Bell’s Seasoning II - The Spawning

Introduction

Having been a drone for the better part of two days (as you shall soon learn), I am bound and determined to do something with my brain now. So why not blog? (Don’t answer—rhetorical question.) To get you in the mood for serious literature, I shall start with an epigram:

”They have a saying in Chicago, Mr. Bond. Once is happenstance. Twice is coincidence. The third time, it’s enemy action.” –Auric Goldfinger (in Ian Fleming’s Goldfinger). 

Do I have an enemy meddling in my affairs? Read on and decide for yourself.

The quest for Bell’s

What is Bell’s seasoning? Well, I’m glad you asked. It is nothing less than the key to Thanksgiving, as documented at length here.  Bell’s goes in the stuffing and is, I believe, instrumental in its apotheosis from dried bread cubes and celery (useless on their own) to stuffing, that supreme Thanksgiving dish. (At this meal, I could probably do without the turkey, and could almost do without gravy —but without stuffing, you might as well forget the whole thing and get takeout Chinese.)

As documented in that first Bell’s post, one of the few ways I contribute to the Thanksgiving feast is to procure this all-important seasoning. That’s a harder task than you might expect. Some stores carry Bell’s, many don’t, and for some reason I can never remember where I got it the previous year. It’s just a blur … like when you have this vivid dream that somehow gets erased within minutes of your waking up. If I were smart I’d have checked out that previous post, though this didn’t occur to me until after my quest.

My strategy

Phoning a store for a stock check is nearly impossible these days. Even if you manage to get past the Interactive Voice Response system and are transferred to a human, they usually shunt you off to some other department and you bounce around until you give up. Or they put you on hold, try to find the item, get distracted, and eventually someone else picks up and you have to start from scratch—or, more often, the line just goes dead. I did phone Andronico’s on Solano Ave because they have legit customer service. It turns out (I only now discovered when rereading my last Bell’s post) that’s where I got the Bell’s last time. Alas, the clerk yesterday advised that they’re out of stock. This answer came swiftly, meaning she’d rather make up an answer on the spot than bother to check, or they’d had a run on Bell’s and I wasn’t the first person to ask.

So forget phoning. I decided to just stop in at this or that store in a gradually increasing radius until I found the Bell’s. Surely somebody would have this and my circle wouldn’t grow to encompass all of northern California … right? I had some time, because I started on Tuesday. (Only an idiot would brave the markets on the day before Thanksgiving, right?)

Store #1 – Berkeley Natural Grocery

This was a no-brainer. I was walking back from the mailbox, several blocks from my home, and Berkeley Natural was right on the way. I dig this store because a) it’s my “corner grocery,” b) they used to give my kids balloons (click here for details), and c) my younger daughter worked there one summer. Alas, though they have lots of bins and an admirable spice section, I did not find Bell’s there. I knew this was a wild card, my “fail-fast” foray, anyway and the effort cost me almost no time.

Store #2 – Magnani Poultry

This is where I went to pick up our turkey. It was supposed to be mobbed—they told us Monday would be a lot better than Tuesday for the pickup—but who wants to store a fresh turkey that long? Early signs were not good—there was no parking anywhere nearby and I had to park in a nearby neighborhood and walk a few blocks—but it wasn’t that crowded in there. I took a number, was served pretty quickly, and was told that the turkey pickup was a separate line, but since I had the guy, I bought a pound of organic local grass-fed beef from cows that are “encouraged to socialize.”

I got my turkey and yikes, it was $115. For that much, I hope it also had been encouraged to socialize. I should have just hit one of our neighborhood’s many stray turkeys with my car … it wouldn’t be hard to do. But then, I’d have had no idea how to pluck it. Plus, what if the impact didn’t kill it? (This is how I rationalize the $115.) I also picked up a quart of frozen turkey stock and—could it be, their extensive spice rack included Bell’s? It did not, alas. All kinds of rubs, sauces, and seasonings, but no Bell’s. There’s the rub.

Store #3 – Monterey Market

I walked over to this place because it’s just across the street from Magnani and has all kinds of cool stuff (beyond their produce which is excellent and cheap; for example, around $0.40 for a bunch of cilantro). They have like ninety kinds of mushroom, fifty kinds of pepper, all manner of salsas and spices and extracts, and … no Bell’s. But hey, it was only like a five-minute detour and I got in some really great people-watching, everyone from restaurant owners to frugal housewives to college professors to tech bros, and a variety of ethnicities including those who actually know the differences among the ninety kinds of mushrooms and fifty kinds of peppers.

Store #4 – Lucky

It was time to stop messing around and actually do some research. The website for Lucky, in the neighboring town of El Cerrito, indicated that this very location did in fact have Bell’s in stock. This is a bit of a schlep so I never go there. In the parking lot an old, run-down guy seemed to need help getting out of his car, and called out for assistance. I was happy to oblige, but when I reached him he said he just needed money to buy a sandwich. This was a bit perplexing. I mean, he had a car, right? How broke could he be? But then, he was sitting sideways on the car’s back seat, legs sticking out, with no driver in sight, so who knows, maybe it wasn’t his car. Maybe he just needed to sit somewhere and found this car unlocked. The smallest bill I had on me was a five. Oh well … happy holidays, dude.

 I made my way through the front door and immediately encountered a large security turnstile, manned by a security guard. I got through that and the next thing I came upon was the “Convenience Section,” an area containing pricier items like cigarettes and booze, all fenced in with a locked door requiring customer service assistance. “Convenience” indeed. The fluorescent lighting at Lucky was that overly intense type that makes you feel like you’re being interrogated. The whole scene was pretty downscale. I made my way over to the spice section and—denied! Here is the gap where the Bell’s should have been:

I headed to the customer service counter, which was oddly situated beyond the checkout lines so I had to squeeze past people. The place was teeming with shoppers. At the service desk I waited behind a woman with a giant clear jar of what looked like granulated ginger, but it was the size of a coffee can, and had been penetrated by moisture so the contents were like cement. She was having a protracted negotiation about a refund or exchange and there was a language barrier, so it took some time. Finally it was my turn. “You mean the spice mix in the yellow box, with the turkey on the front?” the clerk asked. Yes, yes, yes! She said, “Oh yeah, we have that. If it’s all out in Aisle 2, go to our seasonal display.” She pointed toward that area and assured me there’d be more Bell’s there. I headed over and scoured the area. Nothing.

But surely there’d be more in the back, right? I decided to head back toward customer service, but didn’t feel like squeezing through a checkout line again. Seeing some people on their way through the inbound security turnstile (it had two big gates, you could drive a truck through it) I decided to slip through there instead, like piggybacking in reverse. Well, this set off the security alarm, which was exceedingly loud and shrill. The security guard gave me a withering look that said, “Man, you’re a damn fool.”

The next clerk at customer service rang up her boss on the red line. He took forever to answer. “My boss isn’t answering!” she said, bewildered. Finally the boss answered and said I should head way to the back almost by the double-door exit, near the dairy, where there’s yet another holiday display that would have more Bell’s. I found my way there but it was another fool’s errand.

Store #5 – Ranch 99

Ranch 99 is a giant Asian grocery in the Pacific East mall in Richmond. It wasn’t all that far away, since I was already pretty far north. It was a long shot I figured, but then this place is vast and has, like, millions of products. Once in the mall I had a lot of other businesses to navigate, but eventually found Ranch 99. Walking around in there was like a Willy Wonka experience, one tantalizing aroma after another, none of them exactly recognizable but like being at a Chinese restaurant and/or an open-air bazaar. They have half an aisle just for seaweed, and more kinds of cup-o-noodles and ramen than you’ll ever see anywhere. I scanned several hundred wacky spices, but no Bell’s. So I headed over to the seafood department to look at the lobsters. Check this one out:

From this (hastily snapped) photo it’s hard to grasp the scale of this lobster. It was the size of a small dog. Now, unless this critter had been living in this tank for years, which I very much doubt, he (or she) was waaaaay over the size limit on lobsters and should have been thrown back in the ocean (details here). This was basically an illegal lobster.

Not wanting my trip to have been in vain, I searched for something to buy, that I couldn’t get elsewhere. I hit pay dirt with this cookie tin, perfect for a Christmas gift for one of my daughters:

But alas, it too was not meant to be:

Store #6 - Oaktown Spice Shop

Google Maps found me a sneaky way home, which took me on this frontage road and then right up Solano Ave where we have a Safeway. The Safeway app said they were out of stock, but I figured, what the heck, maybe it’s wrong? So I started to head up there and passed right by this giant spice emporium I’ve somehow never noticed before:

This place was huge—I mean, floor-to-ceiling spices—but it’s all this homegrown Oaktown stuff, no third party products like Bell’s. The clerk was very helpful, letting me sniff various products designed to enhance poultry and even stuffing. I’m getting over a cold (don’t worry, I was rocking a COVID mask) so I couldn’t smell all that well, but suffice to say nothing smelled even remotely like Bell’s. So it would be as inappropriate as, say, putting jelly on a hot dog instead of mustard. No way.

Store #7 – Safeway

This is where I normally shop and I found the spice section very quickly, and almost just as quickly ascertained that they were either out of Bell’s, as their app had warned me, or didn’t actually stock it and only made it available online through some partner, like they’re trying to be mini-Amazon or something. But hadn’t I bought Bell’s here before? I decided to check out the discount shelves where they put overstocked and discontinued items. I mean, you never know, right? No Bell’s, but I found this:

Huh? Girl Scout Seasoning? Is this for, like, cannibals? Next I headed over to the “Manager’s Special” shelf, at the other end of the store. I’ve found weird products there before that I liked, and normal products oddly reduced, so I figured what the hell. Alas, no Bell’s, but I did find this:

How about Crushed BS? Is that good in stuffing? Dang. At least when I wandered the shelves for something else to buy, so as not to go home empty-handed, I found a crazy QR-code-driven digital deal that saved me—I kid you not—$18.40 on eight cans of cream-style corn. Since when is this humble product so expensive? At this point I realized my blood sugar was getting precariously low so I headed home, made Southwestern Corn Goo for my visiting daughter, and called it a night.

Store #8 – Berkeley Bowl West

Berkley Bowl is a great supermarket. When I was in college, friends would say to me, “What?! You don’t know about Berkeley Bowl? You of all people would love Berkeley Bowl.” I ignored all their advice because I thought it was a bowling alley. Why, I’d wondered, do all these people thing I’m a bowler? Finally someone clarified that it’s a grocery. So yesterday I checked online and confirmed that their Berkeley Bowl West location (the one nearer me) had Bell’s in stock. At this point my wife had a list of stuff she forget to get for our feast, so it wasn’t a special trip (though it’s a lot farther than I usually go to shop).

Their parking lot was large and cramped and full. I made a hot lap in vain. They even have a parking garage, but I just didn’t feel like it. I took another lap and got lucky. It took ages to walk across that giant parking lot and get a cart. I made my way to the spice section and—denied!

I found a customer service clerk and asked if they had any more in the back. “No,” she sighed. I asked if their other location would have it. “They do carry it, but there is no way I could find out if it’s in stock.” Well heck, if they won’t disclose that proprietary information to their own employee over the phone, I didn’t see any point in calling them myself. I decided I better just head over there.

Now, if you’re starting to think I’m bat-shit crazy to stick with this obviously doomed search (as my wife certainly does), you should know that this will be my first Thanksgiving in at least twenty years without my mother present, either at her place or ours. No, it’s not that I’m some momma’s boy or anything; it’s just that to let my wife to fly solo on the feast without having Bell’s seasoning would be like setting her up to fail. I don’t want to put that kind of pressure on her. If my family isn’t making spontaneous and heartfelt yummy noises over the stuffing, it will be pretty obvious.

Store #9 – Berkeley Bowl

I headed up to the original Berkeley Bowl. Traffic was murder. Every single motorist in the Bay Area was on the road, and many of them were angry, probably hangry, and honking. I so badly wanted to judge them, for being so utterly stupid as to wait until Wednesday before finishing their Thanksgiving shopping, but here I was, one of them. Having to withhold judgment was just insult to injury. I arrived to find another huge parking lot, also cramped, seemingly designed for nothing but Minis and those little Fiats. I totally lucked out and found a spot next to a guy at the end of the row who was so worried about his (albeit humble) car getting dinged, he was at the very far edge of his spot, meaning I had room to squeeze in despite the SUV encroaching on my other side. I headed in past throngs of people going in both directions. It was like a music festival or Burning Man. Oddly, when these masses of people aren’t in cars, I don’t mind them at all.

Now, this is the Berkeley Bowl where my brother M— worked, and I’m going to tell you a fun story about that. M— worked in their excellent seafood department, and was impressed at how well it was run. But he had trouble making friends with the staff, who—being career blue-collar guys—might have assumed he was a fly-by-night college kid or something. One guy in particular, Jose, seemed a bit cold. Well, for various reasons, M— decided to move back to Boulder, and on his very last day working there he waited on a rather snooty old lady who told him something like, “Make it snappy.” She seemed so privileged and self-important, M— just couldn’t bring himself to move very quickly. Gone was his normal verve; he somehow felt like he was underwater and everything was happening in super-slo-mo. Eventually the lady became exasperated and demanded of Jose, “Why is he so slow?” Jose, taken aback, didn’t really know what to say and after an awkward pause, replied, “I don’t know. Why don’t you ask him?” Flummoxed, she could find no other response to this suggestion than to turn to M— and ask, “Why are you so slow?” M— stared at her and said, “Because I’m stupid. Okay?” He handed her her purchase and she stormed off. Jose looked over at him and said, “M—, you’re okay.”

And so, on to the spice section. Guess what:

No, that’s not a repeat of the first Berkeley Bowl picture. It’s just the same old story. Gobs of the competing products on either side (I got really sick of looking at this fancy Colman’s mustard powder and Old Bay seasoning, whatever those are) but the Bell’s was totally gone. The customer service clerk said, “Gosh, that’s odd, this was just stocked this morning!” There wouldn’t be more in the back, she advised, but they might have more in the boxes atop the shelves. She climbed a stepladder and rooted through at least a couple dozen boxes up there, wheeling the ladder down the entire aisle before finally giving up. But hey, at least she tried.

(By the way, did you notice that the Bell’s at this rather upscale store sells for only $3.79, whereas at the down-market Lucky it was $5.19? I’ve seen this disparity before and I just don’t get it…)

Store #10 – second Andronico’s

I decided to head home via Shattuck Ave, which would take me by another Safeway, this one much more chichi than the one near my place. Along the way I passed an Andronico’s I’d totally forgotten about. Since the first Andronico’s acknowledged that they normally did stock Bell’s, this seemed well worth a shot. The parking lot was completely full, and parking in the surrounding streets was no better. On my second hot lap I got lucky and a SUV was pulling out. This was a weird spot right up against a brick wall, but I had plenty of room. Maybe I was just too tired and frazzled, but my first approach was way too shallow and then I felt like I was committed. It took me a good bit of sawing back-and forth to nestle in there, during which time an old geezer in a motorized wheelchair oozed so gradually across my path it took all my patience to wave nicely at him and put on my best fake smile, and also during which time some other dude, as if to rub it in how far I was from the wall, passed by my car on that side. I finally got ‘er done and headed in to the store.

This had to be the flagship Andronico’s. Fricking giant place. I found the spice section, which was quite large and I counted over twenty different kinds of salt. They had stuff I hadn’t seen anywhere, but—you guessed it—no Bell’s.

Store #11 – second Safeway

The Safeway on Shattuck has the largest parking lot of all, and it was 100% full. They had a garage too, with a digital sign to indicate available spaces, but it was broken. I finally found a very narrow spot in the 15-minute section, between a big concrete median and a battered pickup truck full of all of somebody’s possessions, parked diagonally so it infringed significantly on my target spot. I just couldn’t get in there because my tires kept hitting the median. No wonder nobody had taken the spot. I finally managed to find parking along the street. I headed in, braved another crazy crowd, found the spice section, and I know you’re not gonna believe this, but … they didn’t have Bell’s. I was beginning to feel like the narrator of Poe’s “The Raven” who seems to take a masochistic pleasure in asking the bird question after question because he knows it will only reply, “Nevermore.” He’s basically torturing himself, as was I.

As a last resort, I double-checked the websites for Sprout’s and Whole Foods. Here’s what Whole Foods said:

What a blatant lie. “We can’t seem to find this product” actually means, “We have chosen not to stock this, even though we have an entire aisle for homeopathic remedies, aka snake oil.” I’m not necessarily averse to placebos, but they shouldn’t cost an arm and a leg; Whole Foods is basically stealing from clueless people. They’re dead to me. Sprouts showed me bell peppers, some kind of beer with Bell in the name, and hundreds of unrelated spices, but no love.

Well, that was that. I was done. Nobody could say I didn’t try. In fact, I realized it would be better not to even mention stores 10 and 11 to my wife. She already thought (knew?) I was crazy to be so persistent … why salt the wound?

Store #12 – Rose & Grove Market

As I headed home I realized there was one more store I could try, which had been next door to the bike shop I worked at in college (which is where I met my wife). Oddly, I’d never set foot in this little store, but always grasped it was a Berkeley institution. (Its very name attests to its longevity, since the street it’s on, Martin Luther King Jr. Way, was called Rose Street until 1984.) Rose & Grove is not a big place but hey, you never know. I decided if there happened to be street parking right out front, I would take that as a sign from God that it was worth checking out.

Well, guess what? There was a parking spot right out front—unbelievable! So I headed in. Now, if this story were an “ABC After School Special,” Rose & Grove would have had Bell’s Seasoning and the holiday would be saved. But what I encountered was almost the opposite: they had almost zero inventory. All the shelves were bare except for some booze behind the counter. The clerk informed me that they’d gone under and would have a new owner in a month or so. The end of an era, and the end of my quest.

“Wizard of Oz” ending

Oddly enough, my story has a happy ending, along the lines of “there’s no place like home” in “The Wizard of Oz.” No, I didn’t wake up and realize all this had been a dream. Rather, I arrived home defeated, but had a backup plan: on Monday night, foreseeing possible Bell’s supply issues, I took from the freezer a fresh box of it I’d put away last year. My mom has said it freezes just fine. But when I opened the box on Tuesday, I discovered to my great disappointment that it had almost no smell. Since I’m getting over a cold, I had my daughter smell it to double-check. Instead of saying, “Mmmmmm, that smells like Thanksgiving!” she frowned and said, “It doesn’t smell like anything.” Unlike Han Solo, the Bell’s had not survived the cryogenic freezing operation.

But now, in desperation, I gave it another sniff. Eureka! As it thawed out, it must have regained its potency. Like magic, it now smelled like Mom’s stuffing! I had my daughter sniff it again, and she agreed. It’s not ideal, but we should be fine. What a relief.

Enemy action?

What remains to solve is how so many places could possibly be out of Bell’s at the same time. It couldn’t possibly be coincidence. So I started to wonder if I’ve made any enemies who might want to thwart me in this quest. I’ve certainly seen evidence, when shopping, of a doppelganger at work, who buys up, say, all the Bonne Maman apricot jam (but no other flavor!) when it’s on sale because he has the same taste as I do and is just as much of a cheap bastard. But that has a logical explanation: he’s stocking up, same as I would. But who needs more than one box of Bell’s (or two, if freezing one for later)? What would be the motive?

Maybe it’s that first blog post. Maybe somebody read that, decided he hated me based on my writing style, and is an eccentric millionaire, and so went around buying up all the Bell’s, or (if he’s not local) hired some taskrabbit to do it. That could be. But then, why would somebody hate my blog that much (other than the Velominati, Andrew Tillin, or Margolis and Liebowitz)? This enemy action theory just doesn’t seem very realistic.

But then a much simpler explanation occurred to me. Perhaps my last Bell’s post simply hit the mark, and convinced all my readers that this particular seasoning really is the key to Thanksgiving. Maybe across the country, even across the world, including my own locale, people are buying up the Bell’s in droves. To test my theory, I looked up the stock price for Brady Corporation, which makes Bell’s seasoning. Sure enough, its price began a dizzying climb in late 2015, right around the time of that first post. I appear to be a victim of the very success my blog has brought about!

Yeah. That must be it.

Well, if you’ve made it to the end of this post, especially if this was after your big feast, congratulations. And have a very happy Thanksgiving!

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Email me here. For a complete index of albertnet posts, click here.

Thanksgiving Invitation Template & FAQ

Introduction

I know how it is: you decide to host Thanksgiving, and next thing you know you’re on pins and needles wondering who will actually deign to show up, since nobody RSVPs anymore. (Or is that just my family?) Well, I know this may be a little late, but help is on the way in the form of this handy template for the official Thanksgiving invitation. This is useful even after you’ve issued the verbal offer and the save-the-date, in case your people need a reminder or a little prompting.

Of course you’ll want to tweak this a bit for your particular family situation; for example, if you’re all football fans but backing opposing teams, you can start the trash-talk early. Or, if all of your family get-togethers devolve into ruthless character assassination, you can make light of that. Here are some guiding principles for all invitations, before you proceed to the template:

• Brand it – this is more than a meal, more than a holiday, it’s an event
• Keep it light – for example, don’t make too much fun of the vegans
• Make it sassy – there will be plenty of cloying, sentimental speeches on the day itself so there’s no need to start now
• Make it firm – if you come off as too beseeching, you just look pathetic
• Provide actual information – even if this goes against everything you stand for

Thanksgiving invitation template

Hello all you family people,

I know this is really late in the game (though I don’t know what the game is, exactly) but anyhow, consider this your official invitation to TGV’23 at the Albert Headquarters in Albany! Please print out this email summons and bring it to show at the door. (If you can turn this guest authentication concept into a QR-code-driven thing, so much the better. Get your IT folks together with mine and they’ll set it up.)

As no other organizing principle presents itself I’ll make the rest of this invitation an FAQ.

Shouldn’t it be called TVG’23?

No, that was Uncle B—’s idea. I think he was referring to “TV Guide” though I can’t imagine why he thought that made sense. TGV’23 is not really an acronym, as all acronyms are passé.

What do you hosts need to know from me as you plan for TGV’23?

We need to know who all is coming (including plus-ones) and who is bringing the Bell’s seasoning. So far we think we have [list of invited guests goes here]. If anyone in that list is having second thoughts, dismiss them immediately.

Has the turkey been ordered?

Yes, which means nobody is allowed to flake. We ordered a very special turkey. We reserved it, in fact, before it was born. It was still in the egg. We met its parents. Since then we’ve supervised every step of its lifecycle, from its incubation (the mother and father taking turns), its early life (on a real grassy field, none of this fake plastic green grass like with an Easter basket), to its entirely hormone-free organic-grain-fed upbringing with plenty of opportunity to socialize. It is local, organic, fair-trade, and hopefully large enough.

Is lodging included in this deal?

L— gets dibs on the guest room (which she may still anachronistically refer to as “her” “bedroom”) and its magnificent new king-sized guest bed. If you’re nice she might invite you to a slumber party there. Other guests can fight over the legendary Bed of Sand down in the home office. Beyond that, we have a reasonable amount of floor space and two large sofas for those interested in the college-esque party-‘til-dawn experience, and if there are adventurous souls fancying a campout, we have flat (albeit stone) surfaces in the backyard and a large tent available. We would not be offended if one or more parties were to seek a motel/hotel/AirBNB/VRBO, especially given the relatively small number of bathrooms here (i.e., one).

I heard a rumor that the men are encouraged to pee in the backyard.

Yes, but only in the planting beds and the fountain. And please keep your micturition discreet so as not to scandalize the neighbors.

Does your new guest bed have a name?

Yes, we call it the Pound Cake Bed because the mattress is so much like pound cake, it’s tempting to take a bite.

Is there plenty of free parking?

Yes, we have a remarkable abundance of street parking. If your car is currently dripping oil, please notify us in advance and we will provide carpet swatches.

My car is a beautiful Dodge Charger Super Bee and its exterior paint has been polished, waxed, clear-coated, and festooned with glitter. Can I park it in your garage?

Our garage was designed around a 1927 Model-T Ford and can only accommodate a sub-compact car, and only then if we were to remove eight or nine bicycles. So, no.

Have all the  Albany Alberts been vaccinated?

Triple-vaxxed against COVID, flu-shots up to date, shingles vaccines complete, and screened monthly for cooties. No wonder we’re all practically autistic.

When should we arrive?

Wednesday seems reasonable. If anybody is flying, and the airfares are lower earlier in the week or something, well then come earlier!

When should we leave?

I reckon either on Sunday, or right after you break something but before the breakage is discovered, or earlier if you have to, or later if airfares go down or whatever. Just wing it, there are no wrong answers.

I am kind of new to this family and when you all get together, I can’t understand half the stuff you’re saying. What gives?

Fear not: I have put together this handy glossary of Albert-isms.

Will there be gravy?

Look, there are some things we just don’t joke about, okay?

Do you miss us, and are you super-pumped about this, and will there be lots of baking (e.g., pumpkin pie, apple pandowdy), and should Uncle B— bring his biking gear (cleaks, angry biker costume, and helmet), and will there be long hikes, and can people pursue their own activities as desired, and will there be leftovers?

Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, and maybe.

Will there be dad jokes?

Does the pope wear a funny hat?

Was that a dad joke?

No. That was a cinematic reference. A dad joke would be more along the lines of “Two peanuts were walking down the street and one of them was assaulted.”

I heard you have a cat. Was it genetically modified to be hypoallergenic?

No, Freya was conceived the old fashioned way by a couple of strays. However, she has a subcutaneous RFID transmitter in case she gets lost, and because we added our credit card number to her online profile, we can use her as a mobile wallet. Ask for a demo! (As for anyone with a cat allergy, Benadryl is on us!)

Why do you use so many exclamation points?

Because I’m so doggone excited about TGV’23!!

If I’m honest, half the reason I’m even coming is so I can visit San Francisco with my plus-one. Is it a reasonable drive, and will my car get broken into?

If your car is a Prius, its catalytic converter will be stolen, even if you only park it out front of our house. But you’re in luck because with the local BART train system you can reach San Francisco in just 25 minutes, and the city is totally walk-able. You’ll have a blast!

How soon do you need to know we’re coming?

Oh, we already ordered the turkey, so you’re coming. You’re definitely coming. You better. But we don’t need any official total. It’s not like we have to pull permits or something.

Do you have any glue sticks?

As far as you know, no. We don’t need a repeat of what happened last year.

Will there be any strange, nonstandard dishes that will make me feel uneasy?

You mean like those weird tiny onions in the saliva-like sauce your ex-stepmother served? You bet! (Kidding! I never asked for the recipe, needless to say.) We’re sticking to the classics, mostly, though we’ll roast a couple of chickens (just to be “disruptive”).

Can we plan to burn off all those calories by hitting the malls on Black Friday?

Only if you really love window shopping. You probably wouldn’t enjoy actually buying anything here in Albany because have we some of the highest sales tax in the nation. (But it’s all good … I voted for that tax hike, and countless others.)

Isn’t the name, TGV’23, designed to summon the spirit of Train à Grande Vitesse since you love high-speed rail, France, and so forth?

Aha, you got me!

Well, I guess that pretty much sums it up. Please let us know if you’re coming, etc. and if you have any questions I didn’t think of.

Love,
Evil Uncle Dana

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Rubber Spatulas

Introduction

As much as I hate Christmas shopping, it’s got to be done.  I discussed this with my wife recently.  “Everybody is getting spatulas this year,” I announced, and began to extrapolate before my wife cut me off.  “I’m not going to talk with you about spatulas,” she said gruffly.

As noted here, my wife needs to draw boundaries by declaring off-limits certain topics or concepts, including Bell’s seasoning, automotive matters (e.g., double-clutching), and especially bike lore. This is entirely reasonable.  Imagine, dear reader, how tiresome it could be to inhabit albertnet for several hours a day.  My wife rightly needs to protect her mental airspace.   And yet, I have so much to say about rubber spatulas! 

Since you have the freedom to close this browser window (a freedom which I encourage, especially if you then close all your browser windows and go outside), I’m going to get into spatulas here.  My thesis?  Spatulas are Love.

Where the rubber meets the bowl

I’m fond only of rubber spatulas.  (The other kind, like you flip pancakes with?  Not interesting to me, other than the basics:  I need to have exactly one of these, a familiar one which I’m used to, and I regard all other shapes and styles as dangerous impostors.)

Now, if you’re feeling all punctilious and want to tell me all about how the things I call rubber spatulas are actually made of plastic, I’ll just stop you right there.  The term “rubber spatula” is an idiom, not a precise descriptor.  We call a Curad adhesive bandage a Band-Aid, and we call bike jerseys “Lycra” even though many (perhaps most) are 100% polyester.  If society can absorb “fat free half-and-half” as a term, I can say “rubber spatula.”  And no, I won’t call it a plastic spatula—that doesn’t mean anything, since so many pancake-flipping spatulas are also plastic.  If you insist on the term “soft plastic spatula,” then I’m going to ask you to say “facial tissue” instead of “Kleenex,” and then I’m going to quibble (e.g., “You’re going to blow your nose into human flesh you’ve harvested from somebody’s face?!”).

Why rubber spatulas?

I am grimly aware than there are many households that don’t own a single rubber spatula.  My college roommates never had them, and at first I worried that the more slovenly among them would use and abuse mine.  Then it dawned on me that these guys had no idea what a rubber spatula was even for.  This came to a head one evening as I was using my spatula to get the last little bit of food out of a can.  “What are you doing?” my otherwise totally reasonable roommate asked.  I was immediately struck by the irony of my having experienced the polar opposite confusion dozens of times, upon seeing him throw an un-scraped can—that’s right, with at least an entire tablespoon of glean-able food left in it—into the recycling.

Here’s the thing.  My blog could go supernova and be turned into a huge series of books and eventually a giant movie franchise, making me a multimillionaire, and I would still scrape every last morsel.  My motivation here is not frugality born of necessity (as it had been during college, when I was perennially broke).  Rather, I use a rubber spatula—on a daily basis, often several times a day—simply because I have been inculcated from birth to do so.

Inculcated from birth

Okay, that previous statement was a bit of an exaggeration—it’s not like when I was still in diapers my mom would seat me on the kitchen counter and give me a demo of proper spatula use.  But she was using a rubber spatula since before I was born, so as soon as I was ready to pay attention, this behavior was on display.  I love the phrase “inculcated from birth” for this reason.  Nothing conveys principles like repeated demonstration.  The fact is, before our kids become surly, rebellious teens, we have years and years to teach them by example.  We walk the walk, and talk the talk, and since our kids literally learn how to walk and talk by imitating us, we parents have a lot of sway during those early years.  It’s up to us to take advantage.

Here’s an example.  My kids—age 13 and 15—do not have cell phones and aren’t on any social media platform.  When I boast of this stuff to other parents, they never say “you’re fricking crazy!” but rather, “How the hell did you swing that?!”  My response?  “They’ve been inculcated from birth that social media is lame and teens don’t need cell phones.”  Because we introduced these concepts so early, and reinforced them the whole way along (mainly by example), it feels normal to my kids not to have Facebook or phones.  No, they’re not happy about it, but it’s their reality and always has been, so they accept it, like religion or the force of gravity.

For my mom, rubber spatulas didn’t start out as a homemaking tool.  She first used them at work, in a hospital laboratory.  She may have even started using them in her microbiology labs in college.  The point was to be very precise in her measurements; after all, the amount of something that sticks to a petri dish or volumetric flask will vary randomly, so it must be entirely gathered up and added to the sample being tested.  (My mom is a great baker and her scientific precision is certainly a huge part of that.)  Seeing her skillfully wielding the spatula, it’s easy to extrapolate and imagine her bringing great skill and focus to her lab work, and seeing that as a kid made me feel proud.  (By contrast, my dad’s work—aerospace engineering—was so far out there, it was hard to imagine what his particular skill would even look like.)

It is probable that using a rubber spatula was the first kitchen skill I ever developed.  I clearly remember being a small child watching my mom slice mushrooms and dreaming of the day I would get to do that, but it’s a big step letting a child wield a sharp knife.  On the flip side, a pretty young kid can be trusted with a rubber spatula.  When my mom would bake, she’d divvy up the batter-coated implements among my brothers and me:   two kids would get a little beater from the electric hand mixer; one kid would get the mixing bowl; and one kid would get to lick the rubber spatula.  (How did the third kid get the mixing bowl clean?  I don’t remember … perhaps he got his own spatula.)  When Mom used the big KitchenAid mixer, meaning there was only the one big beater/wand thingy to lick, one kid would simply get a soup spoon dipped in batter.  Harvesting residual batter was a family ritual, as treasured and important as the cake itself.

So:  do my own kids use rubber spatulas?  You bet they do!  In fact, this tradition has taken on a new twist in our household.  We have a family rule that licking your plate is not allowed, period.  This bothers my kids, who are aware that their cousins have a different rule:  no licking your plate at the table.  Those kids, upon busing their dishes to the kitchen, are allowed to lick them just before tossing them in the sink.  My wife and I can’t allow this, as our kitchen adjoins the dining nook where we often entertain guests.  So our kids—acting purely on their own volition—took to excusing themselves from the table, busing their dishes, and then carefully removing every trace of sauce from their plates using—you guessed it—a rubber spatula.  Alexa, the more voracious of the two, already handles that spatula with surgical precision.  (One day she’ll forget herself and do this in front of our guests, but at least this will only be bizarre and kind of embarrassing, rather than outright appalling.)

What we talk about when we talk about spatulas

I’ve established that my wife is not going to talk to me about rubber spatulas.  But do my kids?  We haven’t discussed them yet—but I could probably introduce the topic at dinner tonight and they’d have plenty to say.  Actually, Lindsay already has—she loves the colors of the four spatulas I just bought.  Alexa would probably give a thoughtful critique, given her strong interest in maximizing the efficacy of this tool.  Better yet, I could phone one of my brothers and expect a spirited dialogue on the topic.  It might go something like this:

            “So I bought four new rubber spatulas today.”

            “Yeah?  Plastic or wooden handle?”

            “Plastic.”  (Here we would both be envisioning the same thing, with Blu-Ray clarity:  a rubber spatula whose wooden handle is slightly warped, as a result of having been accidentally put through the dishwasher.)

            “Same size head on all four spatulas?”  (I know exactly where he’d be going with this … we have little use for the grossly oversized and particularly grossly over-thick spatula heads you sometimes see, but we like the half-deep heads that are nimble enough for slender jars.)

            “No, couldn’t find narrower ones in this brand.  So it’s just a medium head.  But these bad boys are pretty sweet.  Heat-resistant to 450 degrees!”

            “Oh, that’s a great feature.  Remember that white sauce—“

            “Oh my god, like it was yesterday.”  (Decades ago I was making a white sauce—starting with a butter & flour paste, then gradually stirring in milk—and I got distracted, so that the spatula melted partway, and I was bothered by the prospect of wasting all that perfectly good butter—actually, it would have been margarine back then—so I consulted with my brother before proceeding with the sauce, which meant knowingly eating rubber.  Or plastic, whatever.)

            “How’s the feel?”

            “Well, the head has a nice tight fit on the handle, which is so hard to find.”

            “Right, so it’s not going to twist around, like in a peanut butter jar.  I hate it when they twist around.”

            “Yeah, and I’m hoping less water will get in, too.”

            “Right, less mold … awesome.”  (We’re both envisioning that gross black mold that coats the handle where it goes into the head, and replaying stock memory footage of trying to clean the mold out of the inside of the spatula head.)

            “I’ll let you know how they work out.  Man, the handles are really nice—they’re clear plastic, but clear like glass.”

            “You think they’ll get cloudy from the dishwasher?”  (Now we’re both picturing the headlights of the car that get all cloudy from years of gravel and road grime spraying up on them.)

            “I guess if that happens I’ll buy some more and just hand-wash them.”  (The perfect rubber spatula has become a Holy Grail of sorts.  Life has changed a lot since our childhood, when all rubber spatulas were made by Rubbermaid and they were all off-white with a wooden handle.)  “So, remember those old Rubbermaid ones—”

            “Right, the Rubbermaid, with the wooden handle.”

            “Yeah, exactly.  Were the heads off-white, or had they started off white and just got stained over time?”

            “I dunno … probably they started out white.  Remember how they’d get all pink—’

            “Yeah, from spaghetti sauce!  I hated that.  But these new ones, they’re brilliantly colored.  I wasn’t sure I’d like it, and I don’t think I’d want all my spatulas to be this bright, but it’s a nice splash of color among the others.”

            “It’s not at all strange that we both own lots of rubber spatulas—that seems completely normal to us, though many would find it odd.”  This last bit is unspoken, of course.  We’re not even thinking this in so many words … it’s just a shared understanding that doesn’t need to be outwardly acknowledged, which is one of the pleasures of being in a family.

“But wait!” you may say.  “Isn’t imposing your childhood behavior and vernacular on your own household an oppressive act?  Didn’t you start out this essay talking about your wife refusing to talk about spatulas?”  Fair point—when we say “family” we could mean the family we sprang from, or the family we started.  They’re not entirely separate, but neither are they one discrete entity.

I didn’t want to interrupt earlier, but here’s what I mean about mold on the spatula handle:

Incidentally, my mom still prefers wooden handles on her rubber spatulas.  Check out her collection:

Of  course not all family traditions are taken up by the next generation.  I can envision a family comprising several barbecue aficionados—who might wax rhapsodic about this or that sauce, or rub, or wood chip—but whose uber-modern kids have gone vegetarian.  I’d guess most families enjoy a crazy overlapping of traits and loves and behaviors; the Venn diagram might be kaleidoscopic.  That said, I’d be surprised if you could show me a family totally lacking in highly specific idiosyncrasies.

How families talk is part of this.  Their insular patois isn’t consciously created, but something like natural selection.  Some verbal tropes stick; some don’t.  For example, though my older daughter is an enthusiastic bike racer and loves her bike like a jockey loves her horse, she won’t talk about bike stuff with me.  The cassette on her mountain bike, though deeply scalloped for maximum weight savings, is machined from a solid block of steel, other than the 42-tooth (!) large cog, which is aluminum (!) … and yet my daughter couldn’t care less.  (If you think it pains me that nobody in my household will indulge me in gearhead talk, you’re right.)  But other verbal traditions have taken hold, such that if, upon leaving the house, I call out, “I’m going out there—don’t try to stop me,” I can count on at least one daughter saying, “You fool … you’ll be killed!” and then taking me to task if I fail to reply, “I must do this … alone.”

Will my wife engage in this silly script?  Nope.  But she has adopted this one:  “I know how to run an office!”  This comes from a tale I told once, of a temporary employee I had to train decades ago.  I’d shown her the postage machine and how to work it.  You have to pay attention, because every mistake you make costs you that much in postage—there are no re-dos.  I handed the temp a giant stack of stuffed envelopes and said, “Keep an eye out—a bunch of those are going to Canada.”  This really pissed her off, maybe because I was younger than she, and she snapped back, “I know how to run an office!”  Half an hour later, she strode in and smacked the stack of envelopes down on my desk.  I did a quick spot-check and discovered that the Canada-bound ones had the same postage as the domestic ones.  “The Canada ones have to be re-done,” I said, “because it costs more to mail things to Canada.”  She was horrified, and stammered, “I … I did not know that!” 

Somehow, this anecdote looms large enough in our familial consciousness that we routinely employ the retort, “I know how to run an office!”  It’s a very useful statement, being a nice brief shorthand for something complicated:  “I’m going to arrogantly deride your doubt in me, while acknowledging that in a short while I may well get my comeuppance because I’m not actually all that sure of myself, notwithstanding my strident attitude.”  And I think we all enjoy how the great specificity of this utterance relies on our common familiarity with the story behind it.  Perhaps my wife enjoys this one because, unlike so much of what I say, it wouldn’t mean anything to my brothers, nieces, nephews, or parents.

Synthesis

Getting back to spatulas, it’s not actually important whether or not my kids are ever as passionate about them as I am, nor whether they’re ever moved to hold forth verbally about them.  (Just now Alexa happened by, and I said, “Alexa, it’s time we had our father/daughter talk about rubber spatulas,” and without missing a beat she replied, “I’m not ready!”)  But I take pleasure in the following daydream:  one day, when my daughters have grown up and moved away, I’ll go visit one of them, and when I head into the kitchen I’ll find it well stocked with rubber spatulas.  This will fill me with … not pride, exactly, since using a rubber spatula isn’t something to take pride in, per se, any more than I’m proud to be an American (i.e., proud of the geographical happenstance of being born here).  I’ll be filled, rather, with a sense of identification, and the satisfaction of having had this influence on my kids. 

And perhaps, when I see my daughter expertly wield this handy kitchen gadget, I’ll be emboldened to strike up a conversation about it.  Will my daughter brush me off?  Maybe—and that would warm my heart:  she’s just like her mother!  And if she doesn’t, it’ll warm my heart when she says something insightful like, “Dad, my roommate was going off about my rubber spatula being make of plastic, so I had to correct him.  I explained that the head is actually silicone, or to be very precise, siloxane.  So then she starts rolling her eyes like she’s sooo bored, and I’m like, ‘Hey, you brought it up!’”

Either way, it’ll be heartwarming. See?  Spatulas are Love.

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