Diehard supporters hoist a cardboard Hillary

From her initial announcement as a candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination, Hillary Clinton has been my choice. I am disappointed that she is neither our candidate for president or vice president.

“If I wasn’t real,” Alice said–half laughing through her tears–”I shouldn’t be able to cry.” “I hope you don’t suppose those are real tears?” Tweedledum interrupted in a tone of great contempt.
-Alice Through the Looking Glass

This combination of freshly made pesto, green beans, potatoes and spaghetti is indigenous to Genoa. The simple method, boiling the vegetables with the pasta makes it a one pot preparation. It is good when made with the pesto you can buy in the refrigerated section at the supermarket, but when your garden is steps away with fresh basil begging to be eaten, whip up this recipe and savor the intensity that only your own freshly ground pesto will have. It serves six as a pasta course, follow it with a roasted pork loin, finish with a salad. Wash everything down with a Pinot Grigio

Our first course was astounding; the traditional Japanese custard is a small porcelain pot of savory egg pudding garnished with gingko nuts, but here it had been enlivened with avocado puree and was topped with tuna belly and sea urchin sashimi, garnished with perfect star shaped slices of okra and drizzled with a salty roasted tomato essence. Each little pot was served covered with a fresh green leaf

It hadn’t occurred to us while it was happening that we were spending a night much like the one we did 15 years ago in Central Park, the two of us on an outcropping of rock, this time above the tree line, surrounded by snow, with the moon crossing above, lying next to each other and sharing the thing we both are so willing to give the other: honesty about ourselves, about our fears and loves and as the night wore on, and the cold rattled our tent we zipped up its opening and said good night, without any of the confusing drama of 15 years before.

Meals like this one are hard to remember because they skirt around culinary virtuosity and instead offer up flavors that provide succor and an oddly unmemorable contentment. But these are the meals I find myself wanting to replicate, with their experiences of homey pleasure and uncompromising honesty. I would eat more ambitious meals in my three weeks in Japan, but turning over my food memories, it is that scoop of ice cream that I keep tasting in the back of my mind, unexpected and honorary, offered to me because I was a guest from a distant country, and in an attempt to quench my culinary confusion.

The majority of my coworkers in the New York office, and nearly all of those in China, speak Chinese and Tibetan. They express their needs, their tasks and even their names in a kind of pretend English that presents concepts, ideas and situations to me in a language I need to communicate. But, in the end, I always feel more trouble to them than useful.

During my trip, I often said to Demian that I felt Japan was stuck somewhere in the cultural situation that the U.S. faced before the sexual and political revolutions of the 1960s. And nothing exemplified this opinion more than the roles that women in Japan seem limited to play.

I don’t remember how I spent the summer of 1967. I would have been seven years old. Did I sit with my family watching the nightly news on the TV in the den as hippies declared the summer of love? What did I think of the adage, “turn on, tune in, drop out?” Did I comprehend the dawning of the age of Aquarius? What were my emotional responses to the hundreds of dead American soldiers who returned weekly in body bags from Vietnam?

And there we were, two friends of 15 years, separated from any other human by miles, isolated on a snow capped mountainside, with few of the natural guarantees of comfort, astray from the marked hiking path, uncertain what the morning would bring, zipped up in the warm comfort provided only by our 98.6 degree bodies laughing and singing and smoking, without a worry in our minds.