like hauts de thoiry

[nibot]

today:

1. fish sandwich breakfast at mt hope diner. studied differential geometry.
2. filled hot tub electrical trenches
3. soaked in hot tub
4. sanded down hardwood floors in co-op front room
5. drank beer on porch during lightning storm
6. went on very nice drive
7. ligo

Fish sandwiches are new to me, but here they are ubiquitous. Every diner, most restaurants, and even some civic organizations that don't otherwise serve food will host a Fish Fry on every Friday. I'm told it's a tradition, something about Catholics and not eating meat on Fridays. I don't know anything about catholicism, nor how many catholics observe this, and so forth, but the fried fish sandwiches here are everywhere. A fillet of haddock, dunked in a deep fryer. On white bread, a roll, or a sourdough loaf. A fried fish sandwich for breakfast is wonderful. Maybe I just didn't notice, but I'm pretty sure we don't have this in California. (I also don't remember people on the West Coast identifying as Italian, Irish, or German. Those ancrestries are lumped together into European Descent, or, filling out the bubbles, White/Not Hispanic. But here, if someone is Italian, they will tell you.)

I took a spontaneous drive out into the Villages, south on East River Road. It was really very beautiful, with spiderwebs of lightning across the sky, hailstones collecting in my hand out the window, the sun setting in the West, the anvil clouds, the successive agrarian ridgelines disappearing into the distance. It reminded me of watching lightning from the Hauts de Thoiry.

Comments

[furzicle.livejournal.com]

Several comments:
I remember chatting with my boss at UCLA Medical School, a Dr. T...(Insert Italian name here), when it came up in conversation that she was Italian. It became immediately apparent to me that she took the acknowledgment of her Italian-ness as some kind of slur. I was dumbfounded, as all previous conversations I had had with classmates of Italian descent focused on their pride in their distant, albeit largely unknown heritage. (Being Italian in California is typically a purely academic fact.) As she had grown up in Michigan, I perceived the likelihood that she had probably lived in an Italian neighborhood and experienced an (un)fair share of put-downs related to that.

Fish sandwiches: When I was going to elementary school, we always had fish on Fridays in the school cafeteria because of the Catholic ban on meat for Fridays. The Catholic church eventually lifted the ban sometime during my youth. Most Catholic families apparently quickly adapted.
On the other hand, I believe there are more large populations in discrete neighborhoods in your area of Italians, Irish, and Poles, for example, so such traditions probably are more firmly ingrained than they are out here where such ethnic groups are well distributed throughout the entire county.

Now the Vietnamese, Koreans, and Cambodians, on the other hand are each still happily clustered very near other Vietnamese, Koreans, or Cambodians in certain neighborhoods in Orange Co., the better to retain some semblance of home in this strange land. Kimchee anyone?

(PS, most of my summer students are Korean, btw. Their parents are all diligently attempting to improve their children's English. Some even vacation in California for that purpose (being native Koreans.) It's a challenge to have a significant percentage of one's writing class being non English speakers!)