All posts tagged: Essays

The Bodhisattva of Route 128

The Bodhisattva of Route 128

July 24, 2015

By SUE REPKO

bridge

Once upon a time I fell in love with Jack Kerouac, the words of Jack, the ghost of Jack, the idea of Jack. It started with On the Road, and then it wasn’t long before I set out to read everything he’d ever written, nearly fifty years after he’d written it. I was married, middle-aged with kids, living in the suburbs. My 20s had been spent working, getting married, going to grad school, and having my first child. My 30s were spent raising two children and piecing together part-time work as a writer, urban planner, and volunteer. Then, one month before my 40th birthday, further infatuated with Jack’s Visions of Cody and The Dharma Bums, I latched onto the idea that I myself had never driven across the country before, had never experienced the typically American rite of passage known as “the road trip.” This was something Ineeded to do. Now. Alone. At least that’s the story I told myself and my family and friends as I planned and made my escape.

The Bodhisattva of Route 128
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Closed for Good

July 18, 2015 ,

By ELIZABETH WITTE

 House

Lobster in the Rough is over. On a given summer day we can no longer pull off the highway on the Maine side of the border into the parking lot alongside dusty motorcycles, cars, and trucks, and take a seat at the bar or a table beside the bocce courts, inhale lobster rolls in the sun and have a drink among locals and interlopers. This was a place of tribute bands, ladies nights, and horseshoe pits. A place we visited any chance we had heading north or south, a place we returned to, the origin of memories and oft-repeated phrases overheard in the midst of one fantastic day or another. Its closing confirms or reaffirms that these sorts of things—the places we’ve come to depend on to be there as some small but increasingly significant facet of our lives—are going away.This link—to the past we have lived and a past that is hinted at by the place itself—is gone. It’s not a loss of food (certainly there are other shacks within a mile radius that could sufficiently do the job), but a loss of sustenance nonetheless—a shift in atmosphere. Sometime this past winter it transitioned from closed for the season to closed permanently. It’s for sale.

Closed for Good
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Baltimore Soundscape

June 8, 2015 ,

By MARIAN CROTTY

 baltimore street

The week of Freddie Gray’s funeral, after the rallies and the marches, after the west side ignites and the camera crews descend upon our city, the helicopters swarm in two clusters—one to the east side and one to the west, a steady thunking all-day-and-night stutter. It’s the sound of tension hovering—a sound that makes people stop on the sidewalks and stare up at the sky.

We live on a busy street of tall old houses between the two sides of the city that are being watched from the air and a couple miles north of the downtown tourist area of glass storefronts and office buildings, where a human wall of police officers and national guard troops stretch along the inner harbor, watching at eye level, men and women holding guns and shields with handfuls of coiled plastic handcuffs attached to their uniforms. We are surrounded by the noise of what’s happening, but we are removed from any sense of risk: we are not afraid of the police; we are not afraid of our neighbors; there is no merchandise being protected by force. It is an exaggerated version of how I often feel in Baltimore—safe but not far from people who do not feel safe.  

Baltimore Soundscape
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My Redemption at the Movies

May 11, 2015

By ANTONIO MONDA

black and white film actors

The last thing I remember about my father was him walking away wearing his camel coat. I remember him from the back, his dark hair escaping from his hat.

It was Christmas evening and it was cold, for Rome at least. He had just accompanied me to a train, which I would take to reach my cousins in Calabria. He was not happy that I was leaving, and would die a few hours later. A stroke, the doctors said.

My Redemption at the Movies
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Jesse Owens, Mr. Harris, and Me

Jesse Owens, Mr. Harris, and Me

April 21, 2015 , ,

By NINA McCONIGLEY

This is how my mother tells it. Jesse Owens taught her to run. I am thirteen. I have just come back from track practice. I have no skill at anything athletic. But junior high for me has been a series of attempts to assimilate. That year in the yearbook, there isn’t a club I’m not in—Chess Club, Stamp Collecting, French Club, Honors Society—and because track is the only sport you do not have to try out for, they’ll take anyone, I sit in the front row of the photo, a dark spot in the expanse of white faces.

Jesse Owens, Mr. Harris, and Me
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Where Does the Time Go?

Where Does the Time Go?

April 15, 2015 , ,

By AMIT CHAUDHURI

My relationship with Joni Mitchell and her music moves through two stages. My early admiration for her—in the seventies—in some ways anticipated the zeitgeist. Then I stopped listening to her for about a quarter of a century. I began to rediscover Mitchell’s work in the new millennium, when, by coincidence, so was the rest of the world.

Where Does the Time Go?
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Pomfret Chutney Masala

Pomfret Chutney Masala

April 1, 2015 , ,

By AMIT CHAUDHURI

From the kitchen of Bijoya Chaudhuri
Handed down to her son, Amit Chaudhuri

Author’s note: I grew up in Bombay on my mother’s magnificent
version of East Bengali food, a cuisine reinterpreted and perfected—and often
added to with original recipes—by my grandmother in Sylhet and then my
mother in her decades in Bombay. The recipe below is included in my mother’s
Bengali cookbook, published in Calcutta in 2010, and translated recently by
Chitralekha Basu. But this is not a dish that represents East Bengali food; it
comes out of our contact with Bombay, and is not only my mother’s version of
a well-known Parsi dish: it is her response to my craving for it. Its main feature
is the chutney in its name, made with coriander and mint leaves and coconut
pulp: the seaweed-green condiment is one of the most delicious to be found in
the Konkan region, imported, here by the Parsis, and then by an East Bengali.

Pomfret Chutney Masala
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Mom’s Dal

Mom’s Dal

April 1, 2015 , ,

By NINA McCONIGLEY

From the kitchen of Nirmala Swamidoss McConigley
Handed down to her daughter, Nina McConigley

Dal
1 cup of red lentils (washed well)
3–4 cups water
2 tbsp oil
1 onion
6–7 cloves garlic (cut in two)
1/4 tsp asafetida (sometimes called hing), you get this at Indian stores
1/4 tsp turmeric
Jalapeño
1 tomato (add at the end)
Salt to taste
Fresh cilantro for garnish

Mom’s Dal
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Papad

Papad

April 1, 2015 , ,

By SUKETU MEHTA

Papad was the bard of the masses. He sat during the endless school classes
on the bench next to me, composing rhymes which could be appreciated by
all for their elemental simplicity. Thus:

O dear
Come near
Don’t fear
Have cheer
Beer is here

Papad
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