district to the other, it would probably become tiring, and you would have to walk or bus back, and I haven’t taken a ride on the bus here yet. Along that two-mile length, there are about four or five smaller strips of development, and Spot Coffee forms the urban cornerstone of only one of them. The clientele is younger rather than older, but you do see the random pair of seniors or actual grownups. It hasn’t been taken over by the McLaren stroller crowd the way Seventh Avenue has.

Then we went to Delaware Park and walked around a little bit. My friend is in a rather advanced stage of kidney failure, and has to go for dialysis every other day, so he doesn’t do a lot of walking. But he said the sunshine and fresh air and the brief stroll we took did him good. It did both of us good. The change from winter to spring here this last week has been something to see—palpable and tangible. There are purple crocuses sprouting in the front yard, and the very last bits of snow are the ones in the shadiest corners. The lawn feels like wet springboard, and there was a lot of moss underneath all that snow. I’d like to get busy in the yard right away, but hopefully we’ll have a long spring and summer to do things like finish the deck, paint the door and the breezeway, figure out what to do with the yard.

I find myself wondering what it means to be closing in on my first year here. It is rather incredible that it’s still been only ten-and-a-half months. My life here remains rich and full and busy, and for that I’m deeply grateful. I wonder if it means that I will be staying on here. I don’t think I can figure that out just yet; I don’t think I can even begin to approach it. The timing feels premature. I’m not in my twenties or even my thirties, yet I’ve successfully transitioned into a completely different line of work, one that I could see myself doing for years to come. The kind of work I do for my brother’s studio utilizes all of my skills, and I continue to find it one of the most fulfilling things I’ve ever done in my life. If I were to continue on in the long term, I’d expect certain things from the work like benefits and set hours and such. And I wouldn’t want to be living with my brother while I was working for him. But I’m also at peace because I feel that many of these questions remain to be answered; in fact, most of them remain to be asked. They lie somewhere on the horizon, still out of sight, like summer. Why rush them? It’s only finally become spring.