memories – Page 24 – Life In A Word

Dream Puffs

Last year, Starbucks surpassed Subway as America’s #2 restaurant, measured by gross sales (McDonald’s is still top dog). I don’t consider Starbucks a place to “dine”, so second-place is impressive. Then again, Starbucks’ bakery case has matured since its initial offerings. There are temptations-a-plenty now, en route to the barista. The traditional breakfast items share space with yogurt parfaits, fruit-and-cheese boxes, “fold-over” sandwiches, and entree-size salads. But it’s the smaller offerings I want to talk about today. Look closely through the glass – you’ll see sous vide egg bites and Bantam’s bite-sized bagels. Those little guys could be the future of fast food.

I haven’t tried the mini bagels, but Starbucks wins me over with its egg bites. The first time I gave them a whirl, my wife and I were in the middle of Lent, trying to find alternatives to the foods we gave up. Egg bites to the rescue. The sous vide prep means cooked in water, with nothing but a bit of spinach, red pepper, and cheese mixed in for flavor. Simply elegant (elegantly simple?), and the light, fluffy texture makes them as delicious as they are convenient.

Now let’s talk about real breakfast foods. Last weekend, my wife and I went to a nearby restaurant called Three Little Griddles. Much to my delight, Griddles had Æbleskiver on the menu. If you’re Danish, you already know what I’m talking about. Æbleskiver is heaven-sent breakfast: puffy little balls of pancake with a sweet surprise in the middle, finished off with a delicate dusting of powdered sugar and a side of raspberry jam. Æbleskiver is Danish for “apple slices”, but you’re more likely to bite into a strawberry or a fruit-compote filling instead. Three Little Griddles also offers Æbleskiver with an egg/bacon filling, coated with a maple-syrup glaze and powdered sugar. A complete breakfast!

If you haven’t heard of Æbleskiver and the first thing you thought of was “doughnut hole”, shame on you. Doughnut holes don’t even qualify as poor man’s Æbleskiver. Doughnut holes are a clever product designed to get you to buy more when it appears you’re buying less (think “fun-size” candy bars). I have two issues with doughnut holes. One, they’re not actually the “hole” of a solid doughnut, but prepared and baked separately instead. Two, they’re not shaped like a doughnut hole should be (picture it – something more like the hub of a wheel). They should be called doughnut balls. But enough of this talk; I’m wasting words. Let’s keep the focus on Æbleskiver.

My first taste of Æbleskiver came when I was little, in the Central California village of Solvang. Solvang is like, well, a kid’s “Little Denmark” – a town small enough to walk around, with an overabundance of shops selling toys, candy, and ice cream. Several windmills spin slowly above Solvang’s high-pitched shingle rooftops. A church sits prominently on the edge of town. A small park serves as the town square, complete with a bandstand-sized gazebo. All that’s missing is some water-filled canals and cobble-stoned streets. But meanwhile, there’s plenty of Æbleskiver. Some restaurants even bake them out on the sidewalk, rotating those little dream puffs to perfection in their unique iron skillets.

If you credit the Danes with the invention of ball-shaped food, the rest of the world takes a distant second with its imitations. China makes a spherical egg-based fruit-filled waffle called Gai Daan Jai. Japan makes a variety of savory ball-sized snacks called Takoyaki. (Savory? Yuck.) And America makes doughnut holes called Munchkins.

As if Æbleskiver isn’t cool enough as a food, it’s also a cool word with a unique spelling (note the “letter” Æ). Perhaps Starbucks will start carrying it, along with the egg bites. I’d buy both and a coffee for a complete breakfast.

Finally, if Æbleskiver has you wondering what other delights Denmark has to offer, consider Æblekage. Æblekage is “apple charlotte” – stewed sweetened apples layered with butter-roasted bread crumbs and crushed makroner (an almond-flavored meringue), topped with whipped cream and red currant jelly. Oh my; sounds like dream stuff.

Some content sourced from Wikipedia, “the free encyclopedia”.

Mechanical Wonders

A Wall Street Journal headline stopped me in my tracks today. In Guangzhou, China, you can now buy a car from a vending machine. Starting with a smartphone app, you book a test drive before you arrive. Once at the “dealership”, facial recognition software kicks the machine into gear, delivering your car-of-choice from an eight-story automated garage. If you’re happy with the test drive, you negotiate the purchase through the app – no haggling salesperson to be seen – and off you drive with a new car. I’d fly to China and take a test drive just to see the automated garage vend a car. That’s some cool technology.

Vending is more sophisticated these days than the plain-Jane cigarette and candy machines of old, of course. Airports dispense cell phones and other pricey electronics to travelers from vending machines. Food-truck-like boxes dispense made-to-order pizzas. A mall in Beverly Hills vends Beluga caviar from self-serve refrigerators ($500 a pop). Las Vegas’s “The Lobster Zone” is like one of those machines where you joystick the claw to your toy of choice, only here you’re plucking live lobsters from a tank. Finally, the cupcake company Sprinkles makes serious bank with its street-side “cupcake ATM’s”.

Speaking of bank, I used to collect mechanical banks when I was a kid. That sounds like a strange (nerdy?) admission – collecting toy banks – but that’s what kids did in the 1970’s. They collected things. Mechanical banks wouldn’t appeal to today’s youth for a couple of reasons. One, they’re battery-operated or “wind-up”, so you can’t control them with a phone or an app. Two, they work on the assumption you’re saving up nickels, dimes, and quarters for future purchases. Today’s kids seem less likely to save that way (if at all), and their purchases are with bills or electronic cash. Mechanical banks prefer coins.

My collection of banks – which disappeared years ago – is a good example of the limitations of what and how a kid could purchase back then. Almost all my banks came from the Johnson Smith Company, a manufacturer out of Chicago (“Since 1914!”) Johnson Smith sold endless novelty and gag gift items: x-ray goggles, whoopee cushions, joy buzzers, and those really annoying “chattering teeth”. They also sold mechanical banks; not the beautiful collector’s editions of old, but plastic, battery-operated cheapies, probably manufactured in China. Johnson Smith was the closest thing a kid in my day had to Amazon.

Because I lived in Los Angeles and Johnson Smith sold their mechanical banks in Chicago, the U.S. Postal Service was a lifeline; the critical link between my quiet suburban neighborhood and the Midwest’s biggest city. When I saved enough money, I’d stuff my bills and coins into an envelope, hand-address it, add several postage stamps (Mom helped with the calculation), and walk it out to the mailbox at the end of our driveway. Four to six weeks later, a small brown box would arrive from Chicago, addressed to me and containing my latest mechanical wonder.

Think about that for a second. Not only was I putting cash into a flimsy white envelope to be processed through the endless shipping and handling of USPS, but I was also leaving my hard-earned money out by the street, alerting the world to its presence with the little red mailbox flag. That same transaction today – with “1-click ordering” – takes a single keystroke or voice command and shows up on my doorstep in two days or less.

The irony of collecting mechanical banks is that you’re spending your hard-earned pennies on the very thing designed to keep you from spending them. Truth be told, my banks weren’t about saving money at all. Instead, they were entertainment in the form of plastic-and-battery-operated mechanics, watching coins go here-and-there before finally disappearing from sight.

I never lost my fascination for mechanics. I remember grade-school field trips to commercial bakeries, going behind-the-scenes to see how big vats of dough methodically evolved into sliced, packaged loaves of bread. My kids and I used to watch the Food Network’s “Unwrapped”, a half-hour tour through the sophisticated mechanics behind a product’s evolution, from individual ingredients, through various stages of assembly (and several conveyor belts), finally to the finish line: a brightly-wrapped ready-to-eat consumable.

Mechanical banks may be long gone, but even in today’s age of electronics I say we’re still fascinated by mechanics itself. It’s the reason we buy cars from vending machines or cupcakes from ATM’s. And it’s the reason I still haul my pocket change down to the bank, just to see the teller dump the lot into the coin-counting machine; the noisy, mechanical wonder that sorts, counts, and spits out a receipt just before gobbling up every last penny.

Personal Space

We’re in the midst of Holy Week (for us Christians), which for some means spending more than the usual amount of time in church. Starting with this past Sunday, most Christian denominations conduct a total of five church services unique to this week: Palm Sunday, Maundy Thursday, Good Friday, Holy Saturday, and Easter Sunday. Our Methodist church here in Colorado devotes an hour to each of these services (short by Catholic standards); some during the day, others at night. No matter how you slice it, Holy Week means a lot of time in the sanctuary.

The church sanctuary wasn’t always a welcoming place. Growing up in Los Angeles, my family and I belonged to a formal Methodist church, with a sanctuary I can only describe as intimidating (at least from a kid’s point of view). You entered the building from the back, where the doorway greeters beckoned you to a narrow narthex. So far, so good. But the imposing sanctuary lay just beyond, through a wall of soundproof windows and closed doors, with stern-faced ushers protecting its every entrance. The pews were hardwood and upright with thin cushions, thirty deep on either side of the main aisle, marching in perfect unison towards the steps of an even-more-intimidating white marble altar. The booming organ drowned out any conversation (which was always at a whisper anyway), and the soaring structure of the ceiling made a kid wonder when it would all come a tumblin’ down like Jericho’s walls.

The congregation of worshipers was a lot of “old folks”; the kind of people who thought kids belonged in “Sunday School” instead of the sanctuary (that is, neither seen nor heard). Hence as teenagers, my friends and I sat up in the balcony (at the back of the space, kind of like the last seat on the bus). You couldn’t always hear the pastor, but at least we didn’t feel the eyes of the disapproving adults down below watching our every move. From our vantage point they were just a bunch of suits and dresses, topped by a whole lot of gray hair.

“Sanctuary” took on new meanings as I grew older. The San Diego Wild Animal Park (now the “Safari Park”) opened its gates in the 1970’s and put a completely new spin on the concept of a zoo. Animals lived in wide open spaces instead of enclosures; broad, beautiful environments designed to mimic their natural habitats. Instead of pressing noses against cages or glass, visitors saw the animals from a distance, confined to the seats of a quiet tram circling the park. If I ever come back as a member of an endangered species (like the northern white rhino I mentioned last week), put me in the San Diego Safari Park. That’s what I call an animal sanctuary.

Also in the ’70’s, Hollywood produced “Logan’s Run”. The movie depicted a utopian society of the future, offering a wealth of pleasures and resources and good living… at least until you turn thirty. At thirty you reported to the “Carousel”, where you were assured a place in “Sanctuary” – the supposedly better hereafter. Logan and his friends decide to find Sanctuary before they turn thirty, and that’s where the curtain of the ugly truth is drawn back. I can still hear Logan fighting the controlling supercomputer as he moans “THERE IS NO SANCTUARY!” Logan’s world was seductive for sure, but it was the mystery of sanctuary that had me watching to the end.

Recently, sanctuary has taken on more puzzling associations. In the 1980’s, American thrash metal produced the band Sanctuary (but nothing in my research explains the name). Sanctuary Clothing is a line described as “…capturing the Los Angeles lifestyle… vintage styling with a handcrafted focus on detail…” Again, nothing about the name. The SyFy Channel’s Sanctuary ran for four seasons and explored gene therapy and cloning, and the “strange and sometimes terrifying beings” that emerged within the human population. Finally, today’s sanctuary cities appear to be anything but, as the political feud between the Fed and the state overshadows any sense of actual security.

My definition of sanctuary will always be that primary space for worship in a church; or to put it in broader terms, “a place of refuge or safety”. Whether that’s somewhere inside, worshiping in the pews as I’ll do tonight; or somewhere outside; say, walking on a quiet path in the forest, it’s more about a feeling than a location. Sanctuary is all about personal space.

Chump Change

This week’s headlines included a downer from the animal kingdom. The world’s last male northern white rhino passed away, leaving just two females to live out their days before the species goes extinct. How sad is that? Especially since the northern white’s demise is the result of the poaching of its horns – questionable behavior from we humans.

Speaking of questionable behavior, did you know the U.S. penny and nickel are also on the verge of obsolescence? It’s true, if you believe the arguments of those who say the one-cent and five-cent pieces have outlived their utility. Consider: 1) both coins cost more to mint than they’re worth; 2) a nickel today buys less than 20% of its worth in 1970 (a penny – less than 10%); 3) merchants routinely adjust pricing to avoid their use; and 4) the metals involved – zinc, copper, and nickel – have perfectly good uses elsewhere.

The prosecutions rests and the defense now takes the stand. Pennies and nickels should not go the way of the northern white. Consider: 1) Demand for the little guys is soaring; double what it was a decade ago; 2) The U.S. Mint “makes money” on its production of coins – fully 45 cents for every dollar’s worth (in 2017: a $400 million profit); 3) If zinc becomes too expensive (97.5% of the makeup of today’s pennies), a cheaper metal can be used for filler, and 4) eliminating pennies and nickels could threaten confidence in the U.S. dollar with a forced dependence on higher denominations.

I’ll get behind any of these arguments – pro or con – I just think they’re boring. Defending our little Mr. Lincoln’s and little Mr. Jefferson’s can be so much more creative. Take away pennies and nickels; then consider the following:

1) Penny loafers. No longer the classic men’s slip-on shoes with the cool name, including the cross strap and small opening at the center; the perfect size and shape for a penny. Add those Lincolns and you gave new meaning to the term “shoe shine”. You also had a built-in conversation starter, when the girl asked why you put coins in your shoes. You told her you were retro – back in the day a phone call cost a penny, and loafers were a convenient way to carry around the cost.

2) 99 Cent Only Stores. Fifty years of U.S. retail, with over 400 locations and thousands of products priced at “ninety-nine cents or less”, goes belly-up without the penny. How would a cashier make change on the dollar? They’d have to give you a nickel instead, and… oops, the nickel’s gone too. New math: buy something for $0.99, pay a dollar, and get a dime in change. Huh?

3) Girls named Penelope. They could no longer be “Penny” for short (or “Nickel”) because no one would understand what made the nickname so cute. You say you don’t know anyone named Penelope? Wait a few years. In 2008, Penelope was #2,222 on the list of girl’s names. This year it’s #573.

4) Your thoughts. They used to be “a penny for…”. Now you’ll have to pay at least ten times that much. Keep them to yourself.

5) Beatles hits. “Penny Lane” drops out of the Fab Four’s impressive list of #1’s. The quaint little street no longer exists in Liverpool, England. The barber never shows another photograph (of every customer he’s had the pleasure to have known). There’s no fireman with an hourglass (nor in his pocket a portrait of the Queen). You’re no longer there, beneath the blue, suburban skies.

6) Copper (+ zinc) floors. Okay, I didn’t even realize this was a “thing” until recently. Who ever said you had to spend a penny to give it value?

7) Your parent’s sayings. Out the window goes “If I had a nickel for every time I heard that…”, or “we didn’t have two pennies to rub together”, or “that costs a pretty penny”, or “penny-wise, pound-foolish”, and so on. Nobody would ever “nickel-and-dime” you again.

8) Derailed trains. Okay, a derailed train was just a childhood power trip, to heighten the suspense of flattening pennies on the tracks. The train rumbled on. The pennies sometimes got lost. Would a train flatten a dime or a quarter? Never tried it; wouldn’t expect a kid to sacrifice that much pocket change for cheap thrills.

These arguments are solid; not a bad penny in the bunch. We can’t let a subspecies like the U.S. penny or the U.S. nickel go extinct. Think twice the next time a cashier takes a penny out of the counter cup just so she can give you change in dimes or quarters. Think twice the next time you’re humming along with Billie Holiday:

Oh every time it rains
It rains pennies from heaven
Don’t you know each cloud contains
Pennies from heaven
You’ll find your fortune
Fallin’ all over town
Be sure that your umbrella is upside down

Some content sourced from the Wall Street Journal article, “”Should the U.S. Retire the Penny and Nickel?”

Wait For It

Let’s wager a guess over something that happened to you in the past few days. It probably happened several times in the past few days. It wasn’t by choice, nor were you alone. It might even be happening right now. What is this recurring, oft-maddening event in your daily world (and mine)? Somewhere, for some good reason, in person or in the car, deliberately or unintentionally, you found yourself waiting in line.

Call it a common courtesy or call it the primary by-product of consumer demand. Waiting in line is a timeless (or time-wasting) necessary evil with no satisfactory alternative. While the world behaves efficiently with smartphones, computers and even data-consuming “IoT” appliances, those snaking, switch-backing, several-option, several-category lines of humans seem to grow ever longer. Including traffic on the highways – another version of waiting – you’ll spend one to two years of your life in line.

Consider some of the common reasons why we wait in line:
– store cashiers
– airport security
– phone calls (on hold)
– amusement parks
– voting
– public restrooms

If I wrote this post fifty years ago, I would’ve listed the very same reasons why we wait in line. We have options now, but let’s face it; those options are waiting-in-line in disguise. Store cashiers now work side-by-side with an area of self-check-out machines (which draws its own line). Airports promote pay-for lines like TSA Pre and CLEAR. Telephone on-hold mechanisms offer callbacks instead of waiting (“for an additional $0.75”). Disneyland installed “FastPass” lines; again, for a fee. Voting can be done by mail (forcing your ballot to wait in line instead of you). And public restrooms? Okay, there’s no option to waiting for the potty. Maybe reconsider that second beer.

The Brits refer to a line of people as a queue. I like that (and not just because we need more words beginning with the letter “q”). Leave it to those on the far side of the pond to class up the most mundane activity imaginable. At least we have our phones as distractions when we “queue”. But the old-fashioned distractions still work. It’s why they put candy bars by the cashiers, magazines in the waiting room, mirrors by the elevators, and televisions in the airport. Anything to help you forget you’re waiting in line.

You’d think waiting in line is mindless – no-brainer science really – but I have experienced flaws in the system. Recently in Lowe’s, waiting patiently in a single, central line at the self-check-out area, I was confronted by the person behind me, who demanded I “choose one side or the other” (as if logic demanded a separate line for each row of self-check-out machines). My response to him was not one of my finer moments. Another example – at the airport – my wife and I waited at the curb with a dozen others for the parking lot shuttle, only to discover the “front of the line” was a variable determined by the point on the curb where the driver chooses to stop his vehicle. If you want to see what not waiting in line looks like, try to catch a parking lot shuttle at the airport.

In today’s world, we have new reasons why we wait in line:
– to purchase the latest iPhone
– at restaurants, with pagers (clever disguise for waiting in line)
– on-line (i.e. for concert tickets or sports tickets at a specified time)
– Black Friday sales

Finally, we will always stand in line for our kids, whether to see Santa Claus at the mall or to buy something they simply must have. Years ago, I remember taking my kids to the local bookstore for the latest “Harry Potter” (which they started and finished before the next sunrise). It was the only time I’ve stood in line for the right to stand in line again. The bookstore insisted on selling a limited number of tickets at noon, to be exchanged for the book later that same day, when the publisher allowed its release.

I believe the longest I’ve ever waited in line is five hours – to see the first Star Wars movie in 1977. With no electronic devices to keep my friends and I company back then, five hours was even longer than it sounds, especially knowing two consecutive showings of the movie would run before I even entered the theater. Then again, the truly morbid among us believe we are all simply waiting to die. If that’s the case, let’s hope we’re in a really, really long line.

Love Thee, Notre Dame

I used to love “back-to-school” nights in my elementary school days. My brothers and I would lead my parents through the gates of our asphalt-paved campus on the west side of Los Angeles, eager to show off the classroom projects and displays we prepared for their annual visit. Mom & Dad would cram into our child-sized desks for talks from our teachers while we’d join friends for playground fun under the lights. Finally, we’d enjoy a KFC picnic dinner at the outdoor tables where we kids would have lunch during the day. Back-to-school night was equal parts adventure and pride, returning to campus at a time when we didn’t have to be students.

Such was the feeling this past weekend, visiting my alma mater in northern Indiana. Notre Dame, that most Catholic of universities located near the south bend of the St. Joseph River – founded by Fr. Edward Sorin and his band of Holy Cross brothers in the mid-1800’s – drew me away from more convenient West Coast options like UCLA or Stanford (neither of which accepted me… details). Who was I, a Methodist from California, to attend a smallish Catholic school over 2,000 miles from home? Notre Dame’s admissions counselor did a heckuva sales job. Rather than own up to the humid months of the first semester or the penetratingly-cold months of the second, he focused instead on the promise of an outstanding faith-based education, coupled with small-dorm camaraderie, nationally competitive sports teams, and Midwestern hospitality. When I graduated in 1985, it’s fair to say Notre Dame delivered on all of those.

Administration Building aka “The Golden Dome”, Central Quad

Thirty years later – this past weekend – I set foot on campus again, adding to only a handful of visits since my long-ago commencement. I won’t lie – returning to my college roots was a little daunting. The Notre Dame of my years was by all definitions smaller, more modest, and less prestigious than the globally-renowned multi-campus university of today. My Notre Dame was an intimate cluster of buildings surrounding just three quads, one end of campus seemingly a stone’s throw from the other. The student union was as small as a cracker box. Two dining halls offered the modest sort of food – cafeteria style – I recognized from elementary school. Diplomas were issued in just twenty fields of study. Four percent of the student body claimed a faith other than Catholic. The clear majority of students came from Midwestern states, and only a handful chose to study abroad.

Thirty years later, my Notre Dame of yesteryear has been consumed by a property twice the size. New quads and facilities cover the open fields that once hosted tailgaters before football games. Another one hundred buildings have been added to the eighty or so of my day. The new student union – opening just weeks ago – is the length of a football field (and in fact, co-located with the football stadium). Today’s undergraduates choose from countless degree programs, with another fifty masters, doctoral, and professional programs to follow. Add to the options, fifty foreign study-abroad opportunities in forty countries.

“Only” 80% of students are Catholic now (diverse by Notre Dame’s standards), and – speaking of diverse – almost 20% of the student body comes from outside the U.S. Visiting one of the dining halls for lunch, it wasn’t the broad choice of foods (organic, ethnic, made-to-order) that impressed me, but rather the students themselves. I witnessed a pretty good slice of the global pie at the tables around me.

Stairway to The Grotto and St. Mary’s Lake

Notre Dame’s mission statement includes the following: “In all dimensions of the University, Notre Dame pursues its objectives through the formation of a human community graced by the Spirit of Christ.” Clearly that objective is reflected in the Notre Dame of today. A school once known for little more than football is now an academic behemoth, built on an unwavering foundation of faith and service to God and fellow man.

Notre Dame’s alma mater concludes with the following sentence: “…and our hearts forever, love thee Notre Dame.” There may be a lot of “new” on campus today, but I still find the pathways of “my” years. The Golden Dome, the Basilica of the Sacred Heart, and the Grotto will always form the heart of campus. I maintain ties with only a handful of those who were in school with me, but we’ll always be proud members of the Fighting Irish family. And every time I set foot on campus, I never fail to sense the memories of old, the encouragement of new, and the presence of the Spirit. Indeed, Notre Dame is in my heart forever.

Land of Flying Cars

My wife and I live in a rural area of Colorado known as the Black Forest. The high density of Ponderosa Pines in our small geography gives us our name. Remarkably, there’s only one other notable place on the planet named “Black Forest”: the region near Bavaria in southwest Germany. As it turns out, I have personal ties to both places, though I’ve never been to the south of Germany. Follow along as I connect the Forests.

Fill in the blank, “Best Childhood Movie: ________”. Most of you would respond with an offering from Disney. Including “Snow White…”, “Mary Poppins”, and “The Little Mermaid”, you’ve already covered sixty years of film-making, with countless other Disney classics in between. I don’t think I missed a single Disney growing up in the sixties and seventies, yet – go figure – my favorite childhood movie doesn’t come from the Mouse. It doesn’t even come from my home country. My childhood choice? The UK’s “Chitty Chitty Bang Bang”, based on the 1964 novel by Ian Fleming.

“Chitty Chitty Bang Bang” – the captivating musical about the inventor and his kids who lived in a windmill cottage; about those wonderful-though-not-always-perfect inventions (my favorite: the eggs-toast-sausage breakfast machine); about the candy-maker and the toy-maker and the captivating castle world of Vulgaria; and most importantly about the magical flying motorcar itself – created figments of my imagination like no other movie. The lyrics to the title song (“…Bang Bang Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, our fine four-fendered friend…”) were burned into my brain. Someday I vowed to visit the lands of Caractacus Potts and Baron Bomburst.

As it turns out, the Potts’ windmill cottage really does exist (and not on a movie set) – as the “Cobstone Windmill” in Buckinghamshire, England. The mansion where “Truly Scrumptious” lived is in the same area of the country. And the Scrumptious Sweets Company was a working factory in Middlesex (today a steam-engine museum). But it was the castle and village in Vulgaria I really wanted to see. Not long after seeing the movie of course, I learned “Vulgaria” was a fictitious country. Baron Bomburst didn’t actually lord over the land, nor did he ever keep all those children as slaves beneath his castle. But the castle and the village are based on actual places. The village is Rothenburg ob der Tauber in Bavaria. The castle is Castle Neuschwanstein, also in Bavaria. And how ironic; both locations were inspirations for Disney as well: Rothenburg for the village in “Pinocchio”, and Neuschwanstein for the Cinderella castles in the theme parks.

To bring my journey full-circle, Rothenburg, Castle Neuschwanstein, and Bavaria sit in southwest Germany, adjacent to… the Black Forest. Germany’s version of the Forest is a mountainous land of picturesque villages, castles, vineyards and spas. This is the region that brought the world Black Forest Ham and “truly scrumptious” Black Forest Cake. This is the land of glass-making and cuckoo clocks. From the photos above, it looks every bit as charming as “Vulgaria”.

Colorado’s Black Forest barely amounts to a dot on Google Maps. Within our pines, the “town” is a hodge-podge of nondescript businesses clustered around a couple of traffic signals, with nothing more alluring than a Subway, a post office, and a couple of coffee shops. The terrain is fairly flat, with no windmill cottages or mountaintop castles or cuckoo clocks. But it’s a great place to live, with its own unique charm. And every now and then, when I’m deep in the pines, I’ll start humming that forever-familiar Chitty-Chitty tune, as I gaze up to the skies in search of a flying motorcar.

Getting My Juice GONE (p.2)

“Survivor” is reality TV’s longest-running program. “Survivor” is also my new middle name after a vicious three-day juice cleanse last weekend. For my pre-cleanse (sane) state of mind, refer to last week’s Getting My Juice On. For my current (questionable) state of mind, proceed with caution. The words that follow may be the equivalent of the movie scene you wish you never saw; the one still burned into your brain.

The quick recap: my daughter recently coerced my wife and I into trying Pressed Juicery, a hard-core player in the world of retail cold-pressed juice products. PJ offers gentle confections like coconut water with cinnamon, but for the truly gullible (me), they suggest a “cleanse”, where you down 336 ounces of liquid in three days (assuming you include the recommended twenty-four glasses of water). In those torturous seventy-two hours you get nothing else on the menu – no snacks, no bars; no solid food whatsoever. It’s just bottle after bottle of sickly-green liquefied vegetables (with an occasional fruit thrown in, which might as well be a lamb tossed into a pride of lions).

Considering I knew everything in the above paragraph before I took the first sip labels me as some kind of (raving lunatic)? But add my daughter to the equation and my voice goes rogue with, “sounds great, honey!”. Thus last Friday morning at zero-eight-thirty, I took my first sip of the PJ Kool-Aid. Let’s set the table with the scrumptious ingredients. Kale. Cucumber. Romaine. Spinach. Parsley. Lemon. I’d list the rest but I’m about to toss my cookies just thinking about them again (and believe me I’ve had a few cookies since that last fluid ounce).

In the beginning (this is a tale of biblical proportions), I assumed remarkable confidence staring down Cleanse Bottle #1. I consumed its contents in two or three gulps. Not so bad, I thought. Utterly vegetable with a sickly fungal aftertaste, but nothing a glass of water wouldn’t kill. But two hours later (which is a short 120 minutes on a juice cleanse), Bottle #2 came a-calling. This time I’m not so fast. It takes me a good half-hour to drain the contents. Now I’ve got thirty-two ounces of liquified vegetables in my system, which PJ claims is eight pounds of the real produce. That’s rough(age) on a body, and the body doth protest. After Bottle #3 the burps started. After Bottle #4 I enjoyed the occasional dry heave. By Bottle #5 I was asking for Mommy so I could tell her I didn’t want to do this anymore.

Unbeknownst to me (remember, I am gullible), I had created the perfect storm of stomach acids and vegetable puree deep down in my digestive system. Perhaps that’s why Bottle #6 is all almond milk and vanilla. It’s like dumping two cups of Pepto-Bismol over the whole mess (“Coats!” “Soothes!”). Okay fine, but try sleeping on that stomach. Your dreams are technicolor and downright scary.

Somewhere during Day 2, I looked in the mirror and saw a cucumber with a tomato head and broccoli-stalk arms. I stifled a scream. I put my hands on my hips and tried a “Ho-Ho-Ho” to see if I should audition for those Jolly Green Giant commercials. But there’s no time for auditions when a bottle beckons every two hours. Furthermore, deep into a juice cleanse you stop stop tasting the vegetables. That is, even when you’re not drinking, you’re tasting the green. Every gulp of air is tainted with chlorophyll. No breath mint is strong enough to conquer the stench. It’s like somebody threw your backyard garden into a giant blender, then filled your swimming pool with the resulting green muck, then threw YOU into the deep end. You’re six feet under in vegetable quicksand.

Enough of the madness – let’s cut to the merciful end of my story. Somehow I burped and lurched Day 3 away. On Day 4, the clouds cleared, the sun rose, and I awoke to the promise of solid food. Bless my soul – a full-course breakfast awaited me. No longer would I spend as much time in the bathroom as I would in the free world. Life was good again. Or so I thought. As PJ smartly warns you, one cannot just return to normal eating/drinking immediately after a juice cleanse. One must slowly reintroduce the finer things in life. Choose carefully. Chew slowly. Limit thy portions. Rome was not built in a day.

Would I recommend a juice cleanse? No. (unless you’re gullible – then you don’t have a prayer anyway). Do I feel healthier after my three days in the garden? No, but I feel different, as if a vegetable alien is growing inside my stomach and may someday rip its way out. Do I have any advice after the fact? Yes. Damn, I could’ve had a V-8!

Getting My Juice ON (p.1)

My daughter has a knack for making me do things I wouldn’t choose to do myself. Perhaps it’s because she was unexpected at birth (I came from a family of five boys and already had two sons of my own). Perhaps because as a kid, she could scrunch up her face and use her best sweet-little-girl voice whenever she wanted something. Maybe it really began by relenting to little Girl Scouts and their boxes of cookies at my front door. Whatever the reason, my daughter still finds a way, even as an adult in her mid-twenties. And that is why I’m commencing a three-day juice cleanse tomorrow morning.

Cleanse. The word scares me a little. I think of those whirly scrubbing-bubble characters on TV, dashing around the bathtub disinfecting away soap scum. Or I think about SOS pads and their steel-wool grittiness. Is this simply a short-term liquid diet, or am I on the verge of a full-on purge?

My box-o-cleanse arrived last night; a liquid-brick wrapped carefully inside a foil space blanket. I opened the container to find twenty-four intimidating 16 oz. bottles staring up at me. I swear they were grinning. They looked like they couldn’t wait to get out of their box, sprout their scouring brushes, and commence the cleaning. Each bottle contains a different colored concoction, labeled rather impersonally. Greens 3. Roots 1. Citrus 2. I’ll drink one of these little guys every two hours in the waking hours of the next three days, chasing their green goop with a similarly-sized bottle of “Chlorophyll” water or “Aloe-Vera” water. Chlorophyll? Aloe Vera? I feel like a plant already.

I can’t claim to be surprised by the contents of my box-o-cleanse. Just last week I visited one of the labs – er, retail outlets – for a sample of these products. Pressed Juicery, with locations close to the coasts and Hawaii, sells cold-pressed, 100% fruit & vegetable concoctions; all ingredients non-GMO. I tried one of their delicious coconut-cinnamon drinks… and that was my mistake. P.J. lures you in with mild, decent-tasting options like coconut and cinnamon. Then they gently suggest you consider a cleanse. My daughter wanted to try one, and I was only too happy to foot the bill (these drinks ain’t cheap). I figured Colorado was a safe distance from the cleansing craze, so my only involvement would be with my wallet. Wrong-o. P.J. is happy to overnight their products to just about anywhere. Thus my twenty-four cleanse bottles mock at me today, anticipating tomorrow’s cleaning kick-off.

If I stepped back and gave Pressed Juicery a hard look, I might have used my better judgement, turned, and fled. The retail outlets abound with stark-white surfaces and plate glass. The employees dress in uniforms intimidating enough to double as lab coats. The products emerge from a dark, back wall refrigerator, pre-assembled and ready to consume. For some reason “drinking the Kool-Aid” just came to mind. Gulp.

P.J. describes their juice cleanses with a selection of unnerving words. Reboot. Fresh Start. Body Do-Over. Cue a bout of mild nausea. Am I going to be more intimidated by a) the taste of “four pounds of fresh produce in every juice” or b) what those four pounds will do to my insides? Will my body a) turn green and sprout shirt-ripping muscles like “The Incredible Hulk”, or b) reduce to a puddle (think “Wicked Witch of the West”) through non-stop visits to the toilet?

My daughter is already halfway through her own three-day P.J. cleanse. She claims she’s never hungry, feels really healthy, and only misses “the act of chewing”. But she also admits to gagging trying to get a bottle of “Roots 2” down (she recommends shot-glassfuls).

If I’m still around next week, you can count on a post-cleanse blog report. If I’m not, Lord help me for never saying no to my daughter’s ideas.

The Euphoria of Joe

Today I’m perched at one of my favorite Colorado coffeehouses, sipping the local version of a cafe latte. The air is rich with the bitter aroma from the nearby roaster. I’m surrounded by chatty patrons, each with their own coffee-based delight-in-a-cup. If I had a handful of the crunchy chocolate-covered espresso beans they sell, I could say coffee’s hitting all five of my senses today (instead, I have a delicious apple fritter). These days, coffee is as infused into American culture as baseball and Apple (pie). And how far we’ve come from the cups of Joe former generations would brew with store-bought cans of Folgers.

How far have we come (besides the requisite latte foam-art)? Consider this: my coffeehouse does not allow to-go orders. You read that right: if you get your coffee here you’re drinking in-house. According to the resident “roastmaster”, paper cups alter the flavor of the coffee and thus they won’t sell it to-go. Hard for me to swallow (the cup thing, not the coffee), as my palate has never been very discerning. Yet here I am, paying top dollar to drink real-cup coffee “in the house”.

It wasn’t always this way. Not so long ago all you had on the menu was a “cup of coffee”. Take it black or take it with sugar/cream, but that’s where your options ended. And the reference to “Joe”? That comes from a 1914 ban of alcohol on U.S. Navy ships by then Secretary of the Navy Josephus “Joe” Daniels. The strongest alternative to a “real” drink on-board was black coffee.

Today’s kids get their first taste of coffee at Starbucks. My own first taste took place in Italy, during the college year I lived there in the 1980’s. Italians take their coffee very seriously. Walk into an Italiano café, belly up to the bar, and order an espresso shot and sweet roll. That’s your standard-brand Italian breakfast, and you take it standing up. You’re in, you’re out, and you’re on your way again in less than a minute, sufficiently caffeinated. Not many are baptized on straight espresso, but that was my experience.

My coffee journey continued after college, but it was quite a stumble. I graduated from Italian espresso and regressed to the standard-brand Bunn coffeemakers of corporate America. Starbucks and its kin would not arrive for another 5-10 years. Office coffee was a mindless, characterless, tasteless experience. A Styrofoam cup of black nothingness, with a few unbrewed grounds thrown in for texture. It was like descending from the Golden Age of the Roman Empire to the Dark Ages.

Thankfully, my coffee habits persisted until coffeehouses became an American staple in the late 1980’s. The houses themselves still aren’t the vision of Starbucks’ Howard Schultz: “comfortable, social gathering places away from home and work”, but at least we’re getting past the Frappuccino-this and macchiato-that, evolving back to straight coffee.

My one dedicated-cash phone app is for coffee. I literally wake up and smell the coffee thanks to my Keurig; then structure my waking hours with the possibility of a drive-through cup of Joe later on. To get really serious I could spend $200 on a Ninja’s home coffee bar, which claims to be a coffee system (“Variety of brew types and sizes!” “Built-in frother!” “Tons of delicious coffee recipes!) Their tagline: “See what all the coffee buzz is about”.

Coffee buzz is no joke, as patrons of America’s 33,000 coffee shops will tell you. The euphoria we desire – the blissful effects drawn from caffeine – actually has a name: “margaha”. For that reason, whether your preference is a nitrogen-infused cold brew, a coconut-milk mocha Macchiato, or a take-it-straight cup of Joe, it’s safe to say coffee is here to stay.