Pop
As if there weren’t already enough things I like about octopus, I learned yesterday, when admiring a Picasso platter with an octopus on it that the Catalan word for octopus is “pop.”
(As opposed to the Castilian “pulpo.”)
For a late dinner we stopped at a tapas place, signified by an octopus, in the old part of town. Lots of fried things, fried big round things with mashed potatoes and meat inside served with a mountain of mayonnaise and chili / garlic sauce (yes please), or croquettas in the finger shape, or tiny fried ones with tuna. We were so eager for vegetables that we ordered onion rings. One of the only non-fried things at this particular place was a huge giant tub of very large octopus — POP.
It was off to the side, though, and not on particularly good display.
I asked for some of the huge octopus and the waiter moved to give me some fried calamari instead, from a tray right in front of us, but I wanted the braised octopus. “It’s just boiled,” he said. But he relented and brought it warm on a wooden plate with olive oil and little chips of salt and an egregious quantity of paprika. We ate it with toothpicks and the bread with the tomato smashed onto it which is served with everything here.
Mmm, pop. Lucky.
Misadventures With Ham
I’d like to preface this by saying that we did much better eating standard meals today, and in fact just returned from a restaurant who specializes in many different sorts of snails: snails in the mother in law style, snails in the style of grandfather, etc. Not that this is standard, but it was fun!
We cannot figure out how to eat at normal times here (in Spain) which is compounded by the fact that no one eats at normal times here.
If you arrive for dinner before 9, you are too early.
If you arrive for dinner past 10:15, in the small city we were staying in (until we arrived in Barcelona today), you are too late.
Consequently, last night we were at a strange little outpost called Cafe Viena, which is sort of an unpleasant chain, just to get a little more eating in before bed.
On the “card” (menu) we were given to read in English, there were pictures of a ham sandwich in many different formats. Matthew was looking for a toasted Spanish ham and cheese — known locally as a Bikini sandwich, except for that is made with “York” ham, also known as “sweet ham,” as known as just plain old “ham ham” to you and I.
But Matthew wanted a Spanish ham sandwich. He’d tried to order one for lunch and had failed in the following way:
The woman at a bar we’d wandered into requesting lunch had brought me a tuna sandwich. As a pregnant person I am not allowed to eat ham, you see. I am also supposed to severely limit my tuna, but if you are in Spain and limiting your ham intake to nil, you will be upping your tuna intake by many thousands of percents. When I ordered my tuna sandwich, Matthew had asked for a ham sandwich.
What happened next was worthy of the surrealist castle we were visiting: in front of Matthew appeared a sandwich with both ham AND tuna. He was confused and upset, as any rational person presented with such a sandwich would be, and I cannot imagine that the woman who’d made it for him wasn’t also rather confused and upset.
There were a bunch of stray Spanish cats walking around, though, and I couldn’t help but think about how happy they would be at the idea of a ham AND tuna sandwich. (“Ham and tuna; hold the bread.”) Perhaps it was the cats who whispered into the ear of the sandwich maker.
Anyhow for our evening meal, at Cafe Viena, many hours later, we examined the “card” that was written in English to make our choices. Matthew pointed out what looked like a piece of clip art of a ham on baguette sandwich with a notation that said “CITED BY THE NEW YORK TIMES AS THE BEST SANDWICH IN THE WORLD.” And we laughed, and thought that someone at the Times had once had good things to say about a sandwich with Spanish ham on it, and that Cafe Viena, a strange and antiseptic chain, had misappropriated the quote to apply to one of their own products.
There is no fooling us.
Then Matthew ordered his bastardized version of the Bikini, and while we waited for our food to appear I saw a plaque on the wall immortalizing an article from the New York Times wherein Mark Bittman chronicled a trip where he came to Spain and ate at Cafe Viena chain and decided that this one version of the sandwich was the best in the world, owing to the fact that is has ham that costs $78 a pound on it, and yet the sandwich retails for 4 euros, or somesuch.
Bittman also talked about how uninspired the sandwich Serbian meatball sandwich I had selected for myself would be. As I was ordering it, Matthew checked to be sure it was hot, to help me avoid all of the confusing foodborne illnesses pregnant women are warned about. “Es caldo?” he asked.
“Caliente?” the man at the counter countered. “Si.”
Back at the table, Matthew consulted a book and realized that every time he set out to ask if something was hot, which was a number of times a day, he was actually asking if it was broth.
And then he opened his sandwich and it was full of sweet ham, rather than Spanish ham.
No tuna, though. No broth.
To Spain
spain, you are white and blue paint and white and blue skies and thick walls and breezy curtains. you are full of nutty sweet cheese and eggplant and apple jam and tomato jam and carrot and orange jam — zanahoria, zanahoria, zanahoria, i keep needing matthew to say it for me.
in the fancy place, you are a braised lamb cheek in apple salsa and a breathtaking dessert — pomegranite seeds, mint sorbet, and fresh tangerine juice poured over to join it into one taste.
sometimes, well always, there are flies, moscas, and a spider got smushed into the fibers of my sweater. we are far less concerned about these things than we would be at home.
and hello, spanish chickens in the yard, with a few turkeys also in the coop.
I am confused and challenged and delighted by your choppy country landscape and refreshed by the interplay of antiquities and modern art.
nice natural palette, spain: warms and cools at once, could you help us with our living room?
spain, we simply cannot seem to get on your time but with no restaurants opening til 9pm, that doesn’t seem to matter to you, and if we sleep ’til noon, or til, you know, 1:30pm, the people serving us breakfast at the inn, those kind people who suggested that we arrive between 9 and 11am to eat, are very relaxed and cheerful, and then they cook use fresh eggs with orange yolks running, and anise bread, and dark red ham cut from a leg with a foot that we can see from where we sit.
your pork smells more like animals than the meat i am used to, spain, and now i am suspecting that the meat i buy in the us has been dipped in bleach. still, my pregnant nose is on high alert.
i am wholly flummoxed by your language, lots of x’s and slurred words. to my own disgrace, I don’t even know “typical” spanish from the subway signs or from living in texas. linguistically, i feel less grounded in you than i did even in turkey, because my expectation was to be lost in turkey, and my expectation was to figure out some spanish pretty quickly, but that does not work for catalan.
so for matthew you are an intellectual exercise. for me, you are an exercise in passivity.
RIP Little George Washington aka Kitty
On Saturday I said a final goodbye to one of the first and best friends I made in New York: my beloved, luxuriously soft, generously sized, pink-striped gray tiger kitty, George.
We met in 2000. By no stretch of the imagination was I a cat person, but I had a mouse problem in my East Village tenement apartment. Besides that, my sister was pregnant for the first time. She was getting a baby, and I wasn’t getting a baby, and I’d be ending my 20’s before long with no lasting relationships or offspring on the horizon. What, I could take care of something small and needy and mewling, too. Look, I’ll prove it.
So I responded to an advertisement with a 718 number, oblivious, in my early years of New York living, to the fact that parts of Brooklyn could be a full hour away from my apartment. I rode the F line out to Brighton Beach alone on a Sunday. The woman I’d made an appointment with, who’d turn out to be a full-throttle kook, buzzed me into the anteroom of her house, a urine-soaked hall lined with cages full of sad, nameless cats, reaching out from between the bars with sad, probing paws.
Hello? I called. The woman had buzzed me in, but did not appear.
“I’m eating a roast beef sandwich,” she yelled down some carpeted stairs. “I’ll be down when I’m done.”
I remained trapped in the hall of crying, smelly kitties for about 10 minutes.
I finally yelled up that I planned to leave.
At that point she rushed downstairs, choking down the remainder of her sandwich.
The cat she had in mind for me, “a mush,” she kept saying, “a real mush — the perfect cat for a dog lover”—was in the basement, along with the FIV positive cats, though the little cat was FIV negative.
George was 4 months old and still living with her momma. She came out of their shared cage to play with me. She was shy. I waved my fingers and she reared up on her back feet to swat them, and then fell over, the picture of awkward charm.
We agreed I’d take her.
I tried to name her something Russian based on her roots — the woman told me she was a Russian Blue and also, she was coming straight from Brighton Beach. Sabrina, Katrina, Katerina, nope.
This little kitty was no showboat. She ran crooked. She was not a highly prized Russian blue, but on closer examination was a French sort of cat often described as looking like “a potato on toothpicks,” combined with some wild stripey tomcat. She was so . . . human, if you consider the sense of human meaning having some qualities that set you apart from the rest of the animals in a good way, and yet being quite fragile and flawed at the same time.
To be honest, and hopefully not too narcissistic, the kitten reminded me a little of myself.
When I was born, my parents made a call to many family members and taped them. One call to my Great Uncle Bill stood out. When he heard the news of a new healthy niece, my uncle’s first question was:
“Are you going to name her George?”
“We’re going to call her Meredith,” my dad explained.
“Little George Washington,” my uncle sighed.
Now that I am an aunt, I love being an aunt. It is one of my top favorite jobs that I have ever had. But in my younger years, I thought that maybe I should aim to be the equivalent of my Uncle Bill: ever single, highly indulgent, bright and unusual, always with a New Yorker magazine in one hand and sometimes with a cigar in the other. And perhaps a little Bailey’s Irish Cream.
To the continued confusion of plenty of people, I named the cat George, though she responded most consistently to Kitty.
As a kitten, she distinguished herself by playing fetch as ardently as any dog.
She was with me through an arson / suicide in our East Village apartment building. I was out when it happened. The cat, of course, was home. My door had been axed in and when I was finally let back up the wet, glass strewn stairs, homicide detectives trailed me through our smashed and smoky rooms, wanting information about the man next door who’d set the fire and killed himself in the process. I’d been trying to tell the police about that guys for months, and finally they wanted to talk with me, right when couldn’t find my pet. I was distracted, to say the least. They finally helped me find her before we did an interview. She was deep, deep, deep in the closet, and she stayed hidden in a closet for many hours a day after that.
To get away from the bad smoky apartment, we moved to Brooklyn together.
When I met my husband, the first thing he said on entering my apartment was “Oh. You have a cat.”
Never a cat lover, and prone to allergies, he eventually grew to love and care for her, once we all lived together.
Our eventual son has always been a large fan of animals (not to mention a fan of large animals), and was heard the other days saying,
“I love you Kitty, you are my FAVORITE.”
Apt words for a lovely girl who never, ever raised a paw in anger to Henry, despite his often enthusiastic pursuit of her, and his near-constant invasion of her space.
A terrible mouser, a wonderful friend, oh Kitty, you are my favorite, too. But when a pet no longer enjoys the things they enjoy, it is time to let them go. At least that is the word on the street.
George enjoyed, more than anything else, eating. When she stopped eating last week, I knew what we were facing—we had a cancer diagnosis and a weeks-old prognosis that she might have a month or two—but I didn’t digest it yet.
She was still sweet smelling and perfect looking and in a way, didn’t look sick. She’d lost several pounds but with her “frame,” she could handle it. But I could feel her spine under her fur, and she was becoming very listless. I’d put her on the bed to sleep at night, and kept getting up overnight to be sure that she was still with us.
Overnight on Friday, I felt a sickness in my chest, a weight, and a decision had been made, in my heart more than in my brain, that I would say goodbye on Saturday.
On Saturday I contacted the vet who has been overseeing her care for the last months. I was so upset that even the people at the desk — normally a pack of horrible, annoying receptionists — were kind to me. Sobbing has its benefits; I should remember that. We laid a plan.
I took (take) solace in the fact that the vet had some background information on me as I was making these decisions: this doctor was one I’d initially met after I’d rescued a cat with no eyes who only weighed a pound. When I brought the little blind kitty in one stormy night she was hypothermic and riddled with worms. I thought I was bringing her in to put her out of her misery, and I felt a little scared of her, despite her size. (Eyes are sort of a signature feature on a cat, as it happens; no eyes can be kind of scary.) This vet told me that with some deworming and defleaing and some medication, that this was a fully salvagable animal. I spent more money than I will ever admit to medically board her while I was on my honeymoon. (Those were flush, pre-kid times.) When we returned from our trip to Turkey, one of the vet techs adopted the little cat.
Through all of that, George was patient with me, and I like to think that the vet, who met me in that context, wouldn’t think I was cruel for not opting for surgery and a course of chemo for my 12 year old cat, which was our other option. Though my need to share this story about the eyeless kitty shows that I still have doubts about my actions and feel some guilt.
I did not, for sure, want to see someone I loved get as sick as they could possibly be before they died. I did that with my sister. I cannot tell you how much I hated it. But that experience made me know how important it is to be with someone I love at the end.
And I am glad, I suppose, that George and I could spend her last moments together. People talk about cold comfort but the corollary, not being there, would have been too much. So I do not like this, not at all. But given the facts, I would not have wanted it any other way.
I Can’t Stop Writing Prilosec Commercials
Please don’t think I care less about my blog than I used to, simply because I write in it less at the moment.
There are obstacles to posting.
Heavy ones. Pointy ones.
I’ve been doing teaching prep during nap, and then, nap stopped occurring. I also need to sleep during nap, to keep myself civil while I create this new baby, and so if nap does happen, normally I just sit stunned and wonder what I am supposed to do first. And the suddenly, it is over, before it ever had a chance to begin. This also makes me very, very behind on Breaking Bad, which I used to watch during nap.
What I want to do, lately, is make the blog a public service announcement to women who are pregnant and having a hard time. (Ie, what I want is a public service announcement for MYSELF. I need my own pep talk.)
The message would be, THIS TOO SHALL PASS. AND YOU WILL LIKELY GET A GREAT BABY OUT OF IT. AND IF YOU HAVE HEARTBURN, TAKE PRILOSEC.
I blogged about Prilosec, the acid-reducing pill that one takes once a day when one is desperate to get ride of heartburn, three years ago, but it is time to do so again, because awareness of Prilosec is the greatest public service I can provide to the pregnant-lady community.
Prilosec is a little mauve pill that I, and many of my fellow Americans, take first thing in the morning. It makes me want to speak rhetorically in way that few other things do. Why? It shuts down production of acid. Not having acid shooting out of my neck makes me feel downright presidential.
I still have some measure of heartburn. When I wake up in the middle of the night, which happens to people whose bladders are like thimbles with a 19 pound cats draped over them, I can feel the heartburn. It’s not like it would be, though.
The day before I started taking Prilosec, I threw up 8 times in terrible, never to be forgotten afternoon. I won’t forget it, because it sucked, and Henry won’t forget it, because he got to watch so much TV, which he thought was awesome.
Lest you think I am wholly excused from vomiting, I’m not, but it is a lot rarer. It happens violently if I happen to swallow any saliva, and I go to great lengths to avoid that.
It also happens when I don’t manage to take my Prilosec, but it’s sort of a subtler problem.
I went to Connecticut and stayed overnight a few weeks ago, and I forgot to bring my Prilosec. I drove back in the morning with some food in my belly and some fear in my heart — still an hour before I’d get to take the pill! — but things seemed fine, fine enough that once we were in our neighborhood, I stopped to get Henry and I some lentil soup for lunch. We shared it, and then drove the rest of the way home.
After parking outside of our building, I opened the driver seat door, and leaned over slightly to get out. As I leaned over, the quantity of soup I’d eaten 20 minutes before fell out of my head. No fanfare, just, slosh, splat.
It begged many questions. What is an event like that called? Vomit implies some sort of effort; it implies pain. But the end game is food falling out of your head, and that is what happened. If a tree falls in the wood, if a lady loses her lunch without retching . . . there wasn’t even a burp associated with this.
Would this happen all the time without Prilosec? Did this happen because normally I do manage to take my Prilosec, and without it, I have none of the normal production of body fluids and one needs them if one isn’t going to take the purple pill, which also does something else I don’t understand, like make your throat flaps work in the most basic of ways?
I was worried about taking Prilosec for the whole pregnancy. Would I become physically reliant? Or worse, would it stop working midway through? I asked my sister-in-law, a medical professional, what she thought. She is a nurse practitioner, but also a naturopath, and also a person who suffered her own course of serious heartburn during pregnancy. Take it, she urged. Take it the whole time. I think it’s fine.
But doesn’t a person, I don’t know, need some stomach acid, I countered? Doesn’t stomach acid serve a purpose?
Take it, she said. If you find you need more acid in your body, you can drink some vinegar or something.
Like me, she is a convert.
Church Avenue Chomp 