Category: nostalgia

  • In Memorium: Bev

    One of my aunties- my mother’s best friend through most of my life- died last night. I heard via text when I was inline for a tennis court. Bev would be shocked and amazed, admiring, and incredulous that I would be lined up for tennis. I don’t think she exercised a day in her life.…

  • Christmas Traditions… it’s for us.

    I talked to my sister yesterday, and she mentioned that our traditional Saffron yeast buns were the most popular at her kid’s school’s holiday craft fair. In that conversation we got around the crux of it: holidays are for us. Basically, as Swedes and as kids who grew up in a large, fun festive family,…

  • Getting the Piano

    Probably one of the hardest things to coordinate was getting the piano out of my mom’s house- which she had finally sold- and up to my apartment. 150 miles, from a large Victorian in Pacific Grove, to a small 1-bedroom in San Francisco. First, I read an email in line at Trader Joe’s from my…

  • My Awesome (1940s) Neighbors

    Via Burrito Justice, I started looking into the National Archives’ released census data on who exactly lived at my address (via 1900 Sanborn Fire Insurance maps)- the corner of Columbus (formerly Montgomery) and Taylor, in North Beach. The entries are fascinating, especially when I started doing the math. The details are fun. I decided to…

  • Christmas Traditions

    The new “city visit” tradition with sister & kids & friends I’m a Christmas baby. The other day, I had a conversation with my older sister Amy, who was 5 when I was born, about my mom having me. She already had 4 kids, Christmas was 4 days away. She was sick with the flu.…

  • In Search of My Grandmother’s Silver

    In helping my parents downsize, I took their silver off their hands. It’s the same stuff I used to have to polish as a kid, and I remember doing that, lazy circles with a rag on a coffee pot we rarely used. So awkward now in my modern apartment, these old silver set and the…

  • In Memoriam: Roger Richman

    I lost my friend Roger yesterday. He was a kind of uncle to me, he was always there as I grew up. An expert witness in hundreds of court cases regarding how metal stood up under collision, he was a metallurgist trained in the Mining School in New Mexico, and ran a consultancy that contracted…

  • Biking to Pier 38

    Pull up pant leg, check lights, and generally warm up while biking on flat blocks near Powell, Mason, Chestnut, Francisco, untitil you need to go by the Post Office relay station, eying the 45 on the way to the MUNI depot. Merge quickly onto Bay St., battle Marina girls driving their Audis to the Bay…

  • I’m the Anachronism, I’m the Problem

    I was shocked, when I was 22 and flew to Paris, that it wasn’t like I’d read in the expat novels of Hemingway and Fitzgerald. Instead, it was kinda like home. Grunge was big there, like it was in Seattle. Hip hop was emerging there, just like it was in San Jose. Everyone spoke English,…

  • Travel Food Notes: Part 1 Fish Salad & Horseradish

    My host in Sweden, Ingrid, served me horseradish soup one of the last nights, and I loved the peppery creaminess of it, so I roughly recreated the recipe yesterday for my Dad. From Epicurious and altered. Ingrid said she bought it at the store and re-heated. 1. The hard part is finding fresh horseradish. Whole…