Tea and Maira Kalman and Cary Tennis

http://kalman.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/10/29/e-pluribus-unum/?th&emc=th

Sleepless night. Comforted in the early hours by Maira Kalman and Cary Tennis:

Somewhere people are laughing in a cafe.

But I am looking in a cardboard box for a tax file from 1987.

As I look for the tax file, I find a solitary button in a cellophane wrapper and try to decide whether to keep the button, and if so, whether to leave it in the box of tax files

or whether to find a new place for the button, and if so, where that place would be, and then I examine the button, noting its deep brown color and then I see that it is broken, and I wonder, Well, this button is broken, and yet the package is not opened, what shall I do?

Thusly are the hours of our days flushed down the toilet.

Thusly do we feel the crushing, deathly weight of meaninglessness.

Thusly do we abandon forthwith any such project of getting organized.

We go out into the sunshine and it is still beautiful. We sit in a cafe and laugh.

We come home and there are still boxes on the floor. We sit among them and weep and curse the gods.

I suspect I am not alone in this.

Thus we seek to become aware of the qualities of time, and the qualities of space, and try to live in this world as it is.

copyright 2009 Ann Krueger Spivack

The Art of the Bar and Polenta

This is not good polenta. This is polenta that stiffens immediately in the pot, is bright yellow and crunchy instead of cream-colored and silken. I've made the damn polenta three times today and now, instead of feeling polenta soothed, I want to stomp out back and hurl the pot into the cow pasture.

Instead, I open The Art of the Bar. It's like walking through an art gallery, and every room has a tasteful display of a perfect cocktail glass filled with a perfect cocktail. No people. Just cocktails in jewel tones with perfectly restrained garnishes. Forget the polenta. Look at the light on the glass stem for the Sazerac. Look at the old-fashioned lime juicer in front of what looks like a pressed brass wall. Look at the square platter with the beaded rim and tiny, perfect little cocktail onions. I'm thinking I could go on an all-cocktail diet and be very happy.

And this thought before I go scrub out the polenta pot: one story of how cocktails may have gotten their name describes Betsy Flanagan, a tavern-keeper during the American Revolution who garnished her drinks with a rooster's tail feather. "The soldiers were so enamoured of her drinks that they would toast her with the chant "Vive le coqtail!" Every time I open the book I wonder about Betsy and those feathers, and how I can have such a vivid idea of what she was like without knowing anything else about her.

copyright 2009 Ann Krueger Spivack