I want you to get up right now, sit up, go to your windows, open them and stick your head out and yell - 'I'm as mad as hell and I'm not going to take this anymore!' Things have got to change. But first, you've gotta get mad!... You've got to say, 'I'm as mad as hell, and I'm not going to take this anymore!' Then we'll figure out what to do about the depression and the inflation and the oil crisis. But first get up out of your chairs, open the window, stick your head out, and yell, and say it: "I'M AS MAD AS HELL, AND I'M NOT GOING TO TAKE THIS ANYMORE!"
I mean, not that I have anything against puff paste - other than I think it's often used as a misguided replacement for pie crust and is better suited to palmiers and vol-au-vents - but um, Good Wives? What the hell is a good wife?
Good: a general term of approval or commendation, meaning "as it should be" or "better than average"
Wife: 1) a woman, 2) a married woman; specif., a woman in her relationship to her husband
I am certainly a better than average woman, but if the puff paste in my freezer is called Good Wives, is that not attempting to replace me? Is that not suggesting that I am not a better than average woman?
Not content with spewing venom at my good husband, I looked up the brand on the intertubes:
In 1979, the two wives who started making these hors d’oeuvres in their homes thought the name "Good Wives" would be appropriate and fun. "Good Wife" was a term applied to a married Puritan woman, implying industry and integrity.
Okay. Puritans. Gauntlet thrown.
Goodwife: a wife or a mistress of a household" or "a title equivalent to Mrs., applied to a woman ranking below a lady
You know what? Those women had it hard. Housekeeping was arduous, childbearing was dangerous, church going was de rigueur. "A married woman in early New England was simultaneously a housewife, a deputy husband, a consort, a mother, a mistress, a neighbor, and a Christian. On the war-torn frontier, she might also become a heroine". She was powerful, she was burdened. If her ordinary honorific was Goodwife, so be it, and the more power to her.
So I've simmered down, and I'm no longer offended by the poor innocent puff paste. But it took a couple of hundred pages for me to get there.
NOTE: All definitions in italics are from the Webster's New World Dictionary, Second College Edition, ©1970
I can't put a finger on why I love this image so. Is it the chicken feet? The magical triangles emanating from her fingertips? The bird on her head (which I like to think is a magpie)? Was I Lithuanian in another life?
In my kitchen, I have my mother's mortar & pestle. Where she got it, I don't know - maybe family, maybe a flea market. But it's cast iron, with shapely mortar well suited to the hand, and a barbell-shaped double-ended pestle. Grinding spices in it sets up an industrial musical hum, and I think of Baba Yaga beating her pestle against her mortar - "fly faster!" she says, "we've children to eat!"Say it with me now: Fuck Cancer.
How objects are handed on is all about story-telling. I am giving you this because I love you. Or because it was given to me. Because I bought it somewhere special. Because you will care for it. Because it will complicate your life. Because it will make someone else envious. There is no easy story in legacy. What is remembered and what is forgotten? (p. 17)
Objects have always been carried, sold, bartered, stolen, retrieved and lost. People have always given gifts. It is how you tell their stories that matters. (p. 348)
I sit here writing at the desk that was my mother's, and before that, in my father's family. It's an Eastlake cylinder front desk, with burled insets, and a glass-fronted bookcase on top, and a cornice atop that which is missing its finials - and it dates to around the time in which The Hare with Amber Eyes begins. How do I tell its story? What are the important parts? When was it built? Who was the first owner? Who else has sat in front of it, tucked notes in its cubbyholes, fiddled with its hardware?
Tucked in one of its little drawers is a scrap of paper ripped out of a shelter magazine. Once upon a time, before Antiques Roadshow, you could send in a picture of your antique what-have-you and get an expert opinion on its provenance. Someone, not my mother, because it isn't this desk, had asked about a similar desk; my mother, pre-Evernote, clipped the column as an aide-mémoire, and tucked it in its twin.
I don't know who bought this desk, but it's likely - given its age - that it was my great-grandfather. At the time that my grandfather was born, in 1900, the family was living in a white, shingled farmhouse. My grandfather went to college, got married, moved to a small house in the same town, and later - after his father died in 1933 - moved back into that family house with his wife and older children. At some point, the Eastlake desk was moved into storage in the garage attic. Before my great-grandfather died? After? Later, after my parents were married, and after they'd become homeowners in the early 1960s, my mother - in need of things with which to furnish their house - discovered the desk and convinced my father and his brothers to lower it down from the attic by block and tackle. She refinished it, and it stood in the dining room of their first house, and in the front living room of the house they moved to in 1972.
In 2012, the desk arrived in my living room. Gently, and with the great understanding that we were making an irreversible alteration, my husband drilled several small holes in the back - allowing me to snake a power cord and ethernet cable through onto the desk surface. Built around 1870, it suits my 1920 house and 2013 connectivity, still relevant these many years later.
I tell its story, because it will go on.
As I was reading The Hare with Amber Eyes, I found myself thinking that it was a peculiarly idiosyncratic book, one that wasn't right for everyone - though two different people had recommended it to me, both rather out of the blue. Oddly, though, since I've finished it, I've urged it on a surprising number of people: friends, co-workers, imaginary friends, and family. Maybe it's because it has something for everyone: a little art history, Jews in Vienna in WWII, lovely writing, expats in Tokyo, supple charm, aristocratic bankers in Paris, a family tree. I hope you'll read it too.
| Source | Quantity | Patient’s Cost | Cost Per Day | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| DRUG A | Mail-order pharmacy | 90 | $58.94 | $0.65 |
| Generic | Retail | 31 | $9.22 | $0.30 |
| DRUG A | Mail-order pharmacy | 90 | $400.49 | $4.45 |
| Brand Name | Retail | 31 | $151.31 | $4.88 |
| DRUG B | Mail-order pharmacy | 90 | $101.85 | $1.13 |
| Generic | Retail | 31 | $2.52 | $0.08 |
| DRUG B | Mail-order pharmacy | 90 | $474.12 | $5.27 |
| Brand Name | Retail | 31 | $178.90 | $5.77 |
In fact, it's so much more that I can't see how anyone would actually want to buy their (generic) drugs that way. Besides, even though CVS isn't exactly a local company, buying my drugs at the CVS that's down the road apiece keeps some of my money local, in the form of employee salaries and rent paid.
What is going on here?
