camp haymarket

This is one will be more of a journal entry than a story, so crank up your voyeurism and fade out your literary criticism.

Barbara organized a camping trip to the Dunes last weekend, and I was rubbing my palms in anticipation even when the forecast said that Saturday night would require eskimo-style pajamas or at the very least cuddling. We managed to gather a set of tents and sleeping bags for our crew, and Ed gallantly agreed to drive the cooler full of leftover birthday barbecue goodies for the foodies... plus a bit of cerveza (here's to Yazzan).

Ben, Megan, Sultan, Barbara, Lisa J, Gabi and I caught the early arvo South Shore Line. We didn't look quite like the swimsuit clad lighthearted woman looking over her shoulder in the old classic South Shore posters, since almost all of us wore rucksacks... but we were a fine-looking crew. We split up on the train to grab seats where we could, and the guy next to me asked where we were headed with so much gear. "We're going to camp," I said, and he thought I meant going to A CAMP. Like the summer variety. A troop of Dirty Hippie Scouts. (And what do we sell door to door?)

When we arrived at the campgrounds, we had a few priorities: set up the tents, look at all the awesome dogs, buy some marshmallows, and go for a walk. Yazzan and Ed arrived in the car after their tour of various exits mentioning the Dunes. The whole gang took a stroll before dinner - the woods were gorgeous but the wind off the lake was intense... we split up and I headed back to help build a beautiful wood fire. With a few intermediate emmm strategies (charcoal or wood? lighter fluid or rubbing sticks? pyramid or kindling cross-piles?) until we at last had a roaring grill. I honestly think that nothing hits the belly better than food when you're camping.



We had foraged the woods for kindling and extra fuel for the fire, and kept it burning past midnight. Megan played mandolin and everyone chilled, drinking from cans hidden inside of jacket sleeves... for a brief time we scrambled up the hill to a dunetop clearing and played tennis beneath the star speckled sky.



Over the weekend I dealt with the consequences of my personality with varying intensity, the most amusing moment of which might have been Ed at the campfire announcing the sponsor of Closed Captioning for the Subtext Impaired. (He is a spectacular sport about the shit I give him.) The more tragic moment personally was discovering, with great embarassment, that my pathological honesty and brash sense of humour have hampered someone's comfort. Renew my subscription to Closed Captioning for the Sensitivity Impaired.

Still, the overall atmosphere filled me with joy and energy (enough to keep me warm enough on a cold night, but also too much to really allow me to doze off). The next morning we stashed the bulk of our gear in Ed's car (you're a legend Waz!) which lightened up the remaining portion of our group to go for a hike through the woods then along the dramatic ridge of the dunes. I kept nearly falling on my face staring at the little aquilegia flowers along the woodlad path. Then you ascend, loop back and the dunes sweep down a soft sandy cliff to the beach on one side, and the view soars across springtime treetops on the other side.

Breathtaking.



And doubletaking, when we saw the evolving mirage of the city skyline, inverse and repeated side to side.



We checked with some old ladies to make sure the view was not the result of hippiness.



I heart Camp Haymarket. We're set for a reunion in mid-June.

if only our convos were as savory as our menus

I cooked last night: pasta alfredo, grilled cheese, carrot & cilantro soup, tomato slices with basil, and a nice salad with strawberrys, pears, radish and mozzarella.

Cooking for Haymarket is always a pleasure as it becomes more of an event than a chore, and the rotation allows me to be extravagant when I do make meals. My last brunch: paella, quiche, tomato with sage, garlic mushrooms, citrus & spinach salad.

Informal press conferences answering questions about our lifestyle for mystified co-workers have given must of us a lineup of regular suspects, question-wise, and some of the greatest curiousity surrounds our feeding set-up. Who cooks and how often? Who chooses the grocery list? And a reliable "VEGETARIAN food? I couldn't do it." Although generally once I rattle off the last meal I had cooked then even the meat-eaters of the bloodiest variety acknowledge that they might be able to survive a proper vegetarian meal.

Kate takes the title for absolute culinary royalty, and in the old days I'd say Craig rocked the refection as well, although his withdrawal over the last lonely months in the house resulted in some dishes along the lines of "lentil casserole" or some such chaw and glutch. (Craig, I desperately miss your dicing prowess.) One of the most vivid memories I have of Floyd's application was the mouthwatering bit about earning his voyage on a boat off Africa by cooking for an international crew.

Don't get me wrong, there are some bummers of meals. I recently "roasted" a tray of veggies that looked more like ashes then asparagus by the time I remembered to take them out. Or Ed's infamous gumbo prepared with 4 CUPS of butter that only enhanced the naturally slimey qualities of okra.




Sue me - the texture of body fluids is just not a turn-on to my taste buds.




Plus we all have our lazy cooking nights. And in fairness spaghetti and stir fry are valid, delicious dishes. I even crave macaroni and cheese sometimes - may deities forgive tastes developed during the nutritional indiscretions of my youth - which means I lick my lips at Megan's "Tex Mex Macaroni Surprise" that looks like a school cafeteria lunch but turns out to be quite tasty.

My true test will be when Glenn visits, whether I can serve up tofu in a tasty form that doesn't make his eyes cross - or whether he'll ask the omnivores in the house to smuggle him out to Ribs n' Bibs.

the haunting of the wooden mexican

Moving into my room entailed all of a 6-foot trek into what was, prior to my move-in, Andrew's abode. I'd been subletting while Eli spent the summer in France, and with his impending return mid-September I left my room change to the latest date possible to accomodate Andrew's impulsive move-out that hovered according to fluctuating availability of the apartment he'd chosen. (This was a place for which he made the down payment, literally, in cash to some men who drove by an appointed spot in their pick-up truck and had no id on them to prove that they were, in fact, who they claimed.)

Drew planned to move in with two other programmers, Trevor and Mr. Purdy, who had more or less lived on our couches for the past few weeks despite both having addresses where they received mail, owned beds and so forth. The living room was littered with family size jars scraped almost-clean of peanut butter, empty diet pepsi bottles, and hand-rolled cigarettes as they worked round the clock on a program to beat the stock market. ("No, this one is different.") The Mountain Goats played on loop over our stereo, a retro appliance demanding the occasional bitch-slap to calm the buzz when the wires might loosen, and housemates snuck in once or twice to febreeze the orange couch which had begun to adopt an ever-ripening eau d' purdy.

Although these weeks hearkened the return of a girlfriend for Trevor, who headed the project and sketched hyper scratches across the common room blackboard, he found time to move. And Mr. Purdy, whose intense concentration reduced movement to a speed generally requiring stop-motion to record efficiently, also managed to shift his belongings to the new place they'd call home.

But Andrew was having some difficulty extracting more than a box or two of belongings from his room. Considering the modest square footage of the place one would assume that moving out would take one trip. But Andrew planned to move by bike, which meant more trips regardless, and somehow his room proved a clown car of junk. So I began packing his shit into boxes while he spent the last 48 hours before Eli's return and my eviction... well... in the front yard building a bike attachment. This contstruction job took more concentration (not to mention petty theft) than actually moving his stuff would have.

He and Mr. Purdy spread the materials across the front yard. They first stole a cart to use, but deciding that it had too much wiggle to its wheels, elected to hacksaw off the wheels and attach them to a new structure. (My parents were visiting this weekend, and of all moments to connect to someone of my generation, my Dad elected this as his opportunity, donating engineering advice as Drew proceeded to disassemble the purloined trolley and connect it to scraps of wood from our shop to build a cart-like device.)

Mr. Purdy has been described by some as a mathematical genius. Below witness him sawing over his own legs and crotch. (This is a sort of self-selective evolutionary step, right?)


The sum result of the weekend was a cart Andrew called the Wooden Mexican "because it will haul stuff for cheap all day long." (Although it did not pack Drew's belongings, load itself, or clean the mold and dust from his room.) Andrew holds the peculiar and stubborn belief that as an ethnic member of a once-persecuted people, he is granted the right to make politically incorrect comments against the metaphorical "new jews," any marginalized folk, namely, in this case Mexicans.

Most of us rolled our eyes and left Andrew to his politically incorrect business, seeing as despite his racist humour he was the one who washed the laundry for and nursed several of the neighbourhood homeless men, most of whom happen to be black men in this neck of the woods.

No one was treated for shock when the Wooden Mexican was broken/abandoned/disassembled not long into its scandalous lifetime of hauling laundry and a week of groceries.

However one poor woman who was visiting at the time, Ben's girlfriend Lisa, absorbed Andrew's influence a bit more than the rest of us. She had several key circumstances: speaking German as her first language, having the US American half of her family residing in the colour-conscious land of Kentucky, and perhaps not knowing quite how full of shit Andrew can be at times.

Time progressed, Lisa returned to Berlin. But in the winter she returned to stay in the co-op, and this time for a lengthier residence instead of a brief visit. She was folded into the cook cycle, assigned a chore, and quickly assumed a comfortable and beloved role in the co-op as "crazy Lisa." She amused us with wacky plans to make lots of money, observations about people in fridges being super funny, and outlines for musicals about psychedelic cats. And when she referenced using "a wooden mexican" in an email to the house listhost, we figured it was simply wild and crazy Lisa joking around if a little colourfully.

But she wasn't it turns out.

That night at dinner she was very rosy-cheeked, but not of joy. I somehow convinced her to discuss what was on her mind, and it turned out that she had used the term "wooden mexican" thinking that, while it was clearly racist, it was an accepted term in American English, which sweeps so many other bigoted terms under the rug. And how did she learn of her mistake? A helpful email from Ed.

Ed, who is so earnest it hurts -- particularly those of us whose veins run with sarcasm -- had taken it upon himself to send Lisa an email letting her know that she'd used a racist word, unique as the expression might be. This edification was a thoughtful, if stilted, slap on the wrist... but the email also included a list of ethnically booby trapped terms to avoid, such as that hot button term "paddy wagon."

Lisa of course was mortified that she'd made the gaffe, embarassed that she'd been called out on it in such a pedantic way, and likely surprised that only one person had spoken up.

This story is usually mentioned in reference to Ed's complete straight-laced reading of everything around him, his blindness to subtext, subtlety and irony. But really, about whom does it speak the most?