hope.

I knew where he was going before I heard her choke out: Don’t go in the desert alone. I watched him sling on an Army-issued back pack, watched the little girl—his daughter—stand hesitantly between her sobbing grandmother and her father.

She didn’t know what her grandmother knew, that he would come back different. Even if at first it was only that he could drink more, heft a few more weights. That was only the beginning. There could be a day when he didn’t come back at all. 

He is young, pimpled, handsome. I can tell from his face that he is trying to be strong. But his eyelids are red and he hugs his mother every time she reaches for him, the last time just at the gate door before he disappears.

We are in New York’s LaGuardia airport and I have just spent the last two days with men in skinny jeans and European shoes, women in funky glasses with chic haircuts. We were talking about making ideas happen—businesses, art, dreams. One speaker encouraging us to fuck it all and do what you want. Of course, this particular ceramic artist had always had options. The Army was never one of them and would never have to be.

We also talked about taking risks and failing, the importance of being nimble, the grit it takes to keep at it.  The blue-white glow of iPhones and iPads radiated from the rows of cushy chairs covered in red velour.There was always coffee on tables outside the auditorium with eco-friendly cups and organic granola bars.

We were encouraged to be different, think different, to not settle for the status quo, the status quo being something to smirk at since obviously it was a result of weakness and never a requirement of survival.

And all the while that boy, 19 at most, was getting ready to leave. No doubt his mother made his favorite foods, his daughter drew him lots of pictures and hid a few of her toys in his suitcase. 

We are on the same flight to Charlotte, North Carolina. From here, he’ll likely go on to Fort Bragg. I’ll get on another flight and go home. I’ll wake up Monday morning, make coffee with my French Press, do some writing before going to work and wrestling out communication problems for a few clients. Later that night I’ll be outside watching the dog find the perfect place to pee and the moon will find me with its fullness. I won’t be able to help but look up and wonder, “What does all this mean? What matters, really?”

And that boy, up since 4:30 a.m. for a run with a 40 pound backpack will be outside his barracks, missing the smell of his little girl’s shampoo, his mother’s cigarettes, asking the exact same thing.

It’s ridiculous how many times I’ve forwarded the following recipe to friends and/or myself at various email accounts. I spent weeks one winter trying to find the perfect chocolate chip cookie recipe. Every week i tried a concoction that failed to meet my standards.

Eventually, I gave up and went south. Literally. I’d given up my search and was in Louisiana for some family time when one of my sisters-in-law brought in a tin of THE MOST AMAZING CHOCOLATE CHIP COOKIES I HAD EVER HAD. I’m not kidding. And I am not being dramatic. 

All good things, it seems, originate in the south.

Enjoy.

—

2 cups minus 2 tablespoons cake flour

1 2/3 cups bread flour

1 1/4 teaspoon baking soda

1 1/2 teaspoon backing powder

1 1/2 teaspoon coarse salt

2 1/2 sticks unsalted butter

1 1/4 cups light brown sugar

1 cup plus 2 tablespoons granulated sugar

2 large eggs

2 teaspoons of vanilla extract

1 1/4 pounds of chocolate chips or chunks (20 oz which is usually 1 3/4 bags)

Sift flours, baking soda, baking powder and salt into a bowl, set aside

Using a mixer with a paddle attachment, cream butter and sugars together until very light, about 5 minutes.  Add eggs one at a time, mixing well after each addition.  Stir in the vanilla.  Reduce speed to low, add dry ingredients and mix until just combine, 5 to 10 seconds.  Drop in the chocolate pieces.

Press plastic wrap against dough and refrigerate 24-36 hours.  Dough may be used in batches and can be refrigerated up to 72 hours.

When ready to bake, preheat oven to 350 degrees.

Scoop mounds of cookie dough the size of generous golf balls onto baking sheet (about 6 to sheet) sprinkle with sea salt

Bake 16-18 minutes until golden brown  but soft. (I usually check them after 10 or 11 min and they are done)

Transfer sheet to wire rack to cool for about 5 minutes, then slip cookies onto rack to cool some more.

****bringing the butter and eggs to room temperature helps

**** don’t overbake the cookies; they’re done when the edges are golden brown (the middle looks a little gooey- but will be chewy when cooled)

The letter and the news arrive the same day. It is the kind of news that sends my heart into hiding between my toes. It will take weeks to scrounge it back up again, to feel anything that remotely resembles hope, a steady-eyed belief that life is more than one loss after another, that love is worth what it (can) cost us.

More letters come in the following days.

The letters are mostly from strangers, a letter-writing club organized by a lovely grad school friend. Pink envelopes, my address banged out with a typewriter; white no.10s with a return address label; postcards; bulky manila envelopes insisting: DO NOT BEND; poems, letters, paintings, Cds. 

There are seasons when it is a daily decision to keep one’s heart from turning to stone. I am grateful to these strangers and their letters, reminding me that the fight to keep the damn thing alive is worth it. To feel is a gift worth every hot, red beat.

It’s like clockwork, how every holiday my sister and I are compelled to make pies. That in itself wouldn’t be a problem if we didn’t insist on making the pie crusts, too. We know what will happen. We begin the process all smiles and good intentions, but later, we’ll be clenching our teeth, snapping at people we love and wanting to throw the mess on the floor, shouting and maybe crying, a little.

Look at Paula Deen’s recipe, my sister says when I’m debating whether to just buy crust. Paula Deen’s recipe calls for ¼ cup Crisco and 14 tablespoons butter. I’m not sure that’s even legal?

The recipe I’m using, a lovely little bourbon pecan number, includes a crust and doesn’t look too threatening (or lethal). In fact, it almost feels friendly. So I promise myself that this year, if it doesn’t work out, I will be the mature 32 year old that I am. There will be no slamming the crust into the counter and stomping from the room, no whining and no snapping at beloveds.

This whole thing started the Thanksgiving my grandmother, suffering from dementia and the compilation of eighty-some years, moved in with my parents. Their house was small but the kitchen was wide and warm, so we gathered there to make the meal together. No one had purchased a pie crust, so sister and I decided we’d just make one. How hard could it be? Half an hour later, our grandmother, after watching us snap at each other, nudged us aside and said, “Here, let me do it.” And she did. 

The woman who couldn’t remember the question she had just asked, who kept wondering when she would be going back home, who took multiple aspirins a day because she forgot she’d already had one with her morning coffee, that woman had hands that commanded the dough—folding, patting, adding butter—beautifully. Those hands, blue-veined and soft, had a winsome familiarity, a relationship born from years of working together in a thousand different kitchens for a thousand different meals.

So that’s really why I was trying again, why we always tried again, this time in my house, my kitchen bustling with roll-making and bean prepping and meat-checking. I tucked into a corner and did exactly what the recipe told me, keeping my expectations low, my heart-rate calm. I was willing to do anything to make this work.

But I didn’t have to do much—whether it’s the grace of that particular recipe or the fact that my hands are indeed my grandmother’s, though younger and earning their years—it turned out just fine. 

It also could be that bourbon covers a multitude of sins. 

I don’t want to be a pack rat. Truly. It’s just that there is always a very good reason for keeping something. Like I might be able to pass for a college student and get grocery store discounts so i should keep all my college IDs. 

But I’m cleaning out now. And before it all goes, I’ve made a little virtual exhibit for future generations.

(If you love this kind of thing, check out the Museum of Obsolete Objects.)

—

The dictionary. 

All good word people have them. And those pocket ones were so cool to whip out at a moment’s notice. Then came the smartphone, alas.

Records.

Records have this moment of suspense—the lovely crackling sound just before the music starts—that make them worth all the careful handling.

Notebooks.

You write things in them. Important things. Secret things.

Address Books.

This particular collection spans fifth grade through the first few years after college.

Tapes

Mix tapes are the best, particularly when featuring songs recorded live from the radio. I wish I could remember who Tim was. Apparently we were the sun and the moon (I really hope this was a school project).

Letters.

This one is from my sweet grandmother, written right after I graduated from college and started working. We didn’t have tons in common back then (she’d already had four children by the time she was my age) but she tried. I don’t have her now, but I’ve got her handwriting. Email can’t quite do that.

Walkman.

Only a little bigger than an iPod. That click when it closed up the tape was almost as good as the crackling on a record player. Almost.

Blockbuster card.

Before Netflix there were Blockbuster stores with shelves and shelves of movies. You could wander around and finally pick the movie you were in the mood for only to discover that someone else was, too, and had already checked it out. A good lesson in delayed gratification.

Film

Digital cameras haven’t always been around. Before, we had to use this kinda stuff. 

I’m not sure how it all worked, but 4 x 6 colored prints resulted from it. They looked like this:

Floppy Disks.

My entire collegiate experience is on these plastic babies. When you didn’t have a computer you carried them to a computer lab on campus. There, you printed out those papers you wrote late at night on the characteristics the Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner shared with the movie, The Green Mile. Or maybe that was just me.

Trapper Keeper.

Please, tell me you know these grand keepers of secrets. This one is particularly valuable because it also captures a major jeans brand at its height of popularity.

Video & VCR

Before DVDs and DVD players there were VHS cassettes and VCRs. They looked like this. This was how I met Old Yeller, which is ultimately why Levi is around today (and has all his rabies shots).

In Miss Andrews’ third grade classroom—the year we were finally learning how to write in cursive—I sat across from the cutest boy in the entire world. I had been waiting for two very long years  for the chance to write with swoops and sloops, that secret language of fourth graders and my parents.

When I got my first love note later that year from the cutest boy in the entire world in cursive, I knew I had arrived. I was mature, experiencing real adult things like love and cursive handwriting. 

Not everyone shares my love of the slanted word. I get that. But what I don’t get is why we’d want to deny younger generations the choice of deciding for themselves. People smarter than me are writing about the threats to cursive studies in classrooms all over the country.

Meanwhile, I’m mourning the potential loss to love letters everywhere, especially the ones passed under desks, in focused penmanship, in a cursive handwriting that feels in some small way like the first time you drive a car by yourself—a right of passage.

I was eighteen months old when ten men were starving themselves to death in Northern Ireland’s Long-Kesh prison.

But it wasn’t until I read “Hunger Strike,” a novella of Colum McCann’s that I began to learn a bit about that. Then, I started really researching….

Complicated things intrigue me. Situations that, if you look at them close enough, are more gray than black or white.

Last week I interviewed Danny Morrison, the chair of the Bobby Sands Trust, a writer and former publicity director for Sinn Fein, the IRA’s political party. I wanted to know what he’d learned over the years about writing and responsibility and politics. Here are a few excerpts from our conversation:

What’s your theory on the responsibility of art in society? How have those ideas changed over the years?

As i’ve grown older, I’ve become more sympathetic to the view that you have to separate the politics from the creative writing. There’s an interesting quote from the Israeli writer, Amos Oz: On his desk there are two pens, when he picks up this one, he’s going to be writing politics. When he picks up the other one, he’s going to be writing literature. So, he has separated them and said there should not be overlap. They should be distinct.

I am less hung up, less angry about people choosing a different path even if they have emerged from a community that has experienced oppression. They should have the freedom of choice. I would object if they ignored the oppressed in order to become a part of the oppressors as part of their writing.

Everybody is involved in the learning curve as they go through life. On the one hand I love literature. On the other, I love politics. Whatever artistic talent i had—I wanted to be a writer from about 16 or 17—i poured into the Republican publicity. . .

In his intro to Hunger Strike, a book reflecting on the events 25 years later, Morrison accuses the artistic community of responding with a “deafening silence, a blank canvas.”

Why do you think there was silence from Northern Ireland’s artistic community during the strikes?

[The strike] was a critical period for the history of Ireland. It was easier for artists to respond to Bloody Sunday. It was almost black and white. 

A lot of people adopt the safe position of “a plague on both your houses,” which means they don’t have to make a judgement or take a risk. I was frustrated and critical of artists because the hunger strike wasn’t just an incident. It was a life/death situation with a finite period of time and there was a build up over 4 years. None of them had an excuse with the information* from Archbishop O’Fiaich about the conditions in 1978. 

And yet, a lot of them were ashamed. Head be hanged “but we’re artists, but we don’t get involved in politics” I think there is a responsibility if you live in a society to have a response. I know myself having been on both sides of the fences, as a writer and a fighter. 

In writing and literature, what you have to write has to be of universal appeal. You can still do that even if your characters are partisan people. Because it’s the ability of the readers to empathize with character, regardless of what that character represents. There is a universal appeal of literature, that’s why it’s so powerful. It allows you to jump across that gap and feel the other person even if that other person is an enemy. 

*Archbishop O’Faiach’s comments after visiting the Long-Kesh prison in 1978 :

“Having spent the whole of Sunday in the prison, I was shocked at the inhuman conditions prevailing in H-Blocks 3,4 and 5 where over 300 prisoners were incarcerated. One would hardly allow an animal to remain in such conditions, let alone a human being. The nearest approach to it that I have seen was the spectacle of hundreds of homeless people living in sewer pipes in the slums of Calcutta. The stench and filth in some cells, with the remains of rotten food and human excreta scattered around the walls, was almost unbelievable. In two of them I was unable to speak for the fear of vomiting. The prisoners’ cells are without beds, chairs or tables. They sleep on mattresses on the floor, and in some cases I noticed they were quite wet. They have no covering except towel or blanket, no books, newspapers or reading material except the Bible (even religious magazines have been banned since my last visit), no pens or writing material, or TV, or radio, no hobbies or handcrafts, no exercise or recreation. They are locked in their cells for almost the whole of every day and some of them have been in this condition for more than a year and a half.”

When I approached the desk, four stacks of old books between us, I noticed the faintest mark of a lipstick kiss on his balding head.

“I love this book,” he said when I handed him Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. He kissed the cover before thumbing through, telling me there was a scene he would read after his bartending days and just weep. 

The bookstore’s name is Daedalus and Sandy is its owner. When I first moved to town I read somewhere that it was the closest thing to Paris’s Shakespeare & Co. that you could get in the U.S. And it’s true. At least in Charlottesville. Daedalus is stuffed with books up and down winding stairs and in bookcased walls. There are old windows in some of the rooms and dangling lightbulbs that quiver slightly with the inevitable drafts that sneak through during the winter months. 

There’s a table that sits on the sidewalk just outside the door. Every week there are books there, free for the taking. And there are always books in the window, covers facing the street like old advertisements.

When I was 23, awkward and unsure of myself, I’d visit weekly. Sandy would lead me to the sections I thought I needed most—poetry, way at the top of the store, or religion, way in the back corner of the basement. I could never simply slip in and be invisible, which was comforting. 

Years passed and though I still walked by Daedalus daily, I went in less and less. I got a second job. Made friends. Got a boyfriend. Got an apartment. Quit the second job. Broke up with the boyfriend. Got another boyfriend. Got married. Got a dog. Started graduate school.

But I watched the handicap sign go up so Sandy could park his van right out front. Later, the ramp access appeared so his wheelchair could get through the door and now, other people are there certain days of the week. Someone told me it’s MS.

The other day, from his wheelchair, he tells me my coat looks nice, that he loves beautiful postage stamps, that he and his wife always have dinner parties and he reads poems instead of saying grace. 

When my credit card doesn’t work he tells me to just take the books and come back later. So I leave with Joyce and awe at the chance to see what it looks like when you don’t give up the fight for a beautiful life.

i use twitter for lots of things, particularly for keeping track of quotes i love (in 140 characters or less). so here are some of my favorite quotes from 2010….

+ Every project is not an opportunity for greatness, but any project can be a chance to hone your craft. [Lee Clow]

+ The distance between storytellers and readers can now be so thin, so close, that storytelling itself must be affected. [Craig Mod]

+ Sometimes people who pay exquisite attention see exquisite things.  [Robert Krulwich]

+ People who love ideas must have a love of words.They will take a vivid interest in the clothes that words wear. [Beatrice Warde]

+ If you can’t say why it’s wrong, don’t say that it’s wrong. [Lee Clow]

+ You’re the average of the five people you spend the most time with.  [Jim Rohn]

+ Plans are useless, but planning is indispensable. [Dwight Eisenhower]

+ I have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of library. [Jorge Luis Borges]

+ It is necessary to any originality to have the courage to be an amateur. [Wallace Stevens]

+ It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it. [Aristotle]

+ Your calluses will define how far you go. [Jack Driscoll]

+ Vitality shows in not only the ability to persist but the ability to start over. [F. Scott Fitzgerald]

+ Worries go down better with soup.  [Jewish Proverb]

+ We put on our stories before our clothes…. [William Wenthe]

+ Good prose is like a window pane. [George Orwell]

+ Only the mediocre is unendurable. [mark twain]

+ There is always something for which there is no accounting. Take, for example, the whole world. [leonard michaels]

+ Rather than be proactive with our energy, we have become reactive. [scott belsky]

+ Making the simple complicated is commonplace; making the complicated simple, awesomely simple, that’s creativity. [Charles Mingus]

+ To be persuasive we must be believable; to be believable we must be credible; to be credible we must be truthful. [Edward R. Murrow]

+ The world is a book and those who do not travel read only one page. [st. augustine]

+ I want people to talk to one another no matter what their difference of opinion might be. [Studs Terkel]

+ Get in a bit over your head. That’s how you grow and learn and stretch yourself. [Marissa Mayer, Google’s VP of search & user experience]

It’s been one month since the iPad came into my life. I knew back when I was secretly longing for it but didn’t want to admit it that I would fall in love. 

I also knew that could be dangerous on many levels. One being that it would give me even more access to my beloved internet (and really, like I need that. Ask Sam). And the other being that I am a life long lover of books, of holding them and smelling them and touching them. What would the iPad do to that?

To celebrate my one month anniversary with the iPad, here are my top five favorite apps, in no particular order:

Boggle: I’ve never been a big gamer—online or off. And I only downloaded this ‘cause it was on sale at .99. But I’ve learned why I’m not a big gamer in general—I don’t like to lose. You’d think I’d have realized that losing is inevitable sometimes. But when you’re a person who is around words a lot, who thinks about words a lot and you can barely break 20 points in this game of words, it’s humbling. 

iBooks: This was the one app I was most scared of: the e-reader. My first book download was Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom (a pretty thick book, if you’ve ever seen it and it’s still in hardback). But thanks to iBooks, I could travel cross country with it without it pushing the weight of my already-heavy suitcase over 50 pounds. And it hasn’t replaced my love of the tangible book. In fact, while at my school residency I still bought five of those old things.

Yoga HD: Yoga at my fingertips—and it’s challenging too. The one bad thing is that in a class, I’d never actually quit if I got tired. With the app, I confess I’ve done that once or twice. (In my defense, it was hard.)

News Apps: While I do love this option, it’s more a mixed bag than the other apps. It’s great to be away from home and still see cover stories on the Washington Post. But at the same time, it’s inevitable that someone is curating those stories—they can’t show everything. So you’ve got to be able to trust the curator. Unfortunately, when it comes to the news, I’m not sure who I trust. But maybe having several different sources is where it’s at.

Instapaper: Love at first download. This app makes it even easier for me to do what I love most: read. Anything and everything gets downloaded for later reading into a clean format. I can save things, archive things, organize things and share things. Especially helpful today when Twitter pointed me to a Playboy interview with MLK that I really wanted to read. Now, I can read it off the Playboy site. Me and Instapaper were made for each other.

So were me and the iPad, I’m pretty sure.

photo thanks to Yagan Kiely via Flickr

Dear Nestle

Dear Tollhouse

Dearest Ruth,

Of coursethere’s a pretty, hardworking face behind one of the greatest cultural legacies we have: Toll House Chocolate Chip Cookies.

I learned about that greatness the hard way. I have been one of those who would hole up with just about any chocolate chip cookie recipe in the kitchen if it claimed to be the best. 

But I will never again be lured away by glossy cookbook covers with pictures of perfectly-made cookies. I will never be woo’ed by online five-star ratings and comments in all caps: THESE ARE THE BEST COOKIES EVER.

Your creation is my perfect combination of flavors. I know that now, my favorite accident.

Apparently, you were making this other kind of cookie and decided to throw in some shaved chocolate from your handy Nestle Bar. Voilá—the superstar was born.

I really hope Nestle cut you a good deal with all you did for them, that major jump in sales for Nestle’s Semi-Sweet Chocolate Bar after people starting eating your Toll House cookies. I mean, getting all the chocolate you need for a lifetime is nice, but I hope there was some money involved too since it’s been almost 80 years and they are STILL printing your recipe on the back of their bags. And Nestle has now pre-made your recipe so that folks can pick up the chilled dough in between the butter and milk at the grocery store. 

I’m sorry I wasn’t around to try the original cookies made by you, but I guess that’s what’s so great about legacies—they outlive us.

Thanks, Ruth.

[You can read Ruth’s real story here]

[Thanks to Robert S. Donovan via Flickr for the smashing image]

When I turned 30 I started a list of 30 ways I wanted to live life. I’m gonna keep adding…

1. “Do one thing everyday that scares you.” Eleanor Roosevelt

2. Try something, try something else. Just try things.

3. Live life aware.

4. Create: Stories. Food. Environments. Relationships.

5. Appreciate the stupid, mundane & ordinary.

6. Live in the mornings (because that’s where morning-folks are at their best).

7. Belly laugh as much as possible.

8. Be ok with balancing joy/sadness, hope/despair. Life is not all one thing or another.

9. Be an idea whore. There are lessons learned in thinking through ideas, even if the actual ideas never come to pass.

10. Surround yourself with inspiration—people and things and places.

11. Have compassion & empathy with boundaries.

12. Keep learning about the past—from your own life and the rest of the world.

13. Live in this moment, even if you have awareness of the next.

14. Listen—to what people are really saying, your gut, the crickets.

15. Learn to let go. Understand your emotions but don’t let them squeeze the life out of your hours.

16. Watch sunrises in the winter. In fact, start your day with them as many times as possible.

17. Listen to stories read out loud.

18. “What do you regard as most humane? To spare someone shame.” Frederick Nietzche

19. Never let yourself be consumed by things or people that lack the possibility or freedom to invent.

20.  Sometimes obsession is a good, artful thing. Learn to recognize when it is not.

21.Taste new foods, new places, and new ways of doing things.

22. Fires are worth watching for long periods of time—it’s a good way to quiet yourself.

23. Give people their dignity even when they are different.

24. Keeping running, even if it’s just small distances.

25. Sometimes staring at something is the only way to figure out a new solution. Avoid doing this to strangers.

26. Try to grow things, your own things: tomatoes, roses, beans, lavender.

27. As much as possible experience the world by walking places.

28. Watch Pixar movies.

29. Travel. With and without plans.

30. Be a fighter, but let those fights be great: great stories, great friends, great causes. That means you can’t fight for everyone and everything.

31.  Buy good stationery and write more letters.

I voted yesterday in a line that stretched out the door of the Municipal Arts Building. Unbeknown to most of us, we’d been moved from our previous voting location—the community center in the basement of Cherry Avenue Christian Church. The democrats are the ones that told us with the dozen or so Vote Periello here: hang tags on our doors.

“It was the church people,” the man in line behind me explained. “They claimed the voting workers covered up all the religious symbols in the church. The voting workers claimed they didn’t. Church people said We sure as hell didn’t (pretty sure that was his emphasis) and kicked ‘em out. So here we are.”

“You know,” the bowl-cut blond man in front of me said, “Obama’s people did the same thing up at George Mason before a speech, covered up everything.”

“Don’t put him down,” said the woman on his left, so obviously his mother “I like him.” She flicked her bottom dentures over, her mouth slightly-open. “No one would vote for you if you ran for president.”

How do you argue with that? He didn’t.

Inside we wound within a small, square room with pictures of the municipal band on the walls. It was warm, only a little bit smelly, and very neighborly.

“Who’s that?” a man whispered to his wife, nodding his head to the bowl-cut blond man. “Lives at the bottom of the street,” she explained, “walks that little dog.”

People traded stories about retirement, how they were now getting things done they’d been meaning to do. They recognized each other from the grocery store, from the gas station. It was like a holiday, everyone welcoming each other into this stretched familiarity.

There was an old, old mother and her almost-old son. In one hand he held her hand, the other held her ID and registration card. I watched them until I worried it would be obvious then  I studied the municipal band pictures. I listened to the friendly attempts at conversation, the ones so awkward I winced and the sweet ones like the man who claimed his vote had been canceled for years with a look to his wife that was a mix of pride and adoration. This, I thought, this is beautiful community.

And…I think I’ll try out for the municipal band.

Thanks to programwitch for the Flickr image. And if you’re worried about the biscuit finale, that’s coming next week.

This week’s spot was my attempt to portray myself as a benevolent biscuit dictator. Bluegrass Grill and Bakery is one of those weekend brunch hot spots—lines out the door, wait can be an hour plus.

People love it. They love their half-scone half-biscuit concoctions. Really Southern Living?

Our group of eight gathered around a peachy vinyl tablecloth, asked for unassembled biscuits and had one of our best discussions yet.

You can tell from the pix that these biscuits are hearty—I didn’t even finish mine. But my rating surprised me (and everyone else).There’s no doubt these babies are homemade, which is starting to count for quite a lot.

More on that next week where, interestingly, our last (at least for now) tasting coincides with Election Day. There’s all kinds of change in the air.

I’m really bummed we missed the chocolate-covered bacon.

It was nice to be where we knew the coffee would be good. It was also our first spot without a parking lot. Probably no relation.

The biscuits at Cafe Cubano are prepped by an outside “person” and finished up in the Cubano kitchen. I put “person” in quotes because I’m not so sure it’s not a little yellow box. But not everyone feels as strongly as I do about that. Cubano’s grilled biscuits got some major love from most of the rest of the team. And grilling biscuits, I’m learning, is an art in itself.

Still, I’m beginning to worry about the state of biscuits in modern society. I worry our standards are low and that good biscuit-making is a dying art. Along with a lot of other things.

I’ve worked with graphic designers long enough to know that color matters. The burgundy curtains at Fox’s Diner had fake ivy dangling over them and it felt warm and welcoming. Just like a diner should feel for breakfast.

The room was narrow and crowded and my coffee cup looked like the kind we used to store in our pop-up camper, complete with the square thumb-hole. I craved a country ham biscuit, but we’d decided to be pure in our taste-testing: We had to eat plain biscuits. Thanks to Wilson for enforcing that in my moment of weakness.

I tried to improvise with the waitress: “Could I have a country ham biscuit with the ham on the side?” I made shapes with my hands to help her understand what  I meant. She cocked her head and squinted at me. I know what she was thinking.

“Unassembled,” Sam said. “Can she get the biscuit unassembled?” Half of us got our biscuits unassembled. The other half got them with eggs on the side.

I was quite pleased. But we also faced a dilemma: when rating,how much do you let accidental “things” in the biscuit effect the rating? (Oddly, this dilemma only affected the men in our group. Yep, two out of five.)

The Korner Restaurant’s parking lot is a series of truck fronts. Except for Elizabeth’s little Outback tucked in between, just slightly out of place. Almost as out of place as my fine, suited-up husband when we walk in the door.

To our left, a trio of men sit with dollar bills spread out over the table. Liar’s poker, the waitress whispers behind her notepad, they play every morning.

 We order a round of biscuits and sip on our coffee, swapping biscuit stories while we wait. They arrived quickly, split in half and slightly grilled. It’s a nice touch, but I’m pretty sure they’re a Bisquick mix. For those unfamiliar with the Bisquick lineage, they have a  distinct countenance and taste no matter what their form (pancakes, biscuits,etc). And apparently, they also leave a slight film on the roof of your mouth, much like Captain Crunch. (Kudos to Sam for actually putting this into words for us)

You’ll have to wait ‘till the end of the month to see how we rated it. But if you want to go check them out yourself, just drive your truck, don’t wear a suit and carry some dollar bills.

[Meet my biscuit-hunting friends virtually: Winn, Elizabeth, Ashley and Jodi and of course, Sam who does not have a website or a twitter account and spends five minutes typing one text message]

Some of my earliest food memories involve biscuits, the blue tube of Pillsbury that both my grandmothers would pop open for breakfast or Sunday dinners with butter cut into ponds of brown molasses and a biscuit running through it (can you tell I’ve been thinking of A River Runs Through It lately?)

My first experience of sour dough happened at a church dinner where I was convinced the cook was trying to poison the pastor (who also happened to be my father so i had a vested interest in that strange taste). Since we moved quite a bit, I had a lot of opportunities to taste a range of biscuit makers all over small towns in southern Virginia.

It cultivated some pretty high standards.

For the last six months we’ve started an informal bluegrass and biscuits on Sunday mornings. The local radio station plays the bluegrass and we make the biscuits. My healthy angel is proud of me because the recipe we’ve been using uses yogurt and butter instead of lard. My love-everything-fried angel tells me I’m missing out. What to do but a cook-off between a buttermilk biscuit recipe from Tyler Florence and the yogurt biscuits?

And the winner is…….

(adapted from How to Cook Everything )
1 c flour
1 c cake flour
1 t salt
3 t baking powder
1 t baking soda
4-5ish T cold butter
7/8 c plain yogurt

- Preheat oven to 450F
- Mix up all the dry ingredients and then cut the butter into small pieces. The recipe says you can use a food processor to mix it all together. I prefer my finger tips. If you’re going the hand-processed route, pick up the butter pieces and rub them between your fiingertips with the dry stuff. (It’s a particularly great exercise if you’re feeling angry at the person you live with. But that never happens at my house)

- Use a large spoon to mix in the yogurt so that you have a ball of dough. Turn it onto a lightly floured surface and knead ten times. Press it into a ¾ “ shape and then use a glass or biscuit cutter (we use a wine glass around here).

- Place ‘em on on an ungreased baking sheet and bake for 7-9 minutes.

You should always eat them hot, preferably with this amazing honey from my friend Courtney.

Every week for the rest of the month, friends and I will be hitting up some fine Cville establishments to see who really has the best biscuit in town. Stay tuned.

Many thanks to the excellent taste testers Keira, Rodrigo and Sam.

His name is really Roberto. I learned that after I read the small article in the arts weekly about the homeless man found severely beaten in the bushes by one of our finer hotels downtown.

I met him one morning while I was working the breakfast line at the Haven (Cville’s day shelter). His face was weathered but his eyes were like little blue lights. He asked my thoughts on God, not exactly a subject I wanted to delve into at 7 a.m. He asked me something along the lines of what makes me do what I do, live how I live. Do I even know the answer to that? We talked a bit while I made coffee. Peace, he said with a slight bow before he walked away.

Two days later, also around 7 a.m., I’m letting Levi romp around and notice him in our neighbor’s yard—same blue eyes and long brown hair. People drinking around a fire pit was normal over there (they’d probably been there all night) and the fact that he was now in the group didn’t surprise me at all. Eventually he wandered over to the fence and said good morning. He was a little out of it, a little drunk, maybe even high, but it’s clear he’s a gentle man.

Within the week, I pass him again, talking with folks outside the Salvation Army. Even from several yards away, his blue eyes are obvious, his long hair swinging around as he laughs.

And then I read the article about how he was found in the bushes early on a Monday morning. For the last month he’s been on life support at the hospital just over the tracks from me. And there are no leads in the case.

I can’t stop thinking about what it means to beat someone, to land punch after punch with your fist or something else. To not feel.

I can’t stop thinking about what it means to not hear someone almost dying, from inside rooms at that fine hotel or our homes (like mine) just a mile or so away.