Month: May 2017

The first house we bought, my wife and I, was small. Two rooms and one bath. But we had not bought it for size. We had fallen for the garden. There were two orange trees, a Valencia and a Navel. There was a lath house full of fuchsias. We had a jasmine bush and several deciduous trees around a lawn. The small living room had a picture window looking out on this little paradise of ours.

Clearly, other people feel the same way about the beauty, even the necessity, of flowers, fruit, and greenery. Many a community prides itself of being the “Garden City” of the West or East or whatever. But as sure as variety can be said to be the spice of life there are also those, bless them, who go for the clean shave: some concrete to step on, a pool, and a few pots with geraniums and voilá, the perfect “garden”.

We occasionally chatted with our neighbors over the back fence. I remember the lady praising us for the beautiful garden we maintained. But her folks, she admitted, just were not garden people. “We are car people”, she once said, “from Detroit”. As she said that she motioned with her arms to indicate the three half-disassembled automobiles that were the only ornaments on her side of the fence. I have often thought of this episode, reflecting on the fact that people so much alike in many ways can yet be so different at the same time.

On a visit to Paris the first thing we saw in Parc Monceau, a lovely green spot in the 8th arrondissement, was a statue of the novelist Alfred de Musset. That same day my wife stumbled upon a statue of the dramatist Beaumarchais on rue St. Antoine near the Opera Bastille. On the Left Bank we found a bust of Chateaubriand, the first of the Romantics. Then we noticed that the offices of Air France were located on place Rostand, author of Cyrano de Bergerac, a play written in 1897 and last turned into a movie in 1950. North of the Marais was the blvd. Voltaire and near the Étoile, the rue Balzac. We found a rue Chenier and an allee Cendrars, not to forget a rue Hugo and a square Zola. It was quite obvious that in Paris poets, dramatists, and novelists are kept in high esteem. As we searched some more we found that all Parisian streets have names and that at least 175 of them are named for writers.

I do not know about Boston or New York, but on a map of Los Angeles I found only seven streets named for men of letters. As far as I was able to determine Willa Cather, James Fenimore Cooper, Emily Dickinson, William Faulkner, Robert Frost, Nathaniel Hawthorne, John Steinbeck, Ernest Hemingway, Edgar Allan Poe, J.D. Salinger, and Mark Twain, to count off a few prospects, did not make it. Maybe I am reading more into this than is reasonable but I have a suspicion that it says something about our two cities when I tell you that there are at least 650 streets in Los Angeles that have no names, just cold numbers.

(c) 2017 by Herbert H Hoffman
Picture credit: cityroom blogs ny times

Tea is a plant and all plants, thanks to the Swedish botanist Carl von Linné, have binomial Latin names. So we are talking about Thea sinensis. But not really. We usually talk only about the leaves. How they are plucked, fermented, and dried. Not even that, actually. We are mostly interested in the drink that results from pouring hot water over those dry leaves. In short, we drink a cup of tea.

Some people drink tea for breakfast. In a Chinese restaurant you might get tea for lunch or dinner. In Great Britain, on cruise ships, and all the finer hotels in the world you have afternoon tea which includes not only tea, the drink, but also cucumber sandwiches. A certain class of people call that high tea. It is usually brought by somebody called James. High tea comes close to being a ceremony or ritual, in addition to being a meal.

Another way of high tea is celebrated in Japan. In the Japanese order of things the preparation and consumption of tea is vaguely connected to Buddhism and yes, the tea may be thin or thick, powdered or leaf, and for all I know, even bag. But to do it right, i.e. with respect, grace, and proper form you may have to go to Tea School and learn from a master and that could take years, no kidding.

Another group of ritual tea drinkers is found in Brasil and Argentina. The “tea” in those parts is called Mate. It is brewed in a gourd which is passed from person to person. One drinks it through a communal silver straw which is also passed around for all to use. Think before you book a vacation in South America. Are you prepared for this? It is considered an insult if you decline the invitation to participate, I think.

You drink English tea out of a cup with a handle, preferably Spode china. Japanese tea is sipped out of ceramic cups without handles. In Mongolia tea is more like a hearty soup, slurped out of bowls. Mongolian tea is very strong. It is churned with a little salt and a generous blob of butter made from the milk of yaks. In the days before refrigeration the butter was often rancid. That was considered normal, however, and then as now a Mongolian man’s proper breakfast is a bowl of butter tea. I understand that these days cheaper teabags and cows’ milk are acceptable. There goes the age of ceremonial living. O tempora, o mores.

And then there is Russian tea. One drinks it out of a glass. Without sugar. Between swallows one takes a spoonful of varenye, or jam. At least according to my father who was born there.

In Germany, my native country, and also in China I understand, people are intrigued by the variety of dried plant leaves other than Thea sinensis that can be made into a drink. Thus the word “tea” became a generic term for any such infusion. As a child I especially liked peppermint tea. Recently I heard that peppermint is bad for the eyes. Maybe that is why I have had to wear glasses since I was ten and why my Latin is so bad because I could not read what Herr Kache wrote on the black board. And why I still hate Herr Kache because he made fun of my Latin in front of the class. And all this because of Mentha piperita. The stuff is dangerous!

Nowadays, ending most of my days as a nervous wreck, I drink a cup of “Relaxing Tea” at bed time. It makes me go to sleep because it contains valerian, passion flower, skullcap, chamomile, and catnip. According to the U.S. Pharmacopoeia, I believe, it should actually kill me. But then the War did not kill me, either. I am lucky, I suppose.

If you are queasy you may not want to read on because we are crossing a line, from tea as an infusion of dried plant matter to tea as an infusion — well let us just say a liquid produced by pouring hot water over the antlers of a dead deer. Antler tea, in other words. I understand that the CDC has issued a warning that this tea may really kill you. It can give you botulism.

Enough of tea suitable for human consumption. But there is more. I have heard of garlic tea. It is supposed to smell so bad that aphids and tomato worms run away and have dinner elsewhere. There is also a liquid we could call “compost” tea. It is made from decomposed plant matter and manure. Let me emphasize that it is delicious and nutritional for anything you plant in your garden. For the rest of us caution is advised: toddlers and dogs also love that sort of stuff.

(c) 2017 by Herbert H. Hoffman
Picture credit: pexels.com

What happened a hundred years ago may be considered old by many of us. What happened in 1492 was already considered history by our Founding Fathers in 1800. “Old” is a relative term, it depends on your viewpoint. On the scale of history, however, the entire 500 year span of European discovery and settlement is brand new. If you want old in America you have to look to what we call the Native Americans. Depending on where you went to school you learned either nothing about their origins, when and from where they came, or perhaps you heard of the Alaskan land bridge and tribes from Asia that arrived about 15 thousand years ago on the American continent. If I look at it from this angle I have to admit that all of us who came here after 1492 are newcomers.

It made me feel better when I read a report in the newspaper about humanids (pre-homo sapiens, apparently) that lived in San Diego (or what passed for San Diego then) some 130 thousand years ago. Now that would make even the above mentioned Native Americans newcomers. We may all be fellow newcomers in the end.

Those early people, unfortunately, are now extinct. On the basis of fossils that were excavated, archaeologists speculate that they hunted mastodons, forerunners of the elephants. Those early Americans were sloppy eaters judging by the leftover mastodon bone fragments that were found lying around, together with stone tools used to crack open femurs to suck out the fatty marrow. That they did that is not at all hard to believe because I have seen my own grandfather use his knife to poke around the bones in my mother’s stew for the marrow, a messy affair. And I am sure he was not related to any of those folks in San Diego.

The mastodons are also extinct, by the way. Their descendants are the elephants. Good thing other foodstuffs were invented since then, because if I had to eat a lot of mastodon bone marrow or even grilled elephant trunk, for that matter, I would probably be extinct too before the year is out.

(c)2017 by Herbert H. Hoffman
Picture credit: Ancient Origins