In a new city and need a place to eat? Skip Yelp and ask a local where to go

While visiting Philadelphia for the first time recently I found myself hungry with no idea where to eat lunch. Luckily, I had wandered into an art gallery to check out some cool drawings and the woman working there I was chatting with about the heat wave I hadn't packed for recommended a cafe nearby that ended up being the perfect spot.

That was cool.

All I told the woman was that I wasn't interested in eating a Philly cheesesteak just then, so she suggested I go to Day By Day around the corner. There I found exactly what I wanted: a salad full of fresh greens topped with quinoa and chicken, served in cafe full of windows with many locals sitting alone that were very friendly with both each other and the staff, creating a soothing atmosphere for a woman traveling alone.

The $1 grab bag of desserts.

Even cooler was what I found on my way out: Next to the cash register were $1 bags of broken cookie, brownie and tart bits, what I think is the perfect way for businesses to avoid waste by offering folks like me a little taste of every dessert instead of having to choose just one. 

What was not cool, however, was the cafe I chose through Yelp alone.
I judge breakfast places on just a few basic items because that is all I order: coffee, eggs, potatoes, toast and bacon. I don't care what your scone or scramble of the day is, I want a reasonably-strong cup of coffee, eggs cooked as over-medium as possible and served with decent sourdough toast, big pieces of smokey bacon that ain't limp and greasy and some nicely seasoned and properly cooked potatoes that are preferably hash browns.

I picked a place in the Philly neighborhood I would be walking through that had great Yelp reviews,  but it failed to deliver on nearly every part of the basic breakfast. The eggs were cooked well, but the potatoes were underdone and poorly-seasoned (the type of homefries that seem to be seasoned solely with big chunks of onion) and the bacon slices were not only limp and greasy but also small. Saddest of all, the sourdough toast looked beautiful but had the taste and texture of Kleenex. Oh, and the coffee was mediocre at best. (And yes, I did fill out a Yelp review letting people know that, in my opinion, this was not the place to find good basics.)

So, technology like Yelp is great for some things, but when it comes to food, I vow to seek recommendations from live people whenever possible. And if not, I'll stick to the recommendations in my guidebook, which I should not have strayed from. (Lately whenever I choose a new city to visit, the first thing I buy is the Frommer's Day by Day guide for that city, which so far were great for both Boston and Philadelphia.)

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When I couldn't get pregnant we adopted: A dog

Card from the dog. Or so my husband says.

One day on a hike I met a woman with a baby strapped to her chest. “Is your dog friendly?” she asked. “My daughter’s really into dogs right now.”
I said my dog was very friendly, but was still amazed when the woman leaned her baby’s head toward the dog, who eagerly reached up and licked the pink mound offered to her like an ice cream cone.

That was cool.

The woman and I both laughed as she lifted her child back up, but soon I felt a strong wave of sadness watching this happy young woman carrying what would soon become a happy little girl with her mother’s red hair.  

I felt sad because while I had been that little girl, I would never be that woman.

Any chance of me becoming a mother likely died with my mother. Since at 15 I was forced to mother myself, any desire to mother anyone else evaporated. For decades whenever I saw women carrying babies, I never ached to be the mother, I ached to be the baby.

So when I finally decided I might want to be the mother, the desire likely came too late, because a baby never did. But when I finally put away the ovulation charts at 42, a few months later that dog decided I would mother her instead.

And she really needed mothering, because she was a 13-month-old dog who had never been taken for a walk or taught any manners. I know that because I watched her all those months in my neighbor’s yard, where most days she had nothing to do but watch me garden.

So she dug a hole under the fence to stick her head through and see me better. Soon I was talking to her all the time, greeting her by sticking my hand through another hole in the fence so she could lick it, and playing chase with her by running from one end of the fence to the other.

At night I’d sit at the fence and call to her. She would come and lie on her side, stick her leg through the hole and I’d hold her paw, telling her some day I’d take her for a walk.

But the week my husband came home with a leash we noticed she was no longer in the yard. I looked for her in the animal shelter and there she was, in the very last cage, after being found wandering in the hills several miles away. I wasn’t sure it was her at first because I had never seen her ears or even her whole head before. But she knew it was me immediately, jumping up and pawing through her cage to reach me.

When her owners didn't claim her, we adopted her and on Halloween night we could take her home. The next day I borrowed a crate so she could sleep in the house with the cats, and after seeking help from a dog trainer I quickly got her to stop jumping on me.

It took much longer, however, before the dog and the cats could be left alone together, even longer before I could walk her without her pulling on the leash, and even longer before anything left in the back yard would not be chewed to bits.

I don’t think she will ever learn to avoid skunks or to not run up to new dogs, despite one taking a chunk out of her side for being rude, but she knows the driving routes to and from our favorite parks so well that she will tap my shoulder with her nose if I make what she decides is a wrong turn. I spent more than 40 years being a devoted cat person, but few things now give me more joy than watching my dog running free, then sprinting back to me, her tongue flapping.

 

It's been nearly nine years since we brought home the dog, and sometimes I wonder if I should have adopted a human, too. But then I remember what my mother’s friend, who raised both human and four-legged daughters, told me: "Stick with the dog. She'll be more grateful."

And so I stick with my dog daughter, and sometimes when I hold her paw, I'm still grateful that it's no longer through a fence. And know she's grateful for that, too.

Ukiah High Milk Club: Building community over bowls of Lucky Charms

I recently visited with a group of students at Ukiah High School that meet once a week to enjoy milk with cereal and cookies. They call themselves the Milk Club.

That was cool.

Club president John Gonzalez admitted that many of the kids first came to the club because of “the absurdity” of it, then stay because of the supportive culture.

 

“It’s just a great place to have lunch,” said one student, and Gonzalez said he chose the classroom they meet in because it has lots of circular tables where students can eat in small groups like a family around a dinner table.

 
While the students eat bowls of Lucky Charms (some choose the “healthier” cereal options available) they often invite members of other clubs to speak, a practice Gonzalez said is meant to create a sense of community, rather than competition, among the students.

 
Making a practice of sitting down to eat with people who aren’t members of their current club will serve these students well when navigating a world full of people who don’t think like them, and who now more than ever seem divided into tribes that spend no time listening to, let alone trying to understand, the other side.

 
Because sitting down and talking with someone over food is one of the easiest and most effective ways to build connections with anyone: your family, your co-workers and every other human we share the earth with.  And even if you’ll never agree on who should be president or that Lucky Charms are magically delicious (they’re not, Frosted Flakes have all the magic), odds are you can always find to something to agree on, even if it’s only your favorite ice cream flavor.

What was even cooler than watching the kids sit down together and enjoying cold cereal, however, was the behavior Gonzalez was modeling outside of the club, which was more respectful and considerate than most adults three times his age. 

 

After realizing he couldn’t keep the first appointment we made over the phone, he tracked me down online and suggested we meet two weeks later. The evening before our appointment, he sent me a very polite and friendly reminder.

 

After I met with the group, he sent me some more helpful information and an enthusiastic thank you for attending, followed by a final thank you from the club when the article came out (featuring a handmade card put in an envelope made out of a recycled paper grocery bag).

Of course, I don’t need to be thanked for doing my job, but it was much appreciated.

 

In a time when so many people seem to just be lying in wait for the next the psychic wound to be inflicted on them by their fellow humans, it was inspiring to meet a teenager so focused on what he could do for others, then leading by example. I sincerely wished him luck in his future endeavors, but I doubt he will need it.

Coolest of all, however, was when a couple of kids came near the end. Neither of them drank cow milk because one was vegan and one opposed to dairy milk for “environmental reasons,” but they still came because they felt the club was more about friends spending time together than anything else.

 

And then they entertained those friends by one picking up his trombone and sounding like a car accelerating and the second acting like he was shifting gears and steering.

 

When I showed my husband the video I took of their pantomime, he exclaimed, “Could those kids BE more wholesome?!” 
 

No, I don’t think they could.

Read the story here.

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Westerns With Dad: Man launches podcast with dying father, but they don't talk about cancer. They talk about movies.

After being diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, a man launched a podcast with his son. But the men didn't talk about his illness. Instead, they talked about the movies he taught his son to love, calling their show Westerns With Dad.

That was cool.

What a great gift for both of them. And an “enormous gift” is exactly how the son described the podcast in his farewell episode this month.
“This was a means for my father and I to work together on something, to be speaking to each other frequently, but not about his diagnosis,” the son said on the last episode of the podcast, which they did 50 episodes of over the past 50 months.

 I was introduced to the podcast by my husband, who also loves westerns and liked the men’s easy rapport. But when he saw the farewell episode explaining that “Dad” had died, he did not want a sad blanket of reality dropped on one of his means of escape.
I had a very different reaction.

“What a great idea,” I said. “That must have been why they started the podcast.”

 I knew how I would treasure having so many  conversations with my mother to listen to any time I wanted. 
She died long before we could record every second of our lives with the phones in our pockets, so my only hope at the time was a training video shot recently at her work. She only told me about it because she had been surprised by how many of her facial expressions she recognized in her own.

I called to ask about getting the video, and I still remember the pain in the man’s voice as he told a teenager he already taped over perhaps the last footage of her mother.

So of course I think the episodes are wonderful for the son to have, but what better gift could he have given his dad than to just sit down and talk with him?

I read once that the amount of time your adult kids want to spend with you is a direct result of how much time you spent with them growing up. Take the song “Cat’s in the Cradle” by
Harry Chapin. It’s about a father who can’t get his son to hang out with him because he never stopped to hang out with him when he was a boy.  
This podcast is the opposite story. And if my son had done that for me, it would tell me I raised a great human being who thought I was pretty great, too.  
Here is a link to the last episode they did together:

http://westernswithdad.com/godless/

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Poem: How to Stay Married

Getting married is all about   

Finding that chocolate you like

More than all the others in the box.

But staying married is all about

Picking up that chocolate and brushing it off

Every time it falls on the floor and gets covered in crap. 

- Justine Frederiksen

I kept my mother's binoculars after the crash. Thirty years later, her friend still recognized them.

I kept my mother's binoculars after the crash, though at the time I was still a teenager who resented the passion I blamed for her death. And I was very glad to have them when I finally saw one of her birding pals again 30 years later and her binoculars brought him to tears.

That was cool.

Cool not because I like to make people sad. Cool because I knew how much he missed my mother, too. 

It was healing for me to learn what bird they were all looking for that day, a Spotted Redshank. And that he still agonized over how my mother had been riding with the newest and youngest member of their bird club because his car was full.

One of the few things that can truly ease the grief of losing someone is being with another person who feels their absence. They understand that no matter how long it has been, no matter how fine you look, you are still among the walking wounded.

Losing a loved one in a sudden event feels like someone ripped out your lungs and told you to breathe a different way.

You find a way to adapt, but you never forget how it felt to be whole. And the pain never really goes away, though you soon stop talking about it, because the only thing worse than feeling pain is having to explain it.

But you don’t have to say anything to someone with the same scar. You don’t have to paint your mother in their head: she already lives there.

As you both picture her, your pain feels lighter and her image grows brighter. Maybe it can even grow bright enough for her to see it, and know we still think of her.

Of course, it was even cooler that my grandfather saved the binoculars for me in the first place.

They were damaged in the crash that killed her, but my grandfather retrieved them and had them repaired before returning them to me.

I don’t keep them tucked under my driver’s seat as she did, so she could whip them out whenever she saw anything other than a turkey vulture flying overhead. They now sit on a shelf where I can look at them and smile, but sometimes I do take them out to look for birds. And when I see one, I like to think that she can see it, too. 

And maybe some day I will see a Spotted Redshank for her.

Sometimes you just want a cup of coffee. And to pretend that everything's normal.

A few days after the recent fires erupted in Mendocino County, three of us who work for the Ukiah newspaper were decompressing in Black Oak Coffee when one of the owners walked up to our table.

“I just wanted to say ‘thank you’ for all that you guys are doing,” he said. “You probably aren’t getting a lot of sleep right now, so I appreciate all the information you are providing.”

That was cool.

Photo by Chris Pugh - Ukiah Daily Journal

But what was even cooler was how much space in the coffee shop had been devoted to making sure that anyone who needed help would know where to find it.

Outside, a sign invited evacuees to enjoy a free cup of coffee. Inside, much of the free counter and wall space was devoted to signs explaining where to find food, clothing, toiletries, a place to sleep and even a place for kids to play indoors.

For those without a way to access the internet, an iPad was set up on the counter for anyone to get the latest information on the fires, since at the time they were nowhere near under control.

All of these were small gestures to be sure, but I find the small, unobtrusive gestures – ones that don’t require you to ask for or even accept them – to be the most comforting. I know one of the first things I’d look for a day or two after being chased from my home would be a calm place where I could sit and drink some good coffee while everyone went about their normal lives.

Seeing people eating, gossiping about their day and yes, even buried in their phones, would be a much-needed reminder that the world was still spinning and eventually my life would return to normal as well.

But in the meantime, I’d know exactly where to get some shampoo and toothpaste, all without anyone knowing I had needed anything more than a cup of coffee.