Total Mileage: 317
Song of the Day: “Unless It’s Kicks” (Okkervil River)
Book of the Day:
- Jim & Casper Go to Church (Jim Henderson and Matt Casper)
WARNING: THERE IS PRETTY MUCH NO THEOLOGICAL OR CHURCH-RELATED CONTENT IN TODAY'S ENTRY. YOU'VE BEEN WARNED.
Retracing the Steps
Okay, I admit that I treated this afternoon as a bit of a vacation, and I don’t see myself doing this in many of the other cities (okay, maybe Seattle and Chicago), but today was something of a sightseeing tour. I was also feeling ever so slightly pensive and anti-social (perhaps just as part of the recovery from a demanding school year), so I didn’t make an effort to be outgoing as usual while I was looking around. I didn’t try to meet people and find out more about the city. I didn’t pull my usual shtick of getting to know the panhandlers in high-traffic areas. I didn’t try to go into my parents’ old church or meet up with the New Song folks yet. I’ll have tomorrow and Sunday for that. Today was more about unwinding and getting a feel for the place where my parents spent their first few years of marriage. Today was a vicarious trip down memory lane as I wrapped my mind around what it must have been like for two good little Southern newly-weds to find themselves in the midst of a bustling Northern city for three years. I can already imagine my mom reading this and saying, “Oh please, I grew up in Memphis. It’s not like this was the country mouse’s first time in the city,” but still, I grew up in Memphis too, and the size of this city was a little intimidating for me.
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| Jim and Catherine Lewis (present day) |
I’ve been communicating with my parents quite a bit these last two days to compile the list of must-see landmarks from the first years of their marriage, and my mom’s been great about sending me little stories like this:
Sadye's sandwich shop -- not sure of the spelling -- was a stall [in Northeast Market] where Jerry the Sandwich Doctor held court. His schtick was being hurried and rude, like a good Seinfeld character. If you asked him what went on a particular kind of sandwich, it was a mistake you didn't repeat. He would start into a harangue about how you wouldn't write a prescription by asking the pharmacist what was in the medicine: "You say, 'Gimme so many mg of phenobarb and so many mg of...' Now, you tell me. What do you want on your sandwich?" There were postcards stuck on the glass around the stall from all over the world with messages from former Hopkins people saying things like (I remember this one), "Jerry, I've looked all over Stockholm and still haven't found a decent sub!" Rumor had it that Sadye was Jerry's mother's name, but nobody ever asked that I know of. He did have one sandwich that had fixed ingredients: The Watergate. The handmade sign (they were all handmade) advertising the Watergate said it contained American cheese and lots of baloney. I think it was 85 cents. Most of the subs were around a dollar. He also had a hand-written sign that said, "One of our customers said our kosher sub should be called the Hero Israel."
In her own reminiscing about this time in their lives, my mom recently dug up my dad’s old I.D. from his first year at Hopkins and described his expression in the photo as one of absolute terror. To use her exact words, “Dad’s student I.D. picture first year looked deer-in-headlights. Small town boy in the big city!” You see, my dad grew up in Kosciusko, MS (pronounced “kah-zee-ess-koh,” which sounds nothing like the Polish Revolutionary War general for whom the town is named). With less than 10,000 residents as of the 2000 census, Kosciusko isn’t famous for much, but it was the birthplace of Oprah Winfrey and James Meredith, neither of whom my almost-comically-racist grandmother ever really acknowledged. (Hey, don’t give me that look. The woman was born in 1909 and managed to stave off senility for a whole century. Cut her some slack. Sorry, I digress.) My dad grew up in a community and a household that valued rural simplicity, ardent penny-pinching, faith in God, and distrust of the government. Even though my dad has thoroughly acclimated himself to city life, a trace of a folksy accent lingers in his speech, and his enthusiastic hospitality is almost a little overwhelming at times. Bookish might be the most appropriate word to describe my dad. Having spent ample time engrossed in printed media, he has acquired an encyclopedic knowledge base over the years and developed a reading speed matched by only the world’s fastest computer processors. Even though my dad doesn’t exactly come off as rebellious, I occasionally pick up a glimmer of dissension when he talks about religion or politics that leaves me suspecting he might be the source of my overly pronounced anti-authoritarian streak. Then again, my mom has her rebellious moments too.
The daughter of a Memphis surgeon (who is now retired and travels the world, but more on my granddad some other time), my mom grew up walking to school in a time when walking to school in Memphis was a whole lot safer. Like my dad, she attended Mississippi College in Clinton, MS, and put her pun-prone wit to work on the school’s newspaper (where she met and began dating my dad). A math major and physics minor, she’s very much the handyman in our household, handling everything from gardening to electrical wiring. While in Baltimore, she worked for a semester as a teacher at a private Christian school, but that wound up being a rather uncomfortable fit. She once described to me an anti-Darwin poster on proud display in the school, featuring a chimpanzee with the caption, “Our Father?” Yeah, being a scientifically-minded Christian teaching in a private school in the 1970s must have been a blast. She got out of there after just one semester and worked instead for a Hopkins physician named Dr. Seto, answering the phone in his office with a cheery, “Infectious diseases!” Hey, this looks like a good spot for another Baltimore-on-a-budget story:
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| Johns Hopkins |
There was a cheap grocery store named Eddie's just beyond NE Market, and we bought some things there -- like sandwich bread 3 loaves for $1 and Donald Duck frozen orange juice (Y'got used to it) -- but the owner got mad if you pointed out when his merchandise was past the expiration date, which was pretty often. Oh, and about that Kool-Aid you mentioned: We drank an off brand called “Flav-R-Aid.” It was cheaper than Kool-Aid. We weaned ourselves down to 3/4 cup sugar and then 1/2 cup sugar instead of a cup. It was pretty tart, but we called it "Adult Kool-Aid." (I still prefer using less than a cup for Kool-Aid, but it's closer to 3/4.) Cokes were a treat when we could find it for less than a penny an ounce. Not in the budget if it cost more although I occasionally got a small cup of Coke at the hospital cafeteria when I was at work.
Wow, and I thought I was smart for having a Texas 10 card and drinking off-brand sodas. Anyway . . .
My dad graduated college a year before my mom, so he spent his first year at Johns Hopkins med school alone. I tracked down the site of his original apartment, but with that lot’s proximity to Hopkins, it was turned into office space some time ago. On the other side of the hospital was the lot where my parents’ first apartment once stood. They lived there for three years with just the two of them and a cocker spaniel mix named Domino who they had adopted from a mental institution. No, really. I couldn’t make something like that up. The main story I remember about this dog was that my mom had taken her to the beach at some point, and Domino had taken particular pleasure in rolling around in a dead fish that had washed up on shore. The return drive was significantly less pleasant as a result, and the windows of the car stayed down the whole way. Domino was a good dog for my parents during their early years. She journeyed with them to Memphis when my dad started his residency at Baptist Hospital, and she lived to be 18 years old, by which time I had come along and was almost certainly making life a little more difficult for her. As much of a handful as I am now, can you imagine what I must have been like as a toddler? I’m amazed that dog never bit me.
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| Current building on 1915 McElderry lot |
All of this floated into my mind as I drove past 1915 McElderry: the site of my parents’ first apartment. The lot has since been converted into the Believe in Tomorrow Children’s House. It may have been a little bittersweet to drive past these new buildings where my parents’ past once stood, but at the same time, seeing a hospital grow and expand means that more people are being helped, so I’m okay with that. I wanted to park the car so that I could go scope out the rotunda in the medical center with its gigantic statue of Jesus in the center, but apparently, in all that hospital expansion, garages were kind of low on the agenda. I continued on my way elsewhere.
I was driving along Eastern and heading for Ikaros Restaurant when I realized that my route would also take me right past Patterson Park Baptist Church (where my parents used to attend). Amazingly, I noticed a parking space right beside the church, so I pulled in and walked around for a bit. Again, I was feeling just a bit pensive and meditative and solitary, so I didn’t ring the bell at Patterson Park, but I snagged a few pictures of the outside and walked around the neighborhood for a bit. I really like this little community! The area has mostly row houses, but I observed that there was quite a difference from block to block. While gentrified-looking stone facades faced the park itself, the next row back featured prefab, more economical homes, providing a mixture of incomes in the neighborhood. As I walked through the park, I encountered a pretty even distribution of black, white, and Latino residents, and I noticed signs on all the neighborhood businesses that read, “Se habla Espanol!” Patterson Park Baptist has started a Latino ministry to reach out to their increasingly-diverse neighborhood, and I’m starting to wonder if maybe I should have tried to visit them as well. I’ll have to ask Rev. Williams if he’s had any interaction with this community (even though I know that New Song focuses their efforts on Sandtown).
I walked around the park for a while and soaked up the perfect weather. The grass had grown high enough that each gust of wind created ripples over the whole hilly park. Littered around the place were a handful of some of the most bizarre sculptures I’ve ever seen, and I wondered how long they had been there. Since the 70s maybe? A few of them looked strangely familiar, so perhaps I had seen pictures of them at some point as a kid. I couldn’t resist snapping a few pictures, and I went ahead and resigned myself to the fact that my day was rapidly turning into an exercise in photo journalism. I’ll attach them all here. I wound up not stopping at Ikaros due to the difficult traffic and construction around Greektown, but I attempted somewhat unsuccessfully to grab a picture as I drove by. It's not worth posting, so here are the Patterson Park pictures instead:
Man vs. Pastry
On Saturdays Dad went with me to the market if he wasn't working, and we always got a few pastries at a baker's stall for our weekend breakfast. The lady there thought we were such a sweet, cute, young couple she always dropped a couple of extra pastries into our bag -- kind of mini-turnovers with a red jelly filling. (Sure, this story doesn’t exactly relate to Vaccaro’s, but it’s pastries, so close enough!)
It was time for the main culinary event of my day. My parents had insisted that I go to Vaccaro’s in Little Italy and try what they described as the world’s best cannoli. I found a parking space in Little Italy --I know! I’m surprised too!-- and walked a block over to the bakery. It wasn’t exactly what I had expected. My mom had warned me that, while Vaccaro’s might have started out as something of a hole in the wall run by Mr. Jimmy from Palermo, it was now a very serious business operation with multiple locations that shipped their famous cannolis and run cakes all over the place. I had sort of kept my fingers crossed that I would be stumbling into some sort of mom-and-pop bakery anyway, but when I entered Vaccaro’s, I was astonished by the cavernous, art deco dining area before me. Elaborate metal wire chandeliers hung from the ceiling, the walls were lined with mirrors, and Rachel Ray was playing on every one of the bakery’s half dozen flatscreen TVs (appropriate, I guess). I had definitely expected a little cookie counter where I would have to take my cannoli outside and eat it with a plastic fork. Instead, I was escorted to a table, served water in a fancy stemmed glass, and my cannoli was served to me on a hefty white porcelain dinner plate dusted with powdered sugar and chocolate drips. Wow.
It was then that I remembered the description on the menu: “Rich whole milk ricotta cheese with sugar, spices, and cocoa drops . . .” Wait, ricotta? Dude, I haven’t had ricotta cheese since . . . uh oh. While I’ve had a few cream-filled imitation cannolis since the famous Manicotti Intestinal Distress Incident of 2003, this was the first time I was attempting to brave the cheese again. I looked at the mammoth cannoli before me, sizing it up. I looked down at my stomach and knew that this would be a struggle. I figured, worst case scenario, the hospital was right there, and I’m like 80% sure that my school insurance plan still has me covered right now. I dug in.
The taste was exceptional. There was a strange spiciness to it, and I thought that the chef was either working with a brilliant blend of seasonings, or this was a defense mechanism in which my taste buds were rebelling and begging me not to swallow the potentially-hazardous cheese. Even though I still had not eaten lunch, I felt full only halfway through the cannoli. I paused and looked from my fork to the cannoli. I thought about how my parents were no doubt cheering me on back in Memphis. Eat the cannoli, Lewis. Eat the cannoli.
Clean Plate Club. Booyah.
I lurched to my car and headed off to my next destination. Thankfully, I would be driving around town for a bit, hopefully giving my very-full stomach a chance to relax and unknot itself. My stomach rumbled vengefully at me, knowing full-well that its hour of retribution would soon come.
Man vs. Seafood (and also a parking garage)
I spent the next half hour or so driving around Sandtown and trying to get a feel for the community that I would be worshipping with on Sunday. Again, since I’ll be visiting there the next two days, I didn’t make an effort to get out and talk to people-- mostly just drove around a bit and people-watched. Admittedly, the community was kind of a mixed bag. There were plenty of boarded-up buildings and a lot of people just sort of milling around, but I’m fairly used to that. What really caught me off guard was seeing signs in the overgrown median strips on Fulton Avenue that read, “No playing ball. No pets allowed.” Wow, harsh. There was also a fairly large police presence, and this unsettled me a little. Living in the middle of nowhere really made me see the police more as threats than as protectors, but that’s a story for another day (like when I’m sleeping on a friend’s couch in Ohio next week). My drive through Sandtown was largely uneventful, just a lot of nodding and waving at folks and acknowledging that my natural Southern courtesy puts me at a huge disadvantage when dealing with the more aggressive drivers and pedestrians north of the Mason-Dixon Line. At one point, I was driving past a school, and a man with dreadlocks stepped out in front of my car and began yelling at a woman across the street, calling her a bitch. A woman on the curb yanked the man back by his dreads so that I could pass, and I continued on down the street just a little shaken. I also couldn’t help but laugh a little too: here this guy is trying to be some kind of tough-as-nails gangsta, and he gets his hair pulled grade school style. You just got told, dude.
Of market shopping, my mom writes:
We bought meat at a butcher's stall in NE Market -- a pound of burger, a pound of hotdogs, and one or two other items for the week. Our budget allowed one restaurant meal a month, but for a few months we decided instead to have one fancy at-home meal a week -- like steak or shrimp. Eskay baloney was the best brand and the only brand that Dad could stomach after his bachelor year eating baloney for lunch 365 days. Eskay (probably a phonetic spelling of S-K) was a very good local meat company. There were also stalls where we bought apples and other produce including "cukes."
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| Lexington Market |
At this point, I was getting closer to my second culinary destination of the day: Lexington Market. I realize that my parents would have eaten at Northeast Market due to its proximity to the medical center, but this was a little more on my way. In fact, it was actually within about five blocks of my hotel, so if I had been really smart, I would have just driven back to the hotel and doubled back on foot. Sadly, this did not happen. Not realizing my proximity to the hotel, I foolishly put my car in a parking garage where the arm had been left open, not realizing that I would be unable to reenter the garage on foot without a token that the machine never gave me. I attempted to use the “lost token” option on the automatic validating machine on my way out, but the machine ate my money and wouldn’t give me a receipt! I couldn’t get back to my car, so after my meal, I had only one option: sweet-talk the parking attendant. I’ve discovered that, in potentially hostile situations or circumstances where I am totally dependent on someone else’s help, my meticulously suppressed Southern accent surfaces as a natural bid to acquire sympathy. I informed the parking attendant that I was from Tennessee and that this whole thing of leaving the arm open and having to get a token just wasn’t something we had in my neck of the woods. Believe it or not, this totally worked. The security guard wrote my payment down to $3 and let me out, but I was still in the hole a bit from that expense. Looks like it’s granola bars for a day or two, or maybe just trying to get a couple of meals out of a $5 footlong sub. Also, I’m totally going to mooch off the Kenyon dining hall next week. I never had any idea how much I would miss having a meal plan. But speaking of meal plans . . .
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| Faidley Seafood-- Check out the standing tables! |
I walked around Lexington Market for a while and took in the sights and smells of the place. I will admit that I felt a little self-conscious since I was very much in the racial minority (oh hi, white guilt-- long time, no see). I was hoping for fresh seafood, but most of that was so fresh that it hadn’t been cooked yet-- not my preference. Finally, after walking around for a good solid fifteen minutes, I headed over to Faidley Seafood, one of the market’s more permanent fixtures. The place was set up as short-order with the added twist of having no chairs, so you eat standing up. I had been craving seafood bisque ever since I tried it for the first time in Emerald Isle, NC, a few months back --thanks for getting me hooked, Bert-- and there was a lobster bisque on the menu, so I figured “close enough” and went for that. Of course, I was a little dismayed when the man taking my order had to turn to a cook and ask, “Hey, do we have lobster bisque today?” Uh oh, must not be their most popular dish. I better hedge my bets a little. “I’ll go ahead and get a crab cake too.”
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| Crab cake-- it's like the hushpuppy's crustacean cousin. |
I was served my crab cake immediately while they heated up my lobster bisque. I stood at the table and took a bite of the crab cake. It was pretty good. Admittedly, I would have rather cracked and eaten the legs myself, but I couldn’t find a stall in the market where that was an option, so I’ll accept my crab meat in deep-fried patty form if necessary. The stringy bits of crab were excellent, but I did find myself a little sad that their flavor was somewhat overshadowed by the meat’s fried status, which made the whole dish feel more like an especially delicious falafel. The cashier signaled that the bisque was ready, so I went back to the register to pick it up. Wow. The bisque that I had in Emerald Isle had been a light creamy color with a pleasantly mild aroma. This was bright orange and had a sharp biting odor to it. I brought it back to my table and took a few spoonfuls. Mmm, it’s not exactly what I had expected, but the lobster meat gave the soup a very rich flavor to it. In fact, it was very rich. Almost a little too rich. I finished up as much of the bisque and crab cake as I could (almost as much to get my money’s worth as for the taste) and soon realized that my stomach was getting angry again. It was time to give up. My digestive tract had been forced to handle enough already, and this rich soup was not going to make matters easier. I almost made it to the bottom of the bowl, but it was time to stop.
I decided to head back to the hotel, stretch out and relax for a bit and reflect on all that had happened on my journey through my parents’ early years. I also decided that digestion was going to require my full attention for a little while, and then I could get back here on the blog and spill my guts about all this.
Ooo, poor choice of words.
Peace and Blessings,
Tom
P.S.-- Actually, my night didn’t quite end here. I went on a walk around Camden Yards and had an interesting encounter with a panhandler that I’ll have to write about some other time. My hands have done about all the typing they can handle tonight. Time to kick back with a little reading. I’m on the last chapter of Jim & Casper Go to Church, and I’d like to continue the TV-free streak I’ve been on lately.
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