Getting The Story...

“Winter camping can mean check the pantry in the motorhome for rum and cinnamon sticks, and head south for the weekend. Or it can mean put your gear in your pack, lash on the snowshoes and head for the mountains.”

I hope you’ll have a look at the article “Winter Camping,” by yours truly in the December issue of Local Flavor Magazine, available locally in northern New Mexico or online, here.

Keep warm!

Gordon Bunker

Morning Minutia

Make a pot of tea. Check email, respond to email. Check the weather forecast, rain and snow are coming. Put up the kitchen shades and look at the sky. Tea has steeped, pour a cup. Check election results and thank goodness for four more years of intelligent leadership. Take butter out of refrigerator to soften. No email from Amazon that the order has shipped. Check status. Status is “Shipping Soon.” Soon is a relative term. Give the cat a rub. Give R a kiss and a squeeze and wish her a good day. And drive carefully. Pour another cup of tea, make toast. Put rest of shades up while eating toast. Drink a glass of milk, eat an apple. Take a shower. Floss teeth. Brush teeth. Take multivitamin. Get dressed. Do dishes. Start a load of laundry. Step into garage and wish car and motorcycle a good morning (in German). Remove cat hair and other detritus from black fleece with sticky roller. Whoever invented the sticky roller was thinking. Look at list of things to do. Three interviews. Check out the lineup of Kindles. Look at them all! Too many choices lead to confusion so I’ll stick with books. Make note to drive a Nissan Leaf. To write about. Check local dealer inventory. No Leafs. Or Leaves? Take laundry from washer. Put shirts in the dryer for a few minutes. Spread the rest out on the drying rack. Pull shirts from dryer and put on hangers. Make another cup of tea. Email arrives from Amazon, order has shipped and should be here Friday. Good. Give the cat another rub. Stare at blinking cursor.

All the while the notion the next Great American Novel is in me, gnaws at me. Oh yeah, greatness. But I have no idea what the heck to say, so I occupy / distract myself with the minutia. And hope the words come. Another morning is going by. This is how it is being a writer. How all the great books got written is a mystery to me. It is one weird line of work.

Gordon Bunker

Applesauce

With summer behind us and the coming of fall, trees and gardens overflow with fruits and vegetables. Whenever someone offers produce, even if I have no idea what to do with it, I take them up on it. So after lunch at Sallie’s on Saturday when she offers apples from her trees, I say yes and in less than a half hour we pick a couple bags full. Most of the apples have been pecked by birds and some augered by worms, but with a little trimming, they will be fine for cooking. Driving home, images of pies and crisps and sauces fill my imagination while the car fills with the fruit’s sweet winey perfume. Once home I leave the bags downstairs to keep cool.

.   .   .

Next door, a crew of maintenance guys are fully into their weed whackers and leaf blowers. The noise breaks my concentration enough that I’m unable to get any fiction writing done - that level of creativity requires peace and quiet. These guys show up twice or three times a year so the disturbance is small potatoes. Nothing compared to where I used to live, where the people next door had a crew for a full day every week and actually had workers vacuum individual leaves of the shrubbery. No kidding! One of those days, after hours of listening to the duet of shrieking shop vacs I called the home owner to inquire how much longer this might go on. She immediately launched into a riot act, screaming at me, “… it’s our damn yard and we can have it the way we want!” and so on ad nausea projectum. Needless to say, I’m happy to have moved away from that scene. Please note I did not call it a neighborhood.

Now as the guys work next door I decide to leave the keyboard and make applesauce.

The upside to the pecks and worms in the apples from Sallie’s is that they have not been sprayed with any pesticides. I rinse them in the sink and start coring and cutting them up and tossing the pieces into my 8 quart stock pot. Getting into the process I am reminded of when as a kid, helping my mother do the same. Every fall she would buy bushels of drops and for at least a full day the two of us would make applesauce. Gallons of it, most of which would go in the freezer. In particular, I remember operating the Foley food mill, a hand cranked device which forced the chunks of cooked apples and skins through a sieve; cranking on that thing until my arm hurt, then I’d switch to the other arm and on and on. But of course home made applesauce whenever you wanted it over the following winter made it all worthwhile.

When I flew the nest, my mom gave me a Foley food mill which I dutifully lugged with me all over the country until a few years ago, having never used it, gave it to good will. Picking apples on Saturday, I thought, well, that wasn’t a very smart thing to do and wondered out loud to Sallie how I might deal with the skins - they don’t cook out and would remain tough and chewy. Sallie suggested using a blender, something I do have.

I bought the blender this past summer for one purpose - make frozen watermelon margaritas. When I noticed this particular machine had a “Frozen Drink” button, well, that’s all I needed to know. To good effect, microprocessors have found their way into blenders, just load the pitcher with required ingredients, hold onto your hat (and the blender) and hit that button. It launches into a song and dance; clockwise, counterclockwise, slow, fast, slow, fast, faster and blazingly faster and then without further adieu, shuts itself off. On a mid-July afternoon, as the hot desert sun bears down without mercy, simply pour and enjoy. Ahhh…

One bag of apples cored and chopped fills the stock pot and I set a low flame under it. Slowly it begins to steam and the first time I open the lid to poke at the apples, oh, the sweet smell! Interesting how our sense of smell is linked to our memory and at this moment images of all that work in the kitchen with my mom, the long hours at the stove and how we were a team comes so very close to being reality.

I get the blender set up on the countertop and prepare to move on to the “Food Chop” button. Hit this one and the blender slowly goes one way and then the other and so on until it decides to stop. I make a few experimental runs and eventually learn it’s happiest with no more than two big ladles full of steaming apples in the pitcher. Even then, given the gooiness of the cooked apple glop, air pockets form around the blade defeating the purpose. I get a wooden spoon to push the mess down in blatant and reckless defiance of IMPORTANT SAFEGUARD # 5: “Keep hands and utensils out of jar while blending to reduce the risk of Severe personal injury.” Now really, is there anyone out there dumb enough to put their hands in a running blender? I mean, c’mon. Even I am smart enough to use a spoon, and in a rare flash of common sense strike upon the notion a wooden one would be preferable to metal. So, like a cat going after a goldfish I madly dab at the swirling applesauce with the spoon and after two “Food Chop” cycles have an acceptably smooth puree. Smooth enough for me, but then I like crunchy peanut butter on rye crisp, so we’ll see what everyone else thinks of it. Speaking of rye crisp, I did hit the rotating blade with the spoon now and then which kinda did a number on said spoon (sorry R), and there’ll be some splinters in the sauce. But like rye crisp, this sauce will keep you regular.

The process which started at 11:00 AM pretty much comes to a close at 5:00 PM, and I am whopped. The yard guys next door are picking up their tools and loading their trucks and getting out of here. I am divvying the hot applesauce into containers and lining them up on the counter. They need to cool before going into the freezer. R and I go out for a bite at Counter Culture - I’ve had enough cooking for one day. When we get home I fill a shelf in the freezer with the containers of sauce. And there’s a bowl full I put in the fridge.

This morning I decide to have oatmeal and along with some milk, warm a half cup or so of the applesauce in the microwave. At the right moment it all comes together, I put the blob of steamy sauce in a little well I make in the oatmeal and pour on the milk and sprinkle some walnut pieces on top. Mmm… those flavors, earthy, simple and good, a great breakfast on this cool October morning.

Gordon Bunker

The Healey

Like a lot of guys who spent time in England during World War II, and then were lucky enough to make it home alive, my dad was a British sports car enthusiast.

Sometime right around when I was born (and my sister was five) he bought a used MG TD. I don’t have any memory of this car, but from pictures, know it was black with a red interior. And it had style. I do remember dad telling the story of going out with my sister in it one summer evening to get ice cream cones, and bring one home for mom. On the trip back he decided to hold the cone in his left hand outside the car so not to drip ice cream all over the interior. He knew how to steer with his knees, a handy skill. But of course the ice cream started to melt, and run down his hand, and run down his arm until by the time they got home there wasn’t much of anything left to it. There was also the time, to be cool, he had his arm out the window until a wasp got blown down his shirt sleeve and stung him in the armpit…

The Healey I do remember, and mom not being too pleased when dad rolled in the driveway in it. The TD was worn out and rusted out - this was in Concord, New Hampshire - and it was time for another car. Apparently she figured my dad, recognizing the needs of his family, would buy something practical. A car with four doors and maybe even a roof. Somehow he failed to see things this way and when an Austin-Healey 3000 appeared on his horizon, well, it was meant to be. After all, this car, despite already being hard used and rusted was a big step up, with six cylinder engine and overdrive gearbox. Where the TD was buggy and fun, the Healey was a hot rod. And look! It has a back seat for the kiddies! Sort of.

The weak-kneed excuse of a back seat did little to appease mom. She was indeed pissed, but also smart and knew an opportunity when she saw one. And she knew what she wanted. “Well,” she said, standing there with arms akimbo, “if you can have a sports car, I can have a piano!” So right then and there, in the middle of a downpour we all clamored into the Healey and went to the big city, Manchester, to the piano store. My sister and I sat in the back, um, “seat” and ate M&M’s, so what could be better? We had a great time.

Mom marched into the store, the rest of us in tow, took one look around and said, “I want that one,” pointing to a lovely upright of some sort. The salesman was happy to oblige, a check was written, a delivery order was filled out and voila! The piano would be in our living room in a matter of days.

Somehow, there’s more that’s memorable about the Healey than the piano, certainly about the sounds it made, the throaty exhaust note for example. And the way we’d fly around corners in it, the way the heater would practically melt your shoes off while the rest of you froze. The sublime experience of fresh air and wind and sounds and smells with the top down. I remember dad taking my sister and me to school in it.

But of course the Healey went the way of all cars and one day it was history. This had to be a sad day for my dad. To further frost the cake, he surrendered some part of his free spirit and came home in a Peugeot 403. Complete with four doors and a roof and thank goodness, a sunroof. Having it open of course, bore almost no resemblance to a top down experience but the Peugeot had one huge redeeming quality. Mom was happy with it.

Important lesson learned: When Momma ain’t happy, ain’t Nobody happy.

Years later, as a Christmas present for dad I dug through the family photo archive and found slides he had taken of the MG and the Healey, and had enlargements made and matted and framed them. Christmas morning, boy did those ever stop his clock. The guy sat there in his bath robe and cried. For a moment I thought I’d made a mistake but when he looked at me it was clear this was not the case. The pictures were on the wall in the living room before the end of the day, and that night, admiring them, my dad sniffed and said to mom, “You got the better end of the deal.”

Mom looked at him. “Oh really?”

“Yeah. I don’t have my Healey anymore, but you still have your piano!” he said. It wasn’t often my mother didn’t have some clever retort. This time she didn’t.

Fast forward another six or eight years and I was working at Harvard Forden’s boat shop in Lakeport. That was a great job and Harv was a great guy. Any boss who wouldn’t fire you on the spot for showing up on your first day hung over is a great guy. I shoveled a couple tons of crushed stone that day.

There were big storage sheds behind the shop, and Harv would occasionally tuck in a car or two over the winter for customers. One of these was a mint Austin-Healey 3000. Oh, I drooled over that car, and must have told Harv stories about my dad’s. The following spring the Healey needed to go to the upholstery shop across town and Harv asked if I’d like to drive it.

Pinch me! Ok, I felt that. He actually asked me if I’d like to drive the Healey.

“Yes!” I said. “When?”

“Now,” said Harv and he handed me the keys.

Getting in that car was not so much a step back in time, but a chance to appreciate it from a (more) grown-up perspective. There were the beautiful clocks, Smiths I think, and other details, the shape and rich chrome plating of the door levers, the long look over the hood. The in-line six fired right up and with some fiddling with the choke, settled into a fast idle and a few moments later with the choke off was ready to go.

Puttering out of the neighborhood there was the feeling of the car, solid and light, the engine smooth and very torquey. Yeah baby, torque is where it’s at. Onto the main road I got into the throttle, relishing the sounds. Charging up to an intersection where I’d take a right, the light turned yellow and then took on a distinct orange cast. There was no way I was going to stop for a red before the turn, so I did what any decent fellow driving an Austin-Healey 3000 would do. I downshifted to second and gassed the thing. And WHAAAA! into the corner, flyin’, laughin’… and this is when I looked over and saw the cop, sitting there, legally stopped for his red light which was about to turn green.

The word which crossed my mind at that moment is not suitable for a G rated blog post so I’ll skip it. I looked at him and he looked at me, and I smiled at him and he smiled at me, and I stayed on the gas. And when his light turned green he went along on his way as though nothing had happened.

Proof, there are some decent cops in this world. More than a few, I can assure you.

Gordon Bunker

Photo credit: Bull.Doser

Remembering Franz Jahoda, 1930 - 2012

“We know how the sky is blue, but we don’t know why,” Franz said while marveling the glowing blanket of atmosphere above us. With a career in theoretical physics, specializing in light and optics behind him, the statement not only had profound dimensions in and of itself, but was telling about the man who made it.

Franz and his wife Pat and I were having lunch, perched on the rim of a canyon in the backcountry of Bandelier National Monument. It was a beautiful fall day in northern New Mexico, the air and light so clear if it could make a sound it would ring like a bell.

Franz possessed the rare brilliance of an open mind and humble nature, able to embrace and find inspiration in the fact we do not and likely will never have all the answers. And so, it was always a delight to be in his company. We shared many lively, wondering conversations, many high summits, and other slices of life including the trials, as friends do.

For all his humility, Franz once revealed a flashy side. Curious about his lifelong passion for downhill skiing - after all, you get yourself hauled up a hill to simply slide down over and over again - I asked him what was it about the sport which held him. Without hesitation he exclaimed, “I can show off!”

Many of us now feel the hard ache of missing Franz Jahoda. I do. Fortunately he has left us with uncountable fine memories, and a big blue sky above to look at and wonder about.

Gordon Bunker