I am utterly different from her about food. I reach out for it, always. At least I used to. One day I was horrified to find myself taking a sandwich at the Toyota dealership while having my car serviced simply because it was there and it was free food and for no other reason. I didn’t want it. I wasn’t hungry and I didn’t even like what was in the sandwich. It was such a purely animal gesture that I shocked myself.
A small black-and-white photograph with scalloped edges shows my father standing in the long summer grass on one of my parents’ farms. In his early thirties, he was a handsome man with strong clear features and thick wavy hair that remained so throughout his life. In other photographs he is playing his guitar and singing folk songs, or he is playing his flute, or the recorder. But in this one he is holding fruit. In this photo taken shortly after World War II, he is wearing a nightshirt that comes to the ground. The hem is wet with dew. His feet don’t show so he appears to be floating over the grass. It is dawn and just light enough for my mother to have snapped this picture. Behind him is the orchard. The fruit he is cradling, should it have been peaches, would later be sliced over cereal then covered with the thick cream from our small herd of Guernsey cows. Later in the day more fruit would become a pie. My parents made and ate a lot of pies before they had a family.
When we moved to California, my father still had cream over his morning cereal, but it came in bottles, rising thick and yellowish above the milk. In bed, I heard the milk bottles jiggling in their metal basket as the milkman ran to the front door, followed by the slap of his feet and the sharper jiggle of the empty bottles on the return trip to his truck. These were the sounds that often infiltrated my dreams during the last moments of sleep.
4. Young Life in Davis
We moved to Davis in 1953, one hundred years after the Concord grape was developed in Concord, Massachusetts. My father planted blue, seeded Concord grapes in Davis and every September he and my mother made Concord grape pies. Now I make one at least once a year, partly to honor my parents, but also because Concord grape pie is one of the best pies ever—rich and berrylike. I’ve always included some variation of this pie in my cookbooks. I can’t help it. I really want people to experience it.
First we lived in an apartment house, then in a rented farmhouse in the country where my brother and I went barefoot all summer and stepped on nails and other pieces of rusty metal, which meant a visit to the doctor for tetanus shots. We also stepped on hills of red ants, which meant momentary stinging pain. Mostly, my brother and I had dirty feet with scabs and cuts and no one cared. There was a water tower behind our house where a family of barn owls lived. We visited it often to watch them cluck at us as they dipped their heads and moved them menacingly from side to side. Water gushed in the irrigation ditches that wound through the walnut orchard next to our house and we spent many summer hours floating in them. Navigating our way in these ditches took us far from home into the shade of the enormous trees as the ditches curled around and through the orchard. At some point we outgrew them and willingly rode our bikes three miles to the swimming pool at the university in what felt like an oven’s heat—and three miles back.
At the end of summer we gathered black walnuts and sold them, by the gunnysack, for a dollar a sack, which was a fortune to two small kids. We earned thirteen dollars one summer! The walnuts left stains on my hands that were practically indelible.
Our parents splattered colored paint on a gray floor and my father built Calder-like mobiles for the living room—the same room with the Jackson Pollock–like floor. Come Christmas they stuffed our gifts into panty hose, which stretched and stretched until they held them all—including a jar of green olives for Mike and a box of chocolate-covered cherries for me. Aside from the food, gifts were practical and for our betterment: pencils and socks, books, a recording of the Kreutzer Sonata one Christmas, binoculars for bird-watching and a book of Audubon’s birds on another. I collected feathers, eggs, and dead birds galore and learned to stuff them. I was a budding taxidermist with horrid results, but I was a child with a serious interest in birds. The first “thing” I wanted to be was an ornithologist. Hence the book of Audubon’s birds.
We didn’t really have neighbors, but not too far away, at the intersection of two country roads, the grandparents of a school acquaintance had a house. There was a big cactus garden in front of their home, probably to keep people away. I doubt that it was planted as an ornamental garden, but it gave the area its name, Cactus Corners. If we told a friend in town that we lived near Cactus Corners, they’d know where it was. Once my brother and I rubbed our hands over the cactus pads so that the embedded needles meant we wouldn’t have to practice our instruments—Mike’s the cello, and mine the violin. It took only one time to discover what a bad idea that was. Our hands prickled with pain and we still had to practice.
We stood by the side of the road in the fog in winter, waiting for the school bus and anticipating the moment when its yellow headlights could just be made out. We watched them get stronger and larger until the bus finally stopped and we got on. The bus ride lasted an hour and the route wound through the countryside, through walnut, almond, and citrus orchards, ending up at the school, which was just a few miles away from our house. I saw many orchards felled then replanted over time.
Our move into town did not hamper our pleasure even if there were no more water towers filled with barn owls or irrigation ditches to float in. Instead, there were the annual trips to the auto dealers to see the new models and gorge on the donuts put out for potential customers. I often went to the dump in search of treasures, like old kerosene heaters. Once, I was bitten by a snake. “What were you doing at the dump?” my doctor growled, incredulous, as he gave me a shot.
With all its floats, marching bands from all over California, sheepdog trials, and the freedom to wander into the labs of my parents’ friends and see what they were up to, Picnic Day, UC Davis’s open house, was the best day of the year for me, even better than Christmas.
On other days the university was still a lot of fun for us kids. There were great places to ride our bikes, musty old buildings, and a grand library. Mayten trees grew in the quad. Our father paid us a modest sum to strip the pink berries from their stems once they ripened. His plan was to sell them to a nursery for a lot of money, a plan that failed. UC Davis had a pretty famous vet school even then, and I made so many visits to the horse barns to watch gelding operations that the people in charge finally called my dad and asked him to come get me. When I went to the chemistry auditorium to see art movies there were lots of people to say hello to—mostly my parents’ friends. Even today I harbor a remnant of the expectation that I will know a lot of people at the theater. I almost never see anyone I know.
My friends and I swam in Putah Creek, where two of my siblings now live. We plunged into the waters of a cold green creek lined with plants that were home to giant yellow and black spiders and their webs. Later there was waterskiing above the creek, where the waters that formed Lake Berryessa were vast and deep. Before the lake, there was the little town of Monticello. It had been flooded in 1957 to make the lake and the residents were forced to move. Dorothea Lange talks about this in the movie made recently by her granddaughter, Dyanna Taylor, Dorothea Lange: Grab a Hunk of Lightning. When I was sixteen, I spent a few months living with a woman who had photographed this little town before its demise.
I lusted for good clothes and learned to sew from an expert who taught me all about bound buttonholes, French seams, and invisible zippers. I made my own “Lanz” dresses in lieu of buying them, Nina Ricci suits, and prom dresses from Vogue patterns. But I came home from those dances in tears because no one wanted to dance with me, despite my elegant clothes.
High school was misery, but my junior year I decided that I had to have a pair of sandals from Sandals Unlimited in Berkeley. Once I had those, they were all I wore. Every season, every day of the year. And I wore the
same clothes week in and week out. I was the first in my class to smoke pot, I skipped the sports assemblies in favor of taking classes at the university, and I played in the college orchestra. Secretly I wanted to be a cheerleader more than anything, but that was such an impossibility that I just went all the way to the dark side. I’ve never been to a class reunion, but I have done several book signings and readings in a Davis bookstore where I’ve met many of those I grew up with, those who stayed.
I failed to see why people screamed about Elvis Presley, even though I did go see Love Me Tender. Friends and I went to the drive-ins in Sacramento, where we’d watch four films in a row. “When is Ray Milland coming back?” I’d ask. “Oh, he was in the first movie.” We were on our third or fourth.
I rode horses and donkeys with my girlfriends and later, when I had a job working on a catamaran in a barn out of town and was earning some money, I bought a motorcycle, which I gave up only when I was out of college. I was sure my time had come for an early demise, so I sold it as soon as I graduated from UC Santa Cruz. But it was great fun while I had it.
My parents were Unitarians and I belonged to the LRY, or Liberal Religious Youth. We were liberal and young, but not very religious. I was in a group with four boys and we spent our Sundays doing things like bicycling to the “frog pond” with our adult leader, who was probably a professor at the university, to collect pond scum to study under a microscope once we returned. My mother, who taught religion classes to younger kids, thought we should learn anything more religious than that, but our religious education consisted of learning about our teacher of the week’s research and going to his lab—or the frog pond.
I didn’t know a Republican until I was in my twenties and living elsewhere.
What I especially loved, and I still do about Davis, was the smell of jasmine and the mockingbirds’ song in summer. Today, come summer, I splurge on a five-gallon plant of blooming jasmine to put in my office. We have a few mockingbirds where I live now, but they aren’t persistent the way they were in Davis. They appear for a few weeks in June, then leave. The scent of the jasmine lingers longer. To me that smell is the smell of the future, the unknown, of promise.
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We played outdoors endlessly. We had adventures. We explored, we did stupid things like putting nickels and nails on a railroad track then watching the train run over them from a few feet away. We pulled up surveyors’ stakes for a cannery that was going to be built but that we didn’t want. We rode Flexies, a low sledlike thing on wheels, bikes, horses, and donkeys. We played hockey with croquet mallets. We ran behind the DDT trucks as they sprayed for mosquitoes. We were kids. We knew nothing. It was a good youth. Then we grew up.
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For years my father sent me boxes of single apples from trees he had planted on the California coast, their names written on papers that were twisted onto their stems, their descriptions penned in his elegant script: “King David: Turns a beautiful red in August but is as acid as a barrel of vinegar. By Thanksgiving it will be full of translucent sugar spots.” Or “Sidsport. Hate to waste postage on a yellow delicious especially when it is still a couple of weeks early, but if it mellows on the trip it will be a grand apple.” It was. “As for Ashmead’s Kernel,” my father’s note read, “better organized in its flavor than Golden Russet, in my opinion.” When he penned his opinions for Cox Orange Pippin, Cornish Gilleflower, Winesap, Wykins, and other old varieties, he had the eloquence of Edward Bunyard’s writings on fruit.
In his eighties my father concluded his late-life travels to settle near Ithaca, New York, the site of his first farm. He bought an old farmstead called Windy Hill, where he proceeded to plant hundreds of apple trees on a hillside that sloped to a river. It didn’t seem to have mattered to him that he would probably not live to see any fruit. For my father, age was never a reason for not moving ahead with life.
Between the first tastes of cream and the last gifts of apples that arrived in the mail, my father was the supplier of countless other good things to eat. When we went to the beach to escape the heat of California’s Central Valley, he emerged from tide pools with his hat full of mussels, a crab, an abalone, clams, and sea urchins, which he cooked into a briny stew. The night before I married for the first time, he joined our two families with a paella made from crustaceans both familiar and strange that he had gathered from his home at that time on the Northern California coast.
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One Saturday afternoon, when he was a new professor at UC Davis and Mike and I were children, my father put some golden syrup in a petri dish and offered us the chance to taste something deliciously sweet. Because it was in a petri dish and we were in his laboratory, we were highly suspicious, but we finally did taste it, putting just the smallest drops on our tongues. It was sweet, just as he had promised. Another time he asked us if we wanted to taste pure brown sugar, and when we said “Yes!” he brought out a spotted banana and directed us to the mushy brown places. “Pure sugar,” he said, “that’s where it is.” We were disappointed, of course, but he was right. He also taught us about eating the skins of kumquats and how to suck out the flesh of the pineapple guavas that grew under the campus water tower. We had to climb over a fence to get them. He wanted us to enjoy these tastes, but I believe that he was also teaching us to overcome our prejudices (the petri dish, the rotten banana, skins not flesh, climbing over fences for fruit growing under water towers), to become open-minded people. At least that is how I think of it now.
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On campus he planted corn, which is a grass, after all, even if it’s not turf grass, for his students to observe. He grew one patch using conventional methods with the usual doses of fertilizer and pesticides. The other was planted in organic soil, without fertilizers and pesticides to help out. The organic patch thrived beyond the conventional. This was in the 1950s. My father was an early proponent of organic agriculture even though this was not in step with the University of California. I don’t think he saw any virtue in destroying soil to raise food. He became a charter member of Acres USA magazine, the kind of publication that still makes me feel that finally, here’s where sanity lives, in observations, comments, and stories of intelligent (albeit sometimes cranky) people engaged in growing good soil and raising food right. My dad was that combo—the grower of soil and the cranky doubter of modern methods. At a late point in his life he became, as Mike put it, a cross between Santa Claus and Willie Nelson with his long silvery braid and crackpot ideas, although that’s not really fair to Willie.
I didn’t know, until I read my father’s obituary, that his interest in plants extended well beyond the boundaries of our family garden. Mike knew this and he wrote that our father practiced his own brand of guerrilla horticulture, planting trees wherever he thought they were appropriate without concern for whose land it was. A fig tree planted by my dad in the northwest corner of Redwood Park in Davis is still there. In the schoolyard behind our house he ripped out one kind of apple tree the city had planted and replaced it with a better variety. Forty years later my mother still picked fruit from this tree. And as for our own garden, it was a forest of edibles—apricot, fig, quince, apple, plum, almond, peach, apricots, and bamboo (which we ate), corn, melons, berries, and vegetables. His academic specialty was actually turf grass, and true to form, we had the homeliest lawn in town. But we had the greatest fruit.
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I know I am putting my father in a rosy light. Of course he was also difficult—remote, oddly aggressive, and stubborn. Certain things were his: the Dutch gingerbread and Gouda cheeses and licorice bought from a traveling man who drove around California with his van filled with Dutch treats. He squirreled these away in his home office. They were his. A dog he bought in Scotland, a Skye terrier, was his. He did share boxes of matches that were bright red an
d had nematodes??? (the bad kind) printed on the front. They were around for years as none of us smoked or lit incense. And the Citroën he bought in France, the one that rose and fell on its own hydraulic accord—that was his too.
I was sixteen when he got the Citroën, and for Jamie and me, it was mortifying to go anywhere in that car. At that time my dad had a long, waxed Salvador Dalí–esque mustache. He wore a pith helmet while driving and he took great pleasure in explaining the works of his softly hissing beast as it rose and fell on its hydraulics to astonished gas station attendants. Jamie and I really just wanted to disappear but we couldn’t. It was the family car. We both gloomily wished that our father would want something more ordinary, like a Ford or a Buick, but that never happened.
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Every August my mother went back to Connecticut to visit her mother and relatives in West Hartford. When my father returned from the Sacramento airport his arms were filled with shopping bags, and for one week the food in our house changed. Instead of shredded wheat for breakfast, we had bacon and fried eggs, the hot bacon fat spooned over the yolks to cook them. At dinner my father brought out hearty fare such as chicken and dumplings, pot roasts, and short ribs, followed by pies and cobblers for dessert. It was usually around 110 degrees outside but that didn’t stop him from indulging his taste for the robust wintry foods of his Iowa upbringing. It was unlike anything else we ate the rest of the year and it was wonderfully good. But once Mother returned, those foods receded into the background, where they became the uncertain memory of an interrupted routine. Only when Mike came home from his terms at Andover and Harvard did we have a pot roast, ostensibly to celebrate his return. He, of course, had been eating large pieces of roasted meat every Sunday for months and was not at all interested in eating more of the same, but his homecoming provided a way for my dad to bring a big piece of meat into our household. It was tender and delicious. Falling off the bone. It was just about the only meat I knew and remember from childhood with pleasure.
An Onion in My Pocket Page 3