I was asked to teach self-defense to the volunteers who worked at a local community Center. Fights were common between overburdened migrants and refugees and a few women voiced concerns for their safety. After a while, I began to teach self-defense to women in the refugee camp too. The night before my first class, I wondered, would I be doing more harm than good by teaching Muslim women how to kick ass?
As the nation absorbs gripping accounts from lawmakers who sheltered within the U.S. Capitol during the riot, and from the Capitol Police—a lingering trauma remains. If there is a redemptive dimension to this tragedy, it may be that it has brought home the city’s significance in our collective American story.
Slowly, the story our lives emerged. We’d each left home at a young age to escape convention—she left a village in Sweden for a Greek adventure, and I left a small southern town to pursue my writing in New York. Now here we were two independent women in their 70s, wondering about our final acts.
True Confession: I married a man who co-opted my cat and stole my identity as a writer. Darcy, who had earned his nickname for his aristocratic airs, at first refused to sit on my pristine linen couch, saying it was “redolent of dander.” Then when my wizened Maine Coon leapt upon on the bed, he hissed at her like an Old Tom, decreeing that when we lived together, there would be no cats.
Some people feel if you clean out their crap you’re somehow below them. That attitude became more and more prevalent with the tech boom and the rising affluence. Folks were less kind, less sensitive to the people that they hired. And it was kind of like saying, “You’re cleaning our dirt, so you’re dirt.”
Can we travel back in time through a crumb of chocolate cake? Let the tongue open up the imagination, then sit in wonder as a piece of history unfolds — as it did for Proust who conjured up the Belle Epoque while savoring a madeleine? This is a story about a recipe handed down through several generations and about the memories we can recover through the medium of taste.
My mother lived in the past, and when her ideal of the Currier and Ives Christmas didn’t measure up, she was angry and hurt and made our home life miserable. Now I have my own version of a Currier and Ives Christmas—one both satisfying and attainable.
The paintings in Leo Tadek’s home are a memoir of his marriage, his life in Belgium and in Moscow — and they also double as a tour of European history.