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…
I begin the lunch shift every morning by baking. We make English muffins everyday to serve as the buns for our hamburgers and shrimp burgers. If I don’t start as soon as I walk in at eight they aren’t ready when lunch begins at eleven. Cooking and baking are two different things. Cooking is improvisational…
I don’t think I’ve gone a week without posting since I started this blog. This week I’ve felt tired. Exhausted. As I’ve commented to several folks, I’ve been running out of me before I run out of day. I have a couple of good ideas of things I want to write about – that aren’t…
As I was driving to church yesterday, I heard that Morgan Tsvangirai had withdrawn from the runoff presidential election in Zimbabwe because he couldn’t deal with the violence being inflicted on his supporters by Robert Mugabe’s regime. All indications are that Tsvangirai won the first election and Mugabe doctored the results to cause the runoff….