Daily Archives: January 11, 2010

WHITE STONE — Hope Reese works as an events assistant for the Nieman Foundation.  I can say without certainty after spending five months hanging around the place: She’s the glue of the organization — the person all the fellows go to when they need help with anything, including recommendations for the Three B’s: bands, bars and bargains. She’s enthusiastic and generous, and she gets more done in a day than most of us do in a week.

So when the opportunity arose recently for me to pay her back for the few thousand favors I already owe her, I leapt. She wanted to visit Williamsburg, Va., where her grandmother and namesake worked as a journalist for The Virginia Gazette in the ’70s and ’80s. Her grandmother Hope passed away when Hope was just 10, long before her interested in journalism was sparked, so Hope Junior wanted to do find out about Hope Senior’s career and the influence she’d had on young journalists of her day.

I happen to have an uncle Frosty with a beautiful (and, happily for us, available) river house in White Stone, Va., an hour or so away from Williamsburg, and so I also jumped at the chance to have some quiet writing time here while Hope was off doing her thing. A bargain-hunter extraordinaire — she’s addicted to a Web site called Groupon, such that she’s even achieved “Groupie” status — Hope even found us a cheap flight on Air Tran to Newport News ($59 each way), where we rented a shiny red tin can (Nissan Versa) for four days.

I’ve never been to the river in winter before, so I’m glad I’ve finally had the chance — even if it did take forever to get to sleep last night in Frosty’s spooky, creaky 200-year-old house all by my lonesome. (Hope was away at a friend’s house in Williamsburg for the night.)

It was too cold to go kayaking today — not sure I can get used to seeing snow on the beach! — but after six hours of writing I managed a 40-minute walk along the Rappahannock, which is lovely this time of year and easier to navigate somehow without running into marshland or other people’s piers, as is usually the case. Somehow, some way, and don’t ask me to explain it, but the shoreline has thickened up, allowing a wider berth for beach-walking than usual. I was able to walk most of the way to Windmill Pointe, where I scared a heron perched in the marsh — and it definitely scared me.

By the time I returned, the miracle knead-free bread that Hope had started before she left — it requires a first rising of 18 hours! — was ready to bake. A sublime creation, it has a perfectly crunchy/chewy crust, thanks to the cornmeal and the cast-iron skillet I baked it in. (Ideally, you’d bake it in a cast-iron Le Creuset, a Dutch oven. But you gotta deal with the cookware you’re dealt.) A Mark Bittman recipe (you can watch his New York Times video here), it’s holey and wondrous — perfect for the pooling of butter — not unlike ciabatta, only without much effort.

Hope’s Miracle Bread

3 cups flour

Teaspoon or so of salt

Half-packet of yeast

1 5/8 cup of water

In a glass mixing bowl, combine ingredients and stir, but don’t overwork. Cover with plastic wrap and let sit for 18 hours.

Sprinkle a little more flour on top, then lay down a tea towel on the counter and sprinkle it with a liberal handful of cornmeal. Place the dough on top of the cornmeal-topped towel and put plastic wrap over top for 15 minutes.

After 2 1/2 hours, preheat the oven with the cast-iron Dutch oven inside for 30 minutes. (Hope said not to oil the pan, but I didn’t believe her and did it anyway.)

Being careful not to burn yourself, pull out the oven rack, remove the lid and then carefully nudge the dough from the tea towel into the pot. Shake dough around ever-so-slightly so that it evens out a bit. Return lid and bake at 450 for a half-hour, then remove the lid, and bake a half-hour more.

When the bread-making wunderkind texts (or is it textes?) you to make sure you’ve done everything according to her strict instruction, tell her: Yeah, you got it. And save her a piece or two.

Oh, and check out Hope’s new blog here for updates on her namesake project.

An article in today’s Washington Post helped kick-start my re-entry into the world of home care for the elderly, the subject of my Nieman year research. It also led me to the story of an amazing woman named Evelyn Coke. The Jamaican-born immigrant was a long-time home care worker in Queens, New York, where she ministered to the frail elderly in their homes, often working more than 70 hours a week. For $7 an hour.

I’ve spent a lot of time with home care workers in the past two years, and I know they tend to be overwhelmingly low-income, female and minority — half, in fact, earn so little that they must rely on food stamps, and most either aren’t offered health insurance or don’t earn enough to be able to afford it even if it is offered. I also know that the good ones tend to view their work as a calling.

What I didn’t know, though, until I read about Evelyn is this: Due to a 1975 loophole in a Labor Department regulation, the nation’s 1.4 million home care workers are exempt from overtime and minimum wage requirement protections outlined in the 1938 Fair Labor Standards Act.

Evelyn tried to change all that in 2001 when, working for a Long Island home care company, she sued her agency in a case that went all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court. In 2003, the court sided with the Bush and New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg administrations, both of which filed friend-of-court briefs saying that paying the aides more would bankrupt companies and ultimately lead to greater institutionalization of seniors. Unlike the Lily Ledbetter case, this one didn’t rally most women’s groups.

Because she didn’t have health insurance, Evelyn put off going to the doctor until she was 65 and qualified for Medicare. By that time, her kidneys were failing. She died last August due to complications from a serious bedsore, the kind she had once been so good at tending. Having been denied justice by the court, her son explained, she had not been able to afford a home care worker in her final days.

Home care is a growing industry in a rapidly aging society, with expectations for the employment of 2 million home care workers by 2014. (The Labor Department says the only faster growing occupation is systems and data analysts.)

We don’t need data analysts to tell us that the United States is headed toward a long-term care catastrophe if it doesn’t give more credence to the work of these women — and the patients they care for — as it cobbles together health-care reform. (For more information, check out a very recent article in the journal Health Affairs on the late Sen. Ted Kennedy’s efforts to weave long-term care into current legislation.)

Would that Florence Nightingale have been more prescient when she wrote in 1867: “My view you know, is that the ultimate destination of all nursing is the nursing of the sick in their own homes. . . . I look to the abolition of all [institutions such as hospitals and nursing facilities]. . . . But no use to talk about the year 2000.”