8 States

Spending so much time at home encourages daydreams of traveling. In my life, I have been fortunate to see a lot of the world, and quite a bit of the United States. As of this writing, I have set foot in 48 states (Hawaii and Idaho, I'm coming for you), and I have spent time outside an airport or an interstate in 45 states, and I have actually spent more than a night in 39 states.

This is an amazing country, both topographically and culturally, and it's easy to see why people come from all over the world to visit. Even so, there are places that, for me, one stop was enough. Then there are the places I would go again and again.

These are my top 8 states:

Alaska

Alaska has a lot to live up to, and it does. It has the most beautiful mountains I ever seen outside of the Alps. Forests, glaciers, ocean, tundra, it is immense and amazing.

Maine

I first visited Maine in August 1995. We left hot and sticky Virginia to spend a few days with a friend on Mount Desert Island. I'll never forget the first day-- my friend showed us around the island and through Acadia National Park. Windows down we rolled along the ocean and through forests with the sharp smells of salt and balsam in air. "I hate it here!" I said. "It's too perfect, and I never want to leave, but I have to, so I hate it."

New Jersey

My family lived in South Jersey from the time I was 4 until I was 13. I loved my childhood there. Beaches in the summer, peach, blueberry, and apple picking, in the fall, snowy winters, and rainy springs with daffodils and lilac. I started school there, made my first best friend, learned to swim and ride a bike, and played soccer and softball.

South Dakota

On the eastern side, it's all farm land and prairie that rolls into the Badlands and the Black Hills. Looking out the car window, you can imagine cowboys riding up over the ridge to your right. It is gorgeous country, wide open and still untamed.

New Mexico

The Sandia Mountains make a half-circle around the flat, high plains that Albuquerque sits on. There is true dessert in all the other directions. Dry heat during the day gives way to cool nights, even in summer, and the stars!

California

Everyone knows Cali is amazing, from south to central to north. I can't imagine tiring of it.

The last two slots are sill open.

I think Virginia might make it, if I hadn't lived here for the last 37 years. One day, if I move away, I might long for the monuments of Northern Virginia, or the shores of Virginia Beach, or the splendor of the Blue Ridge Mountains, especially in autumn.

And New York i in the running, too. The City is exciting and vibrant, always worth a visit. My dad grew up in central New York, and I went to college there. The winters were grueling, but I honestly didn't mind. Heidi's folks live in Buffalo, and I've spent a lot of time in Western NY in the last 22 years. Niagara Falls? Incomparable, and the great lakes, Erie and Ontario, are, well, great. But, sorry NY, I just can't commit.

8 Sandwiches (plus 1)

"I don't think I've ever seen you eat a sandwich before," one of my colleagues remarked at lunch a few months ago; this after eating that meal together almost every day for at least three years.

"It's not my usual," I agreed, taking a bite of calabrese salami and provolone on pane di campagne. A couple of seconds in the microwave had softened the bread and warmed the meat and cheese so that no condiments were necessary. It was delicious.

My relationship with that workhorse of the portable meal is a bit fraught. I love a good sandwich, but it rarely occurs to me to go out of my way to eat one. Even that day, the only reason I had a sandwich for lunch was that there were no leftovers or salad fixins in the fridge. As a kid, I always wanted to buy my lunch, despite the fact that my mother packed fresh fruit and homemade sweets with every bag lunch. I think it must have been the sandwich, peanut butter and jelly (which I hate to this day) or bologna and yellow mustard, that I objected to. 

A notable exception was anything with cream cheese, which in our house meant cream cheese and olive or cream cheese and jelly, often my mothers homemade peach jam. I also think that the store-bought white bread of the day was another drawback; I clearly remember tearing the center of a slice away from the crust and rolling it into a gummy ball of dough which some kids liked, but most of us used as ammunition.

Outside the lunchbox, there were some sandwiches that were rare treats, restaurant-made as they were. For us, living right outside Philadelphia, we're talking incomparable cheese steaks and hoagies. A few years later, when we moved to Saudi Arabia, shawarma from a street vendor was always a satisfying, and late night ham and Bel Paese cheese sandwiches with mustard and mayonnaise from Angelo at the snack bar were a staple at my Swiss boarding school.

After college, I moved to Virginia Beach and The Jewish Mother was a fun place to go see live music. True to their name, they had an extensive deli menu, too, and if I was there, I loved Mother's Uncle Sam: turkey, avocado, and sprouts on pumpernickel. Another great sandwich down there was the Taste Unlimited roast beef and havarti with their signature dressing, perfect for packing a picnic to take to the beach.

These days, there's a roasted cauliflower with tahini and pickled beets that a little Lebanese takeout place up in Buffalo makes that I order every time I'm in town, and locally? It's Earl's chipotle turkey with bacon and  field greens. Can you believe I just figured out that they probably named that place Earl's after the Earl of Sandwich?

Yup.

So, to recap, here are my top 8 sandwiches:

Cream cheese and homemade peach jam

Philly cheesesteak

Italian hoagie

Shawarma

Ham and Bel Paese with pickles and mustard and mayonaise

Mother's Uncle Sam

Roast Beef and Havarti

Cauliflower and tahini wrap

Chipotle turkey with bacon and field greens on ciabatta

Oh? And in a pinch? I would enjoy that calabrese and provolone on pane di campagna, as long as it is gently warmed. But I can make that one myself.

8 Homegrown Vegetables

I have had a community garden for 10 years now. My how time flies! Most of the time I still feel like the novice new kid, fighting an endless battle against mugwort and wire grass, but I guess I've learned a few things, too. One of the most important lessons is that every season is different, and although I can do some things to help my plants thrive, most of it is up to them.

At this point in my agrarian career, there are eight must-have crops:

tomatoes
shell beans
okra
eggplant
peppers
corn
summer squash
winter squash

As reluctant as I am to leave my garden for vacations and family visits, coming back after time away and seeing how much has grown is always really exciting. It reminds me that we often lose sight of daily progress when we are right there.

I can't wait until Monday!

Eight Birds

I never paid much attention to birds growing up. My Aunt Sis would always call us to the back door of her Virginia home whenever she spotted a Cardinal or a Blue Jay, though, and I learned early that Robin Red Breast was a sign of spring. But beyond that, all birds with dark feathers were blackbirds and anything that swam on a pond and ate leftover bread was a duck.

I take that back: I knew what pigeons were, and still, on a high school trip, I bought a handful of corn from the vendor in the Piazza del Duomo so that I could hold a dozen of them on my outstretched arm.

Later, when I was in college, it was the bird feeder outside my Aunt Harriett's picture window by the kitchen table and the field guide on the sill that finally captured my attention and kindled my interest in birds. It was kind of thrill to be able to sort and name the birds that came for the millet and sunflower seeds. Chickadees, Nuthatches, Titmice, Sparrows, Wrens, Finches, Starlings, Mockingbirds, and Downy Woodpecker joined Cardinals, Blue Jays, Ducks, and Pigeons in my consciousness.

In 2006, I participated in the Northern Virginia Writing Project Summer Institute, an experience which changed my teaching and writing forever. One of the most popular books among our cohort was Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott. Subtitled Some Instructions on Writing and Life, the book draws its title from advice Lamott's writer dad gave to her 10-year-old brother when he was overwhelmed by a report he had to write on birds: Bird by bird, buddy. Just take it bird by bird.

All summer, we used those words as short hand to describe the best approach to any overwhelming task (such as teaching or writing or teaching writing): Get started and keep going, day by day, word, by word, student by student.

Here are 8 birds I've only spotted once or twice:

Indigo Bunting
Cedar Waxwing
Magpie
Common Loon
Kingfisher
Virginia Rail
Oriole
Screech Owl

But I'll keep looking!

Top 8 Radio, 1972

When we were kids, our car radio was always tuned to WFIL; they played all the top 40 hits live from Center City Philadelphia. Out on any errand, short or long, my mom, brother, and sister and I would sing along to every song.

The year I was in fourth grade, I got a clock radio for Christmas. I guess my mom must have thought that it was time I started getting myself up and ready for school, and what better way to start the day than listening to the radio? She was right about that-- even today my alarm wakes me, not to the top 40, but to NPR. Even so, that first year of having my own radio made a huge impression on me.

Whenever I hear a song from 1972, I'm transported back to that yellow room I shared with my sister. I am sitting on my bed, a homemade canopy contraption made with a plywood frame on the ceiling hung with dyed bed sheets on spring curtain rods. My night table is on the left, and the boxy white analog clock with AM radio is right under the little lamp.

Here's the list of my favorite eight songs of that year:

Doctor My Eyes by Jackson Browne
Candy Man by Sammy Davis Jr
American Pie by Don McLean
Brandy by Lookin Glass
Daddy Don't You Walk So Fast by Wayne Newton
Morning Has Broken by Cat Stevens
Song Sung Blue by Neil Diamond
Heart of Gold by Neil Young

That was also the year I started buying my own records, and I owned the 45 of almost every song on that list!

Pie!

We brought a bag full of those Georgia peaches up here to Buffalo, and they are ripening quite nicely. So much so, that Heidi's mom decided to bake a peach and cherry pie for dessert tonight. It was a warm and satisfying end to a meal of pan-roasted halibut with buerre blanc, sauteed fresh corn, and a spinach salad, and it got me thinking about pie.

Years ago, when my friend and colleague Leah and I started our first online writing community for our sixth graders, using new-ish technology to bridge the distance between our 2 middle schools, the students immediately started shaping the virtual space all on their own, first by posting polls and questionnaires on the discussion board topic we called Random. One of the more memorable was Pie or Ice Cream?  

The profound simplicity of the question, along with the engaged debate it inspired, convinced me that we were on to something much larger than we knew. Our students voluntarily wrote seven days a week, nearly 24 hours a day, on that topic and many others. It was September 2006, coincidentally the very same month that Facebook went live to anyone over the age of 13 with an email address.

As for me? I love ice cream, but I was always pie, no question. Here are 8 of my favorites, in no particular order:

Lemon Meringue
Peach and Blueberry
Blackberry Cobbler
Apple Cranberry
Pecan
Sour Cherry
Chocolate Mousse
Key Lime

And, if I didn't have to choose between the two, I would have them a la mode, anytime!

8 Great Road Trips

This top eight list idea started on a road trip; I love a road trip; so naturally my first list would be road trips.

Here they are in chronological order:

Geneva to Lugano 1978

This was the annual trip our high school basketball team took to the big tournament. Our school was much smaller than the other contenders, and we rarely made it to the semi-finals, but Geneva had the only McDonalds within 200 miles of our school, and our bus always stopped there before we headed back through the Alps. Those french fries and shakes made the sting of getting spanked by the home team a little less painful.

Hamilton to Virginia Beach and back 1983

At the end of the January term our senior year 3 of my college friends and I decided to take the three days we had before the spring semester and go down to Virginia Beach where my mom was living. We left at about 10 at night and drove all the way through, arriving at the ocean just as the sun was rising. We spent the day and one night and then turned back north, breaking our return trip in DC with one of my high school buddies, where we ate fondue and drank beer and Jaegermeister by the fire long into the evening.

Austin to Santa Fe 1992

The first stop was San Antonio and that tiny adobe mission we know as the Alamo, then we ate the best cheese and bean enchiladas I have ever tasted at a roadside dive outside Del Rio. We dipped into Mexico for the afternoon and then drove north on 285 through the scrubby desert in the western panhandle of Texas. Crossing the Pecos River at sunset, the sandstone gorge was glowing red, lit by the golden light reflecting off the water. I'll never forget it.

Minneapolis to Rapid City and back 1997

Early in August, my mom had a conference to attend in South Dakota, and since I was on summer break she invited me to tag along. Heading west, it wasn't long before we left the Twin Cities way behind passing first through farm land and then over the Red River and into the prairie. Until then, I didn't realize exactly where the American west was located. After lunch and fantastic homemade pie at Al's on the Missouri River, our next stop was the Corn Palace in Mitchell. There I bought a paperback of O Pioneers by Willa Cather and read that story of hard scrabble and survival on the prairie as we drove across the same land. In the next four days, we saw the Badlands, Mt. Rushmore, the Black Hills, Crazy Horse Monument, Deadwood, Devil's Tower, Wind Cave, AND Wall Drug.

Arlington to Bar Harbor and Buffalo 2005

Back when my oldest nephews were kids, we used to rent a minivan and drive to Mount Desert Island for a week of hiking and blueberry picking. This particular summer, we stopped in Buffalo on the way home and stayed with Heidi's folks, where we explored Niagara Falls, including Cave of the Winds, and camped on the shore of Lake Erie. We played Settlers of Catan at the picnic table, cooked our meals over an open driftwood fire, and the boys climbed the cliffs that towered over the lake beach.

Minneapolis to Medora and back, ND 2007

Heidi and I joined my mom and a couple of her book club friends for what we came to call the "Dead White Guy" tour of the upper midwest. Our first stop was Sauk Centre, birthplace of Sinclair Lewis and thinly disguised setting for his breakthrough novel, Main Street. From there we drove through Fargo and on to Valley City, which was the childhood home of one of our traveling companions. Then it was all the way across the state, through countless fields of sunflowers, to Medora, and Teddy Roosevelt National Park, home of the North Dakota Badlands. We did the famous steak fry and western show, and toured the park, pulling our van over to witness an actual wild stallion fight. On the return we stopped at Fort Mandan, Lewis and Clark's first winter headquarters.

Arlington to Isle of Palms 2011

We rented a beach house for spring break, and my mom flew in from Minnesota to drive down with us. My sister and her family traveled from Atlanta to meet us in Isle of Palms. We rented a minivan, and although Emily and Treat flew down later in the week, my brother and his dog joined me, Heidi, my mom, and our dog for the trip. We listened to 70s music and laughed all the way down I-95. The first morning we were there, the beach was covered in sea stars, and we thought it must just be like that there, but we didn't see anymore for the rest of the week.

Arlington to Rochester 2019

Heidi and Lucy and I drove west to spend the month of August in Minnesota with my mom. It was a lot of highway, but we passed through Michigan City, where my grandfather was born and raised, and Chicago, the skyline bright at 11 at night. We found a couple of dog parks not far off our route so that Lucy could run a bit, and feasted on fantastic hot Italian sandwiches a couple blocks from the University of Wisconsin in Madison. We admired the glacier carved sandstone in the Dells and cheered when we crossed the St. Croix River entering Minnesota in the 24th hour of our journey. After so many years of visiting my mom out there, it was kind of cool to have my dog and my car there, too. Over the month, we drove back and forth from the Cities to Rochester many times, over the Minnesota and Mississippi Rivers, past the refinery where my mom worked, through farms with fields of corn and soy beans, gray barns and horses, wind breaks and wind mills to the tidy town with numbered streets and avenues and a world-famous clinic at its heart.