At the risk of sounding like a lackey for the Durham Chamber of Commerce, I want to talk about our great neighborhood. Our street is actually on the border between three neighborhoods – Old West Durham (where we actually reside), Watts-Hillandale, and Walltown. Our local weekly newspaper, The Independent, publishes a list of The Best…
One of the food blogs I read regularly is Smitten Kitchen. I don’t know who writes it, but it is among the most beautiful and accessible of the blogs that take food seriously. In one of her recent posts, she asked people to talk about why they were afraid to cook. Her list set me…
Once a month a few of us gather at church for a potluck dinner and discussion. Sometimes we have specific topics; sometimes we don’t. Tonight we were looking at Joy Jordan-Lake’s book, Why Jesus Makes Me Nervous; Ten Alarming Words of Faith. I was fed by the meal, the book, and the discussion. Joy is…
Though it was almost thirty years ago that I was on a mission trip in the interior of the Yucatan peninsula, in a little village called Hoctun, I can still see the man vividly. Our task was to dig wells and put in water pumps to help the subsistence farmers do more than, well, subsist….
When I leave church on Sunday, The Splendid Table is playing on our local NPR station. The show is sometimes a little too don’t-we-all-love-our-villas-in-Tuscany for me to take, but most of the time they offer interesting conversations and recipes. It’s great for a Sunday afternoon. Today the host, Lynne Rossetto Kasper, gave a brief excursus…
Two things have spoken to me this week: music and muffins. As I’ve mentioned before, part of my daily ritual at the restaurant is to make the English muffins that serve as the buns for our hamburgers and shrimp burgers. The recipe takes time, so as I’m walking in at eight each morning I start…
Where there’s a restaurant kitchen, there’s a radio that, for whatever reason, tends to end up on the “Classis Rock” station, if not one that plays “the Oldies.” Having graduated from high school and college in the Seventies, much of what passes for “classic” was the soundtrack of my adolescence (this was the number one…
Our house sits on the border between two neighborhoods, Old West Durham and Watts-Hillandale. The latter has a Fourth of July parade that goes back about sixty years. We even made the news: The line that stuck with me from the piece was the parade is “an unintentional tradition.” The couple that started it were…
When we moved to Durham, we didn’t buy a house right away, mostly because we still owned in the free-falling New England housing market that we had to sell. We rented a place for the first three months that, in hindsight, ended up letting us get to know our new hometown before we decided where…
I’ve been trying to think about what to write off and on all day. Tonight, after the Durham Bulls game, they had fireworks to “patriotic” music — Springsteen’s “Born in the USA,” Lee Greenwood’s “I’m Proud to be an American,” Ray Charles singing “America,” Louis Armstrong’s “What a Wonderful World,” and Toby Keith’s “I am…