Housecleaning

monshu claims to have a "three-year rule". Any papers that he hasn't looked at in three years, he tosses, unless they are needed for tax purposes or something. (Or so he claims; I haven't actually witnessed him doing this.)

I have a similar rule, only for foodstuffs.

Fish 'n' mint

As I was leaving my apartment this afternoon, I caught a whiff of a fishy smell. I couldn't tell where it was coming from--both the Pilipina nurse next door and the African family across the hall seemed to be entertaining that day. The smell wasn't unpleasant--in fact it recalled nothing so strongly as my father's fish chowder. I assume this was an old family recipe (that side originates in Baltimore), but I made the same assumption about his cruller recipe and it turns out it comes straight from the Betty Crocker cookbook. He didn't make it very often, probably because his offspring were a bunch of culinarily-challenged Midwesterners who recoiled at the thought of eating any fish flesh that wasn't covered in a half-inch of breading. (In our defence, Dad was a good cook but not an especially fastidious one, so eating his chowder inevitably meant dealing with a fair number of fine bones and particles of unscaled skin.)

I had another madeleine moment at Icosium Café where I was treating myself to a late lunch of salmon and goat cheese crêpes. Before I settled on that, however, I ordered some "Berber vodka" (as Bourdain calls it): Fresh mint tea. The first sip brought me back more than twenty years to the house in Troy and the fabled kitchenside herb garden with the seventeen varieties of mint my father had planted. Due to the inevitable dulling of the tastebuds with age, I've never had mint tea that sharp and strong since. For that reason, I preferred the milder flavour of the apple and orange mints (two varieties that I've never seen for sale either fresh-brewed or in pre-packaged form anywhere).

With the second one, I had a flash of "pre-morbidity", the realisation that some indefinite time from now, when this person is dead, there's going to be a stab of pain at revisiting this memory. It used to happen to me all the time with monshu--oh, god, this song will probably make me cry; how will I be able to look at this book title again; and so forth--but I don't remember feeling this way about Dad before, they I probably have.

He's coming up this weekend, as bunj and I just found out. My brother was, as you might expect, a little put out until I pointed out what a luxury it was to have an entire week's warning. This sort of thing will most likely only get worse when he retires in May and the obstacles to a sudden visit crumble away.