Author Archives: Dr. Bear

About Dr. Bear

Lived many places, love food, unable to not have a conversation, earned PhD in Philosophy.

Destiny Cake (I don’t really have a better name)

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Ingredients:
for the cake:

  •  2 1/2 cups all-purpose flour
  • 3/4 cup powdered chocolate
  • 1  tsp.  baking powder
  • 1/2 tsp. salt
  • dash cayenne pepper
  • dash ground cinnamon
  • 1 cup red wine
  • 1/2 tsp. baking soda
  • 1 cup dark molasses (not black strap)
  • 1 cup packed dark brown sugar
  • 1 cup granulated sugar
  • 3 large eggs
  • 1/2 cup softened butter
  • 1/2 cup dark chocolate chips

for the cherry butter-cream frosting:

  • 2 egg whites
  • 1/2 cup sugar
  • dash vanilla
  • 12 Tbsp softened butter
  • 1 cup dried cherries
  • 2 Tbsp unsweetened cherry juice
  • 1 Tbsp Kirsch (cherry brandy)

for the chocolate ganache glaze:

  • 1/2 cup heavy cream
  • 1 1/2 cups chocolate chips
  • 1 Tbsp butter
  • slivered almonds to taste

Destiny_Cake_3Part the First: the Cake

Step 1, Prepare ye the way: Pre-heat the oven to 350, grease & flour the pan or pans, line with parchment covered with almond slices if you like; I think this makes one Bundt cake, two smaller cakes and two or three loaves–smaller is actually better, since it can take forever to cook in the middle..  Also assemble all the ingredients on the counter.

Step 2, sifting the dry ingredients: In a large bowl, sift the flour, chocolate, baking powder, salt, cinnamon, and pepper. Set aside.

Step 3, mixing the wet ingredients: in a medium saucepan (leave room; there will be foam), heat the wine–not boiling, but hot. Take it off the burner, and carefully (!) add the baking soda (this is like the elementary school volcano experiment, but also like my soft pretzel/laugen recipe), whisking it smooth. After the foaming subsides, whisk in and dissolve molasses, the brown and white sugars, and the butter, and then, as it cools,  the eggs.

Step 4, combining:  Add the wet ingredients to the dry ingredients, maybe about a third at a time, mixing thoroughly. You don’t want pockets of dry, floury ingredients.

Step 5, putting it in the pan/pans: Add half the mixture to the prepared pan/pans, sprinkle this with half of the chocolate chips, then pour in the rest of the mixture and sprinkle with (you guessed this, didn’t you) the rest of the chips. They should sink into the batter.

Step 6, pop it in the oven for baby & me: bake the pans at 350 for 35 minutes to an hour, depending on the size of pans you chose, or until you can stick a toothpick in it and pull it out without it being covered with batter. Take it out, let it sit for a minute or so, then take it from the pan onto a wire rack to cool all the way.

Part the Second: the center frosting

Step 7, cherry-ho! in a mixer, combine the cherry ingredients and cop and puree until as smooth as possible, let this sit–the cherries should absorb the mixture so it isn’t too wet.

Step 8, sugar and egg whites: In a big bowl over a pot of boiling water (yes, sort of like a double boiler, but not as hot), whisk the egg whites and the sugar together until the sugar is no longer grainy, and the egg whites begin to whiten.

Step 9, mix and whip: add the mixture to a mixing bowl, and whip it until peaks begin to form and the mixture almost doubles., add the vanilla, and slowly add the butter, then the cherry mixture. Beat to frosting.

Step 10, stuffing: slice the cake or cakes into several layers, how many depends on how ambitious you are and how the cake holds up. I suggest 3. Frost the bottom slice with the cherry-butter-cream frosting, cover with the next & continue. Finally, top with the top, and shape the sides until smooth.

Part the Third: the ganache

Step 12, so rich and decadent: place the chips in a bowl, and heat the cream in a pan. Have the butter handy.

Step 13, more whipping: when the cream begins to boil, turn off the heat and pour it over the chocolate. As the chocolate melts, whisk it smooth. Add the butter and whisk.

Step 14, glazed and confused: pour the chocolate over the cakes, spreading with a spatula as needed. Do this quickly, since the chocolate will thicken pretty quickly. After it is all covered and smooth, you may cover with the almond slices, or just dust the edges with the almond slices. I left the top blank, and then decorated it with marzipan shapes and cyphers (ALEA IACTA EST).
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Step 15 share: Surprise a friend or mystify a co-worker. Serve for afternoon coffee with someone you love, deliver to a college student, enjoy life. Like life, this is rich; it is bitter & dark, but also intense and sweet (like some hearts…

A Recommendation

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Asheville-Fringe-and-Arts-Festival-2014Hey, folks!
Just a quick recommendation: Starting Thursday, the city of Asheville, North Carolina will have its Fringe Arts Festival–lots of intense and alternative live art, including a play by a really cool playwright who is also a friend of the Bistro’s: Deborah Harbin. Stuff will be all over Asheville (the poster above is a link), and the play is part of a double-header at the Odditorium on Thursday and Saturday nights at 9:00pm.
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Descartes and the beginning of Modern thought

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Descartes, René 1596-1650It is one of the marks of a great teacher that he or she equips us to move beyond his or her lessons, even if that means that in the rear-view mirror the teacher’s ideas may seem wrong, misguided, or even foolish. I do not particularly like his philosophy, but I have to acknowledge that René Descartes is that kind of thinker–he changed the landscape of our minds.

Let me start with a story:
Imagine the time period around 1619, 1620 or so. A lot of Europe is still medieval–Kings, Knights, Serfs–even the Holy Roman Empire (as either Voltaire or my Mom quipped: “neither Holy, nor Roman, nor an Empire”). Some parts of Europe are moving beyond that–Empires are grabbing land across the Atlantic, The Renaissance has happened in Italy (and beyond!). Nikolai Kopernik (Copernicus) has already published–posthumously–and Galileo has galleopublished, but then recanted and denied it all in order to avoid becoming posthumous.

Most importantly, Luther attempted to convince the Church to return to its faith, and–inadvertently–started a religious revolution, the Protestant Reformation. With that, with his “Here I stand,” he also challenged the authority of traditions.
This was also the beginning of a long series of religious wars and persecutions and would flow across Europe for the next 100 or more years.

Descartes remained a faithful Catholic, at least nominally, and, as far as we know, sincerely as well. As a young man needing to make his way in the world, looking for adventure, having a good education and a great aptitude towards mathematics–both theoretical and applied–Descartes became a military engineer. Much of his career Battle of White Mountainhere is vague, but he was attached to armies which saw a lot of the most brutal fighting in Europe.
Most notably, his division was at the Battle of White Mountain in Bohemia, where 4,000 Protestants were killed or wounded.

What we have is a bright, sensitive young man, raised as a good, and slightly idealistic, Christian boy, a well-mannered Frenchman, suddenly slogging across Europe in all kinds of weather, watching a war unfold  that started for noble, clear moral reasons, but, as is inevitable, degenerated into the messy brutal thing which war is. He saw men die–of bullets, of artillery, of swords and pikes, of infection and disease. He would have seen villages destroyed, crops burnt or stolen, women raped, children starving.
He came back to the cleaned up salons of Paris, where bright people had effervescent conversations about vital matters, and threw skepticism and doctrine about like toys. He set to writing, looking for the clarity of math and the sciences in a very uncertain world, and trying to salvage certainty.

None of that appears in his writings.

What does appear is a few nights in November of 1619, when Descartes was stuck in a house in Neuburg an der Donau, Germany, sitting by the big stove, thinking and writing. He invented Analytic Geometry, but he also devised a method of logic by which to Georges_de_La_Tour_010ascertain truth. He understood that some of what he knew was either false or unreliable, which made all he knew suspect, and he resolved to test all of his certainties, finding they were all doubtable except one, his own existence. Since he was doubting, there had to be a he who doubted, so he must exist (“I think, therefore I am”). From there he slowly proves his way back to the world, and to God.

All of Cartesianism is fairly involved, but what makes him the “Father of Modern Philosophy,” and one of the first modern thinkers are several things, two of which I’d like to discuss: All truth is subject to proof, rather than simply being accepted from tradition and authority, and the mind and the body are fundamentally different.

To me, it is important to remember that this Copernican shift from tradition and ancient authority to proof and individual conviction was undertaken to defend Descartes’ faith. This shift in philosophy is not an attack upon the Church; it is an attempt to return to certainty after the Church’s failure. Although Medieval Christendom produced some great thinkers, it was hobbled by a corrupt power structure which failed on many levels–one of them the spiritual; the Reformation was a reaction to that failure. The religious wars of the Reformation weakened the “Blessed Assurance” further, so that Humanists like Descartes, Montesquieu, Hobbes or Locke were obliged to look elsewhere.

But finally, Descartes’ contention that the self which thinks, and which can be certain, and which can know, is fundamentally different from the frame that sustains it. Whether Mountain Time 5 shadowor not we believe this, this remains a fundamental way in which our thinking is cast–that my mind and my self are radically different from these 170 pounds of bone, nerve, muscle and sinew, organs–both my own and borrowed–which I seem to inhabit. We think of our body as something (thing? how can the doctor say thing?) we are in, not something we are. It is a wet machine useful for sustaining the mind and for the mind to use, but the mind is other.

This is unacceptable.
The scars on my skin, flesh, bone and nerve are as much me as memories and dreams. The joy of touch and taste is joy for me–regardless of whether I call it skin or sensation or heart or mind. I am my body, but my body is so much more than a complex machine, just as the universe is so much more than the brass model Galileo built.
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Creativity

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As a child, I lived in a great big gray apartment building.
Ulmenweg 4It wasn’t one of those terribly drab Warsaw-Pact Blocks, or one of the horrifying projects in North America, but it was a 1972 apartment building–16 floors, 6 apartment a floor, and the outside mostly slate concrete and river pebble accents.
Inside, the walls were a chalky white paint with a matte finish.
The floors were mostly industrial gray linoleum tile, except for the parquet floor in the living room and the white tile in the bathroom.

My mother found it oppressive.
The unbroken gray floors and brilliant white walls glared at us all cold and sterile. Die erde dreht sichWall after wall, down the hall, the same chalky white.
My mother complained about it–not a lot, but we were in no doubt how she felt about it.
In the living room and bedrooms, she covered the floors with throw-rugs, and hung pictures and posters, but down the hall, the chalky cold white walls resisted any warm color and stubbornly refused to make the place a home.

With some mothers, there would have just been a lot of complaining; my mother bought 4 cans of paint: brown, green, red, and a little black.
As I watched on in disbelief, she walked up to the front hallway, and painted the brown trunk, green leaves, and red apples of an apple tree–outlining and shading a bit with the black.
I stared.
Mom's Apple TreeShe would have hung hooks in the branches for our coats, but the concrete under the white paint proved too hard to drill.

This whole thing

blew       my        mind.

It had never occurred to me that a grown-up would solve a problem by just going out and doing something crazy like this. Splashing paint on the wall! It amazed me–facing a problem down and responding by drawing a mural!
Kids my age were pretty whiney, and unimaginative, and pretty much accepted the world as it was, but here was an adult, facing something that drove her nuts head on, and attacking it with craziness and creativity.

This sort of thing is actually pretty typical of my mom.
She faces a problem, complains about it a little (sometimes a lot), then she tries to come up with a solution that is creative and constructive. Although she is occasionally let down, my mom believes that most problems can be solved with prayer, kindness, hard work, and creativity.

That may be naïve, but I still find it amazing.
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Sweet Potato Pasta

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Sweet Potato Pasta with Beet Hummus a light Tahini drizzleI was feeling creative this week and made a sweet potato & Moroccan spice  pasta with beet humus and a tahini drizzle. The colors are amazing, and the flavors are too.
I promised my source that I wouldn’t publish the beet hummus recipe at this time, since it is part of a research project on beets’ nutritional benefits, but I will try to at a later date.

Ingredients
  • 2 cups flour
  •  pinch salt
  • 3 eggs (at room temperature)
  • 1 Tbsp olive oil
  • ½ cup baked sweet potato
  • ½ tsp Moroccan spices (Ras el hanout or رأس الحانوت )
Step 1, Sifting: Measure out the dry ingredients (flour & salt) into a sifter. Sift (I’ll bet you didn’t see that coming). You can do this the traditional way, onto a clean Sweet Potato Pasta3surface, or the easy way, into a large bowl.
Step 2, blending: in a food processor or blender, add your sweet potato and spices and chop it to a fine paste. Add the eggs and oil and blend. Put this mixture in the well in the flour.
Sweet Potato Pasta4Step 3, People, people who knead pasta: When mixture becomes too thick to mix with a fork, begin kneading with your hands or your bread hook. Knead dough for 8 to 12 minutes, adding flour as it will take it—the final bit by hand even if you are using a machine. The dough will be harder than bread dough, and smooth and flexible.

Step 4, let it sit: Wrap dough tightly in plastic and allow it to rest at room temperature for 30 minutes.

Step 5, Roll on: Roll out the dough with a pasta machine or a rollingSweet Potato Pasta5 pin to your desired thickness. For the ravioli, I rolled it to about a millimeter. For long Pasta, I prefer it pretty thin. Cut into your favorite style of noodle.

Step 6, cooking: Bring water to a boil in a large pot and add salt. Cook the pasta until al dente, 1 to 8 minutes depending on thickness. Drain, treat, and eat.

The Old Year’s Books

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I met an interesting man over New Years—it’s one of my hobbies, collecting interesting people.
BooksBen & I were discussing our love of books, how wonderful it is to read and how hard it is to write, and he said something that struck me. He is having trouble with wearing out books—the books he uses a lot, especially the reference books. I thought about how I can wear out books—actually, I can wear out just about anything, but there are books I have read so much that they did begin to wear.

There are books I have worn out, and there are also books that I will eventually wear out.
I have a friend who is quite nice and very kind, but who never reads a book Cheese & Poetry 2more than once. I feel that this is like choosing to never see a sunset twice, or never listening to Beethoven’s 7th or Jump, Jive & Wail again, or never returning to New York City, or never eating a chocolate torte with a rich ganache because you have already had one.

My favorite book of this past year, one that I even bought trade-cloth, new, and retail, because I wanted to own it, was The Golem and the Jinni by Helene Wicker.

The premise is slightly fantastical, perhaps even slightly magic realist: a golem and a jinni meet up in the tenements of New York at the tail end of the 19th century.
For those of you who are not immersed in Eastern European Jewish Folk-lore, or students of Kabbala, or fans of the 1915 silent film, the Golem is a creature made of clay who can be brought to life by rabbis who practice Kabbalist rites by using one of the sacred names of God. The Golem is bound to serve a master, and is usually created in a time of great need to destroy the enemies of God’s people.
Most of you should know that a Jinni or a Djin (الجني) is a Middle-Eastern fire spirit, generally with magical powers, and often mercurial and chaotic.

A rather disagreeable man pays a mysterious and dangerous hermit a great deal of money to create a golem who is a perfect wife, then tries to emigrate to the United States. She, as yet un-awakened, is packed in a shipping crate. One night, suffering from a bad fever and from curiosity, he awakens her, but dies shortly after that. She has been created to serve a master—in fact, she can sense the desires of others and feels a strong, even painful, need to help them—but she is now on her own. In the harbor, she jumps out of the ship and walks ashore, into the Jewish section of Manhattan.
Before she gets into too much trouble—she steals a doughnut a young boy desires and gives it to him, but begins to feel a great rage when she is attacked—she is found by a kindly old rabbi who takes her in and tries to teach her how to be human (as well as keep the law).

Meanwhile, a tinsmith in the Little Syria section of New York is repairing a lamp and sets a Jinni free—mostly free; he is free from the lamp, but still captured in human form. To help him hide, the smith tries to teach him how to blend in as a human being. It is difficult, because he is proud and selfish and not used to caring what others think.

GolemJinni

Eventually, of course, they will meet.

The characters are vividly drawn, and the plot is well carried out. It is a great story beautifully told, and that is the strength of the book. The time period is evoked in a way that is powerful—the grit and smell of the end of the century in a city that contained worlds of people all speaking in their native tongues.
However, it is also a fascinating meditation on what it means to be human—something each of them has to try to learn. They are also a wonderful study in contrast: she is a servant, and sensitive to the needs of others, solid, a creature of the earth, but underneath, also by nature a killing machine. He is self-centered and proud, living for himself with no thought of helping others, mercurial, a spirit of fire.
Yet learning to appear human changes each of them, and then meeting each other changes each of them forever. In some of the best moments, they meet at night (neither requires sleep, yet neither can move about freely during the day), and find themselves arguing about humans, and especially about her need to connect with and help others, which he finds baffling.

Shakespeare & Co stairsIt is an incredible book, so much so that I paid for it.
If you wish, you can borrow mine—beautiful print on creamy paper edged in indigo—or it came out in paperback this past Tuesday.

For the New Year, eat well, read well, talk well and love well,
and do each as often as you can–
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Exuberance

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Christmas was one of those times it was wonderful to be growing up in Germany.
Everywhere, there was Christmas. I would walk home in the snow, and pausing to look up and see a sky full of stars as the church bells all rang the hour. We would sled down the half mile of the Osterberg. I would walk downtown to the Christmas market at the town square, with all the merchants with brightly colored umbrellas over their stalls and tables, picking my way through the apples and oranges and nuts, through the tables of hand-carved wooden toys, though the beautiful ornaments, and all the while, the air was filled with the smell of gingerbread, and of crepes, but most of all, the smell of candied almonds being made in a big barrel.

One year, our youth sponsors took us on a hike the week before Christmas. It was a long hike, thorough the woods. As the afternoon wore on, it got darker and darker, and we walked closer and closer to each other. We were in a thick pine forest, and beyond our flashlights, there was almost no light—that is why they call it the Black Forest.
It began to snow, coming down quickly in huge white flakes, and coating the ground ahead of us. The line tightened even more, and the littler children walked in the footprints of the larger kids. The snow began coming down even harder, so that one could barely see the dark shadows of the trees before and behind us, and covering our footprints behind us. It was now pitch black, covered over with a flurry cloud of white.

Suddenly, we stumbled into a clearing.

In the middle of the clearing was a pine tree covered from top to bottom with burning candles. The dazzling light turned the dark world we were in into a blinding white sphere. As each heavy snowflake would drift into view, it would suddenly shine. It remains one of the most beautiful things I have ever seen, and one of the most extravagant. There was also a candle-lit table with hot cocoa and Christmas cookies, and we warmed up and ate and sang songs, all the while staring at the beautiful tree covered with dozens and dozens of burning candles. In the middle of the chaos and darkness of the forest, a wonderful, dazzling bit of light had been planted. It served no purpose, but it defied the cold dreariness of winter, and, by its exuberance, turned it dazzling white.

Care

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When I am not at the Bistro or my other two jobs, I live with a misanthropic dog.
It’s not entirely true that he doesn’t like people; he likes people, but is not very good at liking.
Mickey also growls at and bites people.Mickey on chair 001
There are folks who think that dogs are good judges of character; he is not. He has bitten some of the best people I know. People see him and say, “Oh! He’s so cute! Is he sweet?” No. He isn’t. It is just a matter of time before he snaps at you.
Vets insist he be muzzled and sometimes even drugged before they will examine him.

Mickey is a Cairn Terriorist.

He seems to hate most people, but he loves me.
He still bites me occasionally, but usually I bite him back, and I weigh 150 pounds more than he does.
I also growl and bark more loudly.

Because he is unpredictable and vicious, he is often called “Stupid Dog!” but he is not. He is quite smart–not wise, but clever.
Once, when we were taking care of a golden retriever, the two of them were completing for my attention. Biscuit won by sitting on me–all 200 pounds of him. Mickey stared at him a minute, then walked into another room, and came back carrying a tennis ball in his mouth. He looked at Biscuit for a moment, then he flicked his head, tossing the tennis ball into the next room. Biscuit bounded off after it, and Mickey quietly took his place.

Mickey was a stray when we got him.
He appears to have been on the road for quite a while–his claws were worn down, and he had at least 4 intestinal parasites. He has an odd kink in his tail, so I think it was broken at some point. He will never allow anyone to touch his tail, in fact, he will turn with a furious snarl if startled from the back, sometimes even if touched anywhere near his haunches.

I put up with him; in fact, I’m rather fond of him, but I accept that Mickey on Round Bald (2)his affection will not come when I choose, but rather when he chooses. I wonder what happened in the two or three years before I knew him. I wonder if he chose to run away from something, I wonder what broke his tail and stiffened that hip. I assume he has his reasons for his fear and anger; sometimes, they catch up to him in his nightmares, or during storms and loud noises.

I will never know; he is a dog and can never tell me his history.
Yet he does have one.

I don’t have to understand him to care for him.
I just have to care, and to be there with food, water, play, companionship, long walks on the AT. and a lap for naps.
It’s actually better if I know I don’t understand him, and I don’t make any assumptions or have expectations.
I just have to read his mood right now.

He doesn’t really understand me either, and he knows this.
Yet he is fond of me.

He doesn’t have to be sweet for me to care for him. His unpredictability and lack of insight don’t remove my responsibility to care for him, rather they make it stronger.
After all, we humans should be the understanding creatures.
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Courage

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Anybody who knows me knows that I have a tendency to lose things—notes, books, pens, spectacles, kidneys, my left hand, etc. Once I almost lost my brother.

It happened like this:
James & I were out for a long walk in the woods a mile or so from the apartment we lived in. I admit, I was a little unhappy to have my brother tagging along, and was wishing I were with cooler friends, but there it was. We were late getting home (again, anybody who knows me knows that I am almost always late; I have a fairly good sense of time, but choose to ignore it). We were late, and I was worried about getting into trouble, so we took a short-cut.
There was a huge construction site near our house, and by cutting across it (I love a good steeple chase, always have) I felt we could make better time. It was probably to be a new apartment building—20 stories or so, so they had dug a good basement/foundation, and left a pile of dirt. The pile of dirt was about a story and a half tall, and maybe a block wide—in the Midwest, this would qualify as a mountain.  We began to climb,
…and climb,
…and climb.

At the top, there was a huge plateau of dirt, stretching as far as I could see; I couldn’t even see the 16 story building we lived in, just a world of dirt. It had been raining for a few days, so it was muddy, and we sunk in as we walked, but I had the confidence of an 11-year-old who lives life as a disinherited nobleman, so I wasn’t worried.
Maybe a little worried about what my Mom would say, but not terribly worried.

We started across the mud, two small explorers alone in a wasteland.

About half way through, we encountered a big patch of clay, and James began to sink. You sink a little bit in mud, but clay pulls you down like quicksand, and holds you tight.
He sank, and started to yell.
I told him to keep very, very still, otherwise he would sink deeper.
He kept still, but started to cry.
He was chest deep in vicious clay, still sinking, and I had no firm footing to pull him out.
These were some of the most terrifying minutes I have ever spent.

Talking to him, trying to calm him, I worked my way to where he was stuck. He looked at me with his watery pale blue eyes, panicked, but absolutely convinced that I would take care of him. I wish I had been as sure.

I only knew that the thought of losing him was more than I could bear.

Gradually—I am not entirely sure how—I worked him out of that hole he was sinking into. All of him except one shoe, which I couldn’t recover.
We slogged home in silence, and were in big trouble; we were late, we were covered head to toe in mud, and he was missing one shoe.

I have a retarded brother.
I realize that anyone who has a brother has thought that at some time, but my brother has Down Syndrome. It is a genetic disorder—one of those failed meiosis things—meaning he has an extra 21st chromosome. This leads to a variety of developmental delays and physical differences. He can communicate English, German and ASL, and, when he isn’t cranky and mule-headed, has an amazing level of empathy, but he does have cognitive and social limitations. As his younger brother (he loves to remind me he is the older one and the good-looking one; my sister is incredibly smart, that left me as the creative, eccentric one), this was generally difficult.

Let me make perfectly clear that I do not like the word retarded, and I hate hearing it used as a pejorative.

Until I started High School, we had never been in the same school. If any of you remember the High School Cafeteria, you will remember that there are rigid social divisions—who can sit with whom, who the cool or popular kids are, which are the pariahs. You might remember the nerdy or geek tables as being the outcasts—the freaks—but there was always one table that was even lower on the scale: The Special Education Table. In those days, the Special Education kids were kept far way—often in a trailer—but invisible, except in the cafeteria. Each day, I would see him there with his buddies, and each day, I would turn my face, afraid to be shamed by being associated with “them.”

This was terrible.
I was wracked with guilt for weeks.
Each day I resolved I would say Hi, and each day I would chicken out, and them kick myself for my cowardice. “He’s your brother! How can you disown him?!?” However, each time I walked by, I turned away, afraid of what my friends might say. I thought about it constantly,  lay awake at night brooding on it, prayed about it, worked it through, but I felt so awful.

Finally, after a month or so, I worked up the courage, and, as I walked by, in a little timid voice, I said: “Hi, Jimmy.”

He stared at me with those blue eyes.
Terror and shame played across them.
He turned away, and covered his face, hoping his friends hadn’t noticed that this “freshman,” this geeky kid with glasses and braces and a voice that cracked had talked to him.

I laughed.

After that, each day I made it a point to stop, and in as loud a voice as I could to yell: “Hey, Jim-bo!”

That’s what brothers do.

PS: He turns 52 next Saturday. If you want to send him a card, send a message, and I’ll send you his address. He loves to have a fuss made over him (who doesn’t?)

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