You know the Alexander Calder mobile, “Twenty Leaves and an Apple,” in the Cincinnati Art Museum, right outside the café? I’ve seen it dozens of times, but on my last visit to the museum, I stopped in the hallway and watched it for 10 minutes or so.
I’ve got the brochures piled up from the Playhouse, Ensemble Theatre, Cincinnati Shakespeare Company. There are so many great plays to choose from for the 2023-24 season. We haven’t decided yet which we’re going to take a chance on. Because it is taking a chance: Tickets are expensive, and not every production is a winner.
For hundreds of years, people wrote their thoughts and ideas down on paper, trusted them to couriers of various sorts, and sent them to and fro around the world. Then, suddenly, sometime in the 1990s they stopped.
Have I ever told you how I got to Cincinnati? It’s not the usual school- or job- or family-related reason.
In 2020, my mom needed surgery, and when she came out of her anesthesia, one of the first things she said was, “You know, I think I could go for some Indian food.”
They attracted me with their solid trunks, their graceful branches, the dry leaves that still created motion and gentle noise on a November day. I walked over to one and felt the rough bark and looked up into the branches, right up into the sky.
Sometime toward the beginning of the tapering-off of the Covid pandemic, going stir-crazy and wanting to get started on my retirement goals, I started doing volunteer delivery driving for La Soupe.
I thought, when given this amazing chance to have a first-person column, I would be offering my opinion on a variety of subjects. I’ve got opinions. But that’s harder than it seems.
On the other hand, while I was writing a book about Cincinnati food history, I realized that the stubbornness pays off: We have our unique regional menu because the Graeters kept doing things the old way until the rest of the world caught up with them. Grandmothers and neighborhood butchers never stopped making goetta, though no one made it anywhere else. That’s to be treasured.
One recent evening, a woman knocked on my door and asked for money. I could have told her to get lost. Or decided she was scamming me. Or I could have given her a little money to get something to eat, or recommend she go somewhere with more help.
