Tag: food

Not Home for the Holidays

November 30th, 2025

“All the lonely people
Where do they all come from?
All the lonely people
Where do they all belong?” – from “Eleanor Rigby” by the Beatles

Three of us sat at the dining room table for Thanksgiving dinner: Karin, Asher, and me. Our holiday meal was simple. We had chicken, a green bean casserole, zucchini fries, and a yogurt dessert that Karin had dreamed up. I think Asher, our nearly five-year-old grandson, actually ate mac and cheese, but at least he ate with us. Karin and I have three children. None of them were able to be with us on Thanksgiving. Our tiny gathering in no way resembled the Normal Rockwell painting from The Saturday Evening Post in 1943. I suspect that almost no Thanksgiving dinners look like what Rockwell idealized.

Thanksgiving is a strange beast. It is officially a secular event with all the trappings of a religious holiday. It commemorates the first Thanksgiving in 1621 when Pilgrim colonists in Massachusetts shared a feast with members of the Wampanoag tribe. The original gathering has a symbolic and mythical status. The current holiday is supposed to be an occasion for people to share food with others and express gratitude for what they have. It is also an opportunity to overeat, binge-watch TV, and then buy unnecessary consumer goods the following day. Thanksgiving is a day full of contradictions. As such, it is profoundly American.

Karin and I said a Christian prayer before we ate our meal with Asher. Then we recited a Japanese Buddhist verse that we learned from our friends, Senji and Gilberto, long ago. We chanted “Na Mu Myo Ho Ren Ge Kyo” three times, and then we joined hands with Asher and said, “Froelich heisst beim Abendessen: Guten Appatit!” (a German phrase that Karin learned as a child that roughly translates to: “Happy means at dinner ‘have a good appetite'”.

Years ago, before Asher entered our lives, I used to go with a small group of people from the American Legion to visit patients in the psych ward at the local VA hospital. We went there every Tuesday evening for a couple hours to spend time with the vets. Around the holidays, especially Thanksgiving and Christmas, the ward was packed full of patients. Holidays that emphasized being with family and friends were particularly painful for veterans who had no loved ones. The loneliness that these vets could somehow keep in check during most of the year overwhelmed them, and they wound up in a hospital ward loaded up with strangers who felt equally forgotten. I’m glad that I had the chance to spend a few hours with these men and women. We shared our common humanity for a little while, and I learned things from them.

Our culture and our technology encourage us to remain isolated. We need to be physically together at least once in a while. I give thanks for Asher and Karin for being in my life every day. I look forward to being with others too.

Back on Brady Street

August 25th, 2025

Asher starts kindergarten at Tamarack Waldorf School on September 3rd. This is obviously a big deal, both for Asher and for Karin and me. Going to school will open up a whole new world for Asher. He will get to know his teacher, and he will make friends. He will have to learn how to follow a schedule. He’s never had to do that before. Asher has mostly done what he wants when he wants, and for the most part we, as his guardians, have been okay with that. That all changes in a little over a week. He is going to have to get up early, eat breakfast, get dressed, and go to class for the morning every morning. I’m almost certain he will balk at this, at least until he gets comfortable in his class and starts looking forward to doing things with the other children.

I will mostly likely be driving Asher to class each morning. I am a morning person, unlike my wife. The Waldorf school is close to downtown Milwaukee, which means Asher and I will have a half hour drive to get him to class by 8:00 AM each day. Traffic will suck. My wife did this kind of thing with our own kids twenty-five years ago. We know the drill. Since Asher will only be there until 12:30, it is kind of iffy as to whether it is even worthwhile for me to drive back home once I drop him off. I might as well stay in area around the school while he is in class.

Tamarack is located on Brady Street on the lower eastside of Milwaukee. It’s close to Lake Michigan. Tamarack uses the old school building from St. Hedwig’s Catholic Church. The steeple of St. Hedwig’s towers over the other buildings on the street. It is the anchor for the neighborhood. The school building is ancient. It has classrooms with high ceilings, tall windows, and hardwood floors. The school has a feeling of solidity and durability. If you listen closely, you can hear the voices of previous generations of children laughing and yelling in the halls. For me, there are ghosts in the school. Even if I am surrounded by the new parents and their kids, I can still feel the presence of the people who taught and learned in that place a quarter century ago. The school contains echoes of the past, but it is also vibrant with the energy of the latest generation. It’s like life is coming full circle.

Brady Street is an interesting neighborhood. It always has been. Early on, it was an immigrant community of Germans, Poles, and Italians. St. Hedwig’s is named after a Polish saint. There is still an Italian grocery store (Glorioso’s) a few blocks away from the school. Peter Sciortino Bakery is across the street from Tamarack. During the 60’s and 70’s, Brady Street was a hippie hangout. Now, it’s a narrow road lined with bars that cater to a mostly hipster crowd, young people with money. But the neighborhood is still quirky. The community is very LGBTQ friendly. The area is ethnically diverse. Brady is a good street for walking and browsing. There is a paradoxical sense of permanence and simultaneous upheaval. It’s a neighborhood that is alive.

I came to know that area in the 1990’s. I used to go down the block from the school to the Brewed Cafe for coffee. Sometimes, I went there by myself, and sometimes with my wife. Brewed is not there anymore. They closed down a few years ago, and now the place is a Brazilian coffee shop. The new coffee house is nice enough, but it’s not Brewed. The Brewed Cafe had this scruffy, working-class, antiestablishment atmosphere. Once a person managed to get through the front door, which never really opened and closed very well, they would see numerous pamphlets and posters advertising upcoming shows by local bands or political events or art exhibits. The front counter was small and cramped. At busy times of the day, customers lined up almost all the way back to the door. Once at the counter, a person could order coffee or other beverages. They had beer (it’s Wisconsin-almost every establishment serves beer). There was a tiny kitchen in the back where people made vegan sandwiches and other dishes. The folks working at Brewed all had more than usual number of tattoos and piercings. I’m sure they worked for minimum wage, but they got to pick what music was played in the coffee shop.

Even when there were only a few customers, Brewed seemed crowded. Space was at a premium. The tables were small and wobbly. If you ordered coffee, you got that immediately. If you ordered food, it showed up eventually. The walls were covered with works by local artists. The bathrooms were microscopic in size, and the walls were plastered with graffiti and stickers for bands that I had never heard of. The place was clean, but cluttered. Over the years, it had accumulated a variety of objects that somehow lost their purpose and meaning, but remained there, nonetheless. Brewed was oddly comfortable. Going there for coffee or lunch was kind of like going into somebody’s home.

I miss that place. I will have to find another hangout on Brady Street.