Food – Page 6 – Science teacher

December 14, 2019January 8, 2022

Honfleur

I found Honfleur by accident, though apparently lots of people a whole lot smarter than me have known about it for centuries.

I followed the Seine on a map, saw where it slid into the sea, and for no better reason than that, decided I wanted, maybe even needed, to go there.

I was not disappointed.

Despite the Germans, despite the English, and probably along the way despite what few Oirish staggered through these streets proclaiming their love “pour les francaises” in awful French, Honfleur remains Honfleur.

It’s not that Honfleur is particularly special (although it is to me). And it’s not that the French (even les Parisiens) are particularly special (even though they are to me).

It’s that there are other ways to live (really live) besides what this great land of ours here has to offer.

(I’m not being fair–we got quahogs free for the raking, trees for the cutting, bees for the hiving, and squirrels for the…OK, not for hunting, tasty as they are, too fookin’ cute.)

It poured one day while we were in Honfleur. We say a class of school children walking from the park, in their yellow vests, soaking wet, as though this was normal, and in France maybe it is.

I miss it.

(Should you go, the folks in Honfleur do not laugh when you attempt French, and will go out of the way to make you feel comfortable, and it goes beyond being part of the tourist invasion taking over their streets in the summer.)

I think they know what they have in Honfleur. Maybe the rest of us trampling through their town remind them of this.

Traveling is a self-indulgent activity; writing about it may be more so.

Still, if you ever get the chance, make the trip.

December 7, 2019November 9, 2025

Clamming in late autumn

They’re alive, just an hour or two after leaving the bay, and will be until they are cooked an hour or two later.

I am alive when I take this picture, and will be even after these particular clams are eaten.

Quahogs raked from the back bay in late November

The air is chilly in the shadows, but the water is still warm enough for sandals.

In a generation or two, different clams will fill the same basket, different hands will hold the same rake.

The shells of the clams above now sit under a maple tree outside, resting among the shards of so many other shells, all raked up alive, all eaten, all dead.

If you’re a high school teacher, here’s a macabre exercise that I think is worth doing once or twice a year. Wander out into the hallways in between periods when the kids are being kids, in varied kid positions, using kid slang–walking, strutting, slouching, skipping. dancing, sliding with in your face vivaciousness .

Now imagine those same bodies a years after they are dead, their skeletal remains as lifeless as the ghostly white clam shells sitting under my maple tree.

And then ask yourself, what are you doing today with these children whose lives are as mortal as the clams.

(Mortality should influence your curriculum at least as much as capitalism does….)

March 6, 2019January 8, 2022

Vibrations

Waves on the inner harbor of Honfleur (taken by Leslie)

I have been mostly deaf all of my life, so I pay more attention to sound waves than may be healthy.

For the same reason, I pay way too much attention to light waves as I stare at people’s lips as they talk.

I talk with the universal accent of the congenitally deaf, and a big piece of my learning how to talk was touching the throat of my mother as she taught me the various sounds people make when speaking English.

I learned most of them, but I’m still struggling with “r”. Grrrr….

Waves allow us to know what’s going on with the things not actually touching us. (Well, sound waves are mechanical, so I guess one could argue that the air particles need to touch our ear drum, but the particles are not the wave.)

We do not observe waves directly–we see what our brains allow us to see, forms and sounds that keep our breathing bodies from quickly becoming carcasses.

Still, as I catch a glimpse of a patch of snow glinting in the optimistic light of a March sun, my eye converting waves of light that only I have seen, I realize how little any of us can know, and how much of the universe casually exists outside our senses, our imagination.

So I write about it, to no one in particular, for no particular reason.