Forklift
The new brown
Very little about winter charms me anymore, but rich ale is one of them. Been all over this brown from Anchor lately, Brekle’s.
Spainly speaking
Kelly got me Spain for my birthday, but we had to send the first copy back because the binding unraveled in shipment. Understandable. It’s bearing the weight of the Spanish table, after all.
Steak and slake
Last spring, Steve Jeffery was running production at LaFarge, the French cement firm with a plant in northeast Tulsa. Jeffery is not a “rock licker,” as he calls those truly passionate about geological formations, but he knows enough to have clued me in on the Lipe Mound.
Absinthe: a fairy tale
Paul Nathan’s forgotten more absinthe than I’ver ever drunk and one of his faves is George Rowley’s La Fee Parisienne. Rowley, an M.D., was the first to introduce absinthe back into France after the 1915 ban was lifted in 1998. I have a bottle of La Fee tucked away at home, but not the French style.
A muse
About a year ago, following nothing but hunches, I flew to San Francisco to meet Barnaby Conrad III, Maurice Kanbar’s new partner in publishing.
Ian Frazier at the Hurley Library
The first thing I ever read by Ian Frazier was his piece in The Atlantic on Minneapolis’ Mall of America. It was in a care package my sister-in-law brought over when she came to France to visit in the spring of ’02. By then, Frazier had already written Great Plains and On the Rez, his two books on the Sioux and other tragic aspects American West.
’Til Death do us part
Todd Zuniga’s Literary Death Match came to town and I was lucky to be among the four combatants. The rules of engagement: Two writers square off and read for seven minutes each, of which one advances to round two. Then, two more. I read in the second, versus ultimate winner Sloan Davis of Nimrod, the Tulsa-based lit journal.
Brace yourself
“He’s cute,” said Reta, about to jam her fingers in my son’s mouth. And I began to wonder for how long. Would he still be cute and 7 when the hour was up? I distracted myself by looking out the picture window, where the creek meandered through a stand of golden-leafed oaks. I said something about the scenery, leaving the orthodontics to the pros.
There’s the beef
If the butcher’s shop is back, we might do well to ask where it went. Growing up, I never experienced the craftsman’s hand at the butcher block. By the time I started buying meat on my own, it was all cellophane and styrofoam.
That’s the spirit
Lastly, certainly not leastly, we sampled Mackinlay’s Rare Old Highland Malt Whisky—the malt meant to replicate the whisky Sir Ernest Henry Shackleton carried onboard the Nimrod during the British Antarctic Expedition of 1907-09.
