Pleasure

Come to Cheeses

I’m sure that everyone has a list of foods that offended them when they were children, but that they enjoy — or even crave — as adults. Mine includes fish, liver, olives, horseradish, and (of course) alcoholic beverages. But way beyond any other item on the scale of repulsiveness was cheese. Cheese — any sort of cheese — was simply disgusting. Even the sound of the word, with its harsh initial consonant followed by a long e-e-e sound that made your face sneer when you said it, was off-putting. Having heard a bit about the process by which cheese was made — which apparently involved curdled milk, bacteria, and juice from a cow’s stomach — did nothing to stimulate my appetite for it.

Whenever I was mistakenly served a cheeseburger rather than a hamburger, I wouldn’t let it anywhere near my face until I’d picked off every bit of melty cheese. On those very rare occasions when my family had takeout pizza for dinner, I refused to eat it. Pizza, after all, was pretty much just a delivery mechanism for cheese.

It wasn’t until late in my senior year of high school that I was cured of this affliction. I was out with a bunch of drama-club friends who decided to go out for pizza, and as a captive in the same car, I had to go with them. I was not invulnerable to peer pressure, and if everyone else was eating pizza, I had to try it too. I did, and it was good. Incredibly good. So good that I cursed myself for all the years of pleasure I’d forgone for not eating pizza. I’ve been making up for that lost time ever since.

Pizza — along with its paesani, calzones and lasagna —turned out to be the gateway drug that led me to appreciate other types of cheese, even those unaccompanied by dough and tomato sauce. I have to admit, however, that my openness to cheese remains limited. I’m still squeamish about soft or smelly cheeses, or cheese made from sheep or goat milk. Processed “cheese food products” such as American cheese, Velveeta, and Cheez Whiz are abhorrent. Any cheese that features mold is out of the question. (My wife, a non-meat-eater, will generously transfer the bacon slices from her Cobb salad onto my plate, but if one of those slices is contaminated by even a molecule of blue cheese dressing, my entire meal can be ruined.)

Still, even my limited gamut of acceptable cheeses includes plenty that are irresistible. Swiss, or Emmental — not to mention its Norwegian cousin, Jarlsberg — is my everyday favorite for snacking. Provolone is the perfect finishing touch for any Italian cold-cut sandwich. Smoked Gouda, especially the aged version known as Old Amsterdam, is addictive.

But the absolute king of cheeses, so far as I’m concerned, is cheddar. Even standard blocks of mass-produced cheddar are OK, but nothing compares to a multi-year-aged, extra-sharp cheddar, with its pungent flavor, crumbly texture, and crunchy crystals. Unfortunately — and for reasons that I’ve been unable to determine — that type of cheddar is almost impossible to get in California. Although it’s a sacrifice that Debra and I knowingly made when we moved from the east coast to the west more than 30 years ago, the absence of extra-sharp cheddar still hurts.

It was a delight, then, to arrive here in London and discover that high-quality cheddar is commonplace. I suppose that it shouldn’t have been a surprise, since the town of Cheddar, where the cheese originated, is only 100 or so miles away. Still, I would never have expected that you could walk into any grocery store and find a variety of cheddars, sliced or in blocks, ranked numerically by level of maturity.

Because we’re here for two months, we prepare many of our meals at home (although it’s hard for me to resist the temptation to have breakfast, lunch, and dinner at one of our several local pubs). Still, even an ordinary lunchtime sandwich becomes a real treat when it includes a slice of tangy, mature cheddar. I don’t know what’s going to happen when we return home to Oakland and once again have to resort to eating Tillamook. I may long for the time when I refused to eat any cheese at all, and therefore had no idea what I was missing.

Posted October 19, 2022 by Mark S
Category: Pleasure

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Parade Grounds

Every Memorial Day, in my hometown of Farmingdale, New York, the whole community turned out for a parade on Main Street. When I think about it now, the idea of a parade seems as absurd as a fashion show — an event where people gather to watch other people walk. But when I was a kid, it was a highlight of my year. My family would get there early to get good seats (a “seat,” in this context, referring to a place to sit uncomfortably on the curb) and wait impatiently for something to happen. Eventually a police car would roll slowly down the street with its lights flashing, and the crowd would let out a cheer.

Trailing the police car would be a succession of applause-inducing sights: proud police and military veterans marching smartly in step, Girl and Boy Scout troops who hadn’t yet learned to march in step, troopers on horseback, freshly waxed fire trucks, and local politicians waving from the back seats of balloon-covered convertibles. All of these were punctuated by marching bands from local schools, led by confident-looking girls twirling flags or batons. (For some reason, the bands always seemed to play anywhere other than where I was sitting. As soon as they reached my field of view, they lapsed into marking time with snare drums — but even the snap of the snares was thrilling.) Most of the kids in the audience, and many of the adults as well, waved miniature American flags on wooden sticks — this being a time when such a thing could be done without irony by people of all political persuasions.

I remember only one year when I had less-than-total interest in the parade. The local news — conveyed to me only through adults’ gossip — was that one of the stores on Main Street had recently been robbed. For me, that news held a sort of dangerous excitement: A robbery — like the ones I would see all the time on the Superman TV show — but for real, right here in Farmingdale! While the parade filed by, I visually combed the street, trying to figure out which of the stores had been the victim. I don’t know what gave me the idea that I’d be able to identify a robbed store simply by its appearance, but there had to be something different about it, didn’t there?

Finally, in the distance, I spotted a store — well, actually, a bar. It looked pretty normal, except that at the top of the storefront were large, white, three-dimensional letters that spelled “ROB ROY.” I found the orthography questionable, but it occurred to me that if I were a traumatized store owner, I too might pay less-than-perfect attention to the spelling of “ROBBERY.” The rest was mysterious, though: At what point had the store owner put up those letters? During the robbery, to summon the police; or after the robbery, to let the rest of the community know? And how did the bar happen to have those particular huge sign letters on hand? Did they have a whole alphabet stored in the basement? Did every store have them, just in case? I regret to tell you, anticlimactically, that I never found out the answers to those questions.

The ideal parade — the one I would have given anything to see in person — was the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade. Our Farmingdale parades were fine, but they didn’t have elaborate floats, giant balloons, and celebrities like that parade I saw on TV. New York City was just an hour-long train ride away, and I begged my parents every Thanksgiving to take me there. They always responded that it would be too hectic, too difficult, and not worth making the trip.

Finally, one year, my wearied father beckoned me to the car and told me we were going to see the Macy’s parade. Confusingly, the place he drove to was not the train station, but a shopping-center parking lot in some unknown part of Long Island. Adjoining the parking lot was an empty, narrow road lined with a few straggling spectators. I was perplexed.

“This can’t be right,” I said. “The Macy’s parade is in New York.”

“After they finish marching in the city, they come here,” he said.

“All of it? The balloons and everything?”

My father nodded. I wanted to believe him, but it seemed impossible.

“The road is so narrow,” I said. “They’d never be able to fit the parade here.”

He told me to be patient. Finally, a parade did come. Needless to say, it was not the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade; it was some local parade, complete with the usual fire trucks and high school marching bands.

I have no idea what my father was thinking. Was he confused, and really did believe that this was an additional stop for the Macy’s parade? Did he know it wasn’t, but think I’d be fooled? Was he just trying to get me out of the house for a while, to give my mother some peace?

Whatever his intention was, it worked. I never again begged to be taken to the Macy’s parade. In later years, my father claimed not to remember the incident. So unlike the letters over the Farmingdale bar, which eventually made sense to me as an adult, the details of this episode remain mysterious. I still would like to see the Macy’s parade someday.

Posted July 26, 2022 by Mark S
Category: Pleasure

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Service with a Smile

A natural smile is a beautiful thing, but the number of forced smiles in the world seems to greatly exceed the number of genuine ones. If you’re a performer of any sort, smiling insincerely is part of the job. As a member of the ensemble in high school musicals, I was always admonished by the choreographer to “Smile, dammit!” When I sang in a barbershop chorus (under the aegis of the Society for the Preservation and Encouragement of Barber Shop Quartet Singing in America, which prizes showmanship almost as much as vocal blending), our music director nearly always displayed a huge, frozen grin as he conducted us — a reminder that we should keep similar grins on our faces as we sang.

But even people who are not entertainers — such as customer-service representatives, flight attendants, and servers in restaurants — are compelled to smile, regardless of their (typically less sunny) emotional state. Women, I’m told, are frequently commanded to smile by male supervisors, coworkers, and even complete strangers.

In classic films from the 1930s and 40s, I see Black people sporting wide, toothy grins as a sign of deference to the white people around them. Although such exaggerated smiling is no longer expected, I still encounter people of color who feel the need to put on a smile to ensure that they’re perceived as nonthreatening. Even I tend to present a self-protective smile when I’m faced with potential anger or aggression.

The past 20 years have brought compulsory smiling to a whole new domain, in the form of emoji. For most of my life, a written communication was assumed to be friendly — or at least neutral — unless the language clearly indicated otherwise. Now an email or text is generally interpreted as stern or hostile unless it includes a yellow smiley face or some other pictorial signifier of light-heartedness. I resisted this trend as long as I could, but eventually I found myself sprinkling my messages with smiles and winks out of fear that my tone might otherwise be misinterpreted.

Of course, the most common occasion for artificial smiles is the taking of photos. In response to the photographer’s command to “Say ‘cheese,’” we all draw on our inner Method actor to bring ourselves into a fleeting state of happiness that will hopefully express itself in a natural-looking smile. Even if this exercise in emotional memory works — which it often doesn’t — the freshly displayed smile almost immediately settles into a frozen rictus accompanied by pleading eyes that say, “Click the shutter already!”

There ought to be a law against holding a smile past its sell-by date. An artificially preserved smile doesn’t communicate pleasure; it communicates creepiness. Watching someone hold a smile makes me squirm. I have this reaction particularly when I watch old movie musicals, when a great dancer such as Gene Kelly or Eleanor Powell finishes a number and then adopts a beaming facial expression that remains pasted on as the camera zooms in on it. I don’t know who decided that this smile-and-zoom ending was a good idea, but it’s disconcertingly common. Somehow only Fred Astaire manages to avoid it.

When I was in college, I frequently signed up to be a subject in psychology experiments conducted by grad students. In one such experiment, I was asked to take a brief written test to assess my mood. The experimenter then brought out a machine with a number of electrodes attached, pasted them on my face, and asked me to contort my mouth in a certain way to keep them from falling off. With the electrodes in place and the machine turned on, I was asked to take the test again.

It was revealed to me afterward that the machine and its electrodes were no more than a ruse, and that the facial contortion I was asked to adopt was meant to approximate a smile. The point of the experiment was to find out whether the simple muscular act of smiling could improve someone’s mood. I never found out what the ultimate results of the experiment were, but I’ve since read about similar studies that have demonstrated such a causal link. Smiling — even unemotional, unmotivated smiling — can apparently cause the brain to release serotonin and dopamine, thereby reducing stress and increasing feelings of well-being.

So perhaps the fake smiles displayed by Hollywood stars, obsequious salespeople, and everyday subjects of photographic portraits are doing their bearers some good. Nevertheless, they continue to make me uneasy. Can’t we dispense with the idea that insincere smiles are desirable? People in portraits rarely smiled until a hundred-or-so years ago, and yet we can assume that they led contented lives outside of the photographer’s studio. I’m fine with seeing Eleanor Powell flash a brief grin when she finishes a dance number, but then I’d like to see her relax, take a breath, mop her forehead, and drink some water. Then I’d really believe she’s happy.

Posted June 8, 2022 by Mark S
Category: Pleasure

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Narrow Escape

At a recent party (during that brief interlude when parties were a thing again), I had a conversation with someone who had attended a wine tasting. He was something of a wine connoisseur, and he spoke derisively of the tasters who had liked the cheaper wines more than the good, complex, expensive stuff. His attitude — although he didn’t express it in quite these words — was “Why should these ignorant people be allowed to drink wine?”

As much as I dislike snobbery, I have to confess that I sometimes share in it. When a new acquaintance told me that he liked blended scotch better than single malt, I couldn’t help but think less of him. It’s one thing to buy blended scotch because you don’t know enough about single malts to be able to pick one out, but to actually like it better…? It was hard to imagine that we could become friends.

I suppose we all have our snobberies — if not about alcohol, then about music, or literature, or fashion. But it only recently struck me that being a snob requires us to go against our usual way of assessing people.

A common, negative thing that one person might say about another is that they’re “narrow-minded.” To be narrow-minded is to be stuck in one set of beliefs, and to dismiss any beliefs that lie outside that set as simply wrong. The opposite of being narrow-minded is to be open-minded, which is to say willing to entertain a wide range of beliefs. If I’m open-minded, it doesn’t mean that I have to accept your view that UFOs are spaceships piloted by aliens from other planets, but I at least have to be open to being convinced. And I have to respect your right to hold that belief, even if it’s one I disagree with.

Of course, there are certain things about which we’re supposed to be narrow-minded. If you express a belief that one race of people is superior to another, I’m expected not only to reject that belief, but to consider you a lesser person. Failing to be narrow-minded in that case would make me a lesser person. But moral issues like that one are in a separate category, because — for mysterious reasons that I’ve speculated about before — we take the moral rightness or wrongness of something to be a fact, not something that we can simply hold beliefs about.

Outside of moral contexts, however, we’re generally willing to concede that our judgment of a particular set of ideas is just that — a judgment. I might consider “Vertigo” to be a better movie than “Santa Claus Conquers the Martians,” but I’d never claim the superiority of “Vertigo” to be an objective fact. The strongest claim I could make is that my assessment of movies aligns more closely with critical consensus than yours does.

So why is it that we generally admire open-mindedness and scorn narrow-mindedness, but in cases of taste, we experience the opposite? Why am I more likely to respect someone who says “I enjoy rosé wine, but I refuse to drink white Zinfandel” than someone who says “All wine is good”?

After all, a drinker who believes that all wine is good will likely have a happier life, since they’ll take pleasure in whatever is served to them at a party. They’ll be more open to trying varieties of wine that they’ve never heard of before. They’ll have equal regard for each new person they meet, regardless of that person’s taste in wine. What reason could I have to look down on someone like that?

My guess is that snobbery is not really about the wine — or whiskey, or art, or whatever — but about social identity. If I believe in the superiority of a particular style of music, I get to be a member of a tribe, and to bond with people who feel the same way about music. I get treated as an insider, and I get to treat others as outsiders. Deep down, I know that my ranking of one sort of music above another is simply a matter of taste, and not a provable fact; but I get social rewards for treating it as if it were a fact.

I’m coming to feel that it’s incumbent on me to start ignoring those social rewards as a way toward being a better person. When I meet someone who prefers blended scotch, shouldn’t I make a conscious choice not to look down on them, but to chastise myself for my own narrow-mindedness? Shouldn’t I say to myself, “Well, sure, blended scotch is up to 80% neutral grain whiskey, with various proportions of barrel-aged malts added to give it flavor, and it’s mass-produced this way not for reasons of quality, but simply to keep the price down — but if my new acquaintance thinks it’s superior, maybe they’re seeing something that I’m missing”?

OK, well, I didn’t say it was easy.

Posted January 18, 2022 by Mark S
Category: Pleasure

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Cats as Cats Can

Timmy, our fluffy orange Maine Coon mix, is an extortionist. When I sit down to have lunch, he’ll jump up on the table, saunter over to my plate, and say, “Nice sandwich you’ve got there. It would be a shame if anything happened to it.” Then, to show that he means business, he’ll poke it with his nose. I have to pay him off with a bowl of kibble if I want to have any peace.

Mary Beth, our gray-brown tabby, is a discriminating shopper. She’ll jump onto my crowded desk, stroll around examining the merchandise, find the object she wants to claim — perhaps a scrap of paper or a thumb drive — and then carry it off with the satisfaction of someone who has found a valuable antique in a flea market.

If you find these cameos charming, then you’re clearly an ardent cat person. If you don’t, I can’t blame you. I’m a cat person, but the only cats I’m really interested in are my own. Other people’s cats are just cats. Sure, they may do something adorable in a Facebook photo, like snuggling up in a blanket or chasing a toy, but that’s just generic cuteness, a defining aspect of felinity. My cats have multilayered personalities and complex psychological profiles. They’re also prettier than anyone else’s cats.

Jon Carroll used to write a daily column for the San Francisco Chronicle in which he’d interweave stories of his daily life with unique insights into politics and culture. He had a devoted following, myself among them. (I’ve recently come to realize that I’ve unconsciously been emulating Carroll in my approach to writing this blog.) Occasionally, he’d choose to write about the latest doings of his cats, Archie and Bucket (and later, Pancho). He didn’t necessarily have anything profound to say about them; he just thought that the activities of his cats were fascinating and assumed that other people would, too. It turned out that they didn’t, or at least a vocal minority of his readership didn’t. He got so many complaints about his Archie and Bucket stories that he ended up having to preface each such column with a disclaimer like “This is a cat column. If you have an objection to reading about cats, stop here.”

Several of my earlier blog posts have begun with stories about my cats, but the cats later turned out to be metaphors for something else. Taking a page from Jon Carroll, I should warn you that there are no metaphors coming up; I’m really just writing about cats this time.

I wasn’t always a cat person. I grew up without pets, because my mother considered animals — particularly cats — to be nasty and filthy. (When my parents came to visit Debra and me after we’d adopted Brook, our first cat, my mother said, “I can’t understand why you’d allow wildlife in your house.”) The first extended exposure I had to a domestic animal was the summer after I graduated from college, when some friends and I sublet a small house that came with a cat named Motley. Motley was a mostly-outdoor cat who would drop by only now and then to pick up his mail, but when he was around, he tended to act as if he owned the place (which, in a sense, he did). I would sometimes wake up in the morning to find him standing on me, and I was surprised to find out that I liked the pressure of his little padded feet on my belly.

Like most other recent graduates, I moved around for a few years from house to house and apartment to apartment, and I gradually got to know other cats along the way. Although I was never one to set long-term goals, I did develop a fantasy of the ideal domestic life: feeling securely settled enough in a place to get a piano and a cat.

That time came years later, shortly after Debra and I moved from New Jersey to California and rented a house in a friendly Oakland neighborhood. Debra, who had even less experience with animals than I had, was hesitant, but we decided to adopt Brook, a month-old kitten — because who doesn’t love kittens? — and assume that Debra would grow attached to her by the time she became a cat. The plan worked, and now Debra is a cat maven who volunteers at three animal shelters. (We eventually got a piano as well.)

As for me, slightly more than twenty years ago, I started studying a form of therapeutic bodywork called Breema. One of Breema’s fundamental principles is that the recipient’s body will be relaxed and comfortable only if the practitioner’s body is relaxed and comfortable. If I’m touching someone’s body with the intention of making them feel better, simply having that intention works against my aim of being comfortable. As a Breema practitioner, the only way I can help someone is by not trying to help them. That was a difficult lesson to learn.

The breakthrough came when I realized how much I could learn from Brook, our cat. Brookie not only slept with me, but was in physical contact with me most of the time — draped over my shoulders when I was sitting at my desk, curled on my lap when I was watching TV, kneading my belly when I was lying down. I came to realize that she was always doing Breema. She was never trying to relax me; she was making herself comfortable, letting her body adapt to mine, and the result was naturally soothing to me. Now, whenever I do Breema, I try to remember how a cat would do it.

Timmy, the cat for whom I currently serve as a bed, likes to drape himself over my left leg with his head resting on my thigh. Each of us sleeps better when the other is there. Nearly every afternoon while I’m working at my desk, Timmy comes over, bumps his head against my shin, and trots toward the bedroom. That’s his sign that it’s time for us to take a nap together. If I ignore him and keep working, he’ll come back and bump me with his head again. Eventually, I’ll give in and follow him to the bedroom. It’s hard to say no to taking a nap, especially with a warm cat draped snugly over your leg.

Posted June 9, 2021 by Mark S
Category: Pleasure

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Come to Cheeses

Parade Grounds

Service with a Smile

Narrow Escape

Cats as Cats Can

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