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family

Keens

My in-laws had this steakhouse in Manhattan that they went to for years and years. It was quite the classy old New York charm. One of those places that was hard to get into. But the in-laws knew a guy, and so they could walk in like stars. They took me there once or twice, and I was glad for it. But the place closed — landlords, man — and then re-opened in some form elsewhere for a few years, but it wasn’t the same, so my father-in-law found himself a new place.

It was two years ago, as far as I know, that they found a new place to call their steakhouse in the city. I’m not sure how they came upon it, but my lovely bride took her parents in for a show and they went to this place. They raved about it. Insisted I had to come with them into the city to go to this place. Full of history, and also the food.

Keens traces its roots back to the 19th century, when the owner’s first joint, a theater man, turned it into a hot spot for the players who trod the boards, and the people who made the plays happen. Many of the walls in the old rambling building are filled with quirky headshots of actors and actresses, most of them forgotten by all but the true connoisseurs. The real item, though, is this.

(Click to embiggen in a new tab.)

That’s supposedly Abraham Lincoln’s playbill. Ford’s Theatre, 1865, the night he was assassinated. The story goes that someone found it after he was shot and picked it up. It passed through a few hands and when Keens took on what is essentially its current form just after the turn of the century, someone found it on the property.

So the second floor has the Lincoln room, and this wall has been devoted to the theme. Here’s an undated article that most likely over-romanticizes the story.

There are framed photos of Lincoln, an image of John Wilkes Booth, a quality reproduction of Booth’s mother that he kept, an 1862 playbill of a show Booth was headlining in Boston. And then there’s this poster, dated six days after Lincoln’s murder and six days before Boston Corbett killed Booth.

Another feature are these pipes. Keens says they have the largest collection of churchwarden pipes in the world. The story in the menu says they once were ordering 50,000 of them every three years. Apparently there was a sort of coat-check style system, and some people left their pipes there. And here are some of the famous ones.

Ted Turner, Stephen King, John Kennedy, Michael Jackson, Jackie Mason, Joseph Heller, Redd Foxx, Arthur Ashe and more have pipes in that case. That one sits right by the door. This one is by the host stand, it’s obviously from a different era.

Please excuse the glare, but in that case the pipe warden placed the spit covered clay pipes of people like Babe Ruth, Will Rogers, Albert Einsten, J.P. Morgan, and many others.

A closer look at Teddy Roosevelt’s pipe. The tradition here started in the early 20th century, so that’s presidential spit on a hard clay pipe that was imported from the Netherlands.

Once upon a time pipe smoking was considered beneficial for dissipating “evil homourse of the brain,” so naturally this was a big thing. The pipes have these thin stems, so they were too fragile to carry, hence the storage and, presumably, the regular big orders the place put in.

I’m guessing MacArthur might have brought and left his own. Looks a bit more ornate, and fits the personality.

Keens’ site says the membership roster of the Pipe Club contained more than 90,000 names. That’s a lot of smoke! And here’s another presidential pipe.

I assume this is the former vice president Adlai Stevenson, not Stevenson II, who was a senator and UN ambassador.

There’s a display case with some signed pipes just thrown in it. No mounts, no labels, just chaotic. This is for a lesser tier of Pipe Club members, I guess. Regular folks pipes?

Just stored on the ceiling. In every possible space.

It’s a steakhouse, but the menu says “legendary mutton.” And when the first woman won the legal right to go into this place in 1905, she sat down and ordered the mutton. She’d been waiting on that. It’s also the first item on the menu. I got that. I was not disappointed.

I was, in fact, too full for the giant desserts, which were giant and delicious.

I’d visit Keens again — that meal was delicious! — but you’re buying.

cycling / family / memories / photo / Tuesday — Comments Off
6
Aug 24

Still not good with the seeds

Every English teacher you ever knew, every English professor you ever met, was always working on that one book. Or they would tell you about their book. Or they had it in them. It was the book of their childhood. Every autobiography was going to have long and beautifully intricate passages about the chrysanthemums in bloom, and their time romping with their friends and the little sisters and cousins of their lives.

It was always so silly because there would inevitably be a metaphor, but the metaphors were interchangeable and, often, not that good. You need a certain something to pull that off, and most people that spend a lot of time in the classroom, or grading papers, don’t have the opportunities to cultivate that certain something. So it all came down, finally, to a lament.

But those flowers were always there, and it was that loss of childhood, the flowers flaring, beautiful, and then fading, like so many bad lectures, and Moby Dick essays before them now

The only person that could write about it well, without it becoming a parody of himself, was when Willie Morris wrote about the jonquils blooming in his native Mississippi. He missed them from New York, where he was finding himself conflicted about so many things in the world changing around him, and he in it. He wrote about the smell of the jonquils, almost every year he was gone. And in most of his work after he went home, they didn’t seem to appear as much. You can use a metaphor up; Morris knew that, and that’s why it worked for him.

I always laughed at the cliché, but now I get it.

One of my lasting memories, he wrote in his best Robert Redford voice, is walking out back to the garden my grandfather kept. He would hold an old dull kitchen knife in his hand. It had a silver handle. Solid but light. It was, I think, the boning knife, that long thin one. He carried a salt shaker in his back pocket. It was a dull white plastic. A little beaten up. Probably it had been around for forever. I followed him as he stepped confidently over ground he’d trodden for decades. And out there, in the hot, bright summer sun, he’d find a great, big, ripe watermelon. He’d pull it from the vine and walk with me over to the edge of his row crops and, there, he delivered to me the secret indulgence of sun-warmed watermelon.

For a long time after he died, I wouldn’t eat watermelon. And then, for a while, I only did when someone brought it out, and only a little, to be polite, and I felt bad about the whole thing. It felt disrespectful.

But now, I do eat some watermelon. It comes with a weird mixture of that same great regret.

And there is also a maudlin nostalgia beneath the rind, the sadly sweet memory in the sweet flesh. I can’t not think about all of that. I thought about it when I cut this one up yesterday. It was a small melon, we got it from a local farm as part of a weekly produce box. I thought about it when I ate part of it yesterday, and again when I had some more today. I will think of it when I finish the thing off tomorrow.

I’ve always thought I was learning the incredibly valuable lesson that fruit was the best when it was still warm from the sun. Putting watermelon in the fridge is an awful act. I thought about setting it outside for a while and eating it the proper way, I thought I’ve never had before, but that really would have been stepping out. This is the thing I have difficulty reconciling. Maybe that’s what grandparents are trying to pass to us. Maybe, a grandparent’s lesson is really about what we can prize about what we had. Maybe it was something about those little yellow flowers on the vine, and the metaphor they hold, briefly, within. Or that salt shaker.

On today’s ride, I set out alone and, ultimately, turned in another slow one. I went through some of the nearby pasture lands and some of the row crops. I pedaled by the winery, turned left toward the gas station and then left again toward the park.

Past some sheep, on a beautifully paved road that has some nice curves into an old neighborhood that leads into the town. Through the town, and out the other side, I wound my way down to the inconvenience center and beyond.

It was that time of day, on a dramatically cloudy day, when you have to plan your route, and be ready to adjust it, based on the light. So I rode on two new roads out that way, watching the light, confident in my bike’s lights — one on the seat post and one blinking through my jersey pocket — and in the three mile downhill back to town. After that, it’s easy, through the town in just under a mile, and then four miles of open roads, and a reasonable bike lane, back to the house.

There’s one spot, in between two hills, and under a dense canopy of trees, that felt dark. But after that, it all opened back up to the same, even, gray light we’d had most of the day. It was 8:30, and I still had time to pick up the day’s peaches.

So many peaches. We’ve only just begun.

Please come get some peaches. If you do, I’ll promise to not torture you with literary allusions.

family / memories / Tuesday — Comments Off
23
Jul 24

A life well lived

He was three years older than my mother. Shaggy haired as a youth. Tall as the trees. He was 6-foot-4 and stood with a deliberate hitch in his leg and hip. It gave him a coolness where he could lean against things or loop a thumb in his belt. He got married a few hours before I was born, a full generation apart, miles apart, not that far apart. For as long as I can remember he called me to wish me a happy birthday and I would wish him a happy anniversary. As a younger man, he was aggressive without being risky. Loud without being obnoxious. Rowdy, but never in trouble. It was a vestigial part of youth that he aged out of, as most of us do, but since he was young, and I was young, and his family was young, it all felt a little adventurous. He was mischievous, with a wicked, good-spirited glimmer in his eye. He was fast and careful. He knew when to be which. He knew a lot.

My uncle was a father, a father-figure to many, a friend of everyone he encountered. He had a lot of friends. Everyone became his friend, because for as tall as he was, his personality could be bigger, and it was full of good cheer, laced with being a merry prankster. His was a personality full of love.

Tony worked at GE, running the software that kept the factory working. Odds are he had a small hand in your kitchen. He was a shortwave radio guy. His license plate, for all my life, was his call letters. He was a volunteer firefighter. He was a handyman. He was a fisherman. He was a Godly man. He was a deacon in his church. I have a dim memory of seeing him preach once or twice. But what he really was was a song leader.

Circa 2007If he wasn’t leading the singing, you could stand in the back of a full church and find where he was sitting just from listening for his voice. Tony’s voice was strong and sure. It was pure. I was delighted when I learned how to single out his sound. A tenor, for a few years he led a talented a capella quartet. I remember helping him set up amps and microphones and him patiently waiting for me to get it right.

He wasn’t a teacher, but he could have been. There was always some lesson or practical explanation he could share. He knew a lot of things and he was generous with what he knew. He wasn’t a comedian, but he might have been. He delighted in making people laugh.

All of it, his good nature, his size, his generous spirit, made him the center of a room, even though he wasn’t the sort who needed that, ever.

Even in his struggles, he would steer himself to a joke. Twenty years ago, or so he got a bad diagnosis. A tremor turned into Parkinson’s. The prognosis wasn’t great, but it came at a time when those prognoses were changing. Medicines were improving, science was making leaps, and activity and the physical therapy helped him continue to enjoy life far beyond that first doctor’s projections. There were always jokes and puns and stories. They got a little slower. A bit more halting. It made us all patient, and even in that he was giving us an example, an opportunity to learn from him. It’s one of those things you might wonder if a person is aware of doing it, or if it was purely instinctive and genuine personality. Either way, it was important. There were always some of the tiniest members of his family around. There was always a trip, or a cookout, or something. This horrible thing was going on, and he was rising to meet it. While he wouldn’t deny it, he wouldn’t let it define him. At the same time, it was rough. As his body fought against him, he lost the abilities to do the sort of finer work he really enjoyed. Even then, on balance, he kept his spirits up, and that meant a lot for the people around him, and maybe for him, too.

He was always an example, whether he intended to be or not, the rest was up to us. That’s how I always saw him: he did his best for you, and around you; the rest was up to you.

At the core of his varied interests, he was a real family man. Tony had a daughter and son, a flock of grandchildren and a mess of noisy, beautiful great-grandchildren. He loved them all. The man loved everyone, and he made it obvious, and he was easy to respect and love in return.

We buried him today, the singer, the programmer, the tinkerer, teacher, prankster. The patient and enduring man. Hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of people came to the visitation last night. Strangers from his regular breakfast haunt came. Today, more people came in, including the entirety of the people from his boxing therapy group. They, with their own troubles and struggles, all came and filled three pews. My mom always said that she thought her brother liked going to that group because there were people who understood what exactly he was facing. That may well be. They came today because of how he made them feel through what they were facing.

People from all the churches he visited, all the churches where he would go to their singings, came too. And, so, when it came time to sing the room was filled and the air beyond it, too. The songs were chosen specifically and everyone who raised their voices did so with verve. It was terribly sad, and joyful. For all of this, a good man’s suffering has ended. I hope that, where he’s gone, he can walk and run and be loud and tinker with things and be young again if he wants, even though he’d matured so well into a quiet, gentle man, a gentleman. However it works, that choir sounds better today than it did last week.

He is at rest at his church, a place I know well. I visited it a lot as a child. As kids, his children, my cousins and I, were all pretty close. I’ve always just been so grateful they would share their dad with me a little. It always meant a lot. But there was always plenty of his enthusiasm to share.

His examples and his joy and his curiosity and his enthusiasm go with us. The rest is up to us.

family / Monday — Comments Off
22
Jul 24

Visitation

We spent yesterday evening traveling. A car, a plane, another car. Dinner on the road from a generous burger place that fed us even as they closed. This evening, we stood on a cement floor for hours and hours. Five hours. Seeing faces old and new. Mostly old. Recollecting good times, trying to recollect some of those old faces. A lot of that is hard. I don’t mean the floor.

adventures / Connecticut / family / photo / Thursday — Comments Off
13
Jun 24

Special Church Thursday

Around noon today we left the house, later than we’d planned. We’re working against a genetically inherited attribute of being late that afflicts millions of Americans every day. I am one of them. The primary concern is one of awareness. As in, we have to be aware how we make other people late. But today, we departed only six minutes later than planned. For me, this is an improvement over the average.

Those six minutes also meant that — after lunch on the road, coping with the designed inability to change directions on this state’s busy surface streets and one quick restroom break — we arrived precisely on time.

We returned to my lovely bride’s hometown, where her mother’s Special Church program was hosting it’s end of the year party.

Let me just revisit this, so that you’ll understand the special woman that my mother-in-law is. She is a retired nurse. She has been running this program for 20-something years now. She runs it because she volunteered prior to that and it all just came to her. This program is not even affiliated with her church, and yet she puts an incredible amount of time and passion and spirit into it, because that’s who she is. And this, somehow, doesn’t get in the way of the volunteering at her own church — where she just recently helped plan and pull off a gargantuan wedding. It does not interfere with her looking after her older friends. Special Church also led to her joining the board of directors of a special needs home in the town next to hers. And that led to her serving a three-year term as the president of that board. People tend to gravitate toward her kind of selfless compassion. Special Church — which has snacks and crafts and a Bible word of the week and music therapy and more — brings in a handful of members every week, and my mother-in-law has built up an equally impressive roster of volunteers that help pull the thing off every week. Also, she has an in with Santa and he shows up every year. Well more than two decades of this, now. And she’s not stopping anytime soon. She’s an amazing person, my mother-in-law.

So we were there to see the end-of-the-year party, because it’s a relatively easy drive. The people involved are all lovely and there are many smiles and the music is good. A talented young man who is a music therapist comes in every week and brings a bunch of silly instruments for everybody to play, bang and smash along with his guitar. The minister sat in on the drum today. And it was hilarious to watch him keeping the twos and fours as everyone sang along to Margaritaville, and he did too. Everyone loves the music, most of it is played by request, or standards the group is accustomed to. It’s chaotic and noisy and perfect. It’s a free spirited, high spirited, animated part of the day for everyone. One of the members of Special Church comes to shine when it’s time for music. She always sings a George Harrison song. A born performer, she brings her own microphone.

Today I handed out ice cream. I sat back and watched the crafts and games. I chatted away with one of the many friendly volunteers. I tried to make myself useful cleaning up at the end of it all.

After Special Church, my in-laws, one of their longtime friends, the music therapist, his wife and toddler, two of the other family friend volunteers and the minister all went for dinner.

My in-laws have been regulars here for years now. We’ve been semi-regulars for almost as long, I guess. We held their surprise anniversary party here 40 years ago. It’s a charming little mom-and-pop establishment. Ten tables inside, four or six more out front. This is the kind of place that closes a few weeks each summer when the owners go on a well deserved vacation. For a long time it was strictly a family affair — husband in the back, wife out front, young-adult children waiting tables and running food. Their kids are, I think, off running their own lives now, but the husband and wife are still at the heart of things.

I usually get a marsala; today I tried the piccata. You wind up trying something off everyone’s plate, so my decision
making will get much more difficult on our next visit.

Tomorrow, I’m sure, we’ll go to another of the favored local haunts, and then it will be back on the road.