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HAPPY BIRTHDAY, AUNTIE JOHANNA!

ETA, From Grandma Texas, Auntie J when she was brand new:

I don’t think about my father’s influence on me on a daily basis.

When your parent has been dead all of your adult life, it can be difficult to tell: Is this thing that I’m doing now something that was sown into my life when I was a child? You no longer have the person who did the seeding. You don’t realize how much you read other people’s reactions to you until the people you spent your time reading are gone.

And yet every so often I stop in my tracks and realize, wow, that right there, that happened exactly because of who my father was.

It happens less in the big picture than in the details. Presumably, everyone tries to instill generosity, dedication, and kindness in their children, so when I am generous or diligent or good-hearted, yes, I would ascribe that to the values my parents tried to instill, but where their influence ends and general societal norms begin, that is harder to tease out.

Where I can see my father is in the spiritual path I have taken to try to become more generous and kind: the enthusiasm for Buddhism and the abiding fascination with the varieties of religious experience (I wish he could’ve read that book. It would’ve been fascinating to discuss with him.)

I would argue that those details are more important when you’re trying to remember someone than the big stuff. He wanted to be a good person and wanted me to be a good person — that doesn’t remind me of him nearly as much as coming across one of the books he read in his own striving toward that particular goal. That he was intrigued enough by others’ spiritual practices to try to slog through L. Ron Hubbard’s Dianetics; that’s interesting, and something I can put my hands on; so is the fact that one of the last books he read was Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.

The bedside stack of books by Karen Armstrong and Thomas Cahill, the fact that my Bible actually has a bookmark in it because I am trying to read it cover-to-cover — that’s my father’s influence.

There are other lines I’ve drawn from me to him over the years — travel, dress, food.

This is in my head right now because I reconnected the other day to a piece of music he loved:

Jean-Michel Jarre is unfairly lumped in with twee New Age tripe like the Mannheim Steamrollers nowadays because of his grandaddy-of-the-movement status, but he was electronica before the category existed.

I had all but forgotten this album when I came upon a write-up on Pitchfork recently and decided to buy it from iTunes.

Walking into work the other morning with this flowing into my head via my earphones, I paused mid-step as I suddenly realized that half of my iPod is based upon my early experiences of being transported by this music. I sent a quick, silent thank you into the ether for giving me a fleeting moment with my father.

In case you were wondering: Still totally psyched about karate.

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I saw my hairstylist at the Y today. I don’t think she saw me, which is good, because holy awkward!

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Eliza went to the Y this morning and because she goes in the big kid’s room at Childwatch now, she gets to do projects.

Today, she made a lollipop, which was basically construction paper with glitter on it, glued to a straw.

Here she is, holding it:

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This weekend, rejection has a new flavor. She used to say, “Should Mommy (or Daddy) go away!”

Lately, she’s been saying, “Should somebody go away!” and glaring at the offended party until they get a clue and skedaddle.

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The senior citizens’ chorus I wrote about a while back is the subject of an honest-to-god theatrical-release documentary! I haven’t seen it yet, but these guys are amazing. I hope they do them justice and don’t just make them into a cheesy gimmick, because, as I have said before, they are so much more than that.

I officially cheated.

After making Jim blanch by showing him a picture of a Backstreet Boy with a fauxhawk and telling him that’s what I was going to do, we went to the mall and I lucked into someone who knew what she was doing at Mastercuts.

I cannot vouch for all the Mastercuts everywhere, but in my experience they seem to hire good stylists for a mall place.

It’s Fix-It Friday again!

A good 10 years ago Jim and I went out to eat pizza. Wait, that sounds like we haven’t eaten pizza since. And while parenting a toddler does crimp your social life, it’s not quite that bad. OK, so this one time 10 years ago, Jim and I went to the fancy brick-oven pizza place in Hipster Town to the North (which I am going to start acronyming: HTTTN) for dinner and decided, what the heck, let’s have some appetizers!

You need to know that I will pretty much crawl over your dead grandmother for good prosciutto. I was warned most sternly by my OB NOT to eat cold cuts (among many other things) during my pregnancy on account of blablabla drooooone disaster yadayada and mostly followed her rules except with prosciutto. I figured if I heated it in some fashion, it would still be OK, and so I became enslaved to our George Foreman Grill and made prosciutto paninis every day.

Anyway, they had an appetizer whose name I’ve since forgotten, but I noticed that there was prosciutto in it, and that was all I needed to know. We ordered it, and it was good. Really good — it totally met the crawl-over-dead-etc. standard. It was also, I realized, ridiculously easy to make.

The next weekend, I bought what I thought were the ingredients, reverse-engineered the recipe, and came up with what I’ve called, for lack of a better word, “Prosciutto Pockets.” They are essentially a fancied-up, Italianized version of pigs in a blanket, and they are guaranteed crowd pleasers. They also take about 20 minutes to make, and that includes baking time.

Here we go.

1. As ever, start by assembling your staff and your ingredients.

The latter are:
1 tube of crescent dinner rolls (8 rolls, any brand is fine, so long as they come in the tube)
Pesto
Prosciutto (figure about a quarter pound for a batch of 8. And don’t buy the super-expensive kind — the drier, saltier, less expensive brands actually work better for this)
A block of part-skim mozzarella cheese

2. Preheat your oven to 375.

3. Whack your tube until it pops (warn your assistant that this will happen before you set her to whacking, or she will give you a stricken look and you will have to assure her that it is OK, that’s what it is supposed to do):

4. Unroll the 8 triangles on a cookie sheet. Take out your prosciutto and eat some of it:

Depending on how much you eat, you may have to up the quantity to a 1/2 pound or more.

Put enough prosciutto on every dough triangle, so all the dough is covered in a single layer of prosciutto.

5. Taste your cheese:

This is why you buy a big block, so you’ll have enough.

6. Cut rectangles, about a quarter inch thick and 1-2 inches long, and put them at the fat end of your dough triangle:

7. Next, it’s pesto time. Heap about a teaspoonful of pesto on top of your cheese. I have no idea why, at this point, Eliza felt it was necessary to get out her purple children’s chopsticks and start pinching the dough, but she works for free, which means I kind of have to go with it:

8. Now, starting at the fat end, roll up your crescents. The cheese/pesto business will be in the center, and the prosciutto will be inside the crescent. Don’t worry about making perfect crescents or about any innards oozing out:

9. Stick those babies in the oven for 10 minutes. Remove from oven. Try not to eat them all before you get to the party:

10. You can make variations on these easily: for vegetarians, leave out the prosciutto, although that kind of obviates their whole raison d’être in my opinion. If your store doesn’t carry prosciutto, you could try hard salami (but NOT pepperoni!). You could vary the cheeses — shredded Italian mixes are tasty but know that the cheese tends to escape during the rolling process.