Cheese Straws as Family Trait

"I couldn't find the piece that holds the top of my pastry extruder on, so I made the cheese straws the way that my mother did, and it was so wonderful just reliving that memory."

My mom was sitting in the back seat of my wife's car, on the way to the airport.  Caroline, sitting in the front seat, looked at me strangely, apparently because of the look that had crossed my face when I overheard the conversation mom was having in the backseat with Kathe.

"She never measured anything.  She just took the block of cheese, and then added butter, and then added  flour until the consistency was right.  And it really struck a chord in my memory, because she would let me help with the mixing things together.  It really was a wonderful memory."

It was the strangest sensation.  All my life I had heard about my Nana's kitchen fiascoes.  The installed ceramic tile in her kitchen, with personalized designs from family members, one of which said:

Because Nana was, well... famous for burning things in the kitchen.

Family legend has it that my uncle Richard didn't know that scraping the burnt part off of the toast was not part of the toast-making process.  So much so, that one time when the family went out to eat, he demanded that the toast be sent back to make it right.

Nana

This is a piece I wrote up a few years ago when I went on a training session to the Corps of Engineers research facility in Duck, located in the Outer Banks of NC.

I am sitting in my hotel room on Corolla, the next town over from Duck, and I just came from the beach. It was an emotional visit that hit me in ways I did not expect.

My fondest memories from my childhood were from the beaches of South Carolina. There were nights when we would wade into the tidal creek on the back side of Fripp Island, swimming through iridescent waves, as the natural phosphorescence from the creek would light up our bodies with sparks, bright enough to play tag while submerged. Amazing setting, delightful fun.

I am a habitually early riser, and never was that more the case than when we were at the beach. I would go and help the turtle lady as she re-introduced recently hatched loggerhead turtles into the surf zone, shooing away the seagulls, giving them the maximum chance at making it.

But mostly I went shelling. I collected shells from before dawn until I couldn't see any more. Some were rarer than others; at times we would find sand dollars, cockle shells, periwinkles, lady slippers, moon snails, pen shells, fan shells, oysters, the periodic scallop and clam, and the occasional whelk. On a very rare occasion, I found sharks teeth or vertebrae, fragments of scotch bonnets, and once in a blue moon, a starfish. I have since learned the scientific names of most of the shells we found, but they fail to light the imaginative fire that the local nomenclature provided. We talked about habitat, we talked about specific density of shells, we explored nature and science through a fury of collecting.

And the competitive urge is strong in this one, Obi Wan. It was a race, and I was bound and determined to win - the best shell, the most complete, the biggest, the smallest, the most fragile; whatever superlative there was, I was going to find it. And, for the most part, I did. I trained my eyes to see sharks' teeth, and was often the only one to find one. I would read every poster and book, seeing what was rare and what could be found, and set my sights on whatever was most infrequently found in the area. I always found cool loot, most of which was left behind when we went back to Greenville, leaving me with one or two shells I was allowed to take with me, and a flotilla of memories of collected wonder.

My Nana - my mother's mom - was there for every dogged step of the way. I would race ahead, afraid that the 'virgin territory' would be picked over if I didn't get there first. And she would walk more leisurely, picking up and holding the 'treasures' of all of the kids that went with her. She must have logged decades of time on the beach, walking with all of the grandkids, each arguing over who had found the coolest stuff. And she lugged tons of 'treasure' back to the house, making each of us feel as though our treasure, and by extension we, were special beyond measure. And it did not matter at all whether it was a ladyslipper identical to the four hundred thousand that we had picked up previously, she made the finding of 'this one' special.

Love. I think I learned to love at the beach. I just didn't know it.

One of the last times that I went out seashelling with Nana, I was on a quest for sharks' teeth. And I was going to find them, come sheol or high tide. My teenage body sprinted from one patch of shells to the next, using pattern recognition skills developed over years to identify any anomalous items quickly, before moving to the next.

And from somewhere behind me, Nana yelled "Ha, ha! Looky here at what I found!!!"

I did come by my competitive urges naturally, and she had won.

No contest.

I turned back to ground I had passed by, and with a sinking feeling looked back at what she had picked up. It was a devils' pocketbook. The Holy Grail of shelling. Technically simply an egg sac from a skate (a critter related to the sting ray), the black, leathery pouch the shape of a naugahyde devil was more rare than anything else we hunted. Every array of collected shells on coffee tables or behind glass in houses in SC had one insinuated in there, carelessly included as though the family could have kept more, if they had made the effort. But those of us who looked for them knew better. You simply didn't see them; finding one was the shelling equivalent of acing the hole in golf. You will play the rest of the holes, but none of the rest will be the one you talk about at the end of the day.

My Nana died of pancreatic cancer before I went to graduate school. And I don't think it was a conscious thing at all, but I have not been back to the beach on the Atlantic since then. I have been down to the Gulf (a poor excuse for a beach, if you ask me) and I went to Hawaii and Yucatan. But when I walked out onto that beach this afternoon, I felt the love that I had been missing since 1993. I felt a part of my soul get fed in a way that I did not expect. Just walking over the dune and smelling the salty air perked up my senses, and I walked straight into the chilly surf.

And I started shelling, thinking fondly of my Nana, and the wonderful way that she had with kids, letting them learn to love and love to learn. Bringing unbridled enthusiasm with every discovery.

And as I looked down the beach, I realized that there were hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands of devils' pocketbooks. Littering the sand. Interspersed with the shells I loved - the cockles, the lady slippers, the pen shells, the fingernails. Devils' pocketbooks everywhere.

I am still overwhelmed with emotion. I competed to find the finest shells throughout my childhood, and never realized that I had already won the lottery. I was loved by the greatest woman who ever walked the planet.

I won. Hands down.

Small world problem

Earlier this week, I was talking with a classmate (Institute for Environmental Communications) about our class, and we started discussing architecture. 

"My parents both have architectural backgrounds," she said.  "Mom is an architectural historian, and tells me all the time that the old houses were not meant to have AC.  They were built to emit heat, and take in cold air.  My dad's basement - he lives in South Carolina..."

"Where in South Carolina?"

"It is a little town on the coast named Beaufort..."

"Beautiful Beaufort, by the sea; twenty..."

"-six miles from Yemassee!  How do you KNOW that?"

The railroad tracks in Yemassee that would wake me up
as we were getting close to Nana's house.

Turns out that her dad is a couple of years older than my mom, and both come from the same town.  We shared stories of Lady's Island, of Land's End Lights, of bluffs and hurricane insurance, Pat Conroy, summers in Hunting Island...

We reduced the size of the world by common origins.

Would YOU expect to see someone you know here?

Two weeks ago, I was standing in line, waiting for the bus to take me back to Cuzco, Peru, from the four-day hike to Machu Picchu.  Suddenly, and I see a friend of mine from New Orleans (she left the Corps of Engineers to go live in Colorado about two years ago).  It was an insane moment, completely unexpected.  In fact, when I went over to speak to her, she didn't recognize me, because it was so unanticipated. My proferred hand just hung in space, unshook.

Finally, the man standing next to her nudged her, and she looked up.  "CROREY! What are you doing here?!"  She introduced me to her dad, we talked about the different hikes, and marveled that we would run into each other a half a world away.

The world, reduced, as a result of a common work environment.  And maybe a common bucket list item.

Friends who know friends, people related to friends who live abroad, co-workers and acquaintances, we face fewer degrees of separation at every turn.  Part of the reason my world keeps shrinking is because my circles keep expanding.  As people I did archaeological survey get hired at universities around the country (and the globe) and as friends from work move away and take jobs elsewhere, my connections all over the place become dendritic.

Two generations ago, the norm was to stay in the community where you grew up.  Moving was a pretty traumatic experience, as you were torn from your friends and out of your social network.  The Eisenhower Highway system shrunk the world considerably, and we have become more peripatetic than before.  The internet has made it possible to stay in touch with those who have moved away, and so those connections can continue to be fostered at a distance.

This is the 'small world problem', introduced by Milgram, following up on concepts by Gurevich and Marconi.  The essence of what they wrote is that there are remarkably few social connections needed to connect one person to any other.  (There were Monte Carlo simulations involved, and horrific displays of statistics.)  But the end result was that people are more interconnected than they realized.

Whether you tap into the small world problem by using the Kevin Bacon application through google (Type "bacon number" (no quotes) into Google's search bar, followed by the name of an actor or actress... oh, I don't know... say, Caroline Lawton), or whether you connect to an archaeology project in Namibia through a mutual friend, the reality is that the world has gotten smaller.

Here's the kicker.  The small community is known for its normalizing mechanisms.  You tend to behave, because Aunt Millie is always watching.  You tend to do the right thing, not because your inner compass is working harder in the small community, but because the people in your community know you.  Know your family.  And report back to your family. 

Now that our world is tiny, and Aunt Millie is watching 24/7 from every cell phone and crime camera, getting away from the small community is impossible.

Even in Machu Picchu.