Parental Artifact #10–a plate of Hamantaschen (and, sorry, a bit of a rant).

To be clear, the plate is not from my parents, and the hamantaschen are definitely not from my parents. But the hamantaschen, the subject I’ve been thinking of, are part of my inheritance. Hamantaschen, particularly the only true hamantaschen, which are made with a poppy seed filling, are the best cookies in the world. This is not open for debate.

Every so often, when I was a little kid, my Grandaddy would give us some hamantaschen that were made by Uncle David. They were delicious. I knew that they were an infrequent treat, but I didn’t make any connection between them and a particular time of year. Grandaddy was not observant about his Judaism, and was far more likely to quote from Rousseau or Spinoza than Torah. I don’t remember if I ever met Uncle David when I was a kid, but I sure was grateful for the cookies.

Now I’m older. I never got the recipe for hamantaschen from Uncle David, who died in 2017, but I make my own every year for Purim. I am far more aware of the story behind these cookies, the book of Esther, the story of how the Divine could manifest as blind chance, and save the Jewish people from genocide. I am also far, far more aware of how humans in the 20th century almost fulfilled Haman’s genocidal aims, and how both Uncle David and Grandaddy escaped these disasters, and how it left them damaged. I’m also aware how, seventy and eighty years after the fact, too many people have forgotten (or deliberately choose to ignore) this history.

Hamantaschen, as my Grandaddy told me, represent the hat of the wicked Haman, the vizier to the king of the Persians in days of old. Because a Jew, Mordechai, once received preferential treatment to him, Haman conceived an irrational hatred of all Jews, and plotted their destruction. The virtuous Esther, daughter of Mordechai, was able to convince the king of the Persians that the Jews shouldn’t be killed, and instead the wicked Haman and all his allies were hanged. We eat Haman’s hat, Grandaddy told me, to celebrate our victory over this murderer.

When I first heard this story, I was six or so, and I wasn’t really aware in any meaningful way of the Holocaust, or of history in general. I was kind of aware that there was such a thing as a Jew, though I didn’t really view Grandaddy as Jewish, and he didn’t make much of it. I learned more as I got older, of course. Grandaddy, David Appleman, was from a Jewish settlement in what is now Belarus. He and his family fled in 1913, after a series of pogroms, eventually ending up in the New World. Nazis completely erased his community during WWII. He abandoned Jewish observance (though not Jewish food or socialist-tinged Zionism), married the daughter of an Irishwoman and a Scot, and settled in to America. He traveled across Europe once after the war; although the train stopped in Germany a couple times, he didn’t set foot on German soil.

Although my Grandaddy liked Jewish food, he was not really a cook. So it was left to Uncle David to bring the hamantaschen. Properly, Uncle David’s name was Alicia, though I didn’t know that or the awful details of her story until I was in high school. She was born in Poland in the early 1930’s. All the male members of her family were killed early in the Holocaust. She and her mother were on a train to one of the extermination camps, but her mother saved her by tossing her out of the train into a snow bank. She survived the war fighting as a partisan, was interred in a DP camp in Cyprus, and worked in the war that gave birth to the state of Israel, where she met and married one of my Grandaddy’s nephews. She had no surviving family, so grew very attached to my Grandaddy, her uncle. Apparently, for a long time, everything was “Uncle David” this and “Uncle David” that with her, and so most of the family started calling her “Uncle David.”

She wrote a good memoir, and it hasn’t been banned, yet. It’s not a comforting read. There is a continual ratcheting up of awfulness, of tragedy upon tragedy. I suppose it could be interpreted as having a happy ending, in that Uncle David avoided the death camps, survived, and started a new life, but every other person around her had been killed and every thing taken away from her. Even after the end of the war there was the continued oppression of the DP camp and the unwillingness of any nation to somehow find a way to deal with the problems caused by the Holocaust. Her book is in my collection, next to Primo Levi’s memoirs and Art Spiegelman’s “Maus.”

Of course, I’m writing this because some jackasses on a school board in Tennessee have removed “Maus” from their middle school curriculum, using some flimsy excuse involving mouse nudity and cussing. The jackasses say they are looking for something more “appropriate.” I suppose it’s possible that they are that prudish, but I doubt it. I wonder if there is anybody in the world who believes that that is truly the reason it has been banned, given the circumstances.

The removal comes at a time when a political party, aligned with fascists, are writing a bunch of vaguely-worded yet punitive laws aimed at teachers, preventing them from “making any [white] student feel uncomfortable” or advocating any “negative account of the founding and history of the United States of America.” There are also bans on the bogeymen of “Critical Race Theory” and the 1619 project (Apparently, it is terribly corrosive to young minds to learn learn that Thomas Jefferson owned his wife’s half-sister and raped her repeatedly, or that slavery was the underpinning of much of early America’s economy, and that these facts have ramifications to this day). There is a massive, nationwide project under way to sanitize history, to make it more comfortable and soothing to White folks, and to let White minds not be troubled by the slightest notion that “White privilege” or “systemic racism” are real things. To these aspiring authoritarians, it’s imperative that their children never see a highly approachable, sympathetic, humane book like “Maus.”

—If you can teach about the Holocaust with something “nicer” than Maus, you can teach kids that Jews are idealized beings rather than humans who have vices and virtues and faults of their own. This is especially easy if you live someplace with very few Jews, like rural Tennessee, or rural Oregon. If your kids believe Jews are something other than humans, well, it makes it easier to treat them like something other than humans.

—If you remove Maus (or, say books by Frederick Douglass or Solomon Northrup or other books that humanize those who have suffered), you might let your kids believe that people unlike them are not quite as human. They might not be troubled by knowing that doctors under-prescribe pain medications to Black Americans, not because of any physiological difference, but because of centuries of belief that Blacks were less sensitive to pain.

—If you ignore the first half of “Maus” and start teaching that the Holocaust began with trains to Buchenwald, you can obfuscate the gradual slide from democracy to genocidal fascism, an imperceptible but constant worsening, of yielding to political bullies and people who used threats of violence. Kids might ignore that sort of thing going on today. They might not even notice when people start banning books.

—If you remove “Maus,” told by and aimed at Americans, children might learn that genocidal fascists were a problem only overseas, and can’t become established in America. They might come to believe that, as long as you don’t personally shoot anybody, you’re not a bad person. They could even grow up to vote for someone advocating the early steps of a fascist program, and justify their vote by saying “the alternative is worse” or “I like some of his other policies” or “he’ll grow into the office” or “the only thing that matters is his view on abortion.”

—If you can avoid teaching about the characters in “Maus” risking all to flee their homeland, kids might learn that policies that bar entry to this country for refugees from persecution are justifiable. If, instead, you teach that the United States is perfect, then our behavior towards the Jews on the MS St. Louis, the “Ship of the Damned”, was perfect, and barring entry to refugees now is just as perfect.

—If you can dodge the lesson about the Poles in “Maus” taking the property of Jews—or about Americans taking the property of interned Japanese in WWII, or the confiscation of Indian lands, or Tulsa, or the extraction of life and labor from Black slaves—you might get kids to believe that ordinary, non-genocidal, non-fascist citizens didn’t reap any benefit from the oppression of others, and that you got where you were entirely by your own virtue and labor.

—If you make it difficult to read Maus—or Alicia’s story, or Night, or Survival in Auschwitz, or any of the memoirs by actual survivors of the Holocaust, you can obfuscate the horror of the Holocaust with incomprehensible numbers. No child can comprehend “six million.” But a child can understand the story of an individual, and then you would have to teach what a genocide really is: a tale of tragedy and suffering on a staggering scale, repeated six million times. But, if you can “educate” your children without this understanding, it’s easy to convince them that your minor inconvenience is comparable to genocide; and if you can do that, you make it easier to say that an actual genocide, happening to someone else, is really a minor inconvenience.

—If you don’t let your kids read Maus, or accounts of other survivors of genocides, they might believe that there’s always a way out—that the “right” person will survive, that faith is rewarded and will survive the test of Auschwitz. They might believe that the suffering stops once the camp is closed, and that there’s no more suffering or responsibility or need for reparations. They may believe that the next generation is a fresh start, a tabula rasa, and that since they weren’t involved, it’s not their problem, and there’s nothing to learn from it. They might come to the conclusion that the Holocaust was even necessary, so that there would be a State of Israel, so that Jesus can make his big return.

I know this is small potatoes. It’s one school board in one district in one state, is been removed from a reading list and not banned, and the jackasses on the board insist they’re going to try to find a suitable replacement. It’s not a giant step on the road to genocide. It is, however, one of many small steps on a “biased random walk” towards fascism. We’re not marching directly towards that end, but we are wandering around—and somehow, the steps in the general direction of fascism always seem to be slightly longer than the steps away. Combined with all the other steps lately, from CRT bans to a proposal that teachers wear body-cams, it’s enough to give Jewish, anti-fascist me the jitters.

It’s part of my inheritance, from Grandaddy and Uncle David, that I eat hamantaschen, and that I get worried about this. It’s a debt I owe them, to fight against this. But there’s others to whom I owe this debt, and you may as well—the Jews who were murdered at the synagogues in Pittsburgh and Poway, and the hostages taken in Texas, and all who have to look at graffiti-ed swastikas and television commentators and politicians who are too chummy with neo-Nazis and “white nationalists.” It’s also owed to the Muslims and Sikhs and Blacks and Brown folks and non cis-het folks and all the others who are targeted by racists and fascists. For all of them, I remember and remember and remember, and let that guide my actions and votes.

Purim this year is on March 16-17. I will, as usual, be baking Hamantaschen and remembering Uncle David and Grandaddy. If you need help remembering the lessons of Purim, or if you need help remembering the lessons from Maus and Alicia’s Story, and if you want to take a bite out of fascism, come by and have some with me.

 Parental artifact #9: a shoebox full of disposable chopsticks from everywhere.

When you go through all your parents’ stuff, you will run into things that just make you stop and scratch your head in puzzlement. Sometimes the puzzle is to identify what the object is or what its provenance may be. Other times, those factors are plain, and the question is simply…why?

A decade ago, as my parents were becoming ever less able to manage their own affairs, and then less able to manage themselves, I and my brothers had to make trips to our hometown and try to help out. We’d stay a few days, do some chores that had been deferred, take care of business that needed attention, and do our best to slow the slide into decay. It became clear, during these visits, that simply dealing with all our parents’ stuff after their death would become an issue, so I would occasionally try to get ahead of things by moving stuff out of the house.

I wasn’t spiriting away valuables. On one visit, I surreptitiously filled a neighbor’s garbage can with yogurt containers and mismatched lids that had filled an entire cupboard. On another visit, I took advantage of my parents naps and stealthily filled three “lawn size” garbage bags with nothing but plastic bags. There was the collection of ketchup packets and coffee-stirring spoons from McDonalds to sneak out of the kitchen drawers, as well as the drawer-full of used plastic forks, a grocery bag of hotel soaps from almost every continent and five decades that had melted into a solid block (not to mention the complementary shower caps), and so on.

I had to do all this furtively, like a thief, because that’s what I was to my parents. They objected bitterly to my earlier efforts at persuading them that there was no benefit to keeping such things, though they could offer no justification for keeping them other than “you can’t throw that away! That’s a perfectly good plastic bag (or fork, or whatever).”

I don’t think my parents were pathological hoarders. But I do think they were “on the spectrum.” They were children of the Great Depression, true, but there is no family lore of privation or struggle during that time. Both my parents’ parents were creatures of the university, stably employed through the worst economic times, as far as I can tell. However, if they were ever offered something free, they took it, no matter its worth or utility. Why? I do not know.

So, many years after the plastic bag purge, and after my parents’ death, my brothers and I set to trying to divide up the material residue of their lives. There were many amazing, valuable, sentimental, prized things, some of which I’ve written about; there was also a lot of stuff that made me wonder…why? There were boxes of swag—keychains and buttons and desk-toys and other baubles that sales representatives showered them with, branded with VWR and Fisher Scientific and Genentech and Calbiochem and USC. There was a trunk in the garage that was half full of plastic shopping bags from all of their considerable travels, going around the world twice and over five decades. There was a shoebox full of disposable chopsticks, of which this is only a portion. The Singapore Airlines and Osaka sticks are from a trip through Asia in 1981.

The chopsticks, the bags, the hotel shower caps—they were not souvenirs or keepsakes as far as I can tell. They were never looked at to evoke specific memories, and they were no more symbolic of, or unique to, their countries of origin than paper napkins (and yes, there were stacks of paper napkins too). They were not framed or displayed on shelves, where they could catch a glance and inspire reverie about a pleasant vacation, or even a sweaty, turbulent day of shopping for necessities in a foreign land. The chopsticks were in a box shoved in the back of a drawer, the bags in a trunk in the garage, the soaps behind the towels in a bathroom cupboard. They couldn’t be thrown out, but they were never used.

Why? Why were they kept? It wasn’t some evidence of mental decline with aging, as the accumulation (I don’t call it a collection) goes back to the 1970’s, and my entire life I don’t think I ever saw my dad throw away a plastic bag. There’s things in my parents’ minds and habits that I’ll never understand, and as long as they didn’t cause harm, I guess it’s no big deal; just an eccentricity of theirs that I can wonder about, and hope that I didn’t inherit.

I did inherit the chopsticks, though. Chopsticks are useful, even if they are 40 years old and came from halfway around the world. As I sample some pad Thai from the local restaurant, I’ll get a brief reminder that I also had okonomiyaki in Osaka; and after dinner, well, chopsticks make decent kindling. Maybe, as I sit by the fire and digest, I’ll look back at my old pictures and remember a meal with my family and my dad’s former student at a swanky restaurant in Japan.

Wait…is that why they saved them?

 Parental Artifact #8–Butter paddles.

Does anybody recognize what these are? Does anybody know how to use butter paddles? Neither I nor my brothers have any idea why my parents had butter paddles. We don’t know when they got them, or where. We don’t recall them ever being used. When we were divvying up my parents’ kitchen goods, they were in a box at the back of a top shelf that hadn’t been looked at in a very long time, along with the aspic cutters. I was the only one who knew what they even were, and that’s because I had recently been making butter, and so I ended up with them. It’s not inconceivable that my parents used those butter paddles at some point. My mom was a good baker, and my dad was an adventurous cook (sometimes a little too adventurous).

The Chef’s story…

It’s December, and our does have been milking now for nine months, and while their production is down, their milk is incredibly rich. Some of them are putting over ten percent fat into their milk, which is on par with the half-and-half in the grocery store. If I don’t have the time to make cheese, this rich milk will sit in the refrigerator in tote for a couple of days. Over this time, cream will come to the top. This stuff is so thick that, when chilled, it can be sliced better than it can be poured.

With cream, I can make ghee. In all the online how-to’s, cream gets poured into a beater, and after several minutes of vigorous action, grains of fat start to coalesce and the liquid thins. If I try this with my does’ cream, I get something more like whipped cheese. The December cream is so rich that I have to thin it with almost an equal amount of milk to make a smooth liquid. When I put this into a stand mixer, the fat coalesces within a minute. I pour off the thin liquid that the fat leaves behind, and rinse it with cold water until the runoff is clear. The result is a blob of fat, soft, pure white, with a somewhat grainy texture.

Were I making butter, I would spend the next hour kneading and rinsing and paddling the fat blob. This is precisely where the butter paddles come into play, their grooved surfaces allowing the watery buttermilk to drain away as I squeeze it out. The ten-dollar word for this process is “malaxage,” and it just goes on forever, batting a lump of wet butter around until it slowly becomes dry.

However, I’ve decided to make ghee, so the nascent fat blob stays wet and is visibly sweating drops of moisture as I drop it into a pot on the stovetop and turn it to medium hot. The soft, white paste melts into a liquid that looks like diluted milk—cloudy, pale white, with dime-sized droplets of clear melted fat floating on top. It comes to a gentle boil, and stays boiling and visually unchanged for the better part of a half hour, after which something remarkable happens. What was cloudy, white, and opaque rapidly becomes crystal clear and a pale buff color. There are some large crumbs of solid matter, which appear to be the focus of all the boiling, and a little scum around the sides of the pot. In a few minutes, the boiling slows and stops. The crumbs, caramelized to a brown color, sink to the bottom of the pot.

The liquid is crystal clear and a pale golden color, and a heavenly smell fills the air. This wonderful substance is decanted through a fine filter, sealed up, and allowed to cool. It will solidify overnight, and when I pick it up in the morning it is ghee. This is, to a cook, wonderful stuff. It is shelf stable, has a very high smoke point for frying, and an indescribably wonderful flavor. Pie crusts made with ghee…I swoon.

The Chemist

Ten years since I last used the knowledge professionally, I can describe every step in the above process in terms of chemistry and physical chemistry. To me, it’s like a novel. Different molecules have different characters. Some are active and vigorous, others stolid; importantly, for the drama, some form friendships, some hate each other, and others diplomatically engage with everybody. From the chemist’s point of view, the goal is to play these character traits against each other to unmix a mixture, and arrive at pure components.

Milk and cream are both water-based solutions, but cream is much richer in fat. Fats are less dense than water, so fats in milk float (or, for a lipocentric view, water is less dense than fat, so milk in fat sinks). So, I let gravity do its thing, and I can pull off most of the fatty cream and use the skimmed milk for cheese or other products.

Cream is really interesting. It’s a water-based solution, but nearly half of it is fat. Ordinarily, fat can’t be mixed with water. The secret of cream is that no fat molecules actually come in contact with any water molecules. Microscopic globules of fat are surrounded by a thin skin of protein molecules, like little balloons. The inner surface of these balloons’ skins is oily and happily socializes with fat; the outer surface of these balloons’ skins is wet, and likes to hang out with water.

Beating the cream smashes these balloons into each other hard enough that the impact can burst the balloons (I had to thin the cream so that the globules could move around more, and get a running start for their impacts). The fat molecules, without their protective skins and surrounded by hostile water molecules, coalesce to try to minimize interaction with water; the lucky fat molecules inside the blob are completely safe, and as the blob grows bigger, the proportion of fat molecules exposed to fat-hating water gets smaller. Continued beating results in one giant fat globule. It’s like the cream solution has turned inside-out: instead of a water-based solution with the fat in protective protein pockets, it is now a blob of fat, with pockets of water and protein.

The chemist’s next goal is to drive all the water and protein away from this fat. A step in this direction is kneading and rinsing. The kneading, with butter paddles, squishes water out of the blob, and it can drain away. Rinsing the blob with cold water, paradoxically, will also remove water from the blob. The blob still contains proteins, from all those balloon skins, and these proteins want to associate with water; in the crowd of fat molecules, the proteins shield themselves with a bodyguard of water molecules. But this is a scary situation for our proteins! Water is getting scarce, and those fat molecules are starting to crowd in. By rinsing, I am offering those proteins and their protective water molecules asylum with their own kind, and they will happily flee the fat blob and join the watery stream—and so our fat becomes butter.

But, butter is relatively impure and still contains some proteins and water. I would like to completely remove these components. I start by melting the blob. It still has a significant amount of water in it; the bubbles that previously held fat in a watery environment have been turned inside out, and hold watery milk in a fatty environment. These bubbles scatter light, so the melted blob is cloudy and opaque. As this is heated above boiling, the water turns into a gas and boils off, and what was once part of my does’ milk is now part of the air I breathe. Those proteins that had been holding on to the water are forlorn; insoluble in fat, and subject to intense heat, they brown and coagulate into chunks that sink.

As the last water joins the air and the last protein falls to the bottom of the pot, only fat remains—pure, beautiful, and transparent, lightly colored and scented from reactions between traces of milk sugar and amino acids, the same reactions that give toast and cooked meat their color. Filtering and cooling gives me ghee, very nearly pure dairy fat. According to my kitchen scale, 46% of the cream I started with is this pure dairy fat (For comparison, “heavy” whipping cream is rather less than 36% fat). There is no protein or aqueous matter to oxidize, so it will last a year without going rancid. The fat molecules are long and saturated, so the ghee can be heated to very high heat without smoking.

The Alchemist

Given my parentage, it’s no surprise that I grew up with children’s science books that mocked alchemists. I remember one had a woodcut showing an alchemist surreptitiously adding gold coins to a reaction that he was performing for a king. Magic, transmutation, the philosophers’ stone—these were things to be mocked, and the only value of the alchemists’ work was technical, preserving the understanding of alembics and stills and the like. Lately, though, thanks to an exhibit at the Getty Center and some reading, I’ve come to a bit more nuanced understanding of the the efforts of alchemists.

From modern science’s point of view, alchemy is silly. There’s no ‘panacea,’ to give eternal life, no Philosophers’ Stone to changes base metal to gold. But alchemy was primarily a spiritual practice, applying medieval theology to the material world; it’s a category error to think of it as a science, in modern terms. Just as the spirit could be chained to this fallen world by the “dirty” body, the essence of gold was trapped in base metals. The alchemist was doing spiritual work by the chemical processes of refining. Transmutation was an allegory for the human condition and aspiration for salvation, an attempt to find human meaning in the behavior of matter.

And so making ghee is an alchemical process. The cream, which contains the pure soul of the milk, rises away from the earthly restraints and wants to ascend towards heaven. I can skim it off, severing some of the ties to the impure body. Some theologians tell us that suffering of the body can help the spirit to reject the body. So I beat the cream, and it begins to reject those remaining impurities. It is a hard process, but so is spiritual purification. Just as immersion the mikveh (ritual bath; or baptism, or immersion in the Ganges) can wash away sins from the newborn soul, so can rinsing the nascent butter with pure water remove trace impurities. The final purification can be achieved by continued physical suffering (malaxage), and through a trial by fire. The soul of the milk enters the pot cloudy and opaque, but the trial of heat drives the last of the earthy impurities away—either into the air, or as something that looks like dirt—and what is left is clear, pure, heavenly gold. This essence, this soul, has magical properties, resisting infernal heat unchanged, and does not decay like ordinary flesh.

Me

Freshly made ghee, still liquid and golden, is magic whether I look at it as chef, chemist, or mystic. It can transport me—to India, in a spice-perfumed butter, or to Nirvana, in a pie crust. Ghee is no less magic even though I know the chemistry that makes it, all the way from air to finished product. My parents absolutely set me on a path to that understanding. I am also grateful that my dad had some adventurousness about food, a willingness to try new processes, and that made it OK for me to explore the world from the kitchen.

However, the mystical magic of ghee, a spiritual story of transmutation and purification, is not something that my parents gave me, directly. I value this understanding: while it doesn’t help me understand why an emulsion breaks, it does make me feel better—about the animals, my relationship with them, the work they do, and the work that I do. I don’t think my parents would particularly care for ghee-making as a spiritual allegory, any more than they cared for alchemy. But, despite how they raised me, my mind is also comfortable working in that allegorical, symbolic, morally and spiritually colored mode. The important thing is, they knew that about me, accepted it, and nurtured it. The fact that they were tolerant of that aspect of my personality, and nurtured it despite not really understanding it, is something I am grateful for—along with a nice pair of butter paddles.

 Parental Artifact #7–a glass fishing-net float.

Some families have ties to the sea; ours has ties to the beach. I grew up in Pacific Palisades, a town name-checked by The Beach Boys in “Surfin’ USA.” My dad grew up in a house on 2nd Street in Santa Monica, two streets over from the beach. While my mom grew up in a more desert setting, from high school on, she lived near the ocean. My parents met in an outing club in college at Berkeley, and there are lots of old pictures of them at one beach or another.

When my dad was in graduate school in the 1950’s in Seattle, my parents continued going to the beach. My dad took up fishing, but the main thing they did was to hike on the beach, collect interesting driftwood, and maybe the occasional bit of striking flotsam. The nature of the Pacific Ocean is that currents swirl north off the coast of Japan, sweep eastwards past Kamchatka and the Aleutians, then down south along British Columbia, Washington, and Oregon (This is how, years after the 2011 Tohoku earthquake and tsunami, a Torii from Isukushima washed ashore in Oregon). Plastics were not so common then, and cork may not have been readily available in Japan. However, something was necessary to provide buoyancy for fishing nets in the Japanese fishing fleet. The solution was to make large hollow spheres out of thick, cheap glass.

There must have been tens of thousands of these in service at the time. Inevitably, some broke free of their nets, and bobbed, wobbled, and floated on a leisurely roundabout that eventually brought them to the Pacific coast of Washington and Oregon. Some of these orbs survived pounding surf and and rocky shingles and landed intact on beaches where my parents walked. For beachcombers such as they, these glass orbs were prized trophies, with their exotic origin and miraculous journey. Two decades later, during my youth, they still had these trophies on display in our living room, along with a very large, elegantly labeled saké bottle that had also floated over from Japan.

In the early ‘70’s, my dad was able to take a sabbatical year, and the entire family decamped to Dunedin, New Zealand, home of the University of Otago. I was only five at the time, and I don’t remember much, but I do remember the beaches. They were the best. Accessed by beautiful walks through fields of lupines, or wretched walks through gorse, the beaches had just the right balance of craggy rocks and broad sand, lots and lots of seashells, tidepools, seaweed, shorebirds, weird and interesting Maori names—even though I was only five, I already knew enough of beaches to appreciate that every single thing was different.

One drive in the little blue Morris took us to Moerake Beach. Like the Washington beaches my parents walked before their life was complicated by children, Moerake Beach also has notable spheres. These, however, are natural, and native to the place. The geology of the shore produces large, spherical concretions, over a meter in diameter. These lay scattered along the beach, singly and in bunches, high on the beach and almost buried in the surf. They are hilariously intriguing for a beach-happy five year old. Some of them have cracked open, revealing an inside full of fissures and gaps, some of which hold miniature tidepool ecosystems. There are so many natural wonders in New Zealand that we visited that I have no memories of—I know I saw them, we have the proof in pictures!—but one of the few that stuck in my mind was the giant stone spheres of Moerake Beach.

One other feature of almost all the beaches in New Zealand—one strikingly different from the beaches I knew in California—was that the high tide line was often bright orange. This was not because of any natural phenomenon, but because of the massive sheep population of the country. Every lamb would get its tail docked, and most ram lambs would get castrated, and this was done with a small, fat, bright orange rubber band about the size of a Cheerio. Called elastrator bands, these cut off circulation and the offending body part shrivels up and falls off. Used elastrator bands get washed from pasture, to creek, to river, and to the ocean, where they wash up on the beaches and limn the high tide line. It didn’t strike me as pollution; it was just a thing about the beaches in this strange country, maybe like the tar blobs back home.

Many years and many beaches later, I worked as a postdoc in landlocked Sacramento. It was a delicious treat to take a day at the beach, especially during stiflingly hot summers. Fifty years earlier, my parents would go beachcombing; now, when we went to the beach, we’d always bring a bag and fill it up with garbage before we left. On one outing with my brother M, there was so much garbage that we focused on just one type—“orbs.” Tennis balls, fishing floats, golf balls, toys, boat bumpers, lures, things we couldn’t identify…all spherical plastic garbage polluting this one beach, and enough to fill both our sacks. It was disheartening, but also a little funny.

Last week my brother E came for a visit. Our farm is landlocked Roseburg, but it’s not a long drive over the coast range to the charming little beaches of Cape Arago. We had a pocket beach to ourselves for the afternoon. I had a nice lunch, and then without thinking I started filling my emptied lunch bag with the plastic debris which was thickly blended with the chunks of driftwood and seal bones there. A distressing thought passed through my head as I picked up a plastic bottle that had, judging by the label, drifted over from Asia.

No one now alive will ever see that beach without plastic litter. My parents might have, 70 years ago, but I grew up accustomed to seeing some plastic litter on the beach, and tar from an oil spill, and orange rubber cheerios. The plastic that is entering the Pacific today will long outlive all of us. If everyone stopped littering right now, it would still be generations until people could walk that beach, and find it amazing that a bit of flotsam had drifted all the way from Japan.

Driving back to Roseburg, one passes through Coos Bay, which is partly supported by the tourist trade. In the gift shops in Coos Bay, and all along the Oregon coast, one can find glass orbs for sale. They aren’t from mid-20th century fishing nets. They are manufactured, as souvenirs of the Oregon coast, in the orient, then hurry across the Pacific in a straight line in a cargo ship. From the port, they go by road to a warehouse, and then a distributor sells them to the gift shops. I suppose they are reminiscent of beachcombing and a simpler time, but the memory is vestigial and artificial, like a mail-order family crest. I have the real thing. As I look upon it, it flits back and forth from being a beautiful, nostalgia-laden object with a history both familial and epic, to being the first harbinger of an ecological catastrophe.

 Parental artifact #6–small tapestry from Guatemala

A cute little souvenir my mom bought on our family’s trip to Central America in the mid-70’s. This is a typical product for the tourist market, based on traditional techniques and styles. It came from one of the markets that are as much for the tourist trade as anything else. I have lots of good memories from this expedition, which was purely a vacation. Aside from reminiscences of a fun time in far-off lands, this item leads my thoughts in two directions.

The first is that it is really very evocative of my mom and her attitude towards sex. It’s always weird thinking about one’s parents with regard to sex, but let’s face it, if they didn’t have some experience with sex, we wouldn’t be around to be embarrassed by the topic. my parents were pretty typical of their generation, so sex wasn’t much talked about. I can’t speak for my brothers, but I don’t recall getting the talk about the birds and the bees from them. As we cracked puberty, we were given a book called “What is Happening to Me?”, and we had sex ed from school. The combination leaves one with a rudimentary understanding of the plumbing, a slim understanding of the mechanics, and pretty much no understanding of the psycho-social issues.

Which is not to say that my mom was a Victorian prude. In our travels, she was always, and obviously, titillated by overt displays of male nudity or sex—such as the Namba-wearing tribes of Papua-New Guinea, the manly Masai, the very male kangaroo hunter in an Aboriginal X-ray painting, an elephant that on first sight was five-legged but was actually a rutty bull, the seamless kangaroo-leather coin-purse that could only be made from males. All these things evoked some girlish giggling from her. “Girlish” really seems to be the word, I can’t really find a better one.

So we get to Guatemala, and find that mating cattle are a common motif in the native weavings. This makes sense: the fertility of animals that are a major part of a family’s wealth would be something to celebrate. For my mom, it was appealing art, reminiscent of a place, and an amusing thing. So she bought the tapestry, framed it, and hung it in the living room along with the kangaroo-hunting Aborigine, a batik elephant from Ceylon, a Navajo rug, a mola of birds from Panama, a bark-paper print from Fiji, and other souvenirs from her travels.

After nearly fifty years on that wall, the tapestry is now here on our farm in Roseburg, Oregon, prompting a second stream of thoughts. I’m writing this in snippets, as I am spending most of my day pimping goats. I walk to one corner of the farm, where the bucks dwell, and select a specific animal, scanning his microchip, to be sure I have the right one (Duva arranges these assignations in advance). I drag him halfway across the farm, at which point he senses that there are does in heat, whereupon he drags me the rest of the way. I tie up the buck, get the appropriate doe, and let them reenact the scene on the tapestry. The does usually are in heat for a day and a half, during which time they get bred three times a day. There are more than thirty does to breed, so there is a lot of walking back and forth, and a lot of waiting for “what comes natch’rly,” and a lot of time to think.

Sometimes I think about how odd it is that my life has taken me here, to a point where the success of breeding animals is almost as important to me as it is to the Guatemalans who started weaving cows and bulls into their tapestries. I start skipping back and forth over decades: thirty years ago, and I was on a path to a career in research in the biological sciences, just like my dad, and his dad, and like my mom’s mom and dad, and his dad too. Ten years ago, I left a job teaching college students and quit academia. My dad was already in the twilit fog of Alzheimer’s disease, and my mom was following. I don’t know if they really understood that their son, the PhD, was no longer in academia. I don’t know if they would really wholeheartedly endorse this course. I don’t know if my mom ever looked at this tapestry and connected it to what I now do for several weeks every year.

No matter. It is now, as it was forty years ago, appealing art, reminiscent of a place, and an amusing thing. It also reminds me of my mom, being giggly and girlish. If it brings our farm luck in breeding in the future, so much the better.

 Parental Artifact #5–some homework from ~1915.

News stories from the last week have brought a sickening spate of stories about educators having to deal with a new and angry wave of censorship. This attack on education has come from above and below. It has come from state and local elected officials who prostrate themselves before the altar of Trump, and who live Orwell’s dictum that “Who controls the past controls the future; and who controls the present controls the past.” It has come from parents who have consumed too much Fox News and think that Critical Race Theory is going to turn their proud, white, Christianist children into self-hating Marxist trans lesbians.

From above, we have legislation, actual laws, saying that teachers can’t teach lessons that might make any student feel “discomfort, guilt, or anguish” about themselves based on race. Like grandfather clauses and literacy tests, this is ostensibly neutral language, but designed entirely to make sure that White parents don’t have to confront the existence of America’s congenital racism. If a teacher were to suggest that American slavery was unambiguously bad and unambiguously racist, that might make a White kid, who had been raised to believe that great-great-grandpa Jeb was a saint, start to have some doubts.

From below, we have parents who act to get award-winning educators disciplined or fired for even having anti-racist materials available for their students. Because of the threat of parental complaint, teachers are having to purge or even eliminate their classroom libraries. Heck, we even have lists of forbidden words!

At least one of my great-grandparents, three of my grandparents, and both of my parents were professionally involved in education, from the elementary to postgraduate level. They came from wildly different backgrounds, from full-on WASP to the child of German immigrants to an immigrant Jew from Belarus. I didn’t know them all personally, but from their records it’s pretty clear that they none of them liked being told what to think.

However, that is not to say that they were all perfect people by modern standards. They were all humans. They had good character traits, they had…less good character traits. I am comfortable with that. Though I owe them all so much, I am not going to put any of them on a pedestal and insist that they, like “all people who contributed to American Society will be recognized and presented as reformists, innovators and heroes to our culture,” to quote an actual, real school board policy from South Carolina.

My grandparents’ education is reflective of the cultural norms of the time and place. They were all, as academics, prone to saving all sorts of papers. So it is that there was a drawer of a file cabinet in my parents’ garage that was all papers from my maternal grandmother—manuscripts, drafts, college notebooks, homework from a graphic design class, and going further back, homework from possibly high school or junior high school, in San Diego, sometime in the nineteen-teens. In a folder labeled “Spanish book” was an assignment to take pictures from magazines other media, and give them legends in elementary Spanish. There were scenes of families, of animals, of foreign lands, and some of foreign peoples. The translation is left to the interested reader.

I don’t think this is in any way defining of my grandmother. It’s not her finest or characteristic work, and I have no idea why she saved it in particular. It’s just a thing from her school days, and I would be unhappy if my personality were judged based on the asshole I was in high school. But it IS how she was educated, and it shows the poison flowing freely in the water everyone drank at the time. She was a good person but I wouldn’t say that she was entirely free of some of the attitudes reflected in her homework.

It would be stupid and dishonest to deny that past. Anyone who believes their parents and grandparents were absolutely, purely good and only “reformists, innovators, and heroes to our culture” is an idiot worshipping an idol. Anyone who believes that anything good comes from believing there is nothing bad in our past is a damn fool. This voice of a teenage girl a hundred years ago speaks to our time, from only two generations remove. Her innocent voice is telling me that we have a lot of work yet to do and I shouldn’t pretend otherwise.

 Parental Artifact #4–Unfinished crafts

It’s not my usual practice to eavesdrop on other people’s conversations, and less so to butt in, but sometimes I make exceptions. So it happened, almost two years ago, that I was in line to check out at the co-op with my bi-weekly feed order, when I overheard a middle-aged woman talking with her friend, near the cash registers. She was animatedly discussing a hobby that she had recently taken up, and the great satisfaction that it was giving her. Stained glass, she was saying, gave her a creative outlet for making designs, and the colors and light just were so pretty to look at!

I had just returned from Los Angeles, where my brothers and I were starting to scale the mountain of worldly goods that my parents left upon their death. At the time, we were simply trying to figure out the lay of the land. Our explorations reached the back corner of the shelves in the garage, a land of boxes that had been labeled and tied shut with twine decades ago. One of the dozens of boxes was labeled “MMA Glass” and another was “MMA Stain glas lead”. These labels were puzzling to us, so we opened them, and the labels were accurate—one heavy box was dozens of sheets of colored glass, and the other heavy box was smaller chunks, some thick or patterned, and a good stock of lead for joining.

Not all memories lie exposed, on the surface, always visible. There’s stuff in your memory that you don’t know is there. Something—an object, a smell, the angle of the light on a winter day—can abruptly shake the crust off of a long-buried memory. Fragmentary and decayed, it is once more exposed to your consciousness. Like filling in the missing pieces of a shattered urn or partial fossil, you reconstruct the memory into a coherent whole. My oldest brother recollected, dimly, my dad making some things with glass. We all, eventually, remembered a mobile of glass and wire fish that hung in my dad’s office, though I had no idea my dad made it. We shrugged, talked of maybe donating the glass to a craft club, and continued our exploration.

Naturally, I was pretty excited to hear this stranger’s enthusiasm for stained glass as a craft. I strayed enough from my own character to butt into her conversation, and offer her a goodly supply of material, on the condition that its delivery would likely have to wait at least a year. She said she’d be able to give it a home, we exchanged names and phone numbers, and there things stood.

A few months later, both of my brothers were again at the parental home, working on the mountain of stuff, while I participated via a video link. My brothers had opened—possibly for the first time in over a decade—a steamer trunk and sorting through a hodgepodge of things. There were trivial souvenirs of travel that my parents always collected: plastic shopping bags from every country they’d been to, hotel bars of soap, “do not disturb” door tags in dozens of languages. There were children’s clothes from our younger days. There were some really nice shirts that my dad had bought during our travels, and seemingly never wore. There were some fabric art projects that my mom worked on, and one of these made my brothers quite interested.

What I could see over the video link was my brothers unfurling a large white cloth with some embroidery, but I couldn’t see what was embroidered. They were laughing and pointing and obviously trying to decipher something confusing, while I was just getting frustrated. Eventually, the whole thing got laid out, and they finally held the phone so I could see what they had discovered.

My mom had been working on a years-long embroidery project; it was to be a growth chart recording the progress of my brothers and me, done with much more artistry and craft than the traditional pencil markings on the kitchen doorway. Both of my elder brothers were there, with several entries, color coded to tell them apart. There was one entry for me, the youngest, and that was apparently it. There were no more entries.

My mom’s embroidery project ended soon after my birth. The last stitch was probably added in 1968. My dad had ordered the stained glass supplies, and set them aside, maybe a year later—along with the glass and some instructions, padding was provided by newspapers dated 1969. My mom was coping with a five year old, a three year old, and a baby. My dad had just started on the tenure track at the university. They had also just bought a house. My dad’s mother had died just before I was born, and his dad (who lived nearby) needed help adjusting to a very different life.

There’s only so much time in a day, and so many days in a week. I know that in my own life, even without children, hobbies have fallen by the wayside as I’ve gotten busy. As a kid and young adult, I happily experimented with lots of hobbies and crafts, and gained moderate proficiency in many. I enjoyed most of them and would probably have loved pursuing them, but the demands of life meant that I put most of them down and walked away. Perhaps in some parallel life I spend my leisure time kayaking, or weaving and knitting, or playing the organ, or flying, or climbing. In one of these lives, maybe I’d see the stained-glass lamp my dad bought the plans for, or I’d have grown up seeing more tapestries made by my mom. Maybe there would be other things, from pastimes they’d sampled but that I never knew about and will never know.

And so, after my most recent trip to Los Angeles, among the boxes that completely filled the bed and cab of my farm truck, were the box of “MMA Glass” and “MMA Stain glas lead”. I contacted the person I met at the co op a year earlier, and she was still interested in the supplies. Her hobby had bloomed, and was keeping her happy and busy. A week ago, she drove over to our place to pick up the boxes. I’m happy that the supplies will get used. Colored glass should not be wrapped in paper, tucked in a box, and buried in the back of some shelves in the darkest corner of a garage for half a century. It should be filling with sunlight and pleasing the eye. The hobbyist said she’d make a small piece for me, as a memory for my dad.

The embroidery sits, rolled up, in one of the boxes I have to unpack. None of us wants it, but none of us feels great throwing it away, though that will probably be its ultimate end.

It feels a little odd to be grateful for things not received, but that box of unused stained glass, and the blank spaces on the embroidery—they are actually very full. They are filled with games of catch and walks on the beach, with drives to the mountains, with an extra half hour of work with flash cards, with an extra bit of fussing on a birthday or when I was sick. No matter that I am not inheriting a fancy lamp or beautiful wall hanging. Mom and dad left me so much more.