It started with June Chatterton, the oldest person I knew. She lived across the street from our house with her daughter’s family. Their home was full of antiques and Mrs. Chatterton gave me my first—a miniature hobnail blue glass perfume bottle, one small enough to hold in my eight-year old fist. Something about its age caught my imagination—the smoothly worn chip on its rim, the inexplicable word “Roll” on its front and the little hobs along its sides. That’s when I knew I would always love old things. And it seemed natural to me even then, at eight-years old, to begin collecting them.

I grew up in a Southern California track home that my mother decorated in a Early American style. I wasn’t very interested in the reproductions of Colonial tables and knickknacks, but I was endlessly fascinated with one unlikely combination of accessories. My mother had arranged three items on a side table: a tarnished brass candle holder, the kind I imagined a little girl in old England might carry to light her way to bed, an antique silver baby cup with my grandfather’s name, Joe, engraved on its side and an even smaller clear glass cup. Curiously—because no one in our family smoked—the silver cup held cigarettes and the glass cup wooden matches, apparently my mother’s attempt at 1950s sophistication. A stale attempt, I guess, because those same cigarettes sat in that cup for years before styles changed. I did most of my childhood reading on the end of the sofa beside that arrangement and, as I’d look up to wonder at the characters’ unusual lives in the books I read, I’d hold that baby cup and consider the grandfather I’d never known, the one who had been my mother’s favorite parent, the one whose name I carried.

I’ve always been drawn to the character in age—worn wood framing the cane seats on my Great Aunt Fern’s Victorian chairs, puzzling shadows behind old mirrors, chipped paint on the curlicues of my cast iron bed. I especially love beading—carefully-crafted raised bumps of glass, wood or metal—that details many old pieces. It borders an old mirror I found years ago at a Lafayette antiques store, it distinguishes the apron on each of three nesting end tables that came from an huge warehouse in Oakland, and it marks a silver picture frame I picked up for $3.00 in a Salt Lake City shop.

Carefully hand-carved wood on really old pieces discloses so much about the age and provenance of a piece—the open heart or simple pine cone on my friend Liz’s collection of oak bookshelves reveals their Arts and Crafts origin when books were honored as much for their cover designs as for their content. I occasionally sit on my old pine church pew, my fingers grazing the stylized Celtic cross on its arm, and contemplate its ancient years of witness to patient, hopeful pleading. A salvaged piece of a dresser—the regal-looking top of its mirror—hangs above my doorway as a nod to its storied past.

Age mellows the colors of old things, often in layers of character. The scarred black and brown stain on my sister’s 19th century Jacobean-legged English oak table creates a patina that can’t be duplicated in anything new. Tagged with faint glass rings and subtle cigarette burns, the rich finish is a hint of long evenings of friendship that probably once warmed a cold stone house. On winter nights, my friend Martha ladles hot soup from her subtly faded brown and white transfer ware tureen and senses ancient nourishment. Daily I hold a creamy faux-ivory hand mirror from the 1920s and feel its years of optimistic toilette.

Ever since my brother and I took a basket weaving class at the park the summer I was nine years old, I’ve been attracted to the texture of wicker. My first purchase as a young and very new wife many years ago was a Victorian wicker container for holding sheet music. Even though I loved its whimsy, I was unsure about spending $15.00 for something so completely useless, especially since my new husband warned that he had been “raised with old furniture and didn’t want anything old in our apartment.” The dealer sensed my hesitation and told me she could get $40.00 for it if she “painted it white and put it in the window,” smartly appealing to my natural instincts to snag a good deal. When I told her my fears of bringing it home into my new marriage, she cinched the sale by telling me, “You don’t have much of a marriage if you have to ask your husband before you buy something.”

Over the years I’ve brought home many pieces of wicker, sometimes leaving them pristinely unpainted like the seaweed-wicker rocking chair, part of a set my friend Joleen and I bought twenty years ago from a paint store in Danville just before the owner painted the whole set white. Years ago my daughters watched in disbelief when I claimed a wobbly wicker side chair at a San Francisco garage sale; it’s still hanging from the rafters in my own garage, its faded 1940s green waiting for the just right spot indoors. One of my staples is a wicker table I got for fifty cents at a church rummage sale from an old guy who said it was “worth that much for firewood.” An all-time favorite is a black wicker floor lamp in my living room, handmade by my former mother-in-law as a crafts project with her sisters in the 1920s.
So I’ve been lucky to have collected antiques when they were easily acquired for good prices or readily given as gifts. But the fact that I’ve never tired of them, that they’ve served me well, says more about their character than my luck or foresight. The old joke that “age doesn’t count unless you’re a cheese” really isn’t true. Age does count, especially so if it includes the endurance of character.
I’ve even grown to appreciate certain signs of age in my friends and myself. I watch my hands on the keyboard and see their tiny scars of experience, know the problems they’ve had to manage. As I feel gravity’s effects on my knees, I recognize too the solemnity in my past. I find of late that I’m slower to react to life’s absurdities, more measured in my responses, more trusting of my own history.
In others I appreciate a distinct and sure integrity of character. I hear my friend Bruce’s wisdom telling me to honor the good in sorrowful times rather than curse them. I observe as my coworker Randy demonstrates the merit in gauging criticisms and choosing battles. He watches and listens and considers the other side. Elayne, a college teacher and travel writer in her 70s, teaches me to keep roaming foreign lands between semesters, so I can return afresh to the classroom each fall.

As I write I notice my grandfather’s globe, now completely out-of-date but beautifully mellow with soft turquoise seas and faded Easter egg colored continents, atop the bookcase beside my desk. I imagine him coming to America from old Armenia in 1912 to escape a brewing war, his new wife alongside him in steerage on an Italian ship, both of them eating Spaghetti for the first time. I can barely fathom the determination it took for this very young couple to cross the country from New York to reach relatives they hardly knew in Los Angeles. Their character is reflected today in that old globe, but more remarkably in a large family still close, still finding comfort in each other’s company.

This patina of character is everywhere around me in my friends’ lives and in the venerable old things I use so often, treasures that enrich my shelves and enlarge my mind. It’s all over the generations of family photos hanging in my hallway; it nestles as my mother’s hand-crocheted spread covering my guest bed; it holds down my bills as a burnished 18th century doorknob. And it’s in the hope I have each time I fill my favorite green art-pottery vase with the wild rosemary growing all over the nearby hillsides.

“I’ve been watching you all week,” he said. “You have a nice smile.” And then, inexplicably, “You are a good wife and mother.”

He was a waiter at Aggie Grey’s Hotel in Samoa and I was on my last day in the country, lying by the pool, trying not to think about leaving this paradise. He had been standing in the sun’s heat for forty-five minutes, holding his tray and trying to convince me to meet him in my hotel room.

When I pointed out the blinding difference in our ages, he said, “For Samoans, age isn’t important. Only the love is important.” I was amused, but not at all tempted. He was beautiful—a tall Samoan with a generous smile and cocoa-colored skin. He was also younger than any of my children and seemingly out of his mind. About six feet away an Australian couple lay silent, lapping it all up.

I’ve traveled to the South Pacific often, always to the tiny island nation of Samoa. The young men there, in all honesty, are ravishing. Before they settle into their village chiefdom where the size of their bellies reflects their status, they are gods of the rain forest. As boys they run barely clad through the taro plantations on errands for their elders. They tote water, palm branches and baskets of coconuts suspended on poles that span their widening shoulders. And they climb coconut trees.

I watched an eight-year-old boy fetch my breakfast one morning: he tied one end of a rag to each ankle to keep his feet about ten inches apart; then he wrapped his arms around the hairy trunk and mounted the tree, scampering up in thrusts. Soon the blond nui, the youngest coconuts, dropped, rolling in all directions. It takes any kid on the island about ninety seconds to whack out a hole in the top of the fruit with his bush knife. The prize is sweet—creamy, cool, coconut milk.

These boys, whose small hands become deft handling bush knives as children, grow to young men with prominent calf muscles and broad backs, black hair and flashing smiles. I’d see them at large along village roads, completely bare, except for the brightly colored sarong-like lava lavas knotted at their waists and the large hibiscus flowers stuck behind one ear. They seemed so comfortable in their bodies. I envied their robust capability.

These are young men who spend hours in the ocean spearing fish and octopus, who cut the grass by hand, their bush knives doing the mower’s work. Many come of age by enduring weeks of tattooing, painfully earning the tatau that covers every inch of their lower bodies in traditional patterns. They are works of art in their own natural setting, Polynesian possibilities of the imagination.

Most fully grown women who travel outside the U. S. know how easy it is to attract a man’s lingering glance far from home. Once away from the States’ tiresomely stylish and annoyingly fit females, normal-sized American women who travel to other, more reasonable cultures are valued for their natural and uncontrived charms. It’s fun and it’s flattering. But when the attention comes from mere boys, it’s always so surprising.

During one hour-long wait for takeoff at LAX on a nearly empty plane, I desultorily resisted a young Samoan man’s invitations for me to sit beside him for the nine-hour trip to Pago Pago. I had no desire to sit beside anyone when I could have an entire row to myself and mostly ignored him. But after he described the tour of the island he had in mind for “us” on our arrival, I finally asked, “Why are you interested in me? I’m probably your mother’s age.”

“But I like you.”

I asked him if he was attracted to me “because I’m palagi”—not Samoan.

He admitted to it, saying, “Palagi women have white skin, and they know what they want.” I thought he meant they are self-directed, independent women who travel alone and love it, as I do. Later, I wondered just what all those other women wanted and how they knew it.
The attention kept coming. A young policeman in Apia, the island’s only town, stopped me while I was out running early one morning. I trotted right over, thinking he beckoned for official reasons. But he was wondering the all-pervasive question, “How long are you staying?” And then, “Do you go to the night club tonight?” There was Fia Fia, a nineteen year old I interviewed for ten minutes in an outlying village. A month after I returned home my mail brought a letter from him, telling me he “wanted to marry up” with me.

Amazing and amusing. It’s not like this at home in Northern California. I teach nineteen-year-old boys at home. I grade their reading skills and encourage them to develop their essays with specific details; I’ve pretty much never thought about taking one home. I’d be happy if it were just a bit easier to get dates with a man close to my age—not necessarily older, but at least a few respectable years older than my thirty-year-old son. But such men aren’t as quickly attracted.

Of course, the air’s different in California. It’s not nearly as heavy and erotically moist. The fish don’t fly and glow in the moonlight just below the tranquil Southern Cross. On my west coast there’s no pungent smoke from cooking fires early in the morning, redolent with hemp. The cab drivers aren’t named “Rambo” and don’t offer tours of the island “because you make my cab smell good.”

After my last trip to the South Pacific, I went on to Bali in Indonesia, another tiny island. Though I wasn’t really there to check out the men, I couldn’t help but notice. Bali’s well-known for its compelling beauty. And everything on the island—both nature’s shapes and those made by the Balinese—seems a gift of a brilliant artist’s hand. It’s sensually stimulating, but not really sensuous. The Asian men I encountered there seemed so placid. Basically, they were men wearing skirts—men who drove and walked and talked with a sort of spent composure.

Until Nyoman, that is. At first Nyoman seemed like the other Balinese men, though he had a playfulness to him I hadn’t seen since Samoa. He was about twenty-five years old and worked at La Taverna Hotel in Sanur. He learned my name as soon as I arrived, and we spoke a few times as he fetched beach towels or icy fruit drinks for me.

Our conversation one evening started so gradually I was completely unprepared. Standing in front of the hotel in the dusk of the Balinese night waiting for my cab, we were both watching some men who’d just arrived and who were excitedly speaking Balinese while waving and pointing to the top of a huge coconut tree right in front of us.

I asked Nyoman what they were saying. He told me they were talking about climbing the tree to get the coconuts.

“Do you ever climb coconut trees, Nyoman?” I asked, filling the languid time with small talk.

“Yes, every night,” he answered.

Thinking that was sort of odd, I replied, “Really?”

“Yes, sometimes seven times in one night.”

I was still staring up, straining to see the actual coconuts in the branches. I immediately recalled those eager boys and young men in Samoa with their easy strength, mounting the coconut trees there. I couldn’t turn toward Nyoman; I couldn’t let him see I knew what he was really saying. Then I thought, what is he really saying? Still, I stared straight up while he said, closer now, right in my ear, “I’d like to climb the coconut tree with you.”

Then the cab pulled up and its door opened. I was safe again from the absurd image of consorting with one of my students. And now I remind myself there’s nearly always more happening than meets the eye and apparently more going on with these men below the surface—behind their ear flowers, their motor scooters, their bush knives and, of course, their skirts.

Back in the States, living as close to the very edge of the continent as I can afford, I fall into my regular lanes of travel to and from work and play. I think about Nyoman’s hopeful appreciation and still laugh when I remember the waiter’s persistence in Samoa. I’ve always admired the prowess of young men—all those years I watched Rudy Curinga quarterback my high school’s games, the long white seasons I skied the slopes with a trove of guys in college, and the fearlessness of those backpackers I see in my travels. They easily sleep anywhere and explore anything.

I still spend the whole of my days from August through June accommodating young men’s restlessness. I know them so well and feel affection for them—for their lanky sprawls, their amiable readiness, their effortless potential. But, like the ability most of us have to admire fine art without needing to own it, I can appreciate them as landscape.

And more and more lately, as the gravity of my own age nudges me, as I realize how limited women of my generation feel, I find I don’t really want a nineteen-year-old boy of my own. I want to be one.

Ingredients:

butter
egg noodles
rice
chicken broth
slivered almonds
chopped dates

Preparation:

Melt the butter in the bottom of a heavy stock pot until it foams. Use at least a whole cube of butter for every three cups of rice. Even if you cook only one cup of rice, still use the whole cube. Melt the butter into a golden foam.

I don’t even consider margarine. It would be a disaster. I hide the amount of butter I use if my children are around. But if it’s others in my family—my parents, my sister or sister in law, my aunt—I melt the cubes with zeal, sometimes three for a big family dinner. They’re pretty in the pot, the sharp edges slowly rounding with the heat, the fragrance rich with promise.

Add noodles, a handful for every cup of rice.

You should use Golden Grain Flat Egg Noodles, the same brand my grandmother, Margaret Artunian Abajian, did. About fifteen years ago my sister told me our Aunt Sara was starting to use vermicelli instead of egg noodles in her pilaf. So we did too, crunching it up as we scattered it into the buttery foam. We thought it looked sort of stylish, I guess, little worms of brown noodles twisting about in the rice. Now I know better.

Be sure to stir the noodles constantly or they’ll burn in just a few minutes.

I’ve burned them many times over the years and have had to throw out the whole black mess, wash the pot and start over—a big waste of good butter.

Stir them into the fragrant foam and watch them constantly until they get really brown. Then add the rice.

I remember the family controversy when I was a child—over whether to use Uncle Ben’s Rice or MJB. My mother always told me MJB made just as good a pilaf as Uncle Ben’s and I wanted to think she was right. But the truth is my mother was odar, a non-Armenian, so couldn’t be counted on for the real scoop. And now that I know the truth of Grandma’s rice and how very difficult it is to get the rice perfect, I never use anything except Uncle Ben’s and, finally, neither did my mother.

Stir the rice in the butter mixture just until it starts to look translucent; it won’t take long. Then pour in the chicken broth. Of course, use only Swanson chicken broth. Use one can (141/2 ounces) of broth per cup of rice. As soon as the mixture starts to boil, cover it tightly and turn the flame to low. Simmer for twenty minutes. Then, turn off the heat and let it sit about ten minutes before removing the lid. Serve immediately.

Your rice will turn out to be Armenian pilaf. If you’re really lucky, it will be Grandma’s pilaf, rice that completely absorbs the buttery steam, so it’s lighter than usual, a perfect integration of the ingredients that tastes creamy and nutty. It’s hard to know exactly when the magic happens that turns Armenian pilaf into Grandma’s pilaf, whether it’s during the noodle browning stage, or the simmering. My sister-in-law (surprisingly successful at it even though she’s odar through and through) thinks it happens when the noodles get really dark before the rice is added. For years I thought it had to do with how quickly I put the lid on the pot after the broth starts to boil. Now I realize it’s something separate from the ingredients or the cooking instructions.

Mine is a family that’s really picky about how things are done, especially anything associated with food. When we get together, it doesn’t take long for one of us to start pointing out the right way to line the trash can, start the barbecue, or load the dishwasher.
One of my earliest memories is my father telling his sister, my Aunt Sara, that she wasn’t wiping the table correctly. “Turn the cloth,” he said from the sofa across the room. “Don’t use the same side of the junjotz over and over. You’re just pushing the crumbs around.” I was probably only six, but I knew he was right, knew there was clearly a right and a wrong way to wipe the kitchen table; I also realized it was a matter of grave importance.

I met my Uncle Eddie in San Francisco one Saturday to see a new photography exhibit at MOMA. We ate at a nearby restaurant and spent the whole meal discussing the lack of proper management in the restaurant, the quality of the service, the cleanliness of the tables. My cousin Tony and I sometimes outline our ideal careers—as restaurant designers, the ones who create the entire ambiance of fine dining from the food to the decor.

Tony called from Hawaii a few months ago to ask how to make Grandma’s roast. (Cook a watermelon-cut rump roast for about five hours at a low temperature. Cover it, but add nothing. Also, if you want it to taste like Grandma’s—juicy and falling apart tender, it’s critical you use a Guardian brand aluminum pan.) Tony was opening a Mexican restaurant on the north shore of Kauai’i and wanted to make tacos with her roast. Although his restaurant was a hit with the locals, he closed it down after six months when he found himself overwhelmed with the sheer work of creating the perfect roast, the freshest salsa and the cleanest tables, nearly single-handedly.

Grandma died in 1988 at 94 years old, yet we still invoke her cooking at every family dinner. Everyone knows the ultimate compliment is “Ah, the pilaf… it’s Grandma’s rice.” But it seldom happens; my Aunt Sara hardly ever eats much rice because it’s so infrequently Grandma’s pilaf. I realize now that I took Sundays for granted as a child—Grandma’s rice, her roast, the white damask linens, the small glass bottles of Coca Cola that ran the length of the table, the simple dependability of her meals.

My eighty-six year old father still makes lamb shish kebab for nearly every holiday dinner. Usually the men stand around the fire in awe and anticipation while my father presides, cooking the meat to perfection. Other than the rich taste of the grilled lamb, the best part of having shish kebab is getting it off the skewers, shishes my dad calls them.

Even though all of us cousins are in our fifties, we turn into children again as soon as we’re all together, taking on the roles we had when Grandma was alive. Randy is still quiet and mysterious, his brother Larry still trying to get me in trouble, my sister Susan practicing the art of relaxation, and my brother, the comic, the center of fawning attention. So when the meat is done (exactly 20 minutes after the rice starts simmering), we race to be right there, slices of good French bread in hand, ready to pull the meat from the shishes, the marinade-soaked bread the reward for good timing. As usual, Susan’s there first.

And in the kitchen, what’s turned ordinary pilaf into Grandma’s rice? What’s the difference between just making it and making it so that Grandma’s there again in her kitchen in Monterey Park, California, my grandpa and uncles playing backgammon in the living room, my aunts sneaking cigarettes in the bathroom, and we cousins trying our best to make the youngest ones cry? It’s simply because Grandma worked while we played. And she hugged us, her Bala Jons, as often as possible and kept cooking (I haven’t even mentioned her dolma, her lahmajun, or Gata, her Armenian cake).

Now I realize it’s partly the real pleasure she took in her cooking that made her rice so perfect, her roast so delectable (you knew that already, didn’t you?). But more than that: When I look back I realize the times my rice has turned out to be so good have been those meals where I’ve done nearly all the work myself and done it without thinking it was a chore. Sort of like the phone that doesn’t ring when it’s watched, the rice doesn’t perform when it’s worried over. It does its tricks when the cook’s so busy cutting the vegetables, chilling the cokes and smooching the babies that she (or he) just lets it alone to do its work.

Garnish the rice with chopped dates and browned, slivered almonds.

Dates and almonds are considered required toppings on the pilaf for any holiday dinner, but we seldom add them to the dish for daily meals. The purists in my family use only good quality California pitted dates from Hadley’s Markets in Southern California, but it’s much easier to use the already chopped and barely sugared Dromedary brand dates.

The slivered almonds must be browned, usually in butter on top of the stove. You can brown them in the toaster oven without any butter at all. It works. Because there’s already so much butter in the rice, you won’t miss it in the almonds. However, and this is critical, if cousin Larry comes to dinner, be sure to serve the dates and almonds separately from the pilaf, a bowl for the dates, another for the slivered almonds. If Larry doesn’t come, combine them and layer the mixture on top of the pilaf that you’ve already poured onto a platter. (I suggest a heavy ironstone oblong platter.)

Sometimes a layer of rice gets crispy and sticks to the bottom of the pan. Just leave that in the pan when you serve the pilaf. When this happens, it would be a good time to do the dishes yourself (Susan will be unavailable, probably in the corner of the living room telling jokes to Larry). Scrape off the crunchy butter-soaked rice with a wooden spatula, stand over the sink and eat it right off the spatula. It’s nearly as good as the juicy bread fresh from the shishes.

from Meeting Ella Peacock, Again

After keeping myself busy in her quiet house for my own long empty days, I was gaining a better understanding of her determination to do her “full-time job of looking” at the desert mountains as a diversion from her isolation. Perhaps it was that loneliness that encouraged her amazing capacity for work in Sanpete County where she painted in her car both during the hot summers and white winters. But I was beginning to see that she wasn’t really painting for the love of it alone. She was also working so hard from a long tradition of duty and from a genuine need to survive. I only then realized the quiet power in her paintings was not entirely a reflection of her unassuming personality; it replicated her inner solitude as well.

As I sat in her kitchen rereading her letters and my transcriptions of our conversations, I noticed how many times she had told me she didn’t think she would “make it through another winter,” how many times she asked me if I thought she “should move back east” again and how frequently she said she was “finished” with this life. I noticed how often she talked about money in her letters to Bailey, how fearful she was of depleting her savings account. Once she told him she had recently sold five paintings and said she was proud she was able to build her savings—and in a subsequent letter asked if he thought she had been boastful. It was probably in this silent kitchen she wrote those letters. Perhaps it wasn’t the cold of the winters as much as the quiet emptiness of the night she dreaded.