Fried Shrimp and TV Tables

Trader Joe’s is always an adventure to me. It’s not where I normally shop, because I get lost easily. But there is always something intriguing to try. Sweet potato gnocchi? Sure, I’ll give that a shot. Smoked salmon and spinach-filled crepes? Why not?

Yesterday, as we were wrapping up a quick hunt-and-gather around the store, we were offered samples of Trader Joe’s Battered Shrimp. Not only were they pretty tasty, but they opened a floodgate of unexpected memories.

My mother was an excellent cook in her day. She regularly introduced foods from around the world into our diet. But she was not immune to Modern Time-saving Conveniences, especially on the evenings when she worked late or had PTA meetings. We didn’t mind. That meant that she would serve one of our favorite meals – TV dinners.

Of course, back then, they would be Swanson’s Frozen TV Dinners. And for reasons unknown to me, my favorite was always Fried Shrimp. I don’t think I ever ate fried shrimp in a restaurant. The closest I can remember was the shrimp cocktail down at Sabella’s, the Italian restaurant near the Richardson Bridge in Mill Valley, where we would also shamelessly scarf those little sugar cubes wrapped in paper, thus helping send our family dentist’s children to college.

Anyway, here’s what my dinner looked like:

It’s funny, but even seeing this old magazine advertisement makes my mouth water uncontrollably. Yes, I can remember the rubbery texture of the crinkle-cut French fries, the too-heavy breading of the shrimp (which was nothing like that at Trader Joe’s), and the way the peas seemed to invariably escape from their corner abode. (Naturally, before I could dig in, I had to chase each one of them back to their little pea-home.) But there was no way to spoil the cocktail sauce and the whole was miraculously more sublime than the sum of its parts.

We never ate TV dinners in the living room, but in the Den. We set up the metal folding TV tables with the flower patterns on a black background (remember the kind that would sometimes collapse without warning?) and watched Car 54 Where Are You?, Gunsmoke, The Flintstones, The Honeymooners and I Love Lucy.

But the best was when we got to eat dinner in the Den and watch Walt Disney’s Wonderful World of Color on our new color TV. Walt himself came into our home and would introduce each show. My favorite character was Ludwig Von Drake. I loved his German accent and the way he would use his nephew Donald to explain principles of science. Don’t see much of that in TV cartoons today.

The Den was where we were entertained, where my mom would darn socks and pay the bills, and where we watched history. It was where I sat for the first moon landing on a hot summer afternoon in July, John Kennedy’s funeral on a rainy November day, and Lady Diana’s wedding to Charles, all the way from Westminster Abbey. My father watched countless football games in the Den, all the time complaining how the cameramen never showed what was happening downfield, only focusing on the offensive line. That drove him crazy.

Most important, the Den was neutral territory. It was a refuge from the arguments that would sometimes erupt at the dinner table. My father, at the losing end of yet another dispute with my mother (she was often in the right), would protest loudly that “I guess I’m not allowed to say anything in this house!” and disappear into the Den to watch sports. No one ever followed and we were left to finish dinner and do the dishes in silence.

But times change. It is now only on special occasions that my family eats at our actual dining table. Instead, we sit on our sagging couch, join hands and say grace, and then watch The Big Bang Theory, Jeopardy or Glee as we eat with our plates in our laps. How terribly uncivilized.

Are we regressing into trailer-trashdom? Maybe so. Conversation about our day is limited, but we do interact, laugh a lot and relax. Once a week, we try to turn off the TV and play games such as Mexican dominoes or Milles Bornes or Scrabble, but between Jessica’s homework and doing the dishes, we often simply veg out till bed-time.

Thinking back, I can’t remember many of our often tense regular dinners around the Clark dining table (except for the holidays). But I do remember with fondness the forbidden pleasure of eating Swanson’s Fried Shrimp Dinners off flimsy TV tables in our Den. So, perhaps our unorthodox dining habits aren't necessarily the end of the world.

Fresh Snow and Frozen Fingers

When we awoke this morning, there was a dusting of snow on the high hills in the Bay Area. No, I suppose for the poor residents in the East and Midwest who are digging out from “Snowpocalypse” and other record winter storms, that is no big deal. But for us folks in Cali, it’s still a novelty to have snow this close to the Left Coast. While I am still hoping and waiting to wake up in Novato one morning and find several inches of snow on the ground, I’ll take what I can get.

The most recent time it really snowed here was in 2003. That day, I woke up, got in the van and started the relatively short drive to my job at Riverdeep Software in Ignacio. I didn’t get very far – onto Rowland Boulevard – when I caught sight of Mount Burdell, just north of town and covered in a mantle of snow from about five hundred feet up. Serendipitously, I happened to have my camera with me and made a detour to capture the view for posterity.

Unfortunately, everywhere I drove, there were trees or power lines or houses in the way. I just couldn’t get the clear shot I was looking for, so I decided to get closer. I parked at the trailhead on San Andreas Drive and thought I would walk quickly up the gravel road to where the meadow opens up, which I knew would give me a spectacular view of the mountain (really more of a very tall hill, at only 1,500 feet). The going was awkward in my dress shoes and chilly in my jeans, but at least I had a thick coat.

Reaching the meadow, I got off some excellent shots. If I left now, I would only be slightly late to work and in time for my 10 o’clock departmental meeting. Instead, I chose to climb higher up along the Middle Burdell Fire Road.

Pretty soon, I was walking on a dusting of snow, which quickly deepened to three or four inches. I tried to walk in others’ footsteps, to keep snow from filtering into my shoes. Soon, that was impossible, as I was making fresh tracks.


Tire tracks in the snow.

 A mountain biker passed me, leaving tread marks in the pristine whiteness. It was now only the two of us on the upper reaches. Without being conscious of it, the decision had been made to blow off the meeting altogether and push for the summit. I passed Hidden Lake, named because it disappears in the summer, but now beginning to freeze solid. Soon it would be hidden beneath a blanket of white.

As I ascended the steepest section of the Cobblestone Fire Road, my shoes slipped on the snow, threatening to throw me into gaping drainage ditches. My feet went from cold to numb. I took off my shoes only to discover that my toes had become blackened with frost-bite. They swelled so quickly that I couldn’t get my loafers back on, so I kept going in my stocking feet, trying to keep Jim and Jennifer Stolpa out of my thoughts.

A couple of hundred feet higher and my food and water ran out. I could also no longer remember where I had left my backpack, tent, and sleeping bag. Too late, it hit me how foolish it had been to attempt this route without oxygen, as hypoxia began to muddle my senses. Still I climbed. I tried to call the office, but my cell phone had lost reception. I tossed it away into the snow drift mindlessly, a hasty action that I would regret later when my monthly bill came and I discovered that all my Anytime Minutes had been used up to call drug traffickers in El Salvador.

My pace slowed as I struggled to place one foot ahead of the other, cursing my decision to leave my crampons in my underwear drawer that morning. Step-pause-breathe. Step-pause-breathe. My thought processes narrowed to just one seemingly unattainable goal – reaching the top.

The mountain biker passed me again, going back down the mountain. His hair was frosted with rime, his corneas iced-over and his mouth a frozen rictus of cold and pain. If he even saw me, it didn’t register as he whizzed past on bare wheels, his knobby tires apparently having become so brittle from the cold that they had literally shattered off the rims. Then I realized that he was probably already dead, his spinning wheels the only things keeping him from falling over in his ghostly descent down the mountain.

Toward the end, I was flat on my belly, making upward progress only by digging my chin into the snow and pulling myself along inch by inch. In the back of my mind, I think I knew that this would now be a one-way journey. As my fingers became numb, breaking off like icicles, I ate them, eager for whatever energy they brought to my depleted body. If this continued, I would consume myself entirely before I achieved my goal.
 

View toward China and Pakistan.

It took me several minutes to suddenly realize that I had made it. I stood slowly and looked out over sleepy Novato, far to the south, and the snow-covered flanks of Mount Burdell, spread out below me like a plus-size wedding gown. As I gazed north, I could see into China and Pakistan, actually looking down onto the 20,000 foot peaks of the Karakoram mountain range.

Realizing that I was now in the Death Zone, where the body starts to deteriorate rapidly due to the effects of high altitude, I ate the last of my digits and began my stumbling descent into the abyss. Hypothermia now began to make me shiver uncontrollably and I lost my footing often. Several times the ground disappeared from underfoot and I found myself falling over jagged glacial bergschrunds.

My arms were frozen into this grotesque position.



Miraculously, I came across some native Novatoans in their indigenous garb just above Hidden Lake. I tried to communicate with them, but my words were addled and my frozen lips could not form consonants. They took pity on me and snapped this photo. Here it is:

The rest is a blur to me. Apparently, I was rescued, spent ten days in a mud hut at the corner of Simmons and Novato Boulevard and then weeks in a medically-induced coma as new fingers were cloned from frost-bitten tissue carved from my toes.



Do I rue my decision to climb all the way to the top of that frigid peak? Definitely not. I still have vivid memories of the day I summitted Mount Burdell in the snow. Would I still have remembered whatever was discussed in that departmental meeting that I missed? What do you think?

Quince and Chowder

I drove my daughter to school this brisk winter morning and passed a house on Gallinas Avenue that displayed a patch of flowering quince in the front yard. For most of the year, quince plants are pretty unremarkable: a low shrub with dense, dark-green foliage. But in the early spring, they are the rockstars of the garden as their joyously red flowers with bright yellow stamens bloom shamelessly on bare stalks. For the first 21 years of my life, quince were off my radar, as were most things having to do with gardens. Until I met Helen Nelson.

In 1977, I was graduated from college and trying to figure out my next steps. I had decided to continue my education at the College of Marin, studying drama, but I also needed to start earning money. I only knew Helen peripherally, as the sister-in-law of my parent's close friends Jean and Ancy Nelson, but she was looking for a gardener (slash) handyman, and I got the call. She lived alone in Mill Valley, in a house with a commanding view of Richardson Bay and her substantial garden. Over the next twenty or so years, I would work in her garden, organize her home and her office, hang and re-hang her artwork numerous times, help her produce a major film documentary on the Consumer Movement, and plan her gala 80th birthday party.

In turn, she would become first my employer, then my mentor and, eventually, one of my closest friends. But this is the story of my first day working at 249 Perry Street.

I arrived early in the morning and Helen showed me around the yard. She pointed out various plants, where she kept the house key hidden (in a jar of bird seed), the tool shed (a disaster) and the "utility area" (another disaster). Then she gave me a list of chores and projects for the day and I made my first attempt to decipher her scrawled handwriting, a task I would become only marginally better at over the coming years.

That first morning, she set me to pulling weeds on what she called "The Mound", which was the long raised flower bed that one saw looking out across the lawn toward the Bay. It was filled with annual flowers, a few perennials, and a broad selection of especially pernicious weeds such as blackberry, crab grass and poison oak. I tackled that for a couple of hours and then moved on to a larger project on the list: removing the climbing fig that was slowly prying apart the eaves of her house.

I made very sure that she wanted me to remove it entirely, and not just trim it. There would be no going back. It was hard work, as the fig clung desperately to the gutters, but I kept at it. My two hours of weeding The Mound had showed only marginal progress and I wanted to complete something showy. Actually, that would become my modus operandi for all of my jobs: to split my efforts between making slow but steady progress on a necessary but un-glamorous task and another task with higher visibility that made my employer feel good about my work.

Anyway, just as Helen returned before lunch, the entire climbing fig lay on the ground below the eaves, from which it had been torn. Something seemed to be tearing at Helen, too. "Wow, you did that fast," was her only comment. I think she had wished we had started by simply pruning the fig, but it was too late. In time, I would learn to anticipate her impulsive desires and occasionally temper them with caution.

As we conferred and laid out the rest of my day, she was suddenly struck, "Oh dear, I don't have any lunch for you!" I told her that was okay; I had a sandwich in the car. She replied that, clearly, that wouldn't do and could I wait a half an hour for her to get something for us? Naturally, I said yes.

I moved on to trimming back the aforementioned quince, which held sway outside the office window. Unfortunately, in addition to being very attractive, it was also very invasive and constantly threatened to take over its neighbors in the side yard. Then I heard Helen announcing her return and for me to wash up for lunch.

Over the years, I have worked for literally dozens of bosses, some considerate, some decidely less so. Never have I worked for one who had the panache of Helen. As we sat at her artisan kitchen table, with its inlay of eight large colorful tiles, she apologized again for the delay and then laid out our meal. Amazingly, she had driven over to The Seven Seas restaurant in Sausalito and returned with cracked crab, clam chowder, and a loaf of fresh Bordenave's French bread. Then she opened up a bottle of chardonnay and we shared the first of hundreds of memorable meals at that table.

From that first day, our relationship was never one of boss and employee. We were friends and we were both helping fill each other's needs: She needed help keeping her yard and home in order, and I needed a steady income.

More important, though, she sought out my creativity and sense of humor, and I eagerly took advantage of having my first true mentor (other than my mother). Over the years, Helen would provide me with countless opportunities to learn and to branch out. She also showed me the true meaning of joie de vivre in everything she did. That, I think, was her greatest gift.

As I often do with close friends that are now gone, I wish that I could drop by her house just one more time, like in the old days. We would sit at her glass patio table beneath the spreading Japanese maple, lunch on some delicious snack that she had managed to whip up out of the mish-mosh of things in her kitchen, and watch the hummingbirds visit the copper birdbath that dripped water into the cement pool below. Perhaps a red fox would pass across the yard on its way to points unknown. She would tell me of her recent adventures and I would tell her what was happening in the theatre. We would drink too much and then take a walk around the garden with her showing me the new arrivals.

I sometimes wonder if those who have passed sense when we are thinking of them. That seems plausible to me; sort of like a phone call from the living, or even a "tweet." If that's so, then I hope you're listening, Helen.