LEG 2

i have embarked upon the second leg of my summer journey. mama and i flew this afternoon from ohio to california. i'm glad to be moving on, though ohio (or, o-flat-o, as i like to say) was good to me. i was sad to see how few mom-and-pop establishments are left. even at home in the west village where gentrification has caught like latent HIV--a brutal reality, at first seemingly symptomless, about which nothing can be done, weakening its natural defenses and eating away at it from the inside out--at least a great number of the local establishments there are not part of huge corporate chains, but are owned and operated by entrepreneurial individuals. in o-flat-o i was dismayed to note the number of malls and chain restaurants. only on small main streets, like on franklin avenue in bellbrook, do you find local businesses. truly no one can compete with the corporate giants in the grand scheme. my, how sad thomas jefferson would be to see all this farmland turned over to chili's and red lobster! sorry, TJ, this ain't no yeoman country any more. in spite of the walmartification of rural america, however, the courtesy in ohio remains unshakable... my pharmacist in ny is a pretty swell fellow, but the pharmacist at drug mart was so truly concerned about how i was going to fill the script for malaria pills which they could not that i felt he might have had my back in a showdown. the busgirl at MCL was as sweet and accommodating as anyone i've ever encountered in the hospitality industry. pedestrians walking through bellbrook nodded when passing, and would've surely tipped their hat to me if it were still fashionable to rock a bowler. the server at steak-and-shake had been to nyc but detested it, and seemed ready to award me a badge of honor for tolerating it all my life. this struck me... how relative life can be. i might have awarded the steak-and-shake server the same badge for surviving rural ohio for a lifetime! is it a stroke of fate, that we are born in the right place? or is it that we are born there which causes us to love it? sometimes it also goes the other way: being born into urbanity, one might spend their whole life seeking its antidote, and vice versa. i, for one, have always felt that the secret to surviving the city (perhaps any city, but especially new york) is to get out of it as much as possible, to remember that life isn't all concrete and shopping bags and suits. and so, here i find myself, sitting in the airport in dayton, ohio, waiting to board for california...


i love flying. almost everything about it: how wrong and unnatural it is that a chunk of steel should fly through the air at hundreds of miles an hour, thousands of feet above the earth's surface. the anticipation of going some place. the people-watching in the terminal and on the plane. the fact that bad food is totally expected and acceptable on a plane, where it would be nowhere else. however, in the years since 9/11 so much about air travel in the states has changed. incessant delays, cancellations, and charging for meals and tv do take so much of the fun out of it. ahhh, i take it all back! who am i to complain? it's still better than traveling by horse drawn wagon on the oregon trail, exposed to the elements and susceptible to dysentery and rogue bandits! i can get there in hours instead of days! 


lucky, modern, mortal fools we are.

and on the seventh day she rested

today was my seventh day away from home. thunder cracked and rain poured, all day until the sun began to set. it was a perfect day for lying in bed and reading a good book. for dinner we hit MCL. this cafeteria-style restaurant is the reason why i was a stranger to the coney before saturday. my nana loved MCL, and consequently we ate dinner here often when i was younger. (and always before 5pm to ensure we nabbed that senior discount!) in my memory, MCL is the epitome of the ohio food scene: true midwestern meat-and-potatoes fare. you enter and immediately get in queue. after grabbing a tray you slide it down the line, pointing the pre-prepared plates of your choice out to servers on the other side of the counter. there were about three variations of salad, at least six entrees to choose from, several different vegetable sides, and about five kinds of dessert--from puddin' to pie. to me, the food is either overcooked or over-buttered, and almost all of it (save for the two green options of salad and broccoli) is of the same beige color family--having lost all its flavor and nutrients in the process of preparing it. sorry, MCL, but your food is certainly nothing worth blogging about. (and yet, paradoxically, i am doing just that...) however, the meal flooded me with memories of my nana--how she would fill up her tray and tuck in heartily, though chewing daintily with lips tightly closed, and always choosing a light-hearted topic of conversation for the dinner table (she preferred to laugh over food rather than brood)--so that much at least i enjoyed.

the tale of the unknown coney

DAY 5

the highlight of my day was being introduced to the coney dog. uncle jim and chucko decided that my visit to ohio this summer would be incomplete without my enjoying a coney.

"what's a coney?" i inquired innocently. 

"what's a coney?!! you mean to tell us you are FROM new york and you don't know what a coney dog is? it's a hot dog, but with coney sauce, and onions, and mustard and cheese on top. you do know what coney sauce is at least, don't you?" 

"nope," i replied with a hint of indignation. 

"what?!?! coney sauce is the chili you put on top!" 

i tried to explain that no one in new york calls a chili dog a coney dog, nor is the chili referred to as coney sauce. quite simply, in coney island, as in the rest of the city, one orders a hot dog (or to some, a frank) and specifies what they do or do not want on it. standard toppings include ketchup, mustard, and sauerkraut. if it's a chili dog you want, it's a chili dog you order. 

i'm not sure either of them was able to grasp that the coney is a fictional beast--an invented name, for a delicious food item, which ties it to the American home of the hot dog and all its tasty variations. why, names tell no lies! if something is called a coney dog, surely it must be from coney island. just as haagen dazs must be from denmark. but that's ok, i will let the world have their imaginings about new york, made up delicacies and all. it's a city so well-known that everyone thinks they know it. 

needless to say, in my hunt to experience firsthand the mystical coney, chucko led me to skyline chili where i was delighted to find not just a satisfyingly loaded hot dog, but a cheap one too! one coney was just $1.49! i haven't seen a dog that cheap in new york for over a decade. fortunately i was able to snap a shot of one of these elusive, midwestern species of the hot dog before the ones on our table all went extinct:

a loaded coney

roadtrippin w mama

DAY 1


haven't been on a road trip with my ma in about 7 or 8 years. when i was younger we used to do at least one road trip a year--always once to ohio and back, sometimes also to florida, a handful of times out west, or to maine or vermont for skiing in the winter and log cabin-building in the summer. our road trip staples? a good audio book, the radio seek button, a disposable camera, a road atlas, and lots of banter. this go-around the times have changed. her car being 21 years old now with an out of commission stereo, instead, i read aloud from ken follet's the fall of giants, played music through my ipod and portable speakers, took pictures and followed our route with my iphone... the banter between us, however, has not changed a bit :) this, i believe, is the most important aspect of a roadtrip. it would be impossible to share the confined space within a car if you can't share some good, hearty laughs. good thing my ma has a sense of humor, and a raunchy one at that--or else i'd share her jokes here, ha. (just teasing ma!) (or am i?) she is quite the independent lady firecracker. a little 5'3 ball of energy. anyone who has met her knows this much is true. she's the kind of lady who will tidy up in an hour a mess that would take an average person 5 to tackle, and she'll do it all with a burning cig dangling from her lips and a bad knee. and so, to ohio we venture, the place of origin for suzie-whippersnapper.


this place has not changed since the last time i was here in 2004. the neighborhood in which i spent so many summers and thanksgivings for the first 16 years of my life is, remarkably, just as i remembered it. coming from new york, where, if you're gone for even ten minutes restaurants close and new buildings go up and whole neighborhoods are gentrified, the stagnance of bellbrook is a striking truth. the few changes that do exist are slight--a new white picket fence around what used to be my nana's backyard, new landscaping in the yard across the street, a different business in place of an old one on the main strip of town. even the people, my family, have barely changed. case in point: cousin jimmy still wears his hair in the frizzy pyramidal style he's rocked since the eighties.


new york moves on at the pace of a runaway freight train, and then here is bellbrook, ohio. upon arrival i felt my blood pressure drop and my intensity diminish. when in the city there is always something to do, and so, i am almost always doing something. here, i know no one but family, and certainly no one my own age. i have no mode of transportation except for my own two feet or (pathetically) a ride from my mom--i have not even a bicycle. (oh, woe is me without my wheels!) there are no young and happening night spots, only the trusty old milton club--an exclusive athletic and drinking club established here in 1914, where the male-only members and their guests spend their time smoking, drinking, playing cards, and pitching horse shoes like it's their job...though fun, these are not exactly my pastimes of choice. so what shall i do here? a pleasant and welcome nothing. and i will enjoy it to the utmost. i will explore the main street on foot. i will take in the flat and stretching view from the car window, knowing this was once all farmland. i will daydream about the two months that still lie ahead of me after ohio. i will read a 1000 page book. i will be content having time pass me by for a week, takin it slow and easy.