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checkurwindow · 3 years

Text

i’m so scared

Book: Open Heart

Warnings: It’s a lot longer than my usual fic and much angstier, but hope you enjoy it!

Rating: Teen for light swearing.

Pairing: Ethan x F!MC

Word count: 5200+ I KNOW!! It’s the single longest piece of writing I’ve ever written.

Author’s note: I’m actually really proud of this fic so please reblog and let me know what you thought of it! Here’s my masterlist for more content! I wrote a sequel to this fic too!

One

That’s how old she was when her father left. Her mother knew that he was never going to stay, but that didn’t stop her from breaking down every night for 3 months when she thought her beloved daughter had fallen asleep, when instead she lay awake, wondering what could have happened to make her mother hide her sadness every day, only letting her walls come down when she thought nobody was watching.

She didn’t understand much beyond that, just knowing that her dear old dad had left for a pack of cigarettes and milk, but left behind only a stack of legal papers on the counter while her mother had gone off to work, desperate to give her little girl the best life she could.

Two

The number of people in her family. She and her mom, her mom and her. It was just the two of them, or at least that’s what her mother told her every time she asked. She was fine with that, she loved her mother with all her little heart. She didn’t need anybody else.

Her mom had found a job in Providence, a job that could support both of them, and an apartment that had a reasonable rent. She was scared at first, moving to a “big city”, but her mom assured her that it was a kingdom, and she was the princess.

Three

That was the number of bracelets she had gotten for her fifth birthday. She and her mom had been walking downtown, running some errands, when they walked past a jewelry store and saw the set of three bracelets in the store window.

She had asked her mom if she could have them, even resorting to using her best puppy dog eyes in an attempt to persuade her.

Her mom had told her that they were too expensive, and they didn’t have enough money to buy them. She was disappointed, sulking the rest of the way home.

3 weeks later, her mom returned to the jewelry store, spending almost a month's worth of her salary to buy that special set of bracelets for her daughter. She was beyond excited when she woke up on her birthday and saw that bright pink box next to her bed.

She started showing off those prized possessions of hers to all her friends at school. One was gold with a diamond charm, the other was silver with a ruby charm. The last was bronze with a deep sapphire charm. The bronze one was her favourite, even after Derek Reagan said it was ugly. She told Derek that he was ugly.

Four

That was the grade she was in when she met him.

It was a usual Monday, she was rushing through some unfinished homework when Mr Kingston, her teacher entered, accompanied by a boy who looked just a little taller than her.

Turns out it was a new student, transferring from another school that had just closed down. He was wearing a blue button-down, a big difference from the rest of the boys in her class whose t-shirts were either dinosaurs, or cars, or superheroes. He introduced himself as Ethan Jonah Ramsey while the rest of the class stared blankly at him, before returning to their own friends. Mr Kingston assigned him to the seat next to her.

“Hi, Eefen Jonah!” She waved excitedly at him as he sat down next to her.

“My name is Ethan, Jonah is my middle name,” he corrected.

She made a small ‘o’ with her mouth, thinking for a short while before responding, “I prefer Eef,” she smiled, making him blush slightly.

She took a container out of her bag, opening it to reveal large apple slices. She took one in each hand, careful not to let them slip as she turned back towards him, offering the slice in her left hand.

He slowly took one and smiled, “thanks,” he said when he noticed the set of sparkly jewelry on her wrist, “I like your bracelets.”

Five

That’s how many people were in her friend group by middle school.

First, there was Jackie Varma. She thought Jackie was a little mean when she first met her, she always picked fights with everyone. But she soon learned that she was only mean to people she didn’t like, and she even called Derek stupid when he was mean to her. She asked Jackie if she wanted to have lunch with her after that.

Next was Sienna Trinh. She was nice to everyone, and her first friend at school. She always shared her food, usually sweet treats, with everyone in class, even when Jackie was convinced they were poisonous, she never stopped radiating her positivity.

Bryce Lahela was a flirt. And rightfully so, as every girl in her class had a crush on him. Every girl except her. Bryce was convinced he knew the reason why, and voiced his opinion every chance he got, “She doesn’t have a crush on me because she’s in love with Ramsey, that’s the only reason.”

She would always blush when he said that, which was often seeing how he and Jackie bickered daily about it. Yes, she and Ethan had been best friends since fourth grade. Yet that was all they were. Best friends, never venturing out of that sacred zone.

And then there was Ramsey himself. He had gotten tall, very tall. He was easily the tallest of the group, while she was one of the shortest, barely taller than Sienna. He was a bit gangly and awkward, sometimes very quiet as well, but he was her best friend.

Six

That was the day of the month Ethan was born.

He was turning fifteen, and begged his dad for money instead of his usual books. His dad thought it was strange, as reading had quickly become one of his favorite pastimes, but waved it off as typical teenager behaviour.

A couple days before, she had lost her treasured bracelets. She had taken them off during art class, careful not to spill paint and ruined her favourite set of jewelry. She had rushed off after class because she wanted to get the cafeteria pizza while it was still fresh and hot for all her friends, and accidentally left the bracelets behind. When she came back to get them after lunch, however, they were gone. She cried for the first time in what felt like forever.

Ethan’s dad had done what he had asked of him, giving him cash for his birthday. Upon receiving his present, he rushed up to his room and took his box of savings out from the top of his closet, almost falling off the chair he was climbing to get them.

He hurriedly counted up all his money, adding to the amount he had been saving, ecstatic when he realised he had a little more than what he needed. He quickly ran out, wallet in hand, barely able to tell his dad that he was going out as he sprinted out the front door.

He finally made it to the jewelry store that, after much research, he knew carried the same set of bracelets as the ones his best friend had lost. The attendant asked what a young man like himself was doing buying such an expensive set of jewelry, teasing about if using all his hard-earned cash by doing extra chores was really worth it for a girl.

He smiled widely, heart racing from the sprint over, but nodded rapidly, forking over the money he had planned to use to buy a new set of books. When he got home, he put the shiny new bracelets in a box, doing his best to wrap them in bright red wrapping paper, her favourite colour.

At school the next day, he got in early and slipped the box into her desk drawer before she arrived.

“Eef,” that’s what she called him when something big was happening, “you won’t believe what I found!” she squealed to him after class.

She told him all about the bracelets she found at her desk, while he smiled and nodded, telling her he was happy for her. Jackie made eye contact with him and gave him a knowing look, his eyes darting around the room when he realised, but she didn’t say a word about it after that.

Seven

The number of med schools she applied to. They all applied to med schools.

She applied to Harvard, Yale, Stanford, Princeton, Brown, NYU, and Johns Hopkins.

She was accepted to all of them, which was more than impressive. Her mother had never been prouder of her.

Ethan never told her, but he applied to the same schools as her, all seven. He got into all of them except Harvard, so hoped to every powerful being up beyond the night sky that she wouldn’t accept their invitation. He wasn’t ready to lose her, not yet, maybe not ever.

After spending countless coffee-fueled nights sorting through and weighing the pros and cons of each school, she finally decided on Johns Hopkins. Ethan did too, after he determined that they had the best professors there. At least, that’s what he told her when she asked how he decided.

Sienna, one of her closer friends in the group, was her shoulder to cry on if Ethan wasn’t around, which was rare but had happened a couple times throughout the years. Sienna decided to go to Princeton, along with her boyfriend, Wayne, or was it Dwayne? Nobody really knew as he never bothered to show up most of the time when they reluctantly invited him per Sienna’s request.

The rest of their friend group split up, each going to a different med school. They made a pact one drunken night the summer before they all headed out to med schools all across the country.

They promised to meet up every chance they could, even if it meant driving in the middle of the night through storm and snow. Jackie insisted it was way too cheesy when Sienna half sobbed, half stated it while they sat on Bryce’s rooftop, bottles of alcohol and snacks surrounding them, but in the end, the tears made Jackie agree.

Ethan helped her pack for college, something she assured him she could easily do herself but he insisted anyway. He helped move her things into her dorm, something he hadn’t yet done for himself but he didn’t care. They met her roommate, Grace Young, who upon first seeing them, mistakenly assumed they were dating. She quickly corrected Grace, properly introducing Ethan as her best friend.

Eight

That’s the number of years it took for Ethan to realise he was in love with her.

Why it had taken him so long, he didn’t have a single clue. He should’ve realised it sooner, but now he couldn’t not see it. Ethan was completely sure he was mind-blowingly in love with her.

Why hadn’t he noticed the first day he met her, when she immediately shared her apple slices with him, making him feel welcome and accepted unlike most of the class. Sure, he had figured out long ago that she was beautiful, but he never thought it was love.

Why hadn’t he noticed it all through middle school, when Bryce mercilessly teased the both of them about it. “Damn,” he thought, “I hate it when Bryce is right.”

And why had he not realised it in high school, when he spent all his savings he earned over countless summers to replace the bracelets that she lost? When instead of bullying her, Derek Reagan started flirting with her, which made Ethan so angry when he saw it happen, but ecstatic when she turned him down in front of the whole school, citing all the times he had bullied and picked on her. Friends don’t do that for each other. But she was more than just a friend, wasn’t she?

Ethan should’ve known when he followed her 370 miles away from their hometown just to be at the same med school as her. Sure, it was a great school, but that wasn’t the reason he was there. He was there for her. You don’t just do that for a friend you like or even have a crush on. No, he loved her.

It was quite ridiculous, really. How had she gotten him wrapped around her finger, and without him even realising for so many years? Ethan knew he was helpless to her charms, he would do anything she wanted him to do, he would’ve followed her to the ends of the earth if she had asked.

But did she know? That was the thought that circled around his head during sleepless nights as he tossed and turned in his bed. Did she know how weak she made him? How helpless he was when it came to anything that had to do with her?

He quickly decided that she couldn’t have known. She wouldn’t have let him spend all his birthday money and savings on her, let him follow her to med school, let him torture himself all these years if she knew it was all for her.

Nine

That’s how many apartment listings she had to choose from.

She sat in the coffee shop near the hospital reading over the listings. Now that they had started their residency, Grace had been matched with another hospital and moved in with fellow interns there.

This one was too expensive, that one would be too loud. She had no idea which one to choose. And to add to her troubles, she had no roommate. There was no way she could find a reasonable place in downtown Boston without a roommate, it was impossible.

That’s when Ethan walked through the door, his hair combed to perfection as usual.

“Ethan, thank god you’re here. Come help me pick out an apartment,” she pleaded, showing him pictures of all the listings.

He shrugged his jacket off as he sat down next to her, inhaling the comforting scent of hers he had grown to love over all these years that wafted through the air.

“This one looks nice,” he pointed to one of the listings, “barely a block away from the hospital, great lighting, tons of restaurants around, and the rent would be affordable for two people.”

“I know, it’s perfect but I can’t afford it,” Ethan frowned and looked up at her in confusion.

She let out a defeated sigh, “I haven’t found a roommate yet, and there’s no way I can afford that place all on my own,” she admitted and turned back to the other listings in search of a cheaper place, the frown still evident on her face.

“I’ll be your roommate,” he mentally cursed himself the second those words escaped from his mouth. He had just offered to be roommates with his best friend that he just happened to be hopelessly in love with. What could possibly go wrong?

His regrets immediately ceased to exist when her face lit up, full of delight. She threw her arms around him gratefully, hugging him as tightly as she could, and he knew every single moment would be worth it for her, “thank you so much, Eef!”

Ten

That’s the number of times he had tried to tell her.

The first time was when she came home after a bad day. It was pouring rain outside, and she had walked in completely drenched and in a mess of tears. After many attempts on Ethan’s part to try to get her to tell him what was wrong, he eventually gave up and stuck to comforting her instead. As she cried, soaking his clothes with not only her tears but the rain her clothes and hair had absorbed on the way in, he wanted nothing more than to tell her how much he loved her.

Then there was the time she convinced him to bake a cake together on their day off. He had accidentally gotten cake batter on her nose, and she laughed as she smeared some of it across his face, which resulted in a war using their leftover ingredients still on the counter. He never thought she was more beautiful than she was right there, and was tempted to risk it all. But he never did.

The third time was over the phone, he had gone home but she was still at Edenbrook, filling in patient charts when he received a call from her.

“Hey, Ethan.”

“Hey, what’s the call for?”

Her voice was momentarily shaky on the other end, it made his heart rate go up significantly, “I just wanted to tell you...hi,” was what she said after a long pause.

“You called just to say hi?” he laughed.

“Yeah. I gotta go now, bye,” she hung up before he had a chance to respond.

The next time was when they watched a movie. “Maybe a romantic movie would help,” he thought to himself as he loaded up The Fault In Our Stars. He was wrong. The movie only made her cry again, and he couldn’t bring himself to tell her then.

The next time, he was determined to finally do it. He stopped by the florist on the way home, picking up a bouquet of her favourite flowers, bougainvilleas. He even rehearsed the exact words he was going to say when he professed his love to her while walking back. But he opened the door only to be met with her wearing a stunning blue sundress that left him was speechless. Only she had that effect on him.

The sixth time was in the middle of the night, around 1 am. Ethan couldn’t sleep, his head was clouded with thoughts of her and her alone. He convinced himself he was going to tell her. Yes, he was going to march into her room and tell her. He got up to tell her, but instead heard her throwing up when he approached the door. He spent the rest of the night comforting her and making sure she was okay.

Then he decided he couldn’t do it himself. He called up Sienna, who had long since figured out who Ethan was in love with. Sienna actually laughed when he had asked her to tell her on his behalf. She thought it was a joke. When she realised he was being serious, her lighthearted behavior dissolved, instead, she firmly told him that he had to do it himself, and promptly hung up the phone.

Eighth time’s the charm, right? Wrong. He thought of writing a letter, “it’s easier this way,” he thought. All he had to do was write his feelings down on a piece of paper and hand her the letter, easy. He then realised that it was far too impersonal. He knew her, hell, he spent more than half his life with her. And that’s why he knew that if he ever did it, she’d want to hear it in person from him directly.

Then he tried to tell her as they walked back from Edenbrook after a long shift. It was a typical Boston day, and Ethan decided there was no time like the present to tell her. He had every intention to tell her, he really did. But she received an important phone call that she needed to take just as he was about to open his mouth.

Finally, he decided that he had had enough. He wasn’t going to let anything come between his plans to tell her the truth for a second longer than he needed to. He planned a delightful picnic for the both of them. They headed to a nearby park that she loved on a cool but sunny day, it was a perfect day. And that was what stopped him from telling her this time.

They were having so much fun, what if by telling her the truth, he ruined the day. What if he ruined their entire friendship, years worth of time spent together wasted and down the drain all because he was so selfish? What if she didn’t reciprocate his feelings, and that was the last good memory of her that he had? He gave up trying to tell her after that.

Eleven

That’s how many times she tried to tell him.

The first time was immediately after she found out. It was a shocking discovery, and she was lost as to what to do with the new information. It didn’t exactly help that it had been an awful day. On her way back to the apartment, it started to rain heavily. A terrible end to a terrible day, really. When she finally made it indoors, she instantly fell into his arms. She knew she could’ve told him there, but she didn’t.

She decided that they needed to be doing something more fun and lighthearted, so she suggested baking, and was surprised when he actually agreed. But seeing him there, covered in cake batter, who knows how much flour, and grinning at her, she wanted to keep this memory.

After feeling guilty for not telling him that day, she called him while taking a break from charts.

“Hey, Ethan,” she said, building herself up to finally tell him.

“Hey, what’s the call for?”

Her voice quivered, the nerves building up, “I just wanted to tell you,” she decided it was too much, she’d tell him another time, “...hi.”

‘You called just to say hi?” she heard his laugh on the other end.

She closed her eyes tightly, embarrassed, “yeah. I gotta go now, bye,” she hung up as quickly as she could.

The next time she tried to tell him was during movie night, but the bastard just had to pick The Fault In Our Stars. Since when did Ethan even start voluntarily watching romantic movies anyway? And he couldn’t have picked any other movie. She spent a good part of the rest of the night cursing the tears that choked back all the words she wanted to say.

Then she was going to tell him when he got back to the apartment. She spent so long in the bathroom practicing what she was going to say to him in the mirror. Time and time again, pacing in her favourite blue sundress to calm her nerves as she recited the words back to herself. But then he showed up with a bouquet of her favorite flowers. He had always been so sweet like that to her. She really didn’t deserve him, and she hated herself for not telling her then.

At 1 in the morning, she felt sick to her stomach, and rushed into her bathroom. She threw up all of her dinner from hours before, no doubt looking awful while doing so. Then Ethan showed up and spent the entire night comforting her. She knew she could’ve ended her own torture right then and there, and she was planning to. Up until she fell asleep on his shoulder.

Maybe she didn’t have to be the one to tell him? And so she drove an hour back to Providence to see her mom, seeking advice. There must’ve been a better way to tell him, a way that wouldn’t be putting her through so much agony. Her mom only hugged her tightly. She told her that she was the only one who could make the decision to tell him and wished her the best of luck.

She sat at her desk and attempted to write a letter, but how could you write someone a letter to tell them about such a subject? There was no way words on a piece of paper could explain how she felt. It wasn’t fair to Ethan, it had to be done in person.

And then there was the time they were walking back home from the hospital. She would’ve told him there, she should’ve told him there, but she didn’t. Instead, she received a phone call. She knew exactly what the call would be about even before she tapped the ‘answer’ icon.

The next was the time he set up a picnic for the both of them. It was a perfect day, it was the perfect time to tell him, but that was the moment she realised she loved him. She just wasn’t willing to stain the moment she realised she loved her best friend with her horrible news.

Finally, there was the time she actually told him the truth. It was cold, but she asked him to go up to the rooftop with her. He agreed, and they made their way up to the empty rooftop garden. They stood in silence as they looked out at the city around them, the city lights glittering like diamonds in the dark, or shooting stars in the night sky. Ethan tried to tell her first.

“I love—”

“Ethan, I’m dying.”

Twelve

That’s how many months are in a year. That’s how many inches are in a foot. That’s how many signs there are in the zodiac. That’s how many days of Christmas there are.

That wasn’t how many malignant tumours she had, Ethan refused to believe it.

Well, as he soon learned, that there were most likely more than 12 tumours in the person he grew up with, the person he loves, the person he wanted to spend the rest of his life with, the person who had much less than a lifetime to live. There were twelve tumours over a month ago, and she hadn’t told him.

He was so caught up in his own feelings that he didn’t know his best friend had stage 4 pancreatic cancer. It was needless to say he felt like absolute shit. She had end-stage cancer and he, a doctor, couldn’t do a single fucking thing about it.

He waited until he was out of her sight before he let all his emotions out, he asked her if she could go back in the apartment and leave him on the roof to process what had happened, she did.

He knew all about pancreatic cancer, he knew that the symptoms usually don’t show up until it was too late, he knew that it would’ve already spread all across her body. Yet, it didn’t stop him from completely breaking down after she went back down.

He sobbed, he sobbed until all the tears were gone, then he shouted, he shouted at the night sky, shouting at every being up there, screaming at them, asking how they could possibly curse the most perfect person in the world with an untreatable tumour.

Once he was done, once his tear ducts were dry and his throat was hoarse, he returned to the apartment, his eyes red and his throat sore. He quietly crept into her room, seeing those teary eyes of hers that broke his heart, that made every cell in his body hurt and scream. He wordlessly climbed into her bed and wrapped his arms around her. That was how they spent the rest of the night, him silently holding her in his arms, not willing to ever let go.

She fell asleep fast, she was tired, she was always tired nowadays. He was the opposite, his mind racing. He spent the entire night hating himself for not realising sooner, for missing all the clues. All the clues that were right in front of his face this whole time.

He remembered the first time he tried to tell her when she came home upset, was that when she learned the news? He thought about how she reacted to the movie they watched, he finally realised why she was crying so much more. Then there was the night she threw up, he cursed himself for missing that. It had been so obvious. But he hated himself the most for not spending all his time with her when he had the chance.

Now as he sat in the hospital room, his head in his hands as she slept soundly, all he could do was wait. Wait for the cancer to take her from her friends, her family, from him. That’s all he could do now, wait. Ethan had been in the hospital for a week now, she’d wanted to be at Edenbrook so that he could see her during his breaks, but he hadn’t worked since the day he found out.

He only went back to their apartment to take a shower every now and then, and even then he sprinted to and fro. They didn’t know when her time would be up, it could be hours, days, weeks, or even months. And he had to be around when she ran out of time, he would hate himself even more if he wasn’t.

He had called all of their friends, and they all took turns showing up at her room to see her. Bryce showed up with a gigantic stuffed teddy bear that didn’t fail to make her laugh. Jackie came with a million stories about her horrible intern, attendings, and patients alike. Sienna came in everyday bearing fresh home-cooked food for her.

His dad and her mom showed up most days too, providing words of encouragement for not only her, but him as well. They both figured out one way or another how he felt about her, and they knew how hard it was for him.

Ethan was always at the hospital, but limited the time he spent in her room. He couldn’t stand being at her bedside, watching her groan and moan in pain as he was completely fine. Everything just felt too real for him.

“Doctor Ramsey, she’s asking for you,” a nurse said. He looked up and nodded. His feet felt heavy, like they were made of bricks as he approached her room. He pushed the door open, and his heart dropped at the sight before him.

She was staring back at him, her eyes hadn’t changed a single bit. The rest of her didn’t share the same fate as her eyes. She was thinner, her face pale and gaunt, she looked exhausted. The hospital gown looked as if it was wearing her, and not the other way around. And despite all of that, she was still beautiful in his eyes.

“Hi,” she said in a whispered tone.

He pressed his lips together, choking back the tears that were beginning to form. He couldn’t handle this.

“You look awful,” she teased, which earned a pitiful laugh from him as he wiped the sides of his eyes where tears were moments away from falling.

She moved to one side of the hospital bed to make room for him. He hesitated for a moment, afraid that he would hurt her some way, but he eventually laid down beside her. Her frail frame clung to him, and he felt the dreadfully familiar feeling of her tears staining his shirt.

“I’m so scared, Eef,” her use of the enchanting nickname she gave him that he wholeheartedly loved made the tears fall from his eyes as he closed them tightly, holding back a sob.

He didn’t know what to say, he couldn’t find the right words, so he just hugged her as tightly as he could without hurting her and pressed his lips against her forehead. After all, what were you supposed to say to someone whose life you would trade your own with when they’re dying?

Was he supposed to lie and say “everything’s going to be okay”? He wouldn’t, he couldn’t bring himself to lie to her any longer after all the wasted time he spent lying about his true feelings. No, he would hold her. He would hold her and love her until he couldn’t love her anymore.

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dwellordream · 3 years

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“In theory, Victorians concerned with troublesome issues on the margins of respectable fiction for girls could deal with them within the family reading circle. Reading aloud was perhaps the most common domestic entertainment within the Victorian family, used as reward, improvement, or therapy for life’s challenges. The sisters taking turns reading to accompany their needlework, the matron at the sickbed, the daughter reading to her father at the end of a business day—there were myriad arenas in which families used reading to ease, amuse, and instruct.

At its most basic, reading aloud enabled the sharing of resources (a book, or a fresh installment of a periodical) among many. But beyond that, it was a profoundly social way of responding to the lessons of history, current fiction, or poetry. The critic Andrew Blake suggests that the novel, in particular, was ‘‘a most important point of contact between the public and the private’’ because ‘‘it gave people a chance to discuss domestic ideology in public without touching on domestic secrets.’’ The semipublic sphere that was the family circle provided an important venue for the discussion of reading. Within this context, instruction in morality could be accomplished informally, gently, impersonally, with reference to fictional characters rather than through direct criticism and rebuttal.

The convention of the family reading circle generally restricted polite novels from treating illicit sexuality or immoral characters, but if any lapses occurred, the family circle could deal with them most effectively. Thus Elizabeth Gaskell said of her own novel Ruth, which features an orphan who has been seduced by an aristocrat: ‘‘Of course it is a prohibited book in this, as in many other households.’’ The one circumstance that would change its unsuitability for young people, she opined, was if it was ‘‘read with someone older,’’ perhaps with an older female relative within a family reading group.

The kind of family conversation which could improve all who participated was explained by Sarah Browne in a private diary in 1859. ‘‘Albert brings [Harriet Beecher Stowe’s] the Minister’s Wooing. We sit quietly and hear how James is brought back to the living, we calmly rejoice with Mary, plan and maneuver with Miss Pressy, call Parson Hopkins in very truth a Christian and wind up the evening by wishing to see Mrs. Stowe, knowing how she would seem and if she would talk at all, like other women.’’

Albert Browne Sr. was generally the reader in the Browne family, sometimes of ‘‘superior articles in the Atlantic Monthly.’’ In these moments of quiet, Sarah Browne most idealized her shared family life, ‘‘sitting as we do in our little western chamber, Father, Alice and I storing in the rich thoughts of others as a life element of our own.’’Reading aloud enabled a submersion of family tensions in a focus outward on the problems of others.

The idealization of the shared reading experience suggested stylized familial communion to daughters as well as parents. During the final days of the Civil War, as she anticipated her own marriage, Helen Hart thought to memorialize the evenings reading aloud together. ‘‘I think I never enjoyed evenings more in my life. First Bertie reads, then Hady, and then Mother and I; from History, Shakespeare, the Atlantic, and other miscellany. Such peaceful, happy winter evenings at home! Something for us to look back upon in after years when we are scattered. I have treasured up each one as it passed, as a sweet and sacred memory.’’ The pleasure came from the contrast between ‘‘our quiet harbor’’ and ‘‘the world with its commotions, its struggles.’’

Never did home seem so secure and safe as when implicitly contrasted with the adventures and misfortunes of fictional characters, warring nations, or past princes. Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s biographer noted that Charlotte and her destitute and emotionally distant mother were at their best when reading aloud to each other, their fraught intimacy dissolved in their shared focus on the lives and feelings of others. Those moments of community might even be resurrected by rereading books so experienced. (‘‘It seems as if we were gathered around the nursery fire again. I can almost hear Aunt Mary’s voice.’’) The pleasures of reading aloud were those of reading mediated—reading mediated by the fiction of shared purpose.

Reading aloud did not have a single simple meaning, however, nor did it model only one kind of power relationship. The Browne family’s shared reading was patriarchal, with father reading and other family members (according to the hardly impartial mother) celebrating familial harmony. Alice Stone Blackwell, in her irreverent and spritely diary, offered another example of paternal reading aloud, lightly satirizing her father, the noted reformer and women’s rights advocate Henry Blackwell:

‘‘Papa sat with his feet on the top of the stove, saturated with laziness, and rated me for enjoying stories [fiction], and formed plans to give me a taste for instructive literature, and ended by making me bring Plutarch’s Lives, and beginning to read them aloud.’’ This depiction of a well-respected father indulging in playful tyranny of his only child suggests a quite different emotional shading—if a similar actual structure—to the idealized portraits of patriarchal reading circles.

Daughters also read on their own, though, and given the risks of immoral reading and the gains from uplifting reading, good parents attempted to mon- itor what they read. The goal in choosing reading, as in all the lessons of character, was to instruct gently and surely so as to encourage daughters to make familial lessons their own. Advice to parents ranged from the relatively cut and dried—‘‘Parents should choose the books that their children read until the age of 15’’—to the more subtle: ‘‘Wise parents put so many good books in the way of their children that the taste for them is formed unconsciously, and there is never any feeling of restraint.’’ (The latter piece of advice, made in 1901, was clearly advice for the book-wealthy.)

Ellen Emerson’s correspondence with her mother while away at boarding school suggested the appropriate supervisory relationship of parents over girls’ reading. Explaining that she was reading Elizabeth Gaskell’s Cranford, which she found ‘‘a very funny book,’’ she went on, ‘‘I never read any that I am not sure you would be willing to have me,’’ and recorded her assumption that Scott, Gaskell, and several others were ‘‘not forbidden.’’ She went on to query, ‘‘May I read [Margaret Oliphant’s] ‘Head of the Family’?’’ Middle-class or elite parents who participated in genteel Victorian culture assumed an important role in controlling the reading of their daughters—its quantity, its contents, and its circumstances.

In the elite midwestern Hamilton family, a family with a strong and eclectic reading tradition, novels were doled out prudently like candies during vacations from school, so as not to interfere with schoolwork. When her daughter was fifteen, Phoebe Hamilton gave her ‘‘Ivanhoe for my holiday reading, she always gives me one of Scott every vacation.’’ The next year her mother was more liberal, providing Scott’s Quentin Durward for a Christmas book and giving permission for the reading of Dickens’s Little Dorrit and Jemima Tautphoeus’s The Initials. As January arrived, Agnes lamented, ‘‘I have finished the latter but I am afraid as I go back to school next Monday I shall have to let Little Dorrit wait till summer.’’

There was a hierarchy within Hamilton family reading, and despite her voraciousness, Agnes felt that her tastes fell short of her family’s preferences. ‘‘Oh! why haven’t I the love of learning of the family?’’ She indicated what was expected in her next breath: ‘‘Knight’s England vol. III has been read all but two chapters since last fall and during two months I have read but four books of the Odyssey.’’ She forced herself to be realistic. ‘‘During this next week [probably a school vacation] I want [to] finish half a dozen or more books which I have begun but I dare say the novels are the only ones that will be looked much in.’’

Like the Hamilton reading regimen, other family routines, too, involved matters of both quality and quantity. There were appropriate ages for the reading of different books. At fifteen, Margaret Tileston wanted to read George Macdonald’s Alec Forbes of Howglen, an homage to the dignity of Scots country life. The author was certainly approved, but Margaret’s mother didn’t want her to read the book ‘‘yet.’’

At eighteen, Margaret was still reading under adult scrutiny. Sick at home she was ‘‘allowed’’ to read Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, considered excessively charged for young girls, and polished off 340 pages on the first day. Reading was one way of being inducted into family ideology; when Margaret reread Pilgrim’s Progress in 1883, she was conscious that she was reading a book that had been important to her mother when she was young.”

- Jane H. Hunter, “Reading and the Development of Taste.” in How Young Ladies Became Girls: The Victorian Origins of American Girlhood

#victorian #history #american #how young ladies became girls #jane h. hunter

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berniesrevolution · 6 years

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The building loomed over the intersection like an apparition. Though hollowed out and lifeless, the shell of the former A.O. Smith Milwaukee Works headquarters on N. 27th Street and W. Hopkins was still magnificent. But the grand two story brick structure, wide as half a city block and featuring the odd boarded up window, felt like a tombstone. “Here lies the dream of the Great Migration,” it read.

“The 53206,” as the area is commonly called, and the predominantly black neighborhoods surrounding it currently have the highest rate of incarcerated black men in the country. Deindustrialization, wealth inequality, unemployment, and historical patterns of discrimination and police terrorism have created a toxic mix for Wisconsin’s 359,000 black residents.

Yet, few outsiders seem to realize that Milwaukee is substantially black. And many of its black residents, who make up 40 percent of the city, have been simmering in their frustrations for decades. Those frustrations came to a head in 2016, after police killed 23-year-old Sylville Smith, when residents set fire to Milwaukee’s Sherman Park neighborhood. But there may be an additional form of resistance bubbling under the surface of Milwaukee’s famed breweries and steadily gentrifying neighborhoods.

A common narrative about the November 2016 election is that a wave of white backlash thrust Donald Trump to the White House and that white Obama voters “flipped” to Trump. This may have been true on a small scale, but Obama-Trump voters did not make a significant difference. White people of all genders and classes voted for Trump at about the same rates as they voted for Romney, McCain, and George W. Bush, and both white and Republican voter turnout stayed fairly steady between 2012 and 2016. More significant was the critical mass of Democrats who defected from the party or didn’t vote at all in the battleground states the Democratic Party needed most. The rate of this decline among Democrats in key swing states was larger than the increase of Republicans who brought Trump to victory. And in some states, the drop was unprecedented.

While the Democratic Party argues about whether and how to win back the vanishingly small number of white Obama-Trump voters, the uncomfortable fact remains that black voter turnout in 2016 was down in over half the country. In Wisconsin, the decline in black voter turnout between 2012 and 2016 was 86,830 votes. Hillary Clinton lost the state by a mere 22,748 votes. If Clinton won over more of the black Democrats who voted in 2012 in just three states—Wisconsin, Florida, and Michigan—she would have won the election.

So why didn’t black voters turn out for Clinton? Even accounting for the thousands of potential voters who were likely harmed by Wisconsin’s incessant suppression tactics, studies show that voter suppression was among the least important factors affecting black turnout in Wisconsin.

In search of some answers, I trekked to Milwaukee last fall to talk to some of the city’s black residents about why they stayed home.

When newly-elected Alderman Khalif Rainey parked his car a couple of blocks from the Sherman Park neighborhood in August 2016, he was met with a stranger’s warning. “Don’t go over there. It’s about to go down tonight.” On August 13, 2016, the historically black, middle class community was in flames, from police cars, to an auto parts store, to the BP gas station that had been a match point for prior protests. This north side Milwaukee neighborhood, which Khalif knew and loved since childhood, burned before his eyes.

Just a few hours after police officer Dominique Heaggan-Brown killed Sylville Smith, the neighborhood was burning. The arson wasn’t just the climax of mourning for Sylville’s death. It was also about the police killings of Dontre Hamilton and Derek Williams, whose deaths were still a recent memory. It was about the folks who were out of work and with few legitimate employment options, and the decades of legalized police terrorism that wracked residents since the earliest years of black migrants seeking refuge in Milwaukee from the Jim Crow South.

In the early 1970s, black people from the corners of rural southern towns could find a relatively fresh start in Milwaukee. Despite the city’s notorious housing segregation, black residents were hired in manufacturing jobs with nothing more than a high school diploma. The city’s culture of anti-black police violence could be mitigated some by its economic opportunities, which ranked among the best in the country for black people.

But the jobs left and the police presence remained. The union labor, pensions, and benefits offered by manufacturing employers gave way to insecure, contractual service work or, in many cases, nothing at all. A 2017 report from the Center of Wisconsin Strategy (COWS), a “think-and-do-tank” based in the University of Wisconsin-Madison, notes that black people in Wisconsin experience “extreme” economic and social inequality far exceeding national rates. In 2015, blacks in Wisconsin were nearly three times more likely to be unemployed than whites. Thirty-one percent of black people in Wisconsin are in poverty, six times the white poverty rate. The black household income is half that of whites in the state, giving it the second highest black-white income gap after Minnesota.

These figures are even starker for black men in the state’s largest city. “No metro area has witnessed a more precipitous erosion in the labor market for black males over the past 40 years than has Milwaukee,” according to University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee professor Marc Levine in his analysis of U.S. Census data. “[A]nd in no other large metro area is the contemporary black male employment crisis more acute than in Milwaukee.” In 1970, 85% of black men in their prime working years of 25-54 were employed. This was above the national average. But by 2010, amid the Great Recession, that employment rate dipped to 52.7%.

This was the lowest level of employment for black males in their prime working years in any metropolitan area in the country.

At the break of dawn, at a news conference following the Sherman Park uprising, Alderman Khalif Rainey diverted from the usual talking points about the ills of violent protest and instead issued a searing indictment of Milwaukee’s failure to address racial inequities:

“This entire community has sat back and witnessed how Milwaukee, Wisconsin has become the worst place to live for African Americans in the entire country. Now this is the warning cry. Do we continue with the inequities, the injustice, the under-education that creates these byproducts that we see this evening?”

With increasing passion, the Alderman professed that “the black people of Milwaukee are tired. They’re tired of living under this oppression. This is their existence. This is their life. This is the life of their children. There’s racial problems here in Wisconsin that have to be rectified. Rectify this immediately.”

Alderman Rainey speaks with the same clarity and fervor over a year later when I meet him to discuss the rebellion, and similar rebellions that took place in Milwaukee and other black, urban centers 50 years prior in the midst of parallel economic and racial conditions. The walls of his wood-paneled office are lined with plaques and notable achievements, including a framed media clipping from TIME magazine highlighting his protest statement.

I asked him what the Sherman Park uprising could have meant for the typically Democratic stronghold and a presidential election that was set to transpire just a few months later. Here, too, the young politician’s response was unconventional: “I felt that there was no one that really spoke—they were speaking to [us] on a superficial level about what was going on.”

(Continue Reading)

#politics #the left #current affairs #economic inequality #black unemployment #poverty #institutional racism #economic bigotry

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auskultu · 6 years

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Special Report: The Canyon Scene

Jerry Hopkins, Rolling Stone, 22 June 1968

[From a larger article on the Los Angeles scene.]

It is the canyons—Laurel and Topanga, especially—that house the people who make the music. Laurel Canyon is a paisley gash that runs from Schwab’s on Sunset to the suburban San Fernando Valley, and Topanga Canyon is a dusty-woodsy pass leading from Malibu Beach to the same suburban sprawl. The environments in these canyons differ, but the people do not.

Van Dyke Parks calls Laurel Canyon “the seat of the beat” in his album Song Cycle, for it is here the music-makers create and rehearse, using the canyon walls as a natural baffle—and the neighbors don’t seem to mind so much.

Stand on the wood porch outside the Canyon Country Store halfway up the hill and watch the neighborhood file in for supplies. In a few days time you will have seen members of Clear Light and the Turtles, Neil Young and Richie Furay (former Buffalo), Lee Michaels, Bryan MacLean (Love), Joe Larson (Merry-Go-Round), Micky Dolenz, Joni Mitchell, A&M’s Michael Vosse, Elektra engineer John Haney, Phil Austin and Phil Proctor of the Firesign Theatre, Andy Wickham, Electra producer Barry Friedman (who shared a home in the canyon until recently with Paul Rothchild), Carol King (Goffin and King), and a dozen others of this musical, house-hopping fraternity. It is also in Laurel Canyon that Eric Burdon has a home, and Frank Zappa just bought the old Tom Mix house.

The attraction of the small store, with a cleaners and tiny restaurant nearby, is social as much as culinary. It is here where dates are made, new homes are found (on a bulletin board or through friends), grass might be scored, and where you usually get some sort of vague answer to the question, “What’s happening?"

Billy Of Ridpath Drive “If there were more mobility in this town,” says Billy James, a personal manager and music publisher who lives just up the hill from the store, “the Canyon store would look like MacDougal Street on Saturday night.”

Billy lives on Ridpath Drive, a steep twisting road that puffs to a dead-end after dividing 50 or 60 small frame houses slammed up against the mountainside. An afternoon stroll along his block reveals the essence of canyon existence.

At 8504 Ridpath, where Billy lives with his wife Judy and son Mark, is a mailbox with a typewritten list of the legitimate addresses for 8504; there are at least 20 companies, groups and individuals on the list. Inside the house this day, the dutiful wife is preparing a 1 p.m. breakfast of hamburgers for Billy and for Jackson Browne, a singer-songwriter Billy represents. Between phone calls, in a small dark “office” cluttered with albums, photographs, collages, tapes and acetates, Billy talks about the canyon.

“I lived in Beverly Hills my first two years here,” he said, “and then I moved into the clear air of the hills. It was either the hills or the ocean; both are here and it seemed silly not to live comfortably.

“I wasn’t the first to move into Laurel, but there weren’t too many here then—musicians and so on. Arthur Lee [Love] lived nearby—and that was about it. It’s all happened in the last year or so. I don't know why, really. If creative artists need to live apart from the community at large, they also have a desire to live among their own kind and so an artistic community develops.”

The Distant Drums As Billy talks, you hear someone in the near distance rehearsing. Billy explains it is the drummer for the International Submarine band. The drumming becomes louder as you pass the house and walk another few yards to 8524, Barry Friedman’s home. There you find Barry listening to tapes he has just produced for Elektra. Outside and on a different level from the house someone is cleaning the swimming pool and in another room of the sparsely furnished but rambling house a young Canadian songwriter named Rolf Kempf is picking and singing quietly.

Barry turns up the tapes for a visitor and begins to hype the group, the Holy Modal Rounders. You can see his lips move and barely hear him as an earthslide of sound fills the room from two huge studio speakers mounted near the ceiling. When the volume is cut, Rolf returns to his picking.

The following day Billy James is not home in the afternoon, but meeting with a record company. The house of the International Submarine Band is quiet as its members sleep. And Barry Friedman’s home is asprawl with musicians listening to albums and rapping—several of those present being the members of the Buffalo Springfield, wondering what’s next

Househopping Earthworms Laurel Canyon has been described by pop writer Richard Goldstein as a place where streets appear as if laid out by earthworms. And so it is. The earth is baked dry and verdant with semi-tropical growth by turns, and the drives and trails knot incredibly—linking a community of sound.

(A footnote regarding the househopping mode of living in LA., which can only be described as incestuous: before Barry Friedman and Paul Rothchild moved into what is now Barry’s home, the tenant was disc jockey B. Mitchell Reed … who, in turn, now lives in David Crosby’s house in Beverly Glen, while Crosby commutes to his boat in Florida … and Barry’s old house, in Hollywood, is now inhabited by Doug Weston, owner of the Troubadour.)

Topanga Canyon is a stranger and somehow gentler place, removed from Hollywood and the center of the scene by almost 20 miles. (But still in L.A.) Say “Topanga” to someone in L.A. and the first-word-you-think-of response is “hippie.” But Topanga carried Goldwater in 1960, and the American Legion post there is a powerful one. Still, it is where Linda Ronstadt and Bob Kimmel of the Stone Poneys lived when the world began to spin. It is where Barry McGuire went to collect himself and began getting back to nature and where, today, in small frame homes against clay hillsides live two songwriters named Alexander (Gordon and Gary), Chris Hillman and Kevin Kelly of the Byrds, and the old Buffalo Springfield’s Steve Stills.

Laurel Canyon is the sort of canyon where you’d expect to find (and will find) a lot of motorcycles. Topanga Canyon is the sort where you’d look for horses. Both these means of transportation are popular among the music-makers who live in these canyons: bikes in Laurel, horses in Topanga. (VW campers in both.)

Immediate Medical Attention Los Angeles is a strange town, seeming at times as if it were made in Japan and shipped here in small parts, then assembled by a committee of capricious drunks. But it has a pull, an attraction that may often (if not always) be related to—but somehow a little stronger than—the record company and the money it represents.

Frank Zappa, after living for 18 months in New York, returned to Los Angeles in May. “New York is a good city to make money in,” he said, “but I can’t write there. I have to be in L. A. There’s something very creative here.”

Roger McGuinn of the Byrds says the music scene suffers some from the city’s unusually beautiful climate, its “terribly relaxed attitude,” but Derek Taylor thinks those points make L. A. valuable. “This town makes no demands on you and it offers you everything good,” he said. “There seem to be 30 hours in every day and eight days in each week. There is a leisurely pace, but a pace of getting it done. It’s all here —the best facilities, the best climate. You don’t have to leave L.A. on business, you know, unless you like to travel on business; everyone you know or like wants to come here. Even the Beatles, who never go anywhere.”

There are others who feel Los Angeles is not yet the blossom Derek says it is. Michael Vosse feels the earth in Los Angeles is “in need of immediate medical attention.” “It's sick,” he said. “The business is sick and we have to keep attacking and working to make it well.”

While John Hartmann, manager of the Canned Heat and one of the Kaleidoscope owners, says, “The L. A. music scene is almost an unborn child. It’s a whole new thing today. The industry is generating product at an incredible pace, and new groups and new record companies are appearing hourly. I believe the LA. scene started with the Buffalo Springfield and I think the Doors really kicked off this new era. Now stand back and watch out!”

So as L.A. troops from club to club by night, from studio to studio by day, or hides out in a canyon to rehearse and write, the scene begins to unfold. The many scenes haze softly at the edges and begin to overlap.

#1968 #laurel canyon #los angeles #sixties #topanga canyon #california #the byrds #frank zappa #buffalo springfield #David crosby #neil young #van dyke parks #roger mcguinn #carol king #linda ronstadt #1960s #60s

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devinlucas · 3 years

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wojiushi18 · 3 years

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differentnutpeace · 3 years

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The Future Of The Pandemic In The U.S.: Experts Look Ahead

A year after the pandemic shut down the country, a growing number of infectious disease experts, epidemiologists, public health officials and others have started to entertain a notion that has long seemed out of reach: The worst of the pandemic may be over for the United States. หวย บอล เกมส์ สล็อต คาสิโนออนไลน์

No one thinks that's guaranteed by any means. There are many ways the pandemic could resurge. But many say it's becoming increasingly possible that the end may finally be in sight.

Even experts who have raised the alarm about the severity of the COVID-19 crisis nonstop for more than a year are optimistic.

"The worst may in fact be behind us," says Dr. Ashish Jha, dean of the Brown School of Public Health, one of more than 20 people interviewed by NPR for this story. "To be able to say: 'I think, [I'm] cautiously optimistic that the worst may be behind us?' Boy, that does feel really good."

Now, to be clear, more than 50,000 people are still getting infected daily with the coronavirus and hundreds are dying. So there's a great deal of sickness and suffering still in store for the country before the pandemic ends.

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How Is The COVID-19 Vaccination Campaign Going In Your State?

And the newfound optimism comes with three big caveats: The worst may be over if too many people don't let down their guard too fast, if the more dangerous variants don't make cases surge before enough people get vaccinated, and if the vaccination campaign doesn't stumble badly.

But if none of those problems occurs, life could slowly but steadily return to something much more normal.

The optimism is based on the rapid ramp-up of the vaccination campaign combined with the fact that a significant proportion of the country already has some immunity from being exposed to the virus, and the warmer weather that is linked to slower viral spread.

"If all goes well, if we stick by the public health measures, if we effectively vaccinate, I think we are looking at a brighter future over the next several months. That's entirely conceivable and probably likely," says Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.

Now, not everyone is quite ready to say the worst might be over. Several experts worry about the more contagious variants combining with too many communities lifting mask mandates and other restrictions and too many people letting down their guard, especially over spring break and Easter.

"I'm worried," says Michael Osterholm, director of the University of Minnesota's Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy. "If you wanted to put all the viral ingredients in one big mixing bowl to cause them to transmit in ways that would be very damaging to us, do what we're doing right now."

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How To Sign Up For A COVID-19 Vaccine In Your State

In fact, new hot spots may already be emerging, especially in Michigan and other parts of the Midwest, and in the Northeast, including New York City and New Jersey. Not only has infections started increasing in dozens of state, but hospitalizations may have also started creeping up again in at least a dozen states, according to new data from Pinar Karaca-Mandic and her team at the University of Minnesota COVID-19 Hospitalization Tracking Project.

But while most experts agree that there's still a sword of Damocles hanging over the nation's hopes, most think that the country could avoid another big surge such as the one that occurred over the winter.

"There are nightmare scenarios that we can paint out. And I can't say that those are such remote possibilities that we can dismiss them," says Jeffrey Shaman, an infectious disease researcher at Columbia University. "But I do think that this was probably the worst, and it will continue to go down."

Here's a road map to what we can expect for the future of the pandemic in the United States.

Late spring and summer: a cautious return to social life

Experts NPR spoke to predict that this spring, as more people are vaccinated, more people may be able to return safely to stores, restaurants and work, more children could return to in-person learning, and small groups of fully vaccinated people can get together for dinner parties indoors without masks.

In fact, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recently issued guidelines that say vaccinated people can already start to get together that way.

And if case counts continue to decline and vaccination rates increase, many public health authorities think the summer could be even better.

"Life will get better for sure," says Ali Mokdad at the University of Washington's Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation. "We will see more grandparents visiting and hugging their grandchildren. More restaurants will open. We will see sport events. Weddings. Church and religious events. We will have summer camp for kids. People will travel more."

In fact, Mokdad says, he has plans to fly to see his mother.

Still, Mokdad stresses that activities such as summer camps could only probably safely operate with precautions, such as random testing, mask-wearing and open windows to provide fresh air.

And Americans still need to be careful: Hot spots could flare up due to the variants, people getting careless and triggering superspreader events, and among pockets of people who haven't gotten vaccinated.

"Specific communities may see a resurgence because of the variants — there may be hot spots," says Caitlin Rivers, an epidemiologist at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. "But I don't think there will be another wave like we saw in the winter."

Fall: Schools reopen, and life starts feeling almost normal

By the fall, while young children still won't be vaccinated because scientists have just started testing the vaccines on them, their teachers hopefully will be. So in places where infections are low, schools should be pretty safe, experts told NPR.

Students will probably still wear masks and may still need to keep their distance from one another. But hopefully no more slogging through school on laptops at the kitchen table for most kids.

Experts predict in-person schools will be able to open widely around the country by fall. Some places already have, such as Medora Elementary School in Louisville, Ky.

Jon Cherry/Getty Images

"I am counting on it, and I'm thrilled," says Jennifer Nuzzo, a senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, who has a 7-year-old son. "Seven-year-olds aren't supposed to spend their entire days on a computer."

Researchers such as Fauci hope that more aspects of our day-to-day lives could edge back closer to pre-pandemic times.

"It is conceivable, and probably likely, by the time we get to the fall — late fall, early winter, by the end of this year — that we have a gradual but very noticeable and important return to some form of normality," Fauci says.

Winter: Brace for another possible surge — and booster shots

Some experts worry the virus could follow a seasonal pattern like the flu and surge again in the late fall or early winter. And that threat may be even greater because of the variants, especially the strains originally spotted in South Africa and Brazil that appear to be better at evading natural immunity and the vaccines.

The vaccine works against the U.K. variant, says Mokdad of the University of Washington, so with more vaccination, other variants may become dominant. "And by winter we assume these two will become the dominant one unless we have more that show up. And they will cause more infections and more mortality."

But even if there is no new winter surge, the virus won't be gone. It just hopefully won't be causing anything like the suffering that's already occurred.

It could, however, still be causing significant problems in parts of the world that haven't gotten vaccinated, which could spawn new, even more dangerous variants that could travel to the United States.

As a result, the country will probably need new versions of the vaccines for the variants and booster shots. And many experts say it's crucial that the U.S. help the rest of the world vaccinate as quickly as possible, too.

"If we don't get rid of this thing everywhere, it's going to just come back and get us again," says Robert Murphy, executive director of Northwestern University's Institute for Global Health. "The virus will continue to mutate. This is really a worldwide problem."

The pandemic's aftereffects

But even if the country is on the road out of this, the impact has been tremendous, and the aftereffects are likely to be long-lasting, many experts say.

"This pandemic is right up there as a world-changing event. It has already had a profound impact on society, on basic questions like the nature of our social interactions. It's already shaped and reshaped this particular generation," says Keith Wailoo, a historian at Princeton University. "And the ripple effects are likely to play out for years, perhaps even decades to come."

The pandemic revealed some deep problems, such as how society treats older people, poor people and people of color.

"Pandemics create what some people have called a kind of stress test for all of the weaknesses and vulnerabilities and fault lines of societies, and I think that's been especially true of COVID-19," says Allan Brandt, a historian at Harvard University.

It could change so many parts of our lives. Our homes. Our work. Travel. How we touch each other. Will the elbow bump replace the handshake for good?

Online schooling and social distancing have taken a toll on kids and adults during the pandemic. The aftereffects of such widespread social challenges may be felt for years, experts say.

Gabrielle Lurie/San Francisco Chronicle via Getty Images

"There's a whole realm of everyday interpersonal practices that are going to be, you know, very, very hard to revisit and redevelop easily, like handshaking and kissing and hugging," Wailoo says. "Or even walking closely together with friends and laughing together. All of these things today carry the stigma of disease transmission."

The Black Death led to the Renaissance. The 1918-19 flu pandemic gave way to the roaring '20s. We've just begun the new '20s. It's impossible to know what world will emerge as the virus recedes. But it seems pretty clear we'll be hearing the echoes of this pandemic for a long time.

"The disruptions to our economy, to our sense of safety in the world are of an order that our established ways of thinking are likely to undergo some pretty significant changes," says Nancy Tomes, a historian at Stony Brook University.

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usashirtstoday · 3 years

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I'm A Little Smart Short And Stout Here Is My Finger Funny

That is a I'm A Little Smart Short And Stout Here Is My Finger Funny psychotic transgender you know wife or daughter in is bad the need this bathroom handicap bathroom to break your fucking links and just in case you guys go don’t believe that this pedophilia shit is really going on take a look at this that is a pregnant child these are pregnant children how do you think these children got pregnant grown man raping that can say having sex is no such thing as consensual sex with a child that is right these children are rape victims and it happens every fucking day in Q’s been exposing it trumps been exposing and going to war with them been exposing it to YouTube is a been exposing it and as a result were being targeted but we can’t stop fighting is one from WikiLeaks to do a bad and you who Montezuma Aberdeen Obama Barack. Four year olds have the background when I got out of the FMLA moments that moment when you drop off back and asked about the people that 11 finance automatic blood profit for my children I would be me and letting worthwhile arrows on CBS news located in a story that will be Catherine Jean Harding transformer is neither a note of the charges against the and went away for me to spend his time take a look at the Thursday March 4 they looking for the election’s names and politics will choose these the questions you want is a very sorry for every the very point to face the nation CBS we are in this area to be made to look through a telescope on in a few hours to nomination for Carolyn bangs forward and primary challengers will also be speaking to Cory Booker and Michael Bloomberg meanwhile brought in from continued to make official White House tricks to key battleground stage where he campaigned against binding in Scranton a former BP birthplace been the subject throughout this week convention last when he was. Happening here and took in what they are doing that’s the that just a continuation of the hoax whether it’s the impeachment Oaks or the Russia Russia Russia hope this is what I’m talking about certainly not referring to this how can anybody refer to this this is very serious about the way they referred to it because these people have done such an incredible job and I don’t like it when they are criticizing these people and that stokes that’s what I’ve done information Dr world renowned for being my Dr is just a question has because he has had that ability to do virtually whatever is wanted to do that in fact he was never muzzled think I can speak what are you let me let me clarify I have never been muzzled ever and I been doing this since the administration of Ronald Reagan I’m not been muzzled by this ministration what happened which was misinterpreted is that we were set up to go on some shows when the vice president took over said let’s regroup and figure out how to be communicated so I had to just stand

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My mom said you dad told you smart dog judging you right now and your best friend is called crazy the only give it to a I'm A Little Smart Short And Stout Here Is My Finger Funny story mansion getting your newsletter noble in Stephenson’s sleep news straight to the store maybe more neuron than I am now with so much on the line number one for on stories stories stories is now is most likely has I had bad news ABC news live watch the street prescribers right now will hear from you 2 now away for 2021 not seem to be ready by 2021 so much attention when he may have a short answer connect and be ready training 2021 according. Our country faces well aware well aware of all the threads to this nation and ready to respond to them as a child of immigrants she knows personally how immigrant families enrich our country as well as the challenges of what it means to grow up black and you need American in United States of America per stories America story different from mine to many particulars but also lots of different in the essentials she’s worked hard she’s never back down from a challenge and she has earned each and every of the accolades and achievements that she has gained many of them often in the face of obstacles that others put in her way but never quit and this morning all across the nation little girls woke up special black and brown girls so often feel overlooked and undervalued in the communities but today today just maybe they’re seeing themselves for the first time in a new way as the stuff of present and vice presidents in her campaign the primary camel often talked about what you referred to as the 3M agenda by moms. Is based on something happening books are that years ago I remember what day is here was actually exclusive from New York comic con 2011 I believeand my friend Kal who owns straight investors the comic shop whereby complex he went to New York goneand pick up this exclusiveand he just gave to me because he was collecting the line so that was pretty sweet but I kept this guy in package I just keep picked up on my walland next a couple of she hulks services Holt’s cousin Jennifer Walters who turned into a hold of her ownand she had a blood transfusion forand this is she holding her classic fit this is what she wears in most of her miniseriesand stuff is cool I didn’t see hope in the marvel of design until very recently been released her in her grave version out which is actually a great figure I don’t have a marvelousand where she will actually Holt’s girlfriend Betty Ross came remember why she turned into a red hope for a while but to deny scope on this figure cool character we don’t ever marvel into herand I can waitand see this figure released in this formatand here we get some hope villains so first up is the abomination which is a pretty nice felt but I will say his first big muscular guy goes it doesn’t work as well for abominations of the whole what it is the sizes had me produced body because it used horses are something it’s focus is not working here but I don’t dislike the figures that does a lot of looking but do you still fly scope in the faceand the scope of the body toand then it took that they figure they did have some new additional parts hereand see he’s got these a very distinctive looks on his forearms but otherwise it he’s mostly the same figure but this is the second abomination which was actually character Rick Jonesand when he became abomination he took on any A bomb which is corny cool thing that I think this is the only A bomb figure that never gottenand I it’s very cool I hope we get him in the wasand still some point that big lookand then the leader was a classical villain pendulous face will walk you need to close this is the glare section to Beth Beth deny scope of this figure I think this one actually looks a lot better than the upcoming Marvel legend figureand the quite a bit portions are nice guys with big goofy heads like this can sometimes be hard to pull off but your think a this leader looks really good so next up with a look at some force so we can we get this file here is essentially classic though her body from the IPE’s comments is what most people associate with the words that will hammer with his little inscription a pretty cool although the head rather classic beardless had to give us his the bearded one here is not college but not a bad figure if I’m going to have one classic door I would prefer beer now than the store her this is a more contemporary look for Thorand my personal favorite store this is the look he wore no is a contemporary for 15 years but the door was dead for while composting he came back sometime after the Civil Warand he had his newly redesigned costumes that was really the first time I started reading for complex on a regularand is seeking a big fan I really love this look this is a great figure is a lot of personality in the face looks a lot like the artwork that this costume is based on you I like the wash over the over the chain mail there there is a detailed brother is a really nice figure one of my favorites from the lineand lastly the for standing this is next with the words another character called thunder strike which I use Thor’s hammer for a whileand yet he is a claim is the classic for a fit on the leather jacket over top of the objectives were popular in the 90sand the he’s okay I see a new associate figure of a character that you don’t expect but the Dr to that much soand now we have some Thor allies have been rebuiltand I absolutely love this figure looks great he’s got an articulated jaw’s message is awesome for such small figure I love this costume love the hammer elevating about it we did recently get a bit rebuilt Marvel legends but his more updated costume as just a is not as nice looking as this one so if I do choose between the two I still prefer the smaller version of the rebuiltand we got sifts so this is based on the look from the movie the first form of so as a counterclaimand the actors likenesses not great is okay for this figure the size but you need to furtherand Connie outcomes based on Anthony Hopkins this is Oden Thor’s father so this is cool again characters with Odenand said I would prefer to have the comic based version rather than a movie one but never made but based one so I will be checking my foot had byand so here are some Thor villainsand these guys are all based on the movies so low key hereand at least as lucky with his helmet on Sotelo bit of a flair for the comic design they always would prefer the comic book appearances post movie appearances but low key characters right never really loved his comic book look anyway you could get a version of this they did make one comp costume is also really skinny goofy looking so I was content with this being my only low key except we have curse you might remember he was kind of a henchman in the second Thor movieand this is a character has a really cool design of the comic books it’s really crazy looking out there is happy that they work this character into the moviesand this is a cool design but I would prefer to look more like the comic book look in your filters underused anyway but it’s cool that these have some figure of him but I hope they eventually do Marvel legend of him based on his comic book appearance then we got one of the frost giants this is supposed to be a specific guy I think I can see he’s pretty cooland then we’ve got one of the dark elves also from the second movie so Mel kicked with the leader than the discipline to henchmen dress like this so I would’ve preferred exit amount kiss but it’s always fun to get some little army builders here too so it I do dig the look of the skyand here we have some comic book based Thor villains so first destroyer in the office action probably was from the movie line as well but the movie line was so close to the car because I would tell the difference so I member this was a hard to find figure I really wanted itand I think actually not by misguided eBay pain a bit of a premium form but it’s pretty cool figure there’s a couple different variations on this one is pretty much sum of solid black are really really dark grayand his but on his chest he had some sort of light up featuring his chest look red or something but the battery emeritus long since died this destroyer is pretty cooland the enchantress so she’s plain looking she supposed to be all seductressand I don’t know how people should be seduced without Syria is a special Marvel legend is much betterand then this guy here I don’t think we go Marvel him this is you look he’s a controland this is pretty cool figure I think it uses a lot of the same body as the abominations of suffers a little bit of heaven that same kind is a look but it may be makes more sense for troll reports to be sized that way then it’s a cool figure’s analysis looks at Capt See Other related products: What Would Joe Biden Do T Shirt

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easyfoodnetwork · 4 years

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To Find Hope in American Cooking, James Beard Looked to the West Coast

James Beard in 1972 | Photo by Arthur Schatz/Life Magazine/The LIFE Picture Collection via Getty Images

In an excerpt from The Man Who Ate Too Much, the culinary icon returns to his hometown and begins to articulate his vision for American cuisine

James Beard looms large in the American culinary canon. The name is now synonymous with the awards, known as the highest honors in American food, and the foundation behind them. But before his death in 1985, well before the existence of the foundation and the awards, Beard was a culinary icon. In The Man Who Ate Too Much: The Life of James Beard, John Birdsall tells Beard’s life story, highlighting how Beard’s queerness contributed to the concept of American cuisine he introduced to a generation of cooks.

Beard’s ascent to food-world fame wasn’t immediate. He came to food after an attempt at a life as a performer, and following a stint in catering and a gig hosting his own cooking show, Beard’s early cookbooks weren’t smash hits, his point of view not yet fully evolved. In this excerpt from The Man Who Ate Too Much, Beard embarks on a cookbook-planning trip through the American West, including his hometown of Portland, Oregon, with new friend and collaborator Helen Evans Brown and her husband, Philip. It’s there, after a whirlwind 25 days of eating (which read as especially envy inducing now), that Beard begins to define American cuisine for himself and, eventually, the country. — Monica Burton

The Man Who Ate Too Much is out on October 6; buy it at Amazon or Bookshop.

American cooks in the early 1950s were in the grip of frenzy. Shiny new grills and rotisserie gadgets, advertised like cars, loaded with the latest features, were everywhere. Outdoor equipment and appliance manufacturers rushed to market with portable backyard barbecues and plug-in kitchen roasters, meant to give Americans everywhere — even dwellers in tight city apartments — an approximate taste of grilled patio meat.

Postwar technology and American manufacturing prowess propelled infrared broilers such as the Cal Dek and the Broil-Quik. An Air Force officer, Brigadier General Harold A. Bartron, retired to Southern California in 1948 and spent his time in tactical study of a proprietary rotisserie with a self-balancing spit. He named it the Bartron Grill.

There was the Smokadero stove and Big Boy barbecue. There were enclosed vertical grills with radiant heat, hibachis from post-occupation Japan, and the Skotch Grill, a portable barbecue with a red tartan design that looked like an ice bucket.

In New York City, the high-end adventure outfitter Abercrombie and Fitch and the kitchen emporiums of big department stores did a bustling business in these new symbols of postwar meat consumption. There was even an Upper East Side shop solely dedicated to them, Smoke Cookery, Inc. on East Fiftieth Street. The only trouble was that many buyers of these shiny new grown-up toys had no clue how to cook in them.

For weeks in the spring of 1953, Helen tested electric broiler recipes, an assignment from Hildegarde Popper, food editor of House & Garden magazine, for a story called “Everyday Broils.” A few broiler and rotisserie manufacturers sent their new models to Armada Drive for Helen to try.

“The subject turns out to be a huge one,” Helen wrote Popper; she had enough material to break the story into two parts. “Jim Beard, of cook book fame, was here when my rotisserie arrived,” she told Popper, “and he was a great help to me.”

Word got around the New York editor pool. Suddenly, Helen and James seemed the ideal collaborators, storywise, to cover the new subject of grill and rotisserie cooking: West Coast and East, female and male, California suburban patio cook and Manhattan bachelor gourmet.

Meanwhile, cookbook publishing was surging. Doubleday became the first house to hire a fulltime editor, Clara Claasen, to fill its stable with cookery authors.

Schaffner took Claasen to lunch to discuss how he might be able to help. “She is very much interested in the idea of an outdoors cookbook,” he wrote to Helen afterward. “This would combine barbecue, picnic, sandwich, campfire and every other aspect of outdoor eating.” Schaffner and Claasen lunched again. James and Helen’s “cooks’ controversy” idea had run out of gas (Schaffner hated the idea anyway, especially after reading first drafts of a few Beard–Brown “letters”), so Schaffner managed to steer Claasen toward a different kind of collaboration for his two clients.

In November 1953, Helen flew to New York. She and Schaffner met with Claasen at the Doubleday offices. On a handshake, in the absence of James (who only the day before had returned from France on the Queen Elizabeth), they decided on a collaboration: an outdoor cookery book to be authored by Helen Evans Brown and James A. Beard.

Everyone was happy: Schaffner for nailing a deal for two clients at once; Claasen for bringing new talent to Doubleday. Helen was getting what she needed: a book with a major publisher. James was getting what he wanted: a reason to get even closer to Helen. Perhaps this was only the first in a long future of collaborations; they might one day even open a kitchen shop together and sell a line of their own jams and condiments. The possibilities were endless.

Claasen was eager to draw up a formal contract. All she needed from Helen and James was an outline.

Under the glowing cabin lights of a westbound red-eye flight on April 3, 1954, James found himself eerily alone. TWA’s Super Constellation was an enormous propliner with seats for nearly a hundred passengers; that night, James was one of only four. He planned to rendezvous with the Browns in San Francisco later that week, but only after he took five days on his own in the city he’d loved as a boy. From there, the three of them would embark on a weeks-long research trip in the Browns’ Coronet convertible, stopping at wineries and cheese factories throughout Northern California, Oregon, Washington, and Idaho. Helen needed to do research for a magazine article she’d long wanted to write. She and Philip had asked James to join them five months earlier, in December 1953.

Nearly a decade after the end of the war, San Francisco was a place of resuscitated glamour, with much of the shimmer and confidence James had known in the city of his youth, when he and Elizabeth would ride the trains of the Shasta Route south.

His plane landed in drizzling rain. For his first luncheon of the trip, James chose a place of old comfort: the dim, wood-paneled Fly Trap on Sutter Street. He wore a suit of windowpane-check tweed (the jacket button straining above his stomach, his thin bow tie slightly askew), eating cold, cracked Dungeness and sautéed sand dabs. The stationery in his room at the Palace had an engraving across the top, an illustration of pioneers trudging next to oxen pulling a Conestoga wagon. Above them floated an apparition: the hotel’s neoclassical façade rising from the fog. “At the end of the trail,” it read, “stands the Palace Hotel.” James imagined himself the son of the pioneer he’d fancied his father to be. Was he now at the end of something or the beginning?

Courtesy W.W. Norton

Helen Evans Brown

He spent his days and nights eating: A luncheon of poulet sauté with Dr. A. L. Van Meter of the San Francisco branch of the Wine and Food Society (they had met on the French wine junket in 1949); dinner at the Pacific Heights home of Frank Timberlake, vice president of Guittard Chocolate; a trip to San Jose to tour the Almaden Winery and meet its owner, Louis Benoist, over a marvelous lunch of pâté, asparagus mousseline, and an omelet. James dined at the Mark Hopkins with Bess Whitcomb, his abiding mentor from the old Portland Civic Theatre days — she lived in Berkeley now and taught drama at a small college. She wore her silver hair in a short crop; her gaze was warm and deep as ever.

Helen and Philip arrived on Sunday, and on Monday the tour began with a day trip. Philip drove the Coronet across the Golden Gate Bridge north to the Napa Valley, with Helen riding shotgun and James colonizing the bench seat in back. The afternoon temperature crested in the mid-seventies and the hills were still green from winter rain. Masses of yellow wild-mustard flowers filled the vineyards. They tasted at the big four — Inglenook, Beaulieu, Charles Krug, and Louis Martini — and lunched with a winery publicist on ravioli, chicken with mushrooms, and small, sweet spring peas. James kept a detailed record of their meals in his datebook. Elena Zelayeta, the San Francisco cookbook author and radio personality, cooked them enchiladas suizas and chiffon cake.

Next day they crossed the bridge again but swung west from Highway 101 to visit the farm town of Tomales, not much more than a main street of stores and a filling station. Among the rise of green hills dotted with cows, at the farm and creamery of Louis Bononci, James had his first taste of Teleme, a washed-rind cheese with a subtly elastic texture and milky tang. Within its thin crust dusted with rice flour, James recognized the richness and polish of an old French cheese, crafted in an American setting of rusted pickups and ranchers perched on stools at diner counters. It stirred his senses and revived his love for green meadows with the cool, damp feel of Pacific fog lurking somewhere off the coast.

Philip drove west to the shore of fingerlike Tomales Bay, where they lunched on abalone and a smorgasbord that included the local Jack cheese and even more Teleme.

The car had become a mad ark of food.

The road stretched north along the coast: to Langlois, Oregon, with its green, tree-flocked hills converging in a shallow valley, where they stopped at Hans Hansen’s experimental Star Ranch. Born in Denmark, Hansen spent decades making Cheddar. In 1939, with scientists at Iowa State University and Oregon State College, Hansen had begun experimenting with what would be known as Langlois Blue Vein Cheese, a homogenized cows’-milk blue inoculated with Roquefort mold spores. (Production would eventually move to Iowa, where the cheese would be known as Maytag Blue.)

They hit Reedsport, Coquille, Coos Bay, Newport, Cloverdale, Bandon, and Tillamook. They stopped at cheese factories, candy shops, butchers’ counters, produce stands, and markets. Already stuffed with suitcases, the Coronet’s trunk became jammed with wine bottles and jars of honey and preserves; packets of sausage, dried fruit, nuts, and candy. The backseat around James filled up with bottles that rolled and clinked together on turns, with apples, tangerines, filberts, pears, and butcher-paper packets of sliced cured meat, smoked oysters, and hunks of Cheddar. The car had become a mad ark of food. James hauled anything regional and precious on board, as if later it would all prove to have been a myth if he didn’t carry some away as proof that it existed.

In Tualatin, south of Portland, they dropped in on James’s old friends from theater days, Mabelle and Ralph Jeffcott. To a crowd that included Mary Hamblet and her ailing mother, Grammie, Mabelle served baked shad and jellied salad, apple crisp, and the homemade graham bread — molasses-sweet and impossibly light — that was famous among her friends.

They lunched on fried razor clams and coleslaw at the Crab Broiler in Astoria and had martinis, kippered tuna, salmon cheeks, and Indian pudding at the Seaside cottage of James’s beloved friend Harvey Welch.

In Gearhart, James trudged out to Strawberry Knoll, walked across the dunes and onto the beach. He regarded Tillamook Head, just as he did as a boy at the start of summers. He felt a weird convergence of past and present: the sting of sand whipping his face and the smell of charred driftwood lingering in the rock-circled dugout pits of ancient cookouts.

For James, the Northwest displayed a delightfully slouchy elegance he’d almost forgotten about in New York. It had taste without snobbery. At the Pancake House in Portland, they brunched on Swedish pancakes with glasses of buttermilk and French 75 cocktails — the sort of high–low mix he had aimed for at Lucky Pierre. Why did Easterners have so much trouble grasping the idea?

Before a meal of roast beef and Yorkshire pudding, they sipped a simple pheasant broth that, dolled up with half a dozen gaudy garnishes and called Consommé Louis-Philippe, would have been the jewel of Jack and Charlie’s “21” in New York. Food here had honesty. It declared what it was. Like James, it was anti-“gourmet.” Its purity was the ultimate elegance.

Thus far, James had fumbled at articulating a true American cooking. He’d taken rustic French dishes, called them by English names, and substituted American ingredients. There was something crude about such an approach. This trip had showed him American food made on French models — Gamay grapes and Roquefort spores and cheeses modeled on Camembert and Emmenthaler that tasted wonderful and were reaching for unique expressions, not just impersonating European originals. It had given James a clearer vision of American food taking root in the places it grew.

As a boy, he had glimpsed this with Chinese cooking, how a relative of the Kan family, a rural missionary, adapted her cooking to the ingredients at hand in the Oregon countryside. How her Chinese dishes took root there, blossomed into something new; how they became American.

They trekked to Seattle, where the Browns went to a hotel and James stayed with John Conway, his theater-director friend from the Carnegie Institute days. John’s wife, Dorothy, was a photographer. She shot formal portraits of James and Helen in the Conways’ kitchen — maybe Doubleday would use one as the author photo for the outdoor cookbook. They took an aerial tour of oyster beds and wandered Pike’s Place Market.

Philip then steered the Coronet eastward across Washington, through the town of Cashmere in the foothills of the Cascades, where they stopped at a diner for cube steak, cottage cheese, and pie that James noted as “wonderful” in his datebook. In Idaho, at a place called Templin’s Grill near Coeur d’Alene, they found excellent steak and hash browns. There was a Basque place along the way that made jellied beef sausage, and a diner in Idaho Falls with “fabulous” fried chicken and, as James scribbled in his daybook, “biscuits light as a feather.” The fried hearts and giblets were so delicious they bought a five-pound sack to stuff in the hotel fridge and eat in the car next day for lunch.

“Drinks, Steaks, Drinks!”

The squat, industrial-looking Star Valley Swiss Cheese Factory in Thayne, Wyoming, with a backdrop of snow on the Wellsville Mountains, produced what James thought was the best Emmenthaler-style cheese he’d tasted outside of France, but this was American cheese. They had delicious planked steak and rhubarb tart in Salt Lake City, but bad fried chicken and awful pie in Winnemucca, Nevada, was the beginning of a sad coda to their journey.

Soon they were in Virginia City, home of Lucius Beebe — brilliant, bitchy, rich, alcoholic Lucius Beebe, dear friend to Jeanne Owen and the Browns and dismissive of James from the minute they met in New York City fifteen years back.

Lucius enjoyed the life of a magnifico in the nabob splendor of the Comstock Lode, among the graceful wooden neo-Renaissance mansions, peeling in the searing Nevada sun, built by nineteenth-century silver barons. His husband in all respects, save the marriage license and church wedding, was Chuck Clegg. Chuck was quarterback-handsome and courtly, in contrast to bloated, prickly Lucius. Helen and Philip were fond of them. They wanted to linger for a few days, which turned into four days of heavy drinking and blasting wit, much of it at James’s expense.

“Drinks, Steaks, Drinks!” James wrote in his daybook. He disliked Virginia City, with its steep hills one couldn’t climb without wheezing. One day, they all had a picnic on the scrubby flank of a hill, under a brutal sun. Chuck and Lucius brought a Victorian hamper filled with fine china plates, Austrian crystal, silver, and antique damask napkins. They ate cold boned leg of lamb and beans cooked with port. They lingered so long, over so many bottles of Champagne, that James’s head became badly sunburned. Back at the motel, Philip, drunk, tried splashing James’s head with gin, hoping it would bring cooling relief. Everyone cackled at his plight.

Finally, twenty-five days after they set out from San Francisco, Philip steered the Coronet home to Pasadena.

“The trip is one of the most happy and valuable memories of my life,” he wrote to Schaffner from Pasadena. “I garnered a great deal of material, had a most nostalgic time in parts of the west most familiar to me and saw much I had never seen before. It was splendid, gastronomically speaking, to be able to see that there is hope in American cooking.”

The best and most interesting food in America was inseparable from the landscapes that produced it. It was all right there, in country diners and small-town grocers’ shops; in roadside dinner houses and bakeries. All you needed to do was look.

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James Beard in 1972 | Photo by Arthur Schatz/Life Magazine/The LIFE Picture Collection via Getty Images

In an excerpt from The Man Who Ate Too Much, the culinary icon returns to his hometown and begins to articulate his vision for American cuisine

The Man Who Ate Too Much is out on October 6; buy it at Amazon or Bookshop.

Meanwhile, cookbook publishing was surging. Doubleday became the first house to hire a fulltime editor, Clara Claasen, to fill its stable with cookery authors.

Claasen was eager to draw up a formal contract. All she needed from Helen and James was an outline.

Courtesy W.W. Norton

Helen Evans Brown

Philip drove west to the shore of fingerlike Tomales Bay, where they lunched on abalone and a smorgasbord that included the local Jack cheese and even more Teleme.

The car had become a mad ark of food.

“Drinks, Steaks, Drinks!”

Finally, twenty-five days after they set out from San Francisco, Philip steered the Coronet home to Pasadena.

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