Question #6:
In your opinion, what is the most timeless toy?

There’s something special about the smell of wooden blocks. It’s different from the scent of freshly cut lumber, different from the smell of any other wood blocks. It’s sweeter, earthier, darker and lighter at once, as if somehow, wooden blocks, and especially wooden blocks that have been handled (sometimes rather roughly) by the tiny hands of more than one generation, hold within them the essence of youth, the spirit of play, the kernel of imagination, and the garden of dreams, all compressed, folded in on themselves time after time, until what remains is a fairly innocuous object.

But what possiblities are in that object!

We talk about metaphorical building blocks all the time, protein, fundamental education, basic cooking skills, these are the building blocks of bodies, intellect, life skills.

Just as important are the building blocks we once used to actually, you know, build.

I remember sitting on the rug in the den near the ghastly yellow recliner my grandfather so loved, arranging blocks into different configurations. The same collection of rectangular and square bits of wood would form in rapid succession: the cages in a zoo, a sky scraper, a tree house, a log cabin, a ship, a town square, a mansion, a thought, a hope, a dream…

I remember the alphabet blocks, with their paint faded, chipped and worn, so the letters on them were as much as mystery as whose hands held them first. (Perhaps my mother, or her older brother, or one of my cousins?)

I remember a faded green rectangular block so old it’s edges had softened, rounded, blurred. It was the size of a bar of soap, a matchbox car, a wish.

I remember my grandfather insisting I sort the blocks by color, shape, and size before I could build (he was just as anal with the tinker toys, with the train sets, with everything). “Lay out your lumberyard,” he would coach, and I would tuck my braids behind my ears and willingly comply.

I remember feeling wistful, when I was too old for blocks, and passed them down to a younger cousin, a child who couldn’t possibly have appreciated them the way I did. The way I do.

I remember my grandfather’s hands, calloused, gnarled, thickened with age, when he would help me build, and I remember his regretful expression the year he could no longer hunker down on the floor and play with me, the year he was relegated to the sidelines of building block play.

We switched to breadmaking after that. I always thought it was because he just liked to bake. Now I wonder if maybe something in those golden loaves, rectangular, firm, loaves, reminded him of blocks.

DecQOTD #5: What is your favorite Christmas (Winter/Holiday) scent?

Even though I’ve lived in homes with fireplaces more often than not, the scent of burning pine has never been a particularly strong holiday memory, largely because my mother is extremely allergic to it. We’ve had plastic trees for as long as I can remember, and even though I’ve had my own tree for more than ten years now, that trend continues, partly out of respect for her, and partly because I’m afraid of what the dogs would do to an actual tree in the living room.

No, the scent of Christmas, for me, is not pine.

But what is it?

Well, sometimes it’s rain, as December tends to be rainy in both California and Texas. There’s something cozy about the faintly metallic ozone taste after a particularly close lightning strike, something tangy about the air just before a storm, and, by contrast, something so fresh and pure about it just after.

It’s also the scent of paperwhites. I love forcing them during the holidays, as they tend to perform reliably, and their essence wafting across the room never fails to improve my disposition.

THe cinnamon, nutmeg, and ginger combination that is ubiquitous at this time of year is also a favorite. It doesn’t matter if it’s ginger snaps, pfefferneusse cookies, pumpkin pie, or just fresh nutmeg sprinkled over cocoa, eggnog, coffee or chai, that trio of spices is instant comfort. They’re all “sweetening” spices, by the way – flavors that bring out the natural sweetness of whatever they’re mixed with – and I rather think they sweeten the season itself as well.

Question #4:
Do you have a traditional Christmas (holiday) dinner that you prepare year after year? If so, what is it?

In honor of Thanksgiving, I posted my family’s turkey and stuffing recipe, as invented and perfected by my grandfather. I’ve heard two stories about it’s origin, one that he invented it while overseas during WWII, when supplies couldn’t get through, the other that he created it much later. In either case, it’s the ultimate holiday flavor for me.

And yet, there are others. Pfefferneusse cookies were introduced to me by my mother, and at dinner, along side the turkey and cranberry sauce (always fresh, never from a can), there was always lasagna. It’s a rule, you know, that Italian families cannot have a big meal that doesn’t include pasta. My grandfather introduced me to coconut macaroons, and they’re still a favorite, and peppermint stick ice cream is just too cool to miss (no pun intended).

It’s aglio e olio, however, that brings back the most memory. Literally meaning garlic and oil, this is a pasta sauce of diced garlic and olive oil, sometimes with other herbs and lemon – but NOT a pesto – and NO pine nuts. It’s simple peasant food, and we always had it on Christmas Eve, and Easter. In my family, with their New Jersey Neapolitan accents, the Italian pronunciation has morphed to the very East Coast “Ahlya Awlya,” though the recipe has remained largely unchanged.

Food, like music, has the ability to transport me to different times, different places. Aglio e olio makes me an innocent seven-year-old, ice skating with my mother on weekends, or meeting her after school for cocoa in the vault-turned-sewing room at the back of her store. It is loud, boisterous family parties, and quiet contemplative evenings in the glow of the Christmas tree lights. Mostly, though, it is the warmth of my mother’s love, and her tireless work to make every Christmas magical.

Studio 60 made me cry this week. I don’t generally get so invested in television shows that I’m moved to tears by anything that occurs, though I’m perfectly capable of willfully suspending disbelief when I choose to, but this was special. It was, in fact, a magical moment in a medium that has largely forsaken magic in favor of money.

I’m writing, of course, of the four minutes at the end of the show, where musicians from Tipitina’s played an instrumental version of “O Holy Night” on an empty stage, with b roll footage of New Orleans playing behind them, and faux snow falling only at the end. Was it part of the story? Yes. It wasn’t the a-plot or even the b-plot, but there was an on-going thread about studio musicians all over the city calling in sick and letting musical visitors from New Orleans sub for them, thus earning union cards and Christmas paychecks. Was it hokey? Maybe a little. Was it effective? Absolutely.

We’ve long known that music can heal, that music can unite, that music can educate, but seeing it in action is vastly different from the purely intellectual “knowing.” I’m reminded by something that either Peter Yarrow or Noel Paul Stookey said during one of Peter, Paul and Mary’s concerts, years ago, that we are all adept at lying when we speak, but that it’s impossible to lie when we sing.

I’m not the most knowledgable person about jazz and blues. I know I like the genre, I have artists toward whom I gravitate, and favorite cd’s, but I learned Monday night, that just as you cannot lie when singing, you cannot hide your heart behind a trumpet, a sousaphone, a saxophone. The men on that stage played from the heart, and invoked the kind of magic that is found in the best performances, the kind that makes you cry real tears even though you’re not sitting in a concert hall, but curled up with your dogs on a plush red sofa, watching network television.

It was holiday magic, in the best form.
And I feel changed, improved, and more whole because of it.

(NBC is offering free downloads of the mp3 here.)