Here’s a radio essay that ran on WVTF, our local public-radio station, this morning. It’s about a semi-recent trip we took to Watoga State Park in West Virginia — one of our favorite places — and about how the family vacation dynamic shifts when kids hit the teen years.
With thanks to my favorite radio editor/reporter, Connie Stevens, who encouraged me to record, then made me sound real good, then even offered her husband up as my babysitter this morning. The perfect trifecta!!! 
Today, I should’ve been packing. The boxes were assembled, the mandate clear: Pack away our winter stuff first, things we won’t need until the Massachusetts chill settles into our wimpy Southern bones.
Instead, while Tom and Max made their first foray to Boston to get the lay of our soon-to-be homeland, I stayed home in Roanoke and I cooked.
Inspired by our recent houseguest, Jes Gearing, who writes a kick-butt vegan food blog called Cupcake Punk, I decided to try something new, an eggplant-gouda appetizer dish I’d sampled at The Isaacs Mediterranean Restaurant last week and absolutely loved. It didn’t hurt that our restaurant manager-friend, Nicole, used to be one of our babysitters, so when I stopped by yesterday and begged to know how they made it, she happily spilled the bones of the recipe.
I used the nonstick griddle on my newish gas range — something I wasn’t appreciating fully until Jes, our soon-to-be tenant, gushed about all the great food she was going to make on it, complete with a spiffy looking picture of our kitchen that she posted on her blog.
Funny how it’s hard to appreciate things until someone else points out the wonders of them to you. I think of that a lot these days as I go about my daily routines — hiking through the near-ripe wineberry patches with Tom and Lucky in the mornings, tending my zinnia cut-flower bed that always makes me think of my sweet pal Frances, yacking at uncle Frosty at his poolside (even though he really should be indoors resting after his radiation treatments — having cancer seems to make him even more hard-headed than before.)
These are the things I’ll miss most about my adopted home of 20 years, a place where you can’t stand in the checkout at Kroger without running into at least one person you know. Or ride your bike up Mill Mountain. Or walk down to Grandin Road, where the new Saturday farmer’s market is hopping. (Foodies, check out the softball-sized shitaakes trucked down from Floyd. And Ashley Donahue’s brownies. And the Amherst County goat cheese. . . . )
It doesn’t matter that I don’t see my favorite reporter-mentor and friend, Mary Bishop, but every couple of weeks. I’m going to miss knowing she’s only five minutes away if I need her. (Who’s gonna bring us sweet-and-sour soup the next time we catch a cold?)
When I first came to Roanoke as a single 25-year-old, I thought I’d be here two years, three years tops. But leaving it has never felt quite right.
Sure, there were bigger and better newspapers I could have tried to work for – though whether I’d still be gainfully employed at them is another issue, never mind being allowed to do the enterprise journalism I’m blessed to do here.
Sure, there were more exciting cities and cooler mid-sized places. Towns with universities and bigger greenway systems and better schools and places where you can get Dogfish Head 60 Minutes IPA on tap. (People at Isaacs, please, listen up! )
But leaving never felt right, especially since Tom’s parents moved here last year, supplying Will with a steady supply of homemade cookies that he picks up daily on his way home from school.
I’m looking forward to my new home in Cambridge — a bike ride away from Trader Joe’s (sorry, it ain’t braggin’ if it’s the truth) — just as Jes is already planning out the meals she’ll make in my kitchen. But when the year ends, I know I’ll be itching to get back to more than my stovetop griddle here in the ‘Noke, which is a lot more than my adopted hometown. It’s home.
Eggplant-gouda appetizer rolls
(Inspired by a recent special at The Issacs Restaurant and a conversation with its lovely manager, Nicole Coleman. Note: I added the Kalamata paste because I’ve been addicted to it ever since we started the Flat Belly Diet. Sorry, Nicole — if you’re an olive junkie, I think it’s even better this way.)
1 eggplant, peeled, sliced longways and sweated (salted and left to sit for 30 minutes or so, until the water oozes out) and patted dry
Half pound or so chunk of gouda cheese
Olive oil for copious brushing
Kosher salt
Pepper
Kalamata olive paste (pitted and pureed with garlic, to taste — I use about a half cup olives to 2 cloves garlic)
1. On your oventop griddle — or lacking that, a good nonstick skillet will do — brush on olive oil and then pan-fry slices of eggplant, grilling on medium-high heat and turning over and reapplying olive oil as needed. I did it in batches, flipping every minute or so, until they were pliable and slightly browned (see photo below).
2. Remove from griddle, let cool on a plate.
3. When cool, slather a tablespoon or so of olive paste on larger end of eggplant strip, then place a chunk (about a tablespoon-sized piece: picture a quarter that’s three times its depth) of cheese on top. Wrap the eggplant up into a roll.
4. Place on oiled cookie sheet and broil for 3 minutes until the cheese is nicely melted but not so much that it’s spilled out all over the pan. (I used my “Low Broil” setting.)
5. Serve immediately, with salt and pepper to taste — and a Dogfish, if you have one, on the side.
Eggplant frying on the griddle.
Finished rollups, after low-broiling.
Posted in food and cooking, Roanoke
I love it when I’m leaving a profile subject after the last of many interviews and ask the profilee: “Is there anything you’re worried about with the story?” And the subject answers, “No, we’re good.”
Trust, people. It’s No. 1 in the toolbox, tied closely to picking the right person to begin with — someone who puts the truth ahead of their image, someone with whom you can develop a near-immediate rapport.
Yesterday, I learned that our 2008 series, Age of Uncertainty, won a Casey Medal for Meritorious Journalism. Many people worked on this newspaper and multimedia project, a 10-part series documenting the struggles of caregivers for the frail elderly — both paid and unpaid, medical and not. Their names will be all be listed on the award, and deservedly so.
But two of the many people featured in the series deserve to be singled out for honors, too. One is Linda Rhodes, the 60-year-old full-time worker and full-time caregiver of her husband, Tommy, who’s had dementia for going on seven years. The other is Cheryl Jones, a single mom and community college student who works as a home-care aide for Family Service of Roanoke Valley.
Linda let us into her life like no other subject I’ve encountered before or since. Between photographer Josh Meltzer and I, we probably took 80 hours of her time over the course of several months. She fed us. She invited us to holiday meals. She shared what keeps her awake at night, opened up old photo albums, invited us to her workplace and described in perfect detail who Tommy Rhodes was before the disease stole him away. As a journalist, you’re really not supposed to fall in love with your subjects, but in my 25 years of storytelling I have never been as blessed to garner such trust from a subject. And love her deeply, I do.
Cheryl was angel-sent; there’s no other way to put it. She took time to explain everything from the Medicaid spend-down to the real-life troubles her frail elderly clients have in accessing services. More importantly, she showed us by inviting us into the homes of her patients, friends and even some of the neighbors she keeps tabs on in her Rugby neighborhood. Her name wasn’t in every story in the series, but her presence surely was. If an agency official or medical expert taught me something in an interview, I appreciated it. But when Cheryl said it, too, I knew for a fact it was true.
Statistics and computer-assisted reporting are well and good, but I think the best journalism begins not with a number but with a story: A wife who has to stop herself from dialing 911 when she thinks her husband might be dying — and remembers the Do Not Resuscitate order. A home-care aide who makes $13,000 a year changing Depends and checking blood sugars and, when a client is too poor to afford cleaning products, balls up little bits of tinfoil to scrub the toilet with instead.
Those are the images that move me and, I hope, allow me to move others. At the heart of it is the thing we talk about least in this business and yet, when you really peel back the layers of any complicated, intimate story, it’s what we lean on the most: trust.
Thanks to editors Carole Tarrant, Dan Beatty and Brian Kelley for giving Josh and me the time to establish real trust. And thanks to Linda and Cheryl for pushing the media stereotypes aside and letting us into their lives.
Cheryl Jones visits Margaret "Mother Bass" three times a week, taking care of cleaning, personal errands and light medical duties.
Linda Rhodes helps her husband Tommy get ready for bed in a scene from late 2007. Recently, she had to place him in a nursing home while she underwent knee-replacement surgery, but she looks forward to feeling better so she can resume her twice-daily visits.
Posted in Aging issues, Journalism, longevity
Last year, I was walking downtown in the mid-sized Southern city where I live, in one of those rare moods where you don’t feel the need to suck in your belly and your clothes hang just right. A man — easy on the eyes, I don’t mind saying — stopped dead in his tracks and said, “Wow. Your hair is amazing. Don’t dye it ever. I mean it. Please.”
I had just been thinking about covering up the gray, authenticity be damned and to hell with Emmylou’s inspirational locks and so what if my husband claims to love my hair. (He let it slip once that he also loves that it’s easier to spot me from across a crowded grocery store.)
Like a lot of women, I still get wishy-washy about my hair, usually after a new acquaintance compliments me on it and then tiptoes into the real topic on her mind: “Uh, and, if you don’t mind my asking, how old are you?”
I’m 45, if you must know, of black Irish heritage, and I spotted my first gray hair at 16. REO Speedwagon was on the turntable, and my dark-brown hair was 1980s-big.
It’s always the women who want to know, and it’s always the same: A whispered confession — I’m thinking about doing it too — followed by a litany of concerns.
They worry it will make them look old (read: non-sexy) to their husbands, boyfriends or potential beaus. They worry their silver locks will count against them in the cruel corporate world.
They share my concern that some day someone will ask if my teenage sons are my grandkids or — fightin’ words — if my husband is my son.
It hasn’t happened, yet. But people do say strange things — in interviews, at the grocery, at my kids’ schools.
A drunk old pal at a party — someone I’d known from an old volleyball team (during my walnut-brown, $100-a-month hair-dye days) — actually grabbed a handful of it. “It’ssss gray now?” he slurred.
Yeah, Barry.
“Hell, it’sss not just gray, it’sss WHHHHITE!?”
Thanks, Barry. I didn’t know.
The hardest thing about being gray at my age is you never know when somebody’s going to feel moved to share their reaction to it.
It can go either way. Not long ago, an old friend apologized profusely when she ran into me , as if she’d let down the Sisterhood of the Premature Gray.
Her hair was blonde now, and she felt the need to confess, half-blushingly: “Divorced. Back on the market again.”
Go for it, Jane. Seriously! (Although I still think the silver was a better compliment to her beautiful, crystal-blue eyes.)
During a talk I attended a few years ago, the narrative writing guru Jacqui Banaszynski exclaimed mid-lecture the moment she noticed me: “Welcome to the Honest Hair Club!”
“Not everyone gets it, you know,” she said later, explaining that people from southeast Asia constantly stop to ask why a woman her age would not dye her hair. Was she being cheap? Groovy and all-natural? Or just stupid?
How about: Maybe she just likes it gray.
Five years ago, when I endeavored the painful raccoon phase of letting the dyed-hair grow out, I went online searching for “gray hair.” I wanted to know if anyone had written about middle-aged women who don’t dye their hair.
I found loads of Clairol ads and the like — and exactly one blog posting on the subject. (Happy to report, there’s been at least one book written about it since, by magazine editor Anne Kreamer, and many essays as well.)
I also found a few articles about the elegant J. Jill model Cindy Joseph, who in her mid-50s really is one of the most beautiful women in the world.
A while back, I noticed that Joseph had disappeared from the pages of the catalog. Then, in a few months, I saw her on TV . . . in a Boniva commercial, of all things. Whether it was by choice — or whether the clothes company just decided she was too old-looking to suit their image — I don’t know.
But I tell you: Every time the catalog comes in the mail now, I toss it in the recycling. . . even, sigh, the one with the killer after-Christmas sale. Sisters gotta support the Honest Hair Club.
A few months ago I was walking past the same place downtown, when the very same guy said, “Hey, I love your hair!”
I had already passed him and, though I was mid-conversation with a coworker, I turned around to acknowledge his remark.
“How’d you know I was talking to you?” he said, a sly grin on his face.
The truth is, I just did. That day I was happy with who I was, and how I looked, and if he was, too, well then let me say in all honesty:
Thanks for sharing.
Posted in Premature gray hair
This morning, I made a variation on Eggs Florentine with Sun-Dried Tomato Pesto for Father’s Day breakfast. This is our 10th day on the diet, and we’ve lost several inches and a (depressingly) few pounds. Happily, we’ve not starved. But oh, how we’ve missed those India Pale Ales.
Because I am too cheap to purchase the books myself, I borrowed them from my in-laws, who ordered them online through Prevention magazine. For $40-plus bucks, you get a book explaining how the diet works: Eat four meals a day of no more than 400 calories; eat every four hours; and enjoy a MUFA at every meal (a “good” Mono-unsaturated fatty acid such as are found in olive/safflower/peanut oils, nuts and seeds, avocados and — here’s my favorite part — dark chocolate).
You also get a cookbook full of tasty and easy to follow recipes. Though I had to tinker with the recipe because I didn’t have any sun-dried tomato pesto, the Eggs Florentine brought to mind my favorite meal from my favorite breakfast restaurant, The Breakfast Club on Tybee Island.
With the inlaws about to return from their trip to Maine, last night I realized that I’ll need to return the books soon. So, like any smart web user and recession-weary cheap-O, I went to the Flat Belly Diet Web site to see if I could get the same recipe and materials for free. I found plenty of promotional materials online, including videos of authors Liz Vaccariello and Cynthia Sass explaining the miracle of MUFAs and “sassy water.” There were also testimonials galore about how you, too, could lose 15 pounds in just 32 days!
But what I really wanted — the recipes — was nowhere to be found. Even Prevention magazine’s recipe finder didn’t include them.
Smart people, those flat-belly mavens.
If newspapers could make their juiciest content fee-based, maybe they could staunch the financial bleed-out.
But they’ve got to do what the MUFA ladies have done: They’ve got to give them material that means something — content that readers can’t find anywhere else. And these century-plus-old institutions have got to do it quicker than the usual bureaucratic pace they’re used to doing things.
Like dieting, it won’t be easy. There will be complaints, pangs of hunger for the old carb-fest days. There’ll need to be a complete overhaul in payment and ad-rate structures that will leave steady readers and advertisers clamoring for the days when they could have as many IPAs as they wanted.
But eventually, over time, people will realize how good the new structure fits — like those favorite jeans you haven’t been able to get into for years but can’t bring yourself to donate to Goodwill.
Brave publishers and stockholders and business-minded folk, please unite and innovate our way out of this mess. Our very health depends on it.
Posted in Flat belly diet, Journalism
Random things about the father in my life:
1. When the kids are really sick, they want Tom, not me.
2. This used to make me feel bad, but then about this time last year I got full-bore pneumonia. As soon as I was well enough to ride my bike again, I broke my hand. All told, I was laid up for about six weeks, during which time it hit me: The kids are right. I prefer him, too.
3. He is not at all a defensive driver and pretty much operates the car the way he operates his life: Life is good, nothing bad will happen to me. I envy his sunny disposition — except for in the early morning! — but I wish he checked his blind spot more.
4. He’s really cute when he dances.
5. On our 15th anniversary, he recreated our very first date by renting the screening room at the Grandin Theatre and showing “The Reader” as a surprise.
6. He’ll eat anything you fix him, even if it’s been in the fridge for seven days.
7. He does most of the laundry and, while he can’t fold napkins for anything, he does a pretty good job.
8. Favorites: blue, Guinness, his mom’s chocolate sheet cake, Ireland, the Be Good Tanyas, John Sayles movies, Thomas Jefferson, Mill Mountain on a crisp spring morning, beef brisket (his mom’s recipe), strawberry rhubarb pie (my recipe), Nepal, playing catch with Will, listening to Max crack inappropriate jokes, lying on the chaise lounge in the garden, reading anything he can get his hands on, making people laugh.
9. He’s a really, really good son and nephew. (He’s fixing his dad’s toilet right now, in fact.) Yesterday he set up Uncle Frosty’s blog.
10. If I had to pick one word to describe him, it would be: helper.
Happy Father’s Day, Tom. You’re a fantastic dad, husband, son and friend.
Ok, so we’ve found an apartment in Cambridge and rented out our Roanoke Ugly — a giant four-square that’s twice the size of our Cambridge digs but only half the cost. We’ve even held the obligatory yard sale, ditching the ill-fitting pants, tattered Yu-Gi-Oh cards and some of Aunt Barbara’s geegaws (she let us keep the cash; oh, how I will miss the world’s best auntie!).
The big break came today, though. Due to the miracle of Facebook, it only took five hours to find a home for the 10-year-old’s hamster as well as the guinea pig the teenager’s been wanting to unload for some time — the last vestige of the little boy who used to play with her on the floor (which makes me sad, but that’s another story, one that feels even more sober than the one I’m relating now).
No wonder the Web is killing our business. A few years ago, with a “Free to Good Home” ad in the newspaper classifieds, it would have taken days before the rodents were out of our house — and they would have gone to strangers, not a former student of mine and his wife (I’m considering this payback for writing his law school rec letter!), a young family that is thrilled to be giving their four-year-old daughter the pets for her birthday this weekend.
Using Craigslist, it took all of two hours to nab a renter for our house. We found a rental in Cambridge via a Web site called SabbaticalHomes.com; the landlord is a Columbia University professor who was residing in Berlin for the school year and, via email and just one international phone call, we hammered out a lease agreement and even talked her into letting us bring the mutt.
We used Kayak.com to score a super deal on two flights to Boston at the end of the month so Tom and the teenager can get the lay out of the land (and hopefully put some of the high schooler’s angst about the move to rest). Maybe then he’ll stop insisting that the only person this move to Cambridge is good for is ME!
Throughout the moving-prep process, nary a newspaper reared its head — except when it came to packing the dishes. While I try to remain optimistic, I really do wonder about the financial future of our business. I think there’ll still be a newspaper to return to next summer; I’m just not sure how well staffed it’ll be.
And yet we can’t count on Craigslist, or even Twitter, to be out there making the public’s business known, as my colleague David Harrison has done so well in recent days with his school scandal coverage. Facebook can provide us with plenty opinions on the school scandal, but as for the kind of reporting Harrison does — pouring over documents, talking to investigators, sifting through both sides of the story and then relating it in a clear and understandable way — there’s no replacing a guy like Harrison, who’s as good a beat reporter as they come.
By the way, I was thrilled to note that editors advertised his position a few weeks back, shortly after he announced he was leaving us for grad school — and, sigh, another career. Another good one gone. In these attrition-heavy times, we can ill-afford one more empty newsroom desk.
The ad, in case you’re interested, is posted — online, of course — at Journalismjobs.com.
Posted in Family, Journalism
Tagged Cambridge, Craigslist, David Harrison, digital natives, moving, newspaper, Roanoke Times
I’m a journalist based in Roanoke, Va., and my family and I are about to embark on a yearlong journey to Cambridge, Ma., where I’ve been astonishingly lucky enough to get a Nieman Fellowship for Journalism.
I hope to blog about our experiences with the move — the culture change from South to North, my kids (the 15-year-old is a little less than thrilled by the move), my patient husband who’s ready and willing to move his online teaching job to Boston and maybe — if he’s very Lucky, which he is (cause that’s his name) — the dog.
Goober and Gomer are going to Harvard, is another way of looking at this journey: a couple of Midwesterners who still think Skyline Chili and a cold beer are two of the greatest indulgences in the world.
“So you think I’m smart enough to go to Harvard?” I asked the teenager last night.
“Well. . . . . ” he said.
We shall see.
Posted in Uncategorized
