Journal

The kitchen, a safe haven. Isolation log: Day 72.

When I first considered how I would spend my time during this shelter-in-place mandate, I decided that I would add to my cooking repertoire by watching instructional videos. Then, I would prepare the dishes that I had learned.

The idea, of course, was to kill two birds with the proverbial one stone. Since I prepare most of the meals anyway, I would be learning new skills and still get dinner on the table each night. I knew I would enjoy both the learning and the eating.

I like French cuisine and have enjoyed many memorable meals in France, but I have limited cooking experience in that field. I have what I consider to be a good skill set in Italian food, a culinary tradition that is product-driven and whose recipe for any dish varies from region-to-region, village-to-village, and cook-to-cook.

A mother sauce in Italy is a sauce made by somebody’s mother.

I have three go-to cookbooks for those times when I wanted to make something in the French tradition: Andrè Soltner’s The Lutèce Cookbook, Lulu’s Provençal Table by Richard Olney, and, of course, Julia Child’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking. But I was looking for something beyond replicating recipes; I wanted some visuals to enhance the cooking experience, hand’s-on demonstrations of the mysterious techniques of the much-celebrated cuisine française. I wanted to learn how to become a French chef.

I began searching the internet for sites and settled upon the French Cooking Academy. It’s a one-man show with an enthusiastic young host named Stephane, whose brief bio says he is a self-taught cook who just might keep a copy of Escoffier’s Guide Culinaire on his nightstand. Although there is an actual course of study available on this site, I chose to be cheap about it and just audit the site, mining it for recipes and video demonstrations on my own timeline.

I’m augmenting my course of study with old television programs hosted by Jacques Pépin. Unlike many, if not most of the cooking shows on the Food Network that seem to have less interest in teaching than in promoting, Pépin is soft-spoken and speaks of the love and joy that should be inherent in any cook’s approach to cuisine. I’ve yet to hear him yell, “Bam!”

I’ve had an enjoyable time in my studies. I have made and re-made the five mother sauces (béchamel, velouté, espagnole, hollandaise, and tomate) and used them to build on for saucing various foods, both proteins and produce.

I’ve made some profound discoveries: There are at least as many kinds of mustard in France as there are cheese. If you make pad thai, you can make it French by adding mustard, cream, and butter. And any piece of animal protein, by the way, is just a medium for some kind of sauce.

Over the last few weeks we’ve enjoyed the blanquette de veau, coq au vin, magrets de canard à la sauce au poivre vert, and poulet au vinaigre, among a few other dishes demanding italics. But there’s something missing in the equation. Each meal, while delicious, seemed like a formal dining experience that missed the point of seeking comfort from food in the time of the pandemic. It felt like we should have been at an over-priced, white-tablecloth kind of place with more silverware than anybody really needs.

I sense that many of the dishes I cooked might have qualified as comfort food for the French, but not necessarily for us.

While many don’t believe America has a food culture, it does. It’s not as defined as in France or, for that matter, in many other cultures. Because of our insistence to view the United States as a melting pot, our many backgrounds have led to a food culture that is diverse. That part of our food culture that seems dominant, though not particularly appreciated by self-described foodies—a sub-culture reeking of elitism—is the drive-thru restaurant. It has become as American as apple pie, TV dinners and Campbell Soup-based sauces.

In 1972, James Beard published American Cookery, an 839-page collection of recipes that runs the gamut from cocktail food to candy. Taking cues from regional cooking expressed in church cookbooks to Ladies Auxiliary collections and university publications, it is a study of a food heritage that he said is “barely beginning to sift down into a cuisine of our own.”

That same year, Jean Hewitt published a volume of near-equal heft, The New York Times Heritage Cookbook. Hewitt organized the recipes by region and then by state. It too describes an emerging food culture created by a melding of other culinary traditions.

For those looking for comfort from the meals they’re making during these times, turning to childhood favorites is where many will find comfort in dishes that remind us of a much simpler time and recall memories of home and family.

Comfort food seems to begin with starch and pretty much stays there. Noodles, potatoes and rice are the bedrock of the Comfort Cuisine that has at its root poverty. One has only to leaf through Ernest Matthew Mickler’s White Trash Cooking to get a glimpse of the diet of the dirt-poor of Appalachia, a diet of highly processed foods and unbridled fat.

On the other side of the poverty coin is the cucina povera, the Italian cooking of the rural poor. Consisting almost exclusively of local ingredients, it has in recent years been elevated to a status dining, typically involving entrails.

While everybody has their own versions of the Comfort Cuisine, I humbly offer a trio of mine.

Photography by Courtney A. Liska

Chipped Beef on Toast
Known colloquially as Shit-On-A-Shingle, it’s filling, cheap, easy-to-make and tastes a helluva lot better than its familiar sobriquet might suggest.

3 Tbs. butter
3 Tbs. all-purpose flour
2 cups milk
Pinch of ground nutmeg
1/4 tsp. garlic powder
1/4 tsp. onion powder
1/2 tsp. black pepper
3 dashes Worcestershire sauce
1/2 tsp. dried mustard
1 2.5 oz jar chipped beef
Chopped parsley for garnish
8 slices white bread

Chop the chipped beef roughly and set it aside.
Melt butter in a small saucepan over medium heat. Whisk in the flour and cook for a minute. Whisk in the milk gradually and season with ground nutmeg, ground onion powder, ground garlic powder, a few drops of Worcestershire sauce, and mustard. Cook until thick and season the white sauce with black pepper. Add the chipped beef and set the heat to low.
Toast the bread and top with the beef mixture. Garnish with parsley.

Chicken Cacciatore
The “hunter’s style” chicken with onions and peppers is both warming and delicious.

8 chicken thighs
salt
freshly ground black pepper
all-purpose flour, for dredging
olive oil
1 large red bell pepper, chopped
1 large green bell pepper, chopped
1 large onion, chopped
2-3 stalks of celery, cut into bite-size pieces
3-4 garlic cloves, finely chopped
1 cup dry white wine
1, 28-oz. can diced tomatoes with juice
1 cup chicken stock
1 1/2 tsp. dried oregano leaves
1/4 cup coarsely chopped fresh basil leaves

Generously season the chicken with salt and pepper.
Dredge the chicken pieces in the flour to coat lightly.
In a large heavy sauté pan, heat the oil over a medium-high flame. Add the chicken pieces, skin side down, to the pan and sauté just until brown, about 5 minutes per side. Transfer the chicken to a plate and set aside.
Add the peppers, onion and celery to the same pan and sauté over medium heat until the onion is softened, about 5 minutes. Add the garlic and cook another minute or two. Season with salt and pepper. Add the wine and simmer until reduced by half, about 3 minutes.
Add the tomatoes with their juice, broth, and oregano. Return the chicken pieces to the pan and turn them to coat in the sauce. Bring the sauce to a simmer. Cover and continue simmering over medium-low heat until the chicken is just cooked through, about 30 minutes.
Transfer the chicken to a platter. If necessary, boil the sauce until it thickens slightly, about 3 minutes. Spoon the sauce over the chicken, then sprinkle with the basil and serve.

Macaroni and Cheese
Everybody has their favorite Mac ‘n Cheese. This is mine.

2 cups dry, small elbow macaroni
1 Tbs. salt
½ tsp. ground black pepper
¼ tsp. white pepper
¼ tsp. cayenne
½ tsp. dried mustard
2 cups whole milk
4 Tbs. butter
4 Tbs. flour
1# shredded sharp cheddar cheese, divided
6 oz. shredded colby jack cheese
1/3 cup sour cream
2 eggs

Cook the macaroni noodles following package instructions. Drain and rinse the noodles and set aside.
In a skillet, melt the butter then add the flour to make a roux. Slowly stir in the milk. When thickened, add eggs, sour cream and seasonings in a mixing bowl and whisk.
Add cooked macaroni to a casserole dish. Stir in the milk mixture and mix thoroughly. Add sharp cheddar and colby jack cheeses. Mix well. Add to the cooked noodles. Bake for 20 to 25 minutes at 375° until cheese is melted and light brown. Place under broiler for 5 minutes. Let stand 15 minutes before servings.

It has been noted that nobody gets to pick their neighbors.

When we moved to Montana twenty-seven years ago, we barely knew anybody in this old rail-and-ranch town. In fact, we even bought the house sight-unseen. We met our neighbors on both sides and from across the street. It was a great, inviting block with friendly people from all walks of life who kept their homes tidy on a not-so-busy street. From the get-go we felt safe and welcomed. There was a sense that our neighbors looked out for each other.

Geri and I were keeping an eye on things for our neighbors to the south when they went on vacation. I happened to be in the backyard when I noticed a man on the roof, opening a second-story window. I chuckled at the thought of this little town having a “second-story” man—that urban burglar who enters through upstairs bedroom windows. But we were concerned enough for Geri to call the police.

The cops arrived and I watched them as they interviewed the house’s new owner.

We hadn’t heard that the home was even listed, let alone sold.

There was a good amount of chuckling as the story unfolded. And then the man who would soon be our neighbor thanked us for calling the police on him. He said it made him feel good about the neighborhood—a neighborhood in which few ever bothered to lock our doors.

Jack Heckles and his wife, Wendy, have been our neighbors for what must be about twenty-five years. We could not have asked for better ones. They watched our children grow up. We count our blessings for our neighbors to the north, Tondi and Gunnar, whose children we’re watching grow up—the youngest of which is a friend of our granddaughter; the oldest who just last week chose to register to vote on her eighteenth birthday. Amy and Jon are a warm and caring couple across the street who have a weird fence and who keep an old pickup truck for anyone to use. They rallied when our grandson died. Our block has changed some, but not the quality of its citizenry. Everybody seems to have each other’s back.

It’s difficult to approach the next paragraph.

Jack died on Thursday after falling from a cliff, just northeast of town off Convict Grade Road. He was pursuing his passion for the outdoors, taking pictures of eagles as he’d done for more than twenty years. And no doubt he was just marveling at the natural beauty of where some of us are fortunate enough to call home.

A Marine veteran and holder of a degree in literature, Jack worked in construction. He was a skilled finish carpenter whose work expressed both his fine craftsmanship and his keen eye for precision and detail. He was soft-spoken and well-read, a progressive liberal with an unflappable ethic and an appetite for history. He played the fiddle. The last time we spoke, on the day before he died, he was on that same roof where I had discovered him all those many years ago. He was high atop a ladder, caulking the eaves, preparing to paint the house this summer. We joked about our advancing years (“No sense buying large jars of mayonnaise!”) and how we wanted to survive long enough to see Trump thrown out of office.

He asked about the new electric lawnmower we had just received. I told him it was light and that I thought it would make mowing the lawn a lot easier for me. I got about a third of the backyard mowed before a spring storm rolled through that day.

Jack and I worked a house demolition job in Clyde Park together. It was his gig and we used my pickup truck to haul the demo-ed materials off site. I’m sure that having that truck gave me about a month’s worth of employment. Jack was methodical in his work and he had only one speed; he never rushed and he never slowed. He had the alarm on his wristwatch set for 10, 12 and 3. When the ten o’clock alarm sounded, he’d drop his hammer in mid-swing because it was time for some tea or coffee and a pastry. The three o’clock break was for a piece of fruit.

And the noon alarm was a simple reminder for him to eat his lunch.

There’s an old adage that says good fences make good neighbors. We were in the midst of enclosing our backyard with a six-foot wooden fence that we hoped would contain our escape-artist dog. (It didn’t.) Jack told me that I should have creosoted the posts. “They’ll last forty years,” he enthused. Since they were already in the ground, I told him that I wasn’t about to dig them up. “In forty years,” I said, “at best, I’ll be in a rocking chair, drooling on myself.”

Then he helped me build a gate so we could access each other’s backyards. It was a gate that was never locked, and  I wish we had used more frequently.

Later, when I was turning our carriage house (too narrow to be called a garage) into my office, Jack, knowing of my fear of heights and just being his neighborly self, joined a couple of other friends and installed the skylights and roofed the structure while I schlepped the shingles up a few rungs of the ladder. Beer, something Jack was very picky about, was the only reward. I splurged and bought the best.

After I built our deck (Jack had come over several times to inspect my work), I asked him if he would help me hang a glass door leading from the kitchen to our new deck. I had framed the opening and as Jack was truing the doorjamb, he said that this little job was making him happy. He liked the way you could now see through the length of the house from the front door, and he liked that its twelve panes brought some of the outside in.

We went hunting together a couple of times, the most memorable being when we spent half-a-day futilely chasing a herd of antelope over hill and dale on a vast expanse of high prairie. It was freezing cold and the wind burnt our faces. Jack was an avid fly-fisherman, a habit he had nurtured in his home state of Pennsylvania and took to a higher level on the rivers and streams of Montana. We once went on a fishing/camping trip with my son, Daniel, that took us to the Missouri River and continued at the Musselshell in Two Dot, a town we found deserving of visits from all of us. Well, at least the Two Dot Bar. We fished the Shields on the way back to town.

And then we got sick, pretty much at the same time.

I was in hospital for a treatment of a lung that had spontaneously collapsed. A morning or two later, Geri told me that Jack had suffered a brain aneurysm and was life-flighted to Billings where he underwent emergency surgery. Not too many years later, we were both patients in Billings—he for a quadruple heart by-pass; me for follow-up procedures following a lobectomy. We were there at the same time on different floors.

He was a man of great resolve and he recovered with remarkable swiftness. He, along with my friend and neighbor, Gunnar, resumed shoveling the snow that would cover our sidewalks. Jack would mow the lawn when I was too weak during my own recovery to push the old gas-powered mower for more than four or five minutes.

We joked about our mortality across the fence I had built. We talked politics in the front yard or on his front porch while sipping cocktails. We agreed vigorously. He would frequently deliver a still-warm loaf of sourdough bread wrapped neatly in a tea towel that Wendy had baked.

Geri and I want so badly to offer our warmest, most sincere condolences to Wendy, but there’s no hugging from six feet away in these days of the pandemic. And I’m guessing there will be no services any time soon to offer a chance for their many friends to gather, tell some stories, lift a glass or two, eat from the covered-dish casseroles we bring to such occasions in our small town. And that means we’ll have to wait for closure.

The idea of a virtual service would be appalling to Jack. There was nothing virtual about him; he was the real deal. As Daniel said when I called him Friday, “Jack was awesome.”

On Thursday afternoon, I drove out to the hospital to pick Geri up from work. When we pulled up to the house, she looked at the front yard and asked, “Who mowed the lawn?”

Photography by Courtney A. Liska

Italian Cottage Pie

For my money, this is comfort food of the highest order. It’s cheap, it’s easy to make and it tastes just how comfort food should.

2# floury potatoes, like Russets
1# Italian pork sausage, crumbled
1 small onion, finely diced
2 Tbs. finely chopped flat-leaf parsley
2 oz. butter
½ pint lukewarm milk
Freshly grated nutmeg
2 oz. grated Parmesan cheese
2 egg yolks, well beaten
S&P

Cook unpeeled potatoes in salted boiling water until soft.
Meanwhile, fry crumbled sausage and onion. Drain.
When potatoes are cool enough to handle, peel and mash or rice them with the parsley and butter.
Add milk, a grating of nutmeg, the cheese, egg yolks and sausage mixture. Mix well.
Pour into buttered baking dish and bake, covered, for 20-30 minutes at 350°.
Remove cover sprinkle liberally with more Parmesan. Return to oven for a few minutes until the cheese has melted on top.

To some, fifty-four years might seem a long time to hold a grudge. Of course, if your last name happens to be Hatfield or McCoy, fifty-four years is nothing. Hell, it barely spans four generations of those gawd-fearin’, snake-handlin’ ridge-runners.

My grudge is about an egregious moment in time when my parents wronged me by not allowing me to take a class in automotive mechanics. This single event has led me to spend countless thousands of dollars in car repairs that could have been avoided if, for example, I had ever been taught whatever it is that an alternator does.

And, as long we’re on the subject, where exactly does engine oil go after we’ve filled the reservoir?

A week or two before my first day of public high school my parents and I went to see what was then called a Guidance Counselor. I don’t remember his name, but I do remember that his face was rather interesting in that it appeared to be one-dimensional—like a child’s drawing, perhaps. After cursory introductions and a welcome that seemed foreboding, we got down to the serious business of planning my academic future. Why I’m including myself in that gathering is something of a mystery. I was never asked about any of my preferences as my mother, mostly, did the talking, along with Mr. Flatface. My father sat quietly and nodded, knowing full well that there would be serious consequences if he didn’t.

It was agreed that I would be on a college track which made certain assumptions about those courses I would be required to take. English composition, literature, four years of math, biology, chemistry, physics, social studies and history, physical education and Latin were neatly penciled in on a graph. My only elective would be band. Although I would have chosen a language that was spoken anywhere other than inside a Catholic church, my mother argued that Latin would improve my English studies which, actually, I didn’t know needed improvement. Since English is a Germanic language, her argument made no sense.

Be all that as it may, I finally was allowed to speak after clearing my throat a few times. I spoke of a mild interest in auto mechanics and asked if I could take such a course. From their reaction, I thought I had attained a new level of comic achievement. Proceeded by three audible gasps, their laughter could barely be contained, with Mr. Flatface recovering just enough to remind me that I was on a “college track” and that auto mechanics, shop and drafting were not available to me. Nor was home economics, a class that my sister had to take in spite of her being on a college track that led to five degrees.

I wasn’t given to do much sulking in those days, but I let my parents know, in no uncertain terms, that I was not happy about their course selections for me. I would have been happy taking English composition, literature of both the American and European varieties, history, French, and auto mechanics. I expressed my concern that while I would be suffering through Chaucer and reading Cicero’s reflections on the Republic, my friends would have admirably dirty hands from tinkering with cars for 50 minutes every day.

I only attended public high school for two years. My last two were spent at Interlochen Arts Academy, where there was little interest in things like math and science. There I pursued literature, writing, music and broadcasting. I took a class in ecology, the highlight of which came when we drove to a nearby river to watch in horror people literally beating the water with clubs and bats to kill coho salmon that were being distressed by a lesser fish known as the alewife. Later in the term we watched the instructor dissect a swan he had found somewhere.

My early instincts about my education were correct, although I will always greatly value a liberal arts curriculum. It’s been fifty-two years since I last tried to solve an algebraic equation. The only other science class I took was biology, in which we dissected a frog or two and made a leaf collection whose only value came when I sold it to an in-coming freshman for $15 the next year. We also watched an animated film strip of a guy getting an erection which provoked the appropriate reactions. I’ll never have a conversation in Latin because I learned it as a written language, not as a spoken one. I don’t know any of the pronunciations.

I read and write every day of the week, and I listen to music with an educated ear. For five years I had a radio show in Los Angeles. I am deeply concerned about the planet’s ecology.

But I don’t know how to work on a car and I wish that I did because every car I’ve ever owned (especially the 1938 Cadillac hearse I owned for about three months) has needed lots of work that I’ve had to pay lots of money to have done.

My first car was a 1962 Chevrolet Bel Air—boxy and four-doored in a faded gunmetal gray. It was a chick magnet in the way a gourmand might be attracted to a box of Saltines. I bought it from my grandmother in Nebraska and drove it back to Chicago, leaving a cloud of carbon that might still linger over much of Iowa. At the time, I thought there was some kind of mysterious fire that didn’t produce flames.

Once, something happened to it and a friend told me I needed to rebuild the carburetor. He said it was easy. I went to an auto parts store where I had never before felt so out-of-place. I was the only guy there wearing a collared-shirt. I bought the kit and took it home, where I rebuilt the carburetor on my kitchen table over the course of five or six days. When done, I only had five little pieces of stuff left over, but I reinstalled it anyway. The car worked just fine. Until it didn’t.

Geri knows enough about cars and their inner workings that at once upon a time would not have even been considered proper. I learned this about her on our first date, when she told me about her car: “It’s a ’71 Mustang convertible with a 351 Cleveland engine—a racing Pantera—with a factory-installed Hurst tranny.”

She actually said “tranny.” I was too proud to ask what a “tranny” might be.

Despite that, I have been in charge of all of our cars’ maintenance, which is as unapt as Geri, the Irish lass, being put in charge of dinner. My idea of maintenance usually involves my opening the hood, looking down at all that metallic stuff that blocks the view to the surface below, and somberly announcing, “I think it needs to go the shop.”

My diagnoses are always met with, “Just check the fluids, dipstick.”

Many years ago we were driving a Dodge Caravan through Utah when the car stalled and died on the side of a country road. It magically started an hour later, and we drove another hour until it stalled and died again. Again, it magically started, and we drove on for another hour. This annoying pattern repeated itself until we arrived in Nephi. It was a Sunday and it was 104 degrees.

I wandered around the truck stop looking for somebody with admirably dirty hands. The guy I found responded to my tale of woe by shouting at me: “Fuel filter! Replace it!”

I could more easily perform an appendectomy, I remember thinking.

A car parts store guy with admirably dirty hands delivered a new fuel filter, but didn’t offer to spend the rest of the afternoon changing it for me. And so I began: I crawled under the car, located the old one, took it off, discovered the wonder of having a gallon or so of gasoline pour directly onto my face, and then gave my young children their first exposure to some really nasty words in a loud, clear voice.

I was afraid to light a cigarette for three days, lest the gas fumes lingering about my face ignite.

We got as far as Provo, following our new driving protocol—an hour on, an hour off.

I had a friend in Los Angeles, who I’ll call Dale, which seems only fitting since that was his name. He might have been the real-life role model for the original MacGyver, a mid-’80s television program that co-starred a roll of duct tape. Dale was as serious a car guy as one could be, even going so far as banning his family from the house each Memorial Day so he could drink Scotch and watch the Indy 500 in peace. I called him and explained our situation.

“Vapor lock,” he said with such conviction that I could picture him in his STP cap. “Got any wooden clothespins?”

“Of course,” I lied, although I could see from the telephone booth a store that would sell them.

“Clip one every four inches along the fuel line. It’ll take the heat out of the line and you won’t vapor lock.”

The next morning we made it to Layton, about an hour away. We waited the perfunctory hour and drove to a dealership.

“Fuel pump,” a young mechanic announced. As the van went up on the lift, he noticed the fifty-four clothespins grasping the fuel line. He called over the other mechanics in the shop and they all started pointing and laughing at the sight, offering no sympathy even after listening to my sad story.

I had to do something to restore whatever shred of dignity I might have had left.

I started asking them which was their favorite tale from Chaucer, and what they thought of Cicero’s politics and statesmanship. I wanted to say something in Latin, so I crowed, “Veni, vidi, vici” with all of the vocal authority of Pavarotti singing Puccini’s Nessun dorma.

The young mechanic with the admirably dirty hands whispered, “In Latin, the ‘v’ is pronounced like a ‘w’.”

Photography by Courtney A. Liska

Irish Hamburgers

Contrary to popular belief, Irish cuisine can be very exciting and satisfying, provided it’s not cooked by an actual Irish person. This has been a family favorite for what seems like forever. It might offer some comfort in these trying times.

1-1/2 # ground beef
½ c. dry bread crumbs
3 Tbs. finely chopped onions
1 tsp. Worcestershire sauce
1 egg
Salt & pepper
2 Tbs. butter
1 medium onion, chopped
2 carrots, chopped
2 stalks celery, chopped
1 Tbs. flour
1 cup cream
1 can of cream of celery soup
2 Tbs. chopped parsley

Combine the beef, bread crumbs, onion, Worcestershire and egg in a mixing bowl. Season with salt and pepper. Form into six or eight patties, or even seven if you just want to be weird.
Fry the patties in butter until well browned (but not cooked through) and remove to a baking dish.
Add chopped vegetables to pan drippings and sauté until tender. Add flour and stir until well-blended.
Combine cream and celery soup and add to the vegetables.
Pour sauce over the patties, cover with foil and bake at 350° for one hour.

If you’d prefer not to use the soup because you’re fussy, substitute with one cup of bechamel. Frankly, the soup works just fine.

My backyard, the final frontier. Isolation log: Day 51.

Everything on the internet is suddenly seeming to appear quite plausible, if not even factual. Now I’ve discovered that the Apocalypse is far more entertaining than I might ever have imagined.

It has a wonderful cast of characters, from the leading man, cast appropriately as the Orange Menace, down to classical Greek Choruses of his angry followers. These groups are mostly made up of white women in tight t-shirts boasting their odd patriotism, and white men with AR-15s and bandoliers of bullets. Their shared anger is directed at Democratic forces trying to keep the protesters from dying of a disease called the coronavirus. Of course, the well-armed dunderheads are convinced the disease is a hoax perpetrated by either some extra-terrestrials from the minor planet Upuranus or Richard Simmons, the enthusiastic exercise guru. They’re not sure. Not a clue, actually.

The narrative is pretty straight forward. There’s a backstory that shows a complete lack of preparedness, with the added intrigue of a racist hatred that led to the dismantling of what, had it not been dismantled, was the very thing that would have shown this Administration as being prepared. (This is the gang that refused to shoot straight.) And few would have thought otherwise. Except for the “lamestream” press that might have pointed out, correctly, that the pandemic task force was created in 2005 by George W. Bush and augmented and maintained by Barack Obama, theirs are the voices that would have been drowned out by the sound of the shuck-and-jive grandstanding from the self-praising Trump.

Even as we Americans awaken each morning to a new and ever-rising death toll, His Orangeness is shouting the huzzahs! in celebration of what? Ineptitude? Callous indifference? Cowardice?

Chatting mostly about the great job he’s doing fighting the invisible enemy reminds many of Don Quixote’s battles with windmills, a literary reference he might have missed in college. His focus is on his television ratings—as if his daily rallies, sparsely attended by a pared-down press corps, were some kind of lurid game show; an alternate reality show, as it were. It’s a blessing that the three major networks and CNN have spared us from having to bear any more than the highlights, many of which include his asinine berating of reporters.

Of course, the best of his highlight reels is when he takes on the demeanor of Marcus Welby, M.D., and waxes idiotic about injecting and/or inhaling or otherwise ingesting Lysol or Clorox. And let’s not omit his temporal brilliance in suggesting that we be given head-on shock treatments with klieg lights or use light-bearing suppositories filled with magic fairy dust.

Not that many folks need much prodding, but there seems to be a growing interest in a list of conspiracy theories that run the gamut from ridiculous to ludicrous which, of course, is a rather narrow gamut. Nothing like a pandemic to bring out the darkest suspicions of people.

Many of the so-called Left, none of whom watch Fox News and therefore have privileged access to actual information, are convinced that the hesitancy of the Administration to act is because Covid-19 had brought Chinese factories to a screeching halt a day or two after the first diagnosis. That resulted in their falling behind making the designer face masks and hospital scrubs that Ivanka was planning to market from her business suite at the White House.

Much of the Right believes the whole thing was made up by Communists to abolish all of their rights, especially their Second Amendment rights that guarantee they can wield AR-15s and don’t have to be vaccinated for anything. They also like that part of the First Amendment for its allowing them to be evangelical adherents of some ill-defined theocracy. It’s a pick-as-you-please interpretation of the Constitution.

Some of this clear-headed group of “very good people” have been holding demonstrations on the steps and inside a few state capitols, demanding that they be heard and be allowed to resume their normal, pre-virus activities which may or may not include returning to work.

While nothing says “idiot” better than wearing your Sunday-best camo, bringing along your weapon-of-choice will probably not help any conversation to even get started, let alone progress.

I find conspiracy theories and their proponents to be mostly annoying. Although usually harmless, they seem to grow naturally in any political environment, much like weeds in a garden. There is a lot of accompanying paranoia (thus the whispers), a serious mistrust of anything associated with authority, constant blame-shifting, and a sense of being victims of circumstance. And there is absolutely no arguing with them. It’s pointless, much like trying to teach a pig to sing.

While some of the theories are so preposterous as to be mind-numbing, there’s usually not much humor involved, except for the theories themselves.

A case-in-point might be to look at the end of Lenny Bruce’s career. At some point, the comic thought the paying public came to see him not for a good laugh but for endless babbling about his legal problems. Bruce thought there were mysterious forces out to get him. Maybe there were, but we still wanted to laugh.

Mort Sahl, the great political satirist and comic, briefly derailed his career by endlessly spouting all of his conspiracy theories about the Kennedy assassination and the subsequent Warren Commission concluding that Lee Harvey Oswald did, in fact, act alone. Had Mort not followed the sage advice, “Forget about it, already, and tell some jokes,” he might have ended up sorting mail at MGM.

Behind every decent conspiracy are some key players. The Covid-19 cast of characters includes the World Health Organization’s Director General Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, known affectionately as Doc Teddy. WHO was, of course, founded in 1948 in Switzerland by Mao Zedong, who was returning to his native China after earning a degree in communication theory from Oxford University, to start the Cultural Revolution, which he wouldn’t get around to for another 18 years. Nonetheless, Communist China still runs WHO—at the expense of the U.S. This cannot be denied. Or not.

Bill Gates and Dr. Anthony Fauci have maintained a close friendship ever since the good doctor was doing his obstetrics rotation and delivered Lil’ Bill, as Tony still calls him, at a Seattle hospital that was subsequently torn down to make room for the Microsoft campus.

On January 20, 2020, a Monday, Bill and Tony were having dinner together in Washington, D.C. This was most unusual because it’s been a long-standing tradition for the entire Fauci family, to gather in Brooklyn on Monday evenings for a dinner of spaghetti and meatballs, garlic bread, and a salad of iceberg lettuce, roasted red peppers, peperoncini and Wishbone Italian dressing. Vintage Chianti from the Rufino province just north of Florence is always served. After dinner, the Faucis would then gather around an old black-and-white television and watch videos of Walter Cronkite anchoring the CBS Evening News from 1975—a period of U.S. history in which not much happened and was therefore soothing.

On the night in question, Lil’ Bill got a telephone call during the soup course saying that the first case of novel coronavirus had been reported in Snohomish, a Washington county that Gates just happens to own. Gates immediately called MIT, which he also happens to own, where scientists have created a new ink that can be embedded in the skin and read with an infra-red smart phone app to see if you’ve been vaccinated and for what. It also can report whether you had breakfast. He told them to get ready.

Fauci, an epidemiologist by trade who just happens to look like an Italian elf, is in a practice that is the very cornerstone of public health, and shapes policy decisions and evidence-based practices by identifying risk factors for disease and targets for preventive healthcare. He calls himself an “odds-maker.”

All that being said, he called the White House and put all 50 governors on Zoom. He proceeded to instruct them to close down the country, with shelter-in-place orders to be enforced until all of America’s guns are confiscated. Only essential businesses—H&R Block, liquor stores, dry cleaners—could remain open. Any restaurant wanting to serve take-out would be required to construct a drive-through service area, thereby leveling the playing field for McDonalds and Chez Panisse, or any of Daniel Boulud’s signature restaurants.

After toasting to the New World Order with glasses of single-malt sake, Lil’ Bill and Dr. “T” read their fortunes from the cookies served at Wuhan Harry’s Noodle Emporium & Asian Massage Parlor. Their fortunes were the same: “Wuhan Harry’s Not Make You Sick.”

Before leaving for the Ford’s Theater for a private screening of Into the Dark Side of the Woods, a documentary about a gay Nazi stuntman in Hollywood with music by Stephen Sondheim, Lil’ Bill called the White House to suggest that the virus was probably a synthetic germ that Chinese scientists had created to help Trump lose re-election.

Fauci objected. “That’s just not true.”

Gates just smiled. “But it will keep the Idiot-in-Chief occupied and maybe, just maybe, keep him out of our way as we establish world dominance. You and me, Dr. ‘T’, you and me.”

Photo illustration by Courtney A. Liska

Survival Guide for the Apocalypse

The following items should be safely stowed should that time come when we really, really need them.

Alcohol, Beef jerky, Fruit roll-ups, Alcohol, Cans of imported duck confit, Instant ramen noodles, Alcohol, Twinkies, Cheez Whiz, Saltines, Vodka & dry Vermouth, Green olives, Foie gras, Gin, Cocktail onions, Dill pickles, SPAM, and, several cases of Bandol, a fiercely structured red wine from Provence that, at $47 a bottle, is capable of being transformative.

The shelter-in-place directive that most of us are complying with is a little like being captive in a Havahart rat trap. You’re pretty much stuck, but at least your neck hasn’t been snapped and you do get the cheese.

This sense of captivity that many of us feel does have its upside. I’m not thinking of anything particularly practical like finally having the time to clean the garage or vacuum the cat or sort by size and reorganize the paper bags you’ve been collecting for the last 20 years. I’ve done those things, except for clean the garage, but only because we don’t have one.

No, I see this as an opportune moment in our lives to reflect on the past, appreciate the moment, and contemplate the future—even if the future is one of a continued sequestration that forces us to give all of our money to Jeff Bezos and never see another person except on Zoom.

I’ve never needed any prodding to think about the future (especially about the very end of the future) or worry about things over which I have no control. Guilt is just a part of me—a piece of my genetic imprint. I’ve learned to accept it, embrace it with a constant and steadfast zeal. It’s a little like the relationships Norwegians have with lutefisk, which, since the Trump family recently invested heavily in cod futures, is currently being tested as a cure for Covid-19. If lutefisk, a gelatinous mass that looks suspiciously like phlegm, is indeed proven effective as an oral medication, I’m opting to go wherever the novel coronavirus wants to take me.

Appreciating the moment is a unique challenge, so I will only briefly look back at what is rather pointless because much of what I recall only makes me blush, even if nobody else is around. If there were lessons to be learned…well, I either learned them or not.

The regrets I’ve had are beyond counting, including the one about wanting to live a life with no regrets. This was an ambition expressed many young people who have vague recollections of the ‘60s as they looked to the next phase of life—like a real job, for instance.

My parents had a small reception for me when I graduated from college. They invited all of their friends and none of mine. Come to think of it, maybe it wasn’t a party for me. Maybe I just walked in on something that had been planned for some other reason. After all, there were no gifts, not even a card.

At one point, I experienced a Graduate moment when I was cornered by two men who took turns jabbing their fingers into my chest as they insisted on hearing my career plans. That was the moment I first said something about wanting to avoid a career in either insurance or real estate that I knew I would one day regret. How was I supposed to know Ted was a State Farm agent and Jack was a realtor?

At least I hadn’t said, “I just want to be happy!”

My parents’ next-door-neighbor then offered to set me up as a manufacturer’s rep selling tools. He walked me over to his house and opened the trunk of his Impala to show me an array of hardware like I’d never seen. The job entailed driving from town to town in an assigned area trying to sell hammers to hardware stores. The big attraction was that you got to stay in rundown motels four nights a week and eat in diners. There was no reimbursement for expenses. And I would need to get a haircut.

I returned to my folks’ backyard and opened my fifth beer. The only reason I know this is because my mother told me it was my fifth beer.

“What?” I asked. “Are you keeping track?”

“Of course I am,” she answered, as if it was her duty to keep track of such things.

The next day I went to a real graduation party. They had a cake, and platters of cold cuts, a grill loaded with bratwurst, a pot of sauerkraut, and washtubs full of Old Style—a Chicago beer that is on par with the worst beer anyone can ever recall tasting, like Old Milwaukee or Schaefer or Coors Light. My mother wasn’t there to keep tabs of my intake. The party showed promise.

The party was for a young woman who I knew professionally during college. She was a talented singer; I had been her drummer for three years. At some point, her father pulled me aside to ask about my plans. As it turns out, I was leaving the next day for Cleveland to pursue a publishing venture. Neil, the red-haired father who looked like he had spent his entire life consuming only bratwurst and Old Style, put his fat-fingered hand on my shoulder and squeezed—hard.

“I’s want youse da stay in Chicago and keep playin’ da drums for Cheryl,” he said, in perfect Chicago dialect.

I twisted out of his grip and told him that I really wanted to move on, and I didn’t want the financial uncertainty that goes with being a musician.

He then told me that he had that all worked out. He offered me a job as an electrical inspector for the City of Chicago. I then told him everything I knew about electricity: “It scares me.”

Neil thought that was pretty funny. He then told me the job was just a title and I’d be paid a handsome salary to act as a Democratic ward boss for a few weeks before City elections. That way I’d have financial security and remain a musician.

It was tempting to join a corrupt political system and usher drunks from Polish bars on the Near North Side to polling places, promising each a boilermaker or two for their votes. And it was a career path to power followed by many an Alderman—a title given to elected criminals who are best compared to raccoons, in that they commit most of their thefts under the cover of darkness.

I went ahead with my move back to Cleveland, known affectionately as the Mistake-by-the-Lake and frequently likened to “Detroit without the glitter.” The publishing venture never really materialized, but I got a story assignment to write a magazine story about EMTs. I spent ten days (nights, actually) riding with an ambulance crew and learning first-hand that some really drunk people show a very real propensity for violence at closing time. From that experience it occurred to me that one really hasn’t led a full life until witnessing a 6’2”, 240-pound African-American female EMT perform a tracheotomy with the neck of a broken beer bottle.

Arriving hat-in-hand back in Chicago, I learned that Cheryl was sleeping with her new drummer, the City had its new electrical inspector, and that my parents had sold the very home I had intended to crash in for the foreseeable future. (They had done this before.)

And that’s when and why I moved to California. Really. It was that serendipitous.

It was the summer of 1976 and my sister was getting married in Colorado to Gary, a Ph.D. professor of communications, an ordained Free Methodist minister, and perhaps the most intelligent person I’d ever met. He had long before abandoned his ministry and soon thereafter his faith, turning instead to a constant use of marijuana.

Anyway, I was to be their only attendant—best man, maid of honor, flower girl, ring bearer, witness, et alii.

At the time, I had a Cairn Terrier named Sappho, a pale-blue Ford pinto station wagon without a name, and maybe thirty dollars. Maybe. And now that my parents were moving to some undisclosed location, I was, basically, homeless.

My father gave me a credit card and told me he’d see me in Estes Park, Colorado, the site of the wedding. After the wedding, which was very nice in an outdoorsy, hippie sort of way, he told me to keep the credit card and follow the advice of Horace Greeley.

A couple of days later I was about as far west as a young man could go in these United States. I found myself camping out on a couch at my sister’s house in Winters, California, a one-horse town near Davis on Pudah Creek, where the fishing was pretty good, and the food and wine at the Pudah Creek Café was impressive. Considering that I was eating on my father’s dime, it was damned affordable, too.

And then one day, after cutting the credit card in half per my father’s request, I drove down to Los Angeles to begin my journey into newspapers and magazines, barely a moment of which I regret.

But I do every now and then I wonder if I had stayed in Chicago, practicing and mastering the fine arts of voter fraud and extortion, would I have risen through the ranks and become a Chicago City Alderman.

Or maybe I’d just be keeping time for a girl singer.

Photography by Courtney A. Liska

Sauerkraut

Every October my grandmother made enough sauerkraut to provide almost-daily servings for three families for a year. It took her a week or so to accomplish as she went up and down the basement stairs to deliver the sliced cabbage, heavily salted, to the ceramic crocks. The kysané zelí, as we knew it, was great. And it was always prepared for the table with some minced onion and garlic, lightly fried, and seasoned with caraway seed. The bagged sauerkraut found at most grocery stores is quite fine when treated with the onion, garlic and caraway.

And then one day our world changed, and we don’t know what lies ahead.

How we emerge from our isolation is key to our survival. Some have imagined that a magic day will be designated, a giant switch will be flipped, and the world will pick up where it left off. It is folly to entertain such thinking.

We are social beings, in frequent contact with friends and family. Now we show our love and respect for each other by staying away. We’re helpless as we watch small businesses close, wondering if they’ll reopen, and which of our neighbors will face financial ruin.

Since most of us rely on the efforts of others to offer relief from the daily grind, we continue to miss sports and entertainment as much as anything. When will it be safe for 40,000 people to gather for a ball game? Television and the movies have shut down their productions. Broadway is dark and theaters are shuttered. We don’t know when we’ll be able to go to concerts again or when dance clubs will turn the lights back on.

Restaurants and taverns are closed, and even going to our friends’ homes for dinner seems an unwise prospect.

Lots of folks indulge their interest in sports by joining “fantasy” leagues. I don’t see the attraction. And to be successful at it requires more statistical homework than I’m interested in, or capable of doing.

I do, however, indulge in fantasy entertaining.

Geri and I have been enjoying this little game since we were first married. Who, the question is, would you like to have over for dinner? The rules of play are that your guests can be living or dead, or a combination. How many guests you want at one party is a consideration, as is the menu and who is to do the cooking. That’s it.

The dinner party I’m working on is for four guests. Three of them are dead, so they won’t be bringing spouses. One will. Including Geri and myself, that will bring the total number to seven. To even things out, I’ll be inviting one friend who I won’t name, but will say that it’s one of you.

While each of the four will be a special guest, the guest of honor is the living one. Here are their brief profiles.

I’ve always had great admiration for Yo-Yo Ma and would enjoy breaking bread with him. As a cellist, he is without peer. He is also a dedicated educator and his humanity has been displayed throughout the world.

Ma was born in Paris to Chinese parents. Educated at Juilliard and Harvard, the classically trained cellist has played bluegrass, traditional Chinese music, Argentinian and Brazilian music. He formed his Silk Road Ensemble to explore music traditional to the cultures found along the Silk Road, an ancient trade route from Europe through Asia to China. He has also performed with Bobby McFerrin, Carlos Santana and James Taylor.

He has been honored as the United Nations Messenger of Peace by Kofi Annan and was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President Barack Obama.

Joining Mr. Ma and his wife will be Shirley Chisholm, Miloš Forman and Richard Feynman.

As a physicist, Dr. Feynman was involved in studies that few could begin to understand. Yet he explained his work in a series of books, lectures and theses that helped popularize an interest in the discipline. His academic resume includes degrees from MIT and Princeton, and teaching positions at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Cornell and Caltech, where he remained until his death in 1988.

Albert Einstein attended Feynman’s first academic seminar. He assisted in the development of the atomic bomb as a participant in the Manhattan Project at Los Alamos, New Mexico. For his work with quantum electrodynamics, he won a share of the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1965. During the 1980s he would become known as a member of the Rogers Commission, the panel that investigated the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster.

Feynman also became known through his semi-autobiographical books Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman! and What Do You Care What Other People Think?. He was a formidable bongo player.

Named to the National Women’s Hall of Fame, Shirley Chisholm became the first black woman elected to the United States Congress as the Democratic representative from New York’s 12th congressional district. She served seven terms from 1969 to 1983. I voted for her in 1972, my first opportunity to cast a ballot.

Born in New York to immigrant parents from the Caribbean—her father was a laborer, her mother a domestic worker—she and her two sisters were sent to live with their maternal grandmother in Barbados, where they received their early education.

A champion of civil rights and women’s rights, Ms. Chisholm, who had earned a M.A. in elementary education from Teachers College at Columbia University in 1952, she served three terms in the New York State Assembly before running for the U.S. House. Her focus on the inner city, poverty and education led to bi-partisan legislation that expanded the food stamp program and created the WIC nutrition program. Chisholm also served on the Veterans’ Affairs Committee and was named to the Education and Labor Committee.

Chisholm joined the Congressional Black Caucus in 1971 as one of its founding members, later that the same year becoming a founding member of the National Women’s Political Caucus. She employed only women on her staff, saying that bias against women was greater than any racial discrimination that she had faced.

In 1972, Chisholm became the first woman and the first African-American to run for President of the United States on the Democrat ticket. That same year, she convinced George Wallace to wrangle the needed southern Democrats to pass legislation guaranteeing minimum wage for domestic workers.

A vocal opponent of the draft and the Vietnam war, she supported spending increases for education, health care and other social services, and reductions in military spending.

In 2015, Chisholm was posthumously awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by Barack Obama.

Born in Czechoslovakia in 1932 to Jewish parents, film director Miloš Forman endured the effects of the Nazi occupation. His father, Rudolf Forman, was arrested for distributing banned books, and died a prisoner in the Mittelbau-Dora concentration camp in 1944. Forman’s mother had died in Auschwitz the previous year.

Forman was an important figure in the Czechoslovak New Wave of cinema in the 1960s. His 1967 film, The Fireman’s Ball, was seen as a satire of Eastern European Communism and was banned. That following year, during the Prague Spring, he moved to the United States, settling in New York, where he would become a professor of film at Columbia University in 1978.

His first film in the United States was Taking Off, which won the Grand Prix at the 1971 Cannes Film Festival, but received bad reviews and fared poorly at the box office. His next film, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, was a critical and commercial success. The film won Oscars in the five most important categories (Best Director, Best Actor, Best Actress, Best Picture and Best Adapted Screenplay), and firmly established Forman’s reputation.

His film adaptation of the Broadway musical Hair was met with favorable reviews but was a box-office flop. His next effort, Amadeus, was a retelling of the story of Mozart and Antonio Salieri. The film was internationally acclaimed and won eight Oscars, including Best Picture and Best Director.

Because I don’t want to miss even a minute of the conversation that I imagine will focus on the roles of science, politics and the arts in the time of pandemic, I’ve decided to have my paternal grandmother cook a Bohemian meal.

It will include chopped liver, dill cucumbers in sour cream, roast duck with plum gravy, parslied potatoes, sauerkraut and bread dumplings. I’ll be pouring a 2015 Joseph Drouhin “Cotes de Beaune.” For dessert, apricot kolacky and slivovitz.

Photography by Courtney A. Liska

Pečená kachna (Bohemian Roast Duck)

1 (5-6#) duck
2 Tbs. kosher salt (more or less)
2 cloves, chopped
2 Tbs. caraway seeds, toasted
1 apple
6-8 ripe plums

Wash and pat dry inside and outside of duck.
Cut wing tips off, as well as any excess fatty skin around the neck and from the cavity.
Pierce the duck fat all over with a fork, but do not pierce the meat.
Liberally salt exterior and interior of duck.
Let rest 24 hours on a rack unwrapped in your refrigerator.
Take the duck out of the fridge and let come to room temperature.
Rub with garlic and sprinkle with caraway, inside and out.
Slice the apple and place inside the cavity.
Place duck breast-side down in a roasting pan with a lid and cover.
Heat oven to 350 F.
Pour a cup water in the bottom of the roasting pan.
Roast duck for one hour, skimming off excess fat.
Turn duck breast-side up and place the plums around the duck.
Continue to roast uncovered for another hour, basting often, or until an instant-read thermometer inserted into the thigh registers 150 F and the skin is golden.
Remove from oven and allow it to rest 10 minutes before carving.
Use the pan drippings and the plums to make gravy. Strain before serving.

We have been burying the dead since the dawn of civilization.

It is a ritual that offers closure, pays respect to families, celebrates life in countless ways and, to some, completes the circle of life by returning bodies to the soil. There is a great history of these final acts, with varied traditions defined by a host of cultures. In older times, for instance, the dead frequently were buried with a favorite tool or perhaps a prized possession that would offer future generations a glimpse into a long-ago past.

For now, because of the Covid-19 that is rampaging across our country, leaving thousands in its wake, burials are on hold, mostly due to prohibitions against gatherings.

Earlier this week, Geri’s father’s girlfriend of some thirty years died in Queens, New York, the center of the epicenter of this virus. Tommy and Pauline never married because his Roman Catholic beliefs kept him from acknowledging the divorce Geri’s mother achieved without his consent.

Pauline was an Italian woman from a large family. She had a large family of her own, created with a husband known for his abuse. Tommy was quiet, supportive and loving in his way. He protected her.

New York is on lock-down and there will be no funeral, no gathering of family and friends and neighbors. No Chianti wine will be poured into plastic cups. Tray-after-tray of lasagna, garlic bread, antipasti, or even Pauline’s famous—and delicious—baked ziti will not be set on a crowded table. Her priest won’t be there and there will be nobody standing around in a cramped living room filled with memories and the lingering aromas of a million meals. For now, the stories that need telling won’t be told. Any expression of love or respect for a life well lived will be silent. There will be no laughter to cut through the tears, no prayers to offer solace to the faithful.

There should have been a service of celebration, an interment and a reception. There should have been ricotta cheesecake and cannoli and melt-in-your mouth brutti ma buoni, those ugly-but-good cookies.

As it is, considering the strains placed on almost every needed service in New York, it’s not even known for sure what will become of her remains, or if there even will be a casket to hold them. On a normal New York City day, one hundred or so die. These past few weeks have seen that number times six or seven or eight. Maybe more.

Refrigerated trucks and cargo containers are lined up outside New York City hospitals to house the dead. They’ve run out of truck space and are creating mass burial sites in city parks. Burial, some believe, contains and kills whatever might have caused a death. There might be a sense of urgency to this task.

My wife is distraught over not just Pauline’s death but that now she has no family left to call. Thus is the nature of growing older. A sibling’s death, a parent’s or friend’s, is a cruel reminder of our own mortality. Geri’s remaining sibling died several weeks ago. She seeks closure on at least two fronts.

Closer to home, a longtime friend of ours passed away Wednesday morning.

Peter Bowen was a brilliant writer the New York Times once called “Thoreau in Big-Sky Country.” He wrote it off as so much nonsense, but he was nevertheless pleased by a wider recognition of his craft and artistry. Or so I suspect. He’d grumble when he walked into the Owl and a small chorus would announce, “Thoreau!”

The Owl—once a hole-in-the-wall tavern with torn bar stools and nicotine stained walls—was where we first met in 1993. He was one of the horde of writers who saw the place as a second home, even during arduous bouts with sobriety. We’d gather there late on weekday afternoons and exchange stories and lies and idle chatter for an hour or two.

Bowen was adopted by a couple who would migrate through Indiana and Colorado to Bozeman, Montana, arriving there in the mid-’50s. Peter would have been ten-years-old, or so. It was there that his father taught at Montana State College and it was there that Peter devised a life for himself that seemed at times unfathomable. To hear his stories over coffee or cocktails was to be transported to a world of excitement and adventure that few could ever imagine.

His manner was brusque; his appearance, generally unkempt—a long scraggly beard, uncombed hair, a ruddy complexion. He presented a picture of another time. He fit perfectly the picture of somebody who had guided fishermen and hunters, bar-tended, wrangled, ranched and irrigated, worked in construction, flipped burgers, and gigged frogs in his youth to supply Bozeman’s biology classes with specimens for dissection.

As a boy, his adventures ended when the sun set. Perhaps. At some point then, he’d stare down at a blank sheet of paper in the platen of a portable typewriter and proceed to create a world that would one day fascinate—no, mesmerize—the reader. It was the first step in a career focused on stringing words together to reveal the nature of man.

We all have stories; Peter listened like a conservatory student and then told the stories with precision and a concertized flair—an improvised cadenza that soared to a coda of promised finality. Some might of considered it a gift.

He thought it a craft, not unlike the cabinetry he built.

He toiled, for the most part, in the mystery genre. It suited him well. He was plot-driven, but was equally interested in character. His protagonists were much like Peter, complex and colorful. He was honest to a fault, knowing full well that mere facts don’t necessarily reveal truth. His stories were truthful.

Peter came across as gruff. He tried to reconcile an Old West with the New, and personified the imagery in both his persona and his work. For all his gruffness though, he had a big heart and was kind and thoughtful, loving and considerate. His attitude toward children was not unlike W.C. Fields, but he doted on ours. He was an exceptional judge of character, once noting that a dog of ours he once tended was awaiting a limousine ride for an appearance on “Beavis and Butthead.”

His laugh was a raspy, staccato exhalation.

Peter was a masterful, prolific storyteller. He was not a patient man and he could interrupt another’s story with an ending that was more to his liking, or perhaps just to move it along. He was insistently laid back in demeanor, and always seemed in a hurry to walk away slowly.

I used to see him almost every day as he’d step out of the door of Sax & Fryer. He’d stop, light one of his hand-rolled cigarettes, push his sunglasses on, and look up and down Callender Street before deciding which direction to go. He’d amble away then, lost in the thoughts that guided a life both on and off the page.

My father-in-law met Peter at the Owl one long-ago day. Tommy had grown up in Ireland reading fanciful novels about the American west. Peter seemed to embody that spirit and to that Tommy seemed happy to raise his screwdriver to Peter’s club soda.

The irascible storyteller seemed pleased.

Photography by Courtney A. Liska

Pauline’s Baked Ziti

As is typical with great Italian home cooks, recipes are something locked in memory. Pauline’s suggest that you cook the ziti following the package directions, probably 8-10 minutes. One then should mix the cooked pasta with a rich marinara sauce. One then adds ricotta and mozzarella cheese to the mix. Finally, one adds sliced Italian sausage—spicy or sweet, your call—and meatballs. This masterpiece of an Italian casserole is then baked, covered, for 40 minutes at 350°. Uncover and return to oven for another five minutes to crisp the top.

Meatballs

1# ground beef
2 eggs
Salt and pepper
1/4 cup finely chopped flat-leaf parsley
1-1/2 Tbs. pecorino-romano cheese
1/4 cup chicken broth
1 slice of stale bread, crumbled

Mix ingredients. Form into balls or ovals. Fry in vegetable oil.

There seems to be an untoward urgency to get through what we, as a nation, are enduring. Patience, it’s been noted, is a virtue, but virtue seems in short supply. Social media is full of complaints of boredom and loneliness, perhaps spurred by the President’s own impatience with a flagging economy—a concern he seems more troubled by than any concern for the thousands of Americans suffering and dying of COVID-19.

There is probably nobody alive who has any recollection of the Spanish Flu of 1918 that so devastated the world’s population. The stories told about that pandemic seem more focused on the numbers of its quick spread and the casualties left in its wake than the pain and suffering of those who survived it.

But a lot has transpired in the intervening 102 years. We’ve become a smaller world with a larger population. We’re in constant touch with people we don’t know. We spend more time on Facebook than we do visiting across the fence with our neighbors. Our businesses operate on a world stage to such an extent that cultural practices and traditions have been altered to serve commerce. World travel is a given for many people. We’re as likely to make a restaurant recommendation in some small burg in France as we are in our own hometowns.

We spend more time watching television than we do reading. News from around the world arrives at a record pace—with many of its consumers not seeming to care about its origin or veracity. Information is gobbled up without much thought or reflection and is then passed on to audiences of similar political views. Or it is manipulated to be used to inflame the anger of those we oppose. There was a time when a rolled-up paper arrived on your doorstep and families shared pages devoted to world, national and local news; sports; home and garden; crossword puzzles; opinion and letters.

There is at least one generation that has no idea what the “funny papers” are.

I believe that COVID-19 will change the world immeasurably, definitively on many levels. In reality, it already has.

Each of us is likely soon to know a victim of the virus, which personalizes it to a painful level. The tears we shed for strangers on the evening news will, in time, be shed for family members, neighbors and distant friends. Perhaps because of our government’s failure to respond in a timely manner, it can be assumed that we are far from the virus’s peak. Dr. Anthony Fauci has talked in the range of hundreds of thousands falling to this disease. Some predictions run into the millions.

As a nation, we are understaffed, under-equipped and underfunded to deal with anything of this catastrophic nature.

Trump balked at $1 billion for ventilators, yet has stated that he will ignore Congressional restrictions of his personal use of the monies, and is promising the airline industry $70 billion. There are many who believe politics should be left out of any pandemic discussions. It’s not going to happen. It can’t happen. Important, relevant decisions are needed from our governing agencies, our elected officials. Yet given that charge, appropriations that seem downright frivolous or self-serving have been written into a package that sorta-maybe will give American adults a taxable $1,200. The Dems and the Repubs seem to agree only that each member of their cabal deserves a raise. Really?

Steven Mnuchin, Trump’s secretary of the treasury, is a former hedge fund manager who believes that the stipend is enough to provide financial security for a family for four months. Again. Really? His contempt for Americans is astonishing, especially since he probably spends that on a business lunch that—Oh, shock!—he likely bills back to the Treasury for reimbursement. (I humbly suggest he relinquish his table at Bistro Français and sit on a curb with a paltry sandwich and talk to the homeless veterans who have no voice.)

Mnuchin’s actions are the standard operating procedure for the boys in that club and, to paraphrase George Carlin, you and me, we ain’t members of that club. We weren’t invited.

The fact that Trump doesn’t seem to have an ounce of sympathy or compassion for the American people whose suffering could have been lessened had his Administration been paying closer attention, doesn’t stop him from being a cheerleader for economic recovery—key to his re-election, which is foremost in his feeble mind. The President’s behavior is so abhorrent in the face of such tragedy as to be almost unbelievable. He plays to his base, urging its evangelical clergy to defy common sense and conduct church services. At heart he has nothing more than a country club mentality whose affluence dictates an I-got-mine attitude. Screw the rest of us.

In dealing with what is the most horrific event since 9/11, he routinely attacked the press and claimed the pandemic to be a hoax foisted onto the world by the Democratic party. Then he, in all his worldly wisdom, said that this blip on the medical radar would miraculously disappear after the 15th person contracted the disease. In the meantime, he and his minions tried to blame the Democrats for Trump’s impeachment that kept him distracted from the rigors of his gilded office. Apparently he was not distracted enough to keep him from hosting his insipid “aren’t-I-great” rallies, fund-raising parties, and his taxpayer-funded golf trips.

Despite his not anticipating the Coronavirus nor initially being even responsive to it, he had already dismantled an agency his predecessor had in place that was prepared to both detect and respond. Trump’s pathetic hatred for President Obama reveals not only his racism, but his pathological denial of anything approaching truth, let alone justice, and may result in thousands of unnecessary deaths.

After insisting that he knew COVID-19 was a pandemic from the get-go, Trump seemed eager to add insult to injury by naming his son-in-law to lead the troops into battle against the plague. Jared Kushner, whose arrogance is only surpassed by his ignorance, isn’t fit to carry Anthony Fauci’s stethoscope. We can only hope his incompetence doesn’t lead to the same failing result as his so-called Middle East peace. J. William Fulbright would have had a field day analyzing this mess, this disturbing marriage of arrogance to power.

Geri and I have different approaches to many things and the current crisis is no exception. I get angry, perhaps to mask my own fear of contracting the disease, and I seem always to remain skeptical, if not downright pessimistic. Geri weeps for the stricken and in her grieving maintains a bright optimism as she tries to find a plausible reason for the suffering. Rather than look to some supernatural force in this instance, she is suggesting that this virus is earth’s immune system at work.

She points to the fact that carbon emissions have been remarkably reduced—the sky and the air we breathe benefiting the most. While that bodes well for the momentary delay of the increase of global temperatures, Geri is most pleased that there are dolphins in the waterways of Venice, Italy. They are there after only a few weeks of the cessation of polluting factors in those famed canals. I think that is terrific.

Unfortunately for us, the powers-that-be don’t give a Tinker’s damn about dolphins or blue skies. In fact, they even deny the very science that is proving us to be our own worst enemy.

Iain M. Banks, a Scottish author and essayist, made this observation in his 1993 novel, Complicity: “The point is, there is no feasible excuse for what we are, for what we have made of ourselves. We have chosen to put profits before people, money before morality, dividends before decency, fanaticism before fairness, and our own trivial comforts before the unspeakable agonies of others.”

A certain disconnect that seems pertinent was explored by Albert Camus in his 1947 novel, The Plague. In it, the rich and the poor are severely separated by circumstance. Both share a desire to survive, but the privileged have the wherewithal to do so.

I feel fortunate to live in a town that’s small enough to have a real sense of community. Differences in this dot on the map melt in the presence of need. We have barely noticeable class divisions. We depend on each other for goods and services, friendships and goodwill. We drink together in our bars and sit next to each other for the plays produced by a talented cast of local actors at our two theaters. It seems that not a day goes by that somebody isn’t asking for help for somebody else. We tend to oblige as we can, opening our wallets to pull out a five or a twenty. A website, Livingston Fights the Coronavirus, was created within days of the initial outbreak to help deal with the vagaries of the pandemic. It offers advice, resources, alerts, solace and even a Zoom class in baking focaccia.

But we are hurting as a nation, as a people. Some have lost their jobs, their livelihoods, their sense of a secure future. Hopes are being put on the back burner as we struggle just to survive. There are businesses in each of our towns that may never again open their doors, neighborhood restaurants that lack the resources to continue in their quests to offer alternatives to the cash-rich chains. I fear we may become accustomed to our isolation and not emerge to even shop as we once did. We may be allowing ourselves to become prisoners of Amazon.

Tapping into my wife’s optimism, I hope to see our humanity triumph over adversity. Our social distancing will lead—someday soon, I hope—to more ardent nearness. Maybe this imposed lack of human interaction will lead to a deeper understanding of each other, our communities and our nation.

We might even discover that our helping each other in this time of crisis might translate into a universal practice that does not play second fiddle to greed and is not motivated by crisis.

Illustration by Michelangelo and Courtney A. Liska

A Recipe for the Sequestered

Stay home. Read. Surf the internet. Bake cookies and/or bread. Do crossword puzzles. Write a poem. Watch your favorite movie over and over. Call an old friend. Make mac ‘n cheese or your mother’s meatloaf. Clean under the kitchen sink. Tell your children stories about your grandparents. Wash your hands frequently. Design the garden you need to plant in the coming weeks. Organize a junk drawer. Find something to laugh about. Apologize for something you wish you hadn’t said. Tell somebody you love them.

I learned at a very young age to never say aloud, “I’m bored.”

“I’ll give you ‘I’m bored’,” my father would say, his syntax always a challenge. He’d then assign me additional chores to help pass the time.

While I’m sure there are experts on the subject of boredom who, given an audience, could demonstrate exactly what boredom is, I’m content with my own notion that boredom is less about having nothing to do than just being weary of doing the same thing. Boredom is an active state, accompanied by feelings of lethargy and dissatisfaction. Ennui is its five-letter synonym frequently found in crossword puzzles. It is French and sounds quite dramatic if spoken in an exhalation and with a casual brushing back of one’s hair from the brow. Try it. It’s fun.

To stave off boredom for fear that Dad will come back from the dead and make me clean the garage, I’ve kept a journal of our self-quarantine.

Day 1: Didn’t leave the house. Didn’t know this is how shelter-in-place works, but Geri said it was. I know better than to argue. The day seemed normal enough. Read, did a couple of crossword puzzles, monitored the situation in Washington—resisting the urge to throw things at the screen images of Trump. Toilet paper inventory good at five spare rolls of 2-ply.

Made some garlicky sausages with mashed potatoes. Watched missed episodes of My Mother, the Car. To bed by 1:30 a.m.

Day 2: After being particularly sedentary yesterday, today I walked around the deck for about 10 minutes. Felt great, until I “hit the wall” at minute “8.” After a brief break, I finished the last two minutes. Plopped onto the couch to continue my reading of Plato’s Republic, which I read in college. In Greek, it’s much easier to detect the nuances of his dialogue and to see just how much is lost in translation. Watched Zorba the Greek.

Felt inspired in the kitchen: σπανακόπιτα, καρολίνα, and, of course, πλακοῦς. Opa!

Day 3: This isolation thing has me inspecting the house more than usual. It made me ponder the notion of dust and all of its many properties and how it has a remarkable ability to spread evenly across horizontal surfaces. I wonder if a little dust isn’t perhaps good for the soul. It is, after all, what we’re supposed to return to, after a quick stop at being ashes. I think that’s the order. Listened to Mozart’s Requiem in D minor until Geri got home. She was uninterested in hearing any of my musings about dust and said I was blocking her view of Inside Edition. Listened to Mahler’s Symphony No.2, Resurrection. It cheered me up.

Made an interesting “survivalist” dinner from one can each of beets, tuna fish, and pickled asparagus. Geri opted for a bag of Cheetos from her private stash.

Day 4: Addressed the dust situation again. Geri suggested I address the “situation” (her quotes) with a moist rag. Or maybe it was a damp rag? Is there a difference? I started on the highest shelf in the living room and found a book that I’d forgotten we had: “100,000 Names for Your Baby.” That’s a lot of names to ponder, even if you exclude the chapter on Texas towns that have become popular names for boys. I told Geri how I’d spent the day and asked her if she thought the names we had chosen for our two babies were good enough. You know? In retrospect. She took the book away from me.

There was plenty of leftover beets, tuna fish and pickled asparagus. Geri had a PB&J and chose to eat it in a different room, while I listened to Thelonious Monk’s Straight, No Chaser.

Day 5: Discovered three more books of baby names. Quit dusting. I tightened the handles on four saucepans. I might be obsessing. Not sure. Our TP supply seems adequate. I noticed that Geri’s hair seems to be getting whiter. Must be the light.

Day 6: Ate half-a-cantaloupe and played 13 games of computer solitaire. I had a friend tell me that he didn’t like computer solitaire because you can’t cheat. I made an espresso while I wondered what the point of cheating is in a game one plays alone. Are you going to be somehow rewarded? And if your cheating is discovered are you stripped of some imaginary title and humiliated like Lance Armstrong? Huh, what then? And then I tried to remember when I learned to play solitaire and who taught me. I have no such recollections. Maybe we’re born with solitaire as a genetic imprint.

Made chicken stock and watched five back-to-back episodes of “Chicago P.D.”

Day 7: The days seem to just rush by. Watched CNN while I untangled the 37 device chargers I found in a kitchen drawer. I tried to recall 37 devices we might have owned over the years but couldn’t get further than the four I’ve had. Because they were abandoned in a drawer, I thought they had outlived their usefulness, but why take chances? I neatly rolled each cord and secured each with rubber bands and put them back in the drawer.

Made matzoh balls for the soup I made on Day 6. They were delicious. I told Geri about my day with the tangled chargers. She looked at me blankly and said, “Who cares?”

Day 8: Bach’s Goldberg Variations (all thirty of them) accompanied my researching Israeli newspapers to discover if the crossword puzzles are in Hebrew, meaning that the “across” clues would read right to left. I once bought a food magazine in Paris, intending to read it on the long flight home. It was in French and I don’t read French, which only made the flight seem longer, especially when I tried to do the crossword puzzle.

Finally finished off the beets, tuna fish and pickled asparagus. You might wonder why I say “tuna fish” and not just “tuna.” I wonder that, too. It might be a cultural thing. Anyway, Geri had nachos.

Day 9: My daughter, who seems happy enough with the name we gave her, has been doing our grocery shopping for us—as well as for others—during this merciless incarceration. This is a particularly kind and wonderful thing for her to do. She dresses in very funny costumes as she performs her new-found duties. I laugh at her impersonations, but last week’s portrayal of the Grim Reaper was perhaps a bit much. Far be it from me to complain, but she forgot the kosher dill pickles. For much of my life, pickles and sauerkraut were my tribe’s staffs of life. We like pickles so much that we even wrap them in thinly pounded round steak and serve them with gravy, sauerkraut and bread dumplings (knedlíky a zelí) on Passover.

Finished the matzoh-ball soup. A pickle would have been nice.

Day 10: It’s Monday. I haven’t juggled in a long time, so I found three tennis balls and discovered that I’ve still got it. I cross juggle. Circular juggling is not for the faint-of-heart. Practiced my origami skills then, but I still can’t seem to get past the paper airplane stage. At least they fly. Practiced some charade moves in the bathroom mirror. Noticed the mirror needs cleaning. Have no idea where the Windex might be. An e-mail suggested that Tuesday coffee with Stephen is postponed until, possibly, October. Tried to cheer myself up with Rilke’s Book of Hours. Backfired.

Roasted a chicken for dinner while my Monday with Mel took place via telephone. Carrots with cumin and orange are a simple pleasure. So is a phone call that picks right up from it ended two months ago.

Day 11: Sent an e-mail to Texas Lt. Governor Dan Patrick thanking him for his “Do the Right Thing by Your Grandchildren and Just Die Already” economic relief program. I assured him that I would volunteer to do the right thing as soon as he does. Spent almost an hour wondering why anybody could possibly care what Britney Spears thinks about wealth redistribution. TP inventory still good.

Hamburgers tonight, with lots of thyme and a brandy-mustard-cream sauce. Oven-baked bistro fries. Geri likes almost anything with gravy.

Day 12: Forwarded a copy of yesterday’s e-mail to Brit Hume, he of Fox News, who wants most of my age group to die to save Wall Street. Made him the same offer as Dan’s, adding a common suggestion that begins with “Go” and ends with “Yourself.” The line’s getting longer.

Made corn chowder. Used frozen corn-on-the-cob and saved the cobs. These are uncertain times.

Day 13: Called a friend in New York who I haven’t seen or talked to in almost 50 years. He said, “What’s new?” I hung up. Who’s got time for that? Thought about it all day. Exhausted. Baseball should have started today. Bummer. Watched Fear Strikes Out. Didn’t help. Might have made things worse.

Hot dogs for dinner—Chicago style, of course.

Day 14: Couldn’t find my lace-up work boots. Geri asked, “Why do you need them? You don’t work.” Went back to Plato. Listened to music from the Byzantine era.

Made Sicilian meat sauce for pasta. Always use imported pasta that has been extruded through bronze dies. Coarser texture holds more sauce.

Day 15: Watched Outbreak, the 1995 medical thriller starring Dustin Hoffman. Edge-of-your-seat entertainment that I certainly didn’t need to watch in the time of Covid-19. Think I’ll pass on Contagion and Flatliners. Maybe something funny. “Blazing Saddles.”

Beans for dinner, then. TP inventory still good.

Photography by Courtney A. Liska

Rouladen

8 thin slices of top round of beef, each measuring 4 x 6 inches
1 ½ Tbs. Colman’s mustard
4 kosher dill pickle spears
2 tsps. dried marjoram
Freshly ground pepper to taste
1 Tbs. oil
½ cup finely chopped onion
½ cup finely chopped carrots
⅔ cup finely chopped celery
1 Tbs. flour
⅓ cup dry white wine
1 ¼ cups beef broth
¼ tsp. dried thyme
1 bay leaf

Pound slices of meat to ¼-inch thickness.
Brush top of each slice with mustard. Cut each pickle spear crosswise in half. Place spear in center of each slice. Sprinkle with marjoram. Fold over ends of each slice toward center. Fold other ends over to enclose pickles. Tie each roll with string. Sprinkle with black pepper.
Heat butter in casserole or Dutch oven and add beef rolls. Cook, turning as necessary, until nicely browned all over, 8 to 10 minutes. Remove beef rolls.
To the casserole add onion, carrots and celery. Cook, stirring, until wilted.
Sprinkle with flour and stir with wire whisk to blend. Add wine, stirring rapidly with whisk. Stir in broth. Add thyme and bay leaf. Return meat rolls to casserole. Cover and let simmer 1 hour.
Serve with sauce spooned over.

As pestilence devours the earth, the ashen-orange Antichrist rides his pale horse in the apocalypse—accompanied by the Manny, Moe and Jack of his administration—where he discovers that many Americans hoard toilet paper as if the latest plague to beset mankind is an acute diarrhea that may last a fortnight or two.

Unfortunately, that is about all he knows about a crisis he believed was a hoax perpetrated by a leftist media just three weeks ago. What he also understands is that many of his friends are losing their shirts in the stock market. For them, their bankers, the airlines and Fox News, he is empathetic and willing to offer expensive cash bailouts or, in the case of Fox, continued bribery payments.

Why, I wonder, if the Fed has dropped interest rates to near-zero levels, don’t the big boys put up some collateral and borrow what they need to get back on their industrial feet? Oh…is it because one doesn’t have to pay back bailouts? Free money? Socialism for the rich.

For those who actually work for a living—waiting tables, digging ditches, running small businesses, tending bar, playing music, cleaning hotel rooms, picking up trash—his attitude initially was summed up in the oft-used expression, “Go piss up a rope.”

His advisers then told him that he could buy re-election by giving every adult citizen $1,000—or perhaps a tad more—of their own money. (Too bad Bloomberg hadn’t thought of this.) Trump’s base, which seems to wallow in its collective lack of education, has characterized Bernie Sanders as a communist nut yet sees this cash bailout as being the very foundation of capitalism. When Andrew Wang, who I believe should be named Secretary of the Future, suggested a monthly stipend, the super-rich went ape while the Orange Menace’s base tried to figure out how much cheap beer $1,000 would buy every month. It also now views the racist Twit-in-Chief as a fair-minded humanitarian whose spiteful attitudes towards non-whites have been magically erased by a hands-on transformation from Billy Graham’s moronic son.

And then I heard one of the condescending henchmen say how Americans need the $1,000 to get by for the next two or three months. Really? What world does he live in?

It’s been more than a week since I’ve ventured out of the house. That’s not exactly true. I’ve been to the doctor; and the liquor store where my friend brings my Scotch to my car. It’s been about 10 days since I last went to the grocery store. Because I typically go to the market every day, I miss it as an activity that provides mild entertainment, minimal exercise, and a chance to visit with some of my friends who work there and the neighbors I run into.

It’s a sacrifice I’m willing to make because I don’t want to get sick, nor do I wish to make others sick by spreading specific forms of germs that I may or may not have. While I have been tested (negative for the virus I learned just last night), many others can’t because of a shortage of test materials the pandemic task force failed to order. Oh, that can’t be right. That tiny branch of the government was dismantled by his Orangeness so the funds could be given to Walmart’s poverty-stricken owners. Must be somebody else’s fault.

Anyway, my not spreading disease just seems like the right and kind thing to do. Social distancing is what I’ll practice unless Astrud Gilberto wants to give me bossa nova dance lessons.

Stockpiling of food stores to last a week or two, although that time frame could stretch much longer, seems like the prudent thing to do. Although we’re always prepared at our house for a couple of weeks of really odd meals should the need arise—mostly due to weather—I wish I had picked up a few extra items for the larder. Oh, well…

I’ve admitted in this space before that I like to look into the shopping carts of others to see what they are buying. It amuses me, sometimes, and frequently challenges me to imagine what kind of meals they might be making. It’s also fun to notice body types and see how they reflect their grocery orders.

But back to toilet paper. While the purchase of mass numbers of rolls seems to have ebbed, many are now turning to arming themselves. I’ve seen several pictures of lines of people awaiting entry to gun shops in various parts of the country.

I’m not sure why, although I’m pretty sure it has something to do with an “I-got-mine” mentality that some folks have adopted since Ronald Reagan decided government should favor the rich while hoodwinking the poor.

But maybe they are just imbecilic gun nuts with some vague understanding of the Second Amendment who are using this crisis as an excuse to buy more weapons. Or are they seeking to protect the caches of toilet paper they’ve rightfully hoarded? Are they actually willing to shoot somebody who wants a clean bottom? Or maybe they just want to retaliate in a meaningful way should somebody not sneeze into a tissue or elbow.

And then I read somebody’s expression of this as “a response to the coming of martial law, because Montanans will shoot back.” I can assure you that I will not. Ironically, those most likely to oppose martial law with violence are those most likely to have supported the man who most likely would impose it.

Go figure.

One of the things I noticed at the grocery store 10 days ago—other than the run on toilet paper—was that people were shopping without lists. They were filling their carts and baskets willy-nilly with items whose main virtue was that they weren’t perishable.

At checkout, a gentleman in front of me had full cases of canned peas, corn, green beans, carrots and one pound of ground pork. I can’t even begin to imagine what he was planning to make.

I inspected the dried or powdered milk option. Has anybody ever used such a thing? And why? The first box I picked up had a “best used by” date from 1967, which even pre-dates the concept of low fat. Instant potatoes seem to be a thing, also, for no reason I can imagine.

Judging by many of the carts I peered into, Jell-O and Oreos seem to be the preferred dessert for Armageddon—that “great day of God, the Almighty, in which He pours out their just and holy wrath against those unrepentant sinners led by Satan.” I have absolutely no idea what in the hell that means, but it sounded sufficiently ominous for me to throw caution to the wind and place two packages of instant pudding into my basket.

I saw one lady put eight loaves of plain-wrap generic white bread in her cart. At $3.29 a loaf, each loaded with no fewer than 13 ingredients nobody can pronounce without a degree in chemistry, she would save a small fortune by buying some flour and yeast and making her own bread. I know it’s a lot of work blah, blah, blah…but if nobody is allowed to leave their homes unless they’re bleeding from their eyes, what the hell else is there to do?

Unlike store-bought bread, which stays soft and rubbery with no signs of mold for up to a decade, milk turns sour pretty quickly. One shopper I noticed had 12 gallons of 2% milk, each with an expiration date marked for three days later. Unless she’s running an orphanage, there’s going to be a lot of crying over spoiled milk.

Of course, she might be teaming up with the lady who had a cart load of cereal that are purposely displayed at eye-level of a kid stuck in that fold-down part of the shopping cart. If the kids are sequestered at home, exactly how much sugar do you want to give them before you’ve had your second cup of coffee?

And what’s up with buying cases of bottled water? In all of my reading about Covid-19, I’ve not noticed anything about our water supply being threatened. Besides that, based on the amount of toilet paper being hoarded, everybody seems to be confident the toilets will flush. When we lived in earthquake-prone Los Angeles, we kept a case or two of bottled water because it made sense. We never knew which room we should keep it in, however. The unpredictable nature of earthquakes made it virtually impossible to know which part of the house might collapse, possibly burying our water supply.

One person I know observed that a lot of folks are buying up toilet paper and bottled water but are forgetting to buy food. He has invested a small fortune in canned beans—cannellini, black, kidney, navy, great northern—as well as six cans of every variety of Bush’s baked beans. He’s on a high-protein diet, but his real motivation is to be able to trade beans for toilet paper, should the need arise.

I think his investment will out-perform the Dow.

Photography by Courtney A. Liska

Mashed Potatoes

This is a time for comfort food if ever there was one, and nothing says comfort better than mashed potatoes. This is my favorite recipe and it goes perfectly with baked ham or garlicky sausages.

2 pounds Yukon Gold or Russet potatoes, peeled and diced
Kosher salt
4 Tbs. unsalted butter
4 oz. crème fraîche
1/2 C. whole milk
2 tsp. Dijon mustard
2 tsp. whole-grain or coarse mustard
1 tsp. dry mustard
Freshly ground black pepper, to taste
Fresh parsley, for garnish

Put the potatoes in a large saucepan with 1 tablespoon of salt and enough water to cover. Bring to a boil and simmer for 20 to 25 minutes, until the potatoes are very tender. Drain the potatoes in a colander and return them to the saucepan. Add the butter, crème fraîche, milk, Dijon mustard, whole-grain mustard, dry mustard, 1 tablespoon salt, and the pepper and beat the potatoes until very smooth and creamy.
Sprinkle with fresh chopped parsley and serve.