This Week

New pot of succulents joins my cactus.
I’m sharing this and other things in my life with the Sunday Salon at Readerbuzz.

Watched the Olympics Opening Ceremony

Olympics in our living room…yes to Paris in July! A favorite moment: when they tolled the bells of Notre Dame for the first time since the catastrophic fire.

The bridge was decorated with new murals to celebrate the Olympics.

The torch is lit.

We watched the entire 4-hour ceremony.

Family Visit July 18-23

Miriam finds interesting critters on her run. Time for Eileen’s critters.

We made our traditional pilgrimage to DQ for blizzards.

A fabulous seafood dinner.

One last breakfast before their 9-hour drive.

Time to say goodbye!

What I’m Reading This Week

The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store is a satisfying book. It’s funny and serious at the same time. The main characters are wonderful and memorable (but I'm not going to describe them). Just one example: this description of a very minor character:

“Bernice was also the proud mother of, at last count, eight children, all of whom looked more or less like Bernice in varying degrees of skin color from light-skinned to dark. That was not a bad thing. Nor was it a good thing. Everybody knew Bernice had the kind of face that would make a man wire home for money. The question was, who was the man and where was the money?” (p. 94)

In this novel, good people mostly end up with good things happening to them. Quite a few bad people end up not so happy, maybe even satisfyingly dead. Good individuals from several mistreated or unlucky groups are often rewarded — Jews, blacks, Italians, other immigrants, disabled people, poor people, people who can’t read, people with a secret past, and more. But nobody is a stereotype. 

What saves this book from being a cloying mess of well-meaning fake optimism? It’s hard to say how the author manages, but somehow the evil doers get their just deserts, the survivors don’t gloat, and there is exactly enough revenge on the bad ones and rewards for the good ones.

Vivid writing also is absolutely a key to why this is such a lovable book. Like this description of the sounds heard in a hideously cruel home for mentally and physically disabled people: “moanings, groanings, coos, burps, sighs, growls, yells, chirps, yelps, chortles, cacklings, farts, chatterings, and howlings …” (p. 266)

The NPR reviewer described the writing thus: “McBride's roving narrator is, by turns, astute, withering, giddy, damning and jubilant. He has a fine appreciation for the human comedy: in particular, the surreal situation of African Americans and immigrant Jews in a early-to-mid-20th-century America that celebrates itself as a color-blind, welcoming Land of Liberty.” (source)

The New York Times reviewer describes The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store as:  “a murder mystery locked inside a Great American Novel.” (source) From The Atlantic: “In McBride’s work, digging deep into the tangled roots of complicated communities is the antidote to misplaced blame and false history.” (source)

I enjoyed reading this Great American Novel. Totally. I’m grateful to my sister who gave it to me as a gift.

Blog post © 2024 mae sander

What I ate in Paris in May

Our trip to Paris in May was unfortunately interrupted after only a day because I had badly bruised my hip. I’m happy to report that I’m almost entirely over it now, and that we feel that we made the right decision to fly home immediately when we realized how serious it was. Luckily, not broken! I’ve been saving my very few food photos from the trip to share with Paris in July! Surprisingly, very few people have written about French food for this year’s blog event hosted by Emma HERE.

In the shop windows

You saw the bear who inhabits a food shop.

Dinner at Tadam Restaurant

The kitchen.

A delicious beef dish served with blackened endive, garnished with pomegranate seeds.

Dessert: “Gourmandise de fraises, crème Fontainebleau, fenouil confit et crackers de granola.”

Luncheon at the Musée d'Orsay

The famous clock is in the formal dining room at the museum.
We did not eat here — we ate at the cafe on the ground floor.

Monet’s Luncheon.

Smoked salmon with potato salad. By the time we ate, I was hopelessly troubled by my hip pain.

Photos © 2024 mae sander

The Ann Arbor Art Fair

Art and People

Evelyn and Miriam at the ceramic fish artists’ booth. The family is spending the weekend here,
partly to visit the Art Fair.

Two of the ceramic fish.

Skin art (we saw lots of this)!

After over a 24 hour delay, thanks to the airline chaos this weekend, Alice is here in time for the end of the Fair.

Food at the Art Fair

Friday: a black bean burger. Saturday: candy-coated nuts.

At the Carl Milles Fountain

The beautiful Carl Milles Fountain is always surrounded by Art Fair goers and food stalls.

Appreciating the fountain.

Ibrahim, the Vendor of African Art

As we often have done in the past, we found Ibrahim, who deals in African tribal art.
He usually finds a place to set up (unofficially) but this year he was disallowed,
so he only spent a few hours selling from the back of his van.

Some of Ibrahim’s selection of masks: not the one we bought.

In the center of our mantlepiece: the sculpture we bought this year.
The other two sculptures are from earlier years at Ibrahim’s stall.

Saturday Night Dinner

Blog post and all photos © 2024 mae sander

Shared with Deb’s  Sunday Salon.

Sunny Summer Days

 

In the garden

The herbs keep growing.

We walked along the Huron River.

Summer Reading

I read one more mystery by E.C.R. Lorac: Checkmate to Murder (1944)
Quite enjoyable!

Throughout Lorac’s novel, we keep coming back to one character, Roseanne, and her preparation of a stew to feed the men who were assembled while the murder next door was taking place:

“Rosanne returned to her cooking. She had undertaken to produce supper for five people at nine o’clock. The chess players and Delaunier had each provided a ration of something ‘to put into the pot,’ and Rosanne was contriving a savoury stew from the miscellaneous collection brought in by the others, added to the meat and vegetables she had bought for herself. Actually she loathed cooking, but with the rare common sense which characterised her, she had taught herself to cook, and to cook well, in order to prevent Bruce squandering their slender means on restaurant meals.” (p. 8)

It’s a well-plotted mystery, and the characters are interesting though not necessarily likable. Inspector Macdonald, of course, succeeds again.

A major success by World Central Kitchen described in detail.
I have enormous respect for this organization and its founder José Andrés. 

This book was published in 2018 about the events following the hurricane in Puerto Rico the previous year. Unfortunately, it’s still painfully relevant both in terms of the challenge of how to deal with natural disasters, and in the horrific indifference and cruelty shown by then-President Trump towards the American citizens (that is, the people of Puerto Rico) whose entire world was destroyed and who were starving and homeless.

Photos © 2024 mae sander