The Writing on the Wall

When the twins were eleven months old, we flew from hot and sticky Buenos Aires to icy, wintry Albany, New York (via Rio de Janeiro and NYC) for the holidays. We stayed with my mother in her tiny house in Kinderhook. The twins had their cribs in an upstairs bedroom, pushed against one wall. Almost from the first day, a mysterious thing happened – scrawling scribbles in what looked to be pencil appeared on the wall by Sebi’s crib. Now, the twins were, at that time, eleven months old. They didn’t walk or talk yet, so we couldn’t ask what was going on. I looked everywhere for a pencil. We took Sebi’s bed apart. We took his mattress off, we shook out his covers. We looked in nooks and crannies in the crib and found nothing – but every morning there were more scribbles.

We washed the wall. Searched again. A pencil in the hand of an eleven month old could be dangerous. We took the bed apart, again. The next morning – more scribbles. This happened for over a week. We could Not understand where Sebi got the pencil. Where was it? How? And then one day, as we were washing the wall and again, searching for the pencil, my mother moved Sebi’s stuffed bunny out of the way, and felt something hard in it. Carefully looking, we found a tiny hole, and poked into the hole, was the stub of a pencil. Sebi had been taking it out, scribbling on the wall at night, and pushing it back into the stuffed animal when he was done.

The mystery cleared up, we could stop worrying about ghosts handing out pencils to wakeful babies at night. And then we went to Florida for the polo season. There, we rented an apartment with pristine white walls. And there, one day, Sebi (or Alex – I’ll never know) found a pen and scribbled all over the wall behind the couch. My husband had been gone all morning and I’d been watching the twins. When he came home, I was busy scrubbing the wall. Obviously, I’d failed in my duty – the blue markings on the wall proved it. “How could you let him do that?” My husband said. “How hard can it be to watch two toddlers for an hour?” 

Well, the next day I went shopping and an hour later I came back to find my husband, red-faced, scrubbing the wall. While I’d been gone, and while he’d been watching one twin, the other had found a pen and had scribbled all over the wall again. I was far too virtuous to say “I told you so.” But one day, I promised, I’d write the story down. And so I have.

 

Around and about all over the world

A lot of my travels were done before I can properly remember them. I was born in Kingston, NY, but can’t recall a thing about that. Possibly my first memories are of California, when my sister was born, but the memories are like small details cut from faded photographs and tell me nothing about California. Then we moved an impossibly long distance across the Pacific to the Samoan islands – and I have rain drenched memories of this place.

The Melting Pot, a Cookbook!

Would you believe I’m finally getting it together to write a cookbook? I wrote the query this weekend, contacted Andrea, (my co-idea-co-cooking partner), and we’re going to get this baby out by summer’s end.

It made my think of how bad a cook I was in the beginning – basically I had no idea how to do anything. My mother cooked, my little brother and sister even cooked – and I poured cereal into a bowl and ate only the marshmallows. Maybe it was because I was such a picky eater. I hated everything, and until I got to France, I never thought about cooking. No, that’s not true. I was 17, in the British Virgin Islands and a Swedish woman was making a West Indian curry. It was the first time I’d ever liked something new, the first time I ever asked for a recipe, and the first time cooking became interesting. Typically, it was a melting pot of ideas and ingredients – and it was so easy a child could make it (or a teen who’d never cooked anything but rare toast). 

Phosphorescence

When I lived in Saint Thomas, one of the most magical things I experienced was the phosphorescent plankton that would appear in the secluded bay where we lived. On nights when the waves would crest with pale green light, we would go to the beach and swim surrounded by beads of green-blue light.
It happened on the hottest nights of the year, and when the sea was calm. The plankton gives off light when it’s agitated, so it glows just at the edge of the ocean where the waves wash onto the beach. Walk along the wet sand, and your footprints glow. When you swim, the plankton lights up all around you. You can smear the plankton on your body, and leave luminescent tribal tattoos. Once, on a boat at night, the plankton lit up in the boats wake. We leaned over the railing, the starry sky above, the dark water below, and it seemed we were floating along the milky way.
Of course, that’s when my glasses dropped off into the ocean, and we couldn’t afford to buy new ones. I didn’t get another pair of glasses until I’d lived in Paris for a year.