So long, Saveur

by Anton Zuiker on April 16, 2017

We will be closing on this house this Friday, and after two months renting from the new owners, we’ll move to Chapel Hill. (Update to come about the new purchase and where we’ll be in the interim.) We’re already sorting, discarding, packing, boxing, and stacking.

One decision I’ve been putting off for weeks: should I continue to save the collection of Saveur issues that I’ve been saving since 2000. See the photo in my Coconut Wireless blog post from 2012. Since most of my favorite recipes from that travel-and-cooking magazine are included in the Saveur cookbook, I’m inclined to toss the old issues. But I will renew my subscription. I hear the new issue includes an article by my friend, Michael Ruhlman, about eating in Ireland.

Blogging from up above

by Anton Zuiker on April 1, 2017

A 1960s Triumph Tippa 1

One night recently, after his teeth were brushed but before he was tucked into bed and read a book, Oliver asked if he could write his friend a note.

Oliver is in first grade. He wakes at 6 a.m., catches the first bus to drive up our street, and spends half the day learning in Mandarin, and the other half in English (with an intro to French, too). He went to his desk, took out a pencil, and ripped a piece of paper from a notebook. He began to write, in English, and hesitated only long enough to ask how to spell tornado.

The note was to his best friend, who lives next door, and reported that he’d succeeded in spinning his Beyblade Blast to a new level.

Ehi, the friend, had left for a family trip to Benin earlier that day, so Oliver carefully positioned the note at the corner of his desk, and climbed into bed.

—

I bought a working typewriter last fall, a brown-and-beige Triumph Tippa 1. Every few weeks, I type a letter to one friend or another, and entrust the envelope to the care of the U.S. Postal Service. Whether the letter arrives, and is read, I don’t always know.

The waiting reminds me of my time as a Peace Corps Volunteer in Vanuatu, where most nights I sat at the table in our house and wrote letters to family and friends back home.

My friend, David Jarmul, was also a Peace Corps Volunteer. He served in Nepal before the internet allowed instantaneous, across-the-ocean communication. David and his wife, Champa, have rejoined Peace Corps and are serving in Moldova. I’m proud of David for blogging about his experience, at Not Exactly Retired. He also wrote a magazine essay about the benefits of internet connectedness, but also how that’s challenged volunteers’ face-to-face conversations with their hosts.

In Vanuatu, a plate of food brought to the house was never to be returned as an empty plate. My family and friends replied to all my aerograms, and their letters fill a half dozen binders in a plastic bin in the garage. My more recent typed letters have gotten a couple of replies: one friend sent a hand-written note from her Alaskan redoubt; another friend sent her holiday note as a typed report of her change in life direction.

—

I’m heading north at the moment, high above the sea in an airplane returning me to North Carolina.

I’ve been attending the annual professional development conference of the AAMC Group on Institutional Advancement. We met in Fajardo, Puerto Rico.

Normally, this time of year, I’d be with my family not too far away on St. Croix. But our impending house sale and purchase blocked another spring break on Sprat Hall beach. That meant we missed last night’s fireworks celebrating the 100th anniversary of Transfer Day, marking when Denmark gave over the islands to the States (for a price).

—

Last Saturday, we were celebrating my mother’s birthday, with a nice meal at our table in Carrboro. Anna still had the sniffles, Oliver was a second day into fevers, and then Erin rapidly began to feel ill. I roasted chicken parts, and put them into a pot of water in the oven for the night (per Michael Ruhlman’s chicken stock instructions).

The next morning, I woke early, ignored my own achiness, and went to play soccer in Durham. I returned home, added carrots and onions and garlic and tomato paste and parsley and thyme and peppercorns and bay leaf to the pot, and let it simmer for an hour. I read the perfect NYTimes magazine essay, by chef Gabrielle Hamilton, about radishes with sweet butter and coarse salt, and then the travel story about Puerto Rico and wondered if I’d have enough time during my conference to catch a ferry over to Culebra Island.

I love to make chicken soup when one my family is under the weather. But this pot of soup had no effect on our ills — Monday morning, all five of us were down and out. It was clear we had influenza.

—

I was just finishing the Danielle Ofri book, What Patients Say, What Doctors Hear. It’s quite good, and I’d underlined and annotated quite a few pages, excited to have material to add to my Voices of Medicine listening booth proposal. And yet, I was a perfect example of what Ofri explores: I’d been timid at the pediatrician’s office last week, and had failed to get the doctor to hear that my children had been exposed to flu. We were the final appointment of the Saturday, and I didn’t think the lab tech was even in that day, but maybe if I’d said more, Oliver at least would have been given tamiflu.

When my flight arrived in San Juan, and I’d turned on my phone, a text came through: Oliver had pneumonia.

—

Did not make it to Culebra. Laid low at the conference resort, kept my distance from the other attendees, religiously washed my hands. Oliver responded well to antibiotics. Erin shouldered her way through the week.

—

I’ve been playing soccer Sunday mornings with men my age, men from a dozen countries. I hustle, fall down, pass the ball too fast or too hard, and rush toward the goal too soon. But I have fun.

I’m 47 tomorrow. I remember my father playing soccer in Idaho with men in their forties. The Over the Hill Gang, I think they were called. I recently came across a photo of dad on the field in Caldwell, but that photo is buried in a bin in the garage, awaiting the move.

Erin tried to get tickets to the U2 tour this summer. The band is coming through the States to celebrate the 30th anniversary of the release of The Joshua Tree album. In 1987, I listened to that album on my Aiwa personal cassette recorder while sitting in my clunker of a car, waiting for my fellow high school soccer buddies to gather for summer evening scrimmages.

—

A glance down: brown shoes buffed bright by an airport shoe shine.

—

My laptop now sports a tamtam transfer sticker, ordered through StickerMule. The tamtam is an upright drum in Vanuatu. My sticker is a design created for me by a friend a few years ago.

The arrival of the stickers coincided with our download of the Disney movie Moana, which has an extra feature about the Polynesian music and culture that the movie so wonderfully captures. That led me to the music of the Samoan-in-New-Zealand singer Opetaia Foa’i and his band Te Vaka.

And I recently came across a research article about Lapita skulls found in an ancient cemetery in Vanuatu. I was unfamiliar with the Lapita people and the recent scholarship explaining how the Lapita migrated from east Asia, into western Oceania, and became the Polynesian people. Fascinating.

Coffee on the go

by Anton Zuiker on March 14, 2017

In the NYTimes Travel section this Sunday was a feature story about visiting high-quality coffee fincas near Medellin: A Journey to Colombia’s Coffee Belt. As I read that, I pictured my friend, Badi Bradley, in those same hills. Badi is founder and managing partner of coffee distributor Caravela Coffee. He’s a former Peace Corps Volunteer in Guatemala; Erin and Badi worked together as Peace Corps recruiters while they were in grad school at UNC-CH. Badi was partner in 3CUPS, a Chapel Hill shop that was one of my regular haunts when I worked on Franklin Street. I wasn’t a coffee drinker until 3CUPS, and now, when I’m traveling, I send Badi a message asking for recommendations for good coffee in whatever city I happen to be visiting.

Here are some of the shops Badi has recommended, and others I’ve visited with family or stumbled upon myself:

And closer to home:

The Times feature about Colombian coffee tourism was good. Maybe I’ll ask Badi if I can tag along with him on his next trip to the fincas of Central and South America.

Hearing voices

by Anton Zuiker on March 5, 2017

Malia asked me if we could go to the Carrboro Farmers Market yesterday, so she and I drove into town. It was cold, crisp morning, and only two dozen or so vendors were gathered. Chapel Hill Creamery, which sells cow’s milk cheese and pork products, had two vacuum-packed bags of beef shanks; that’s a rarity for them, so I purchased them soon as I saw the sign atop the blue cooler. And now, those shanks are in the oven, in my orange Le Creuset pot, braising into osso buco.

After our short visit to the farmers market yesterday, Malia and I stopped into Gray Squirrel Coffee Company, which has the best cappuccino and hot chocolate that comes with coffee-flavored whipped cream. Malia brought along a new book I’d bought for her the day before at the Regulator Bookshop. She’d asked me to order it on Amazon, but I buy all my books from local bookstores only. At the Regulator, I had glanced across the new releases table, and grabbed a copy of What Patients Say, What Doctors Hear by Danielle Ofri, MD, who I once heard speak at a conference. At Gray Squirrel, I sipped my cappuccino and started Ofri’s book, which explores the doctor-patient conversation, or “the single most powerful diagnostic tool.” Just a few pages in, I knew that this book will be very useful and informative to me — after years of talking about my Voices of Medicine listening booth project, last month I finally drafted a document to explain the project, and I’ve been sending it around to Duke faculty who are interested in narrative medicine. One piece of this project is a narrative medicine blog, but I’m not sure the best place for that, so I may just start blogging here about Voices of Medicine and narrative medicine and the listening booth.

Anyway, later in the day, Anna and I went to the Chelsea Theater to see A United Kingdom. It’s a solid, uplifting movie about love and racial harmony and democracy, based on a husband and wife who were integral to the founding of the Republic of Botswana. There’s a scene where the Bechuanaland women gather at the couple’s home to sing their thanks to Ruth Williams, and their harmony brought tears to my eyes. “I love the human voice,” I said to myself in that dark theater, looking at the dusty African scene, picturing myself at Duke in the listening booth.

On the map

by Anton Zuiker on February 14, 2017

Ambrym (top), Epi (bottom), and Paama and Lopevi

I learned of a new website, TopoTopo, for making puzzles out of topographical data. ‘Search any place on Earth,’ it commands. So I did, not thinking it could show me Paama, the small island in the South Pacific, where Erin and I had served as Peace Corps Volunteers. And yet there it was, in the shadows of towering Lopevi volcano, and Ambrym island with its double volcanoes that glowed most evenings.

These past few weeks, I’ve spent a lot of time on Google Maps, peering at the four acres of wooded land in Chapel Hill that we’ll soon call home.

Tonight, on a Valentine’s date, Erin and I saw the film Lion, about an Indian boy who is lost a thousand miles from his mother and 25 years later walks back into his village, having used Google Earth to remember his way home. It’s a beautiful, bittersweet movie that made me cry, and smile. It puts hope back on the map.

Read | posts, or go to the ARCHIVES.