Forced Hiatus

After a forced leave of absence, I'm happy to breathe new life into your favorite blog, "Your Prodigal Son." Through the astounding power of the internet I can see it's body has not even begun to decompose. It is my sincere hope that the coming year won't be quite as intense as the last few months and I'll be able to detail all my student activity for you in loving detail.

What happened? This is the man you have to blame:



Freakishly tanned? Certainly. Formerly head of a major mortgage company? Oh yeah. Center of maelstrom of litigation? Big 10-4 on that one.

And, being a fairly large corporation, there has been quite a lot of work to do. I can't go into details of course, but suffice it to say that litigation will be ongoing.

Why Egg Salad?

So, the egg salad sandwich recipe in my previous post may have seemed out of the ordinary. But the reality is that egg salad has never been as much a part of my life as it is now. The reason is the Outdoor Church, an outfit that (coincidentally?) Irene begins work for next week.

For whatever reason, egg salad is the sandwich of choice among the homeless population of Cambridge (where they are distributed). It's a happy coincidence because they are also full of protein and provide otherwise valuable nutrition to an undernourished population. While Irene was at North Prospect we made sandwiches for the Outdoor Church to deliver--now we've moved up to the collecting and delivering.

For obvious reasons the focus in making the sandwiches is usually on quantity. But I said to myself, "Why shouldn't homeless people have nice egg salad sandwiches with paprika and prepared mustard? Is there something inherent in being homeless that makes them dislike paprika?"

The answer is obvious. Everyone likes paprika.

Egg-cellent Egg Salad Sandwiches

I just couldn't resist. Here you go:

INGREDIENTS

* 4 eggs (enough for two sandwiches)
* 1/4 cup mayonnaise
* 1 teaspoon prepared yellow mustard
* 1/4 cup chopped green onion
* 1/4 teaspoon paprika
* salt and pepper to taste

DIRECTIONS

1. Place the eggs in a saucepan and cover them with cold water. Bring the water to a boil and then immediately remove from heat. Cover and let eggs stand in hot water for 10 to 12 minutes. Remove from hot water, cool, peel and chop.

2. Place the chopped eggs in a bowl, and stir in the mayonnaise, mustard and green onion. Season with salt, pepper and paprika. Stir and serve on your favorite bread or crackers.

Enjoy!

Photos

Here are the photos from Irene's graduation, and here are a few from Webster's wedding.

Enjoy!

EdFest 2008

Sorry for the delay in posting. We had a big trip up North by Ed and Nic. A college reunion tour! Ed was up for a science conference down by the World Trade Center where I used to work and Nic came up from New York for the weekend. Good times. I put a few of the photos up online here.

And, on top of that, our soccer team played their first game on Friday and won 2-1, with your son scoring the winning goal!

Memorial Day

At this very moment, Somerville's Memorial Day Parade is passing in front of my house, with all its marching bands, sirens, and even the occasional cannon firing. Actually, the parade path winds the exact route I walk home from church, so following today's service I got to see a great deal of the goings on.

Which set me to wondering: How should one celebrate Memorial Day? Parades are wonderful things--the very fact that we have them is an obvious sign that the community supports and thanks its veterans. Parades also bring the community together briefly, and instill a sense of national pride in the citizenry, especially from the old (who are the primary participants in the parade) to the young (who are often most bedazzled by the spectacle). But there's no specific connection between parades and Memorial Day; after all, we have parades on many major holidays. And the parade can't be primarily about thanking the participants, although many active military personnel participate, because of the two holidays we dedicate to the Armed Forces it's Veteran's Day where we celebrate our current military force, and Memorial Day where we commemorate the fallen.

Indeed, viewed from a certain perspective, the way people generally choose to celebrate Memorial Day--with barbecues, pool openings, and general frivolity--is quite peculiar. If Memorial Day is meant to honor the memory of military personnel who are no longer among us, including those who died in the heat of battle, there's very little that could be more sobering. What could be more tragic than the thought of the many young men, years younger than I am now, who died on foreign shores, far from home, from the places they knew, and the people that they loved?

One could always say, I suppose, that they would want us to be happy, and that they would want us to enjoy the fruits of their sacrifice. That today of all days we should be happy, and remember the fallen well. Still, there is a powerful sadness in Memorial Day that isn't echoed in the cannon fire, and isn't reflected in the faces of the people watching the parade go by.

In the end, the only thing that I can find that ties them is their cause. Both soldiers on the battlefield and people cheering at a parade do what they do from a love of their country, and of what it represents. It seems strange to me that that should be it, but it's possible that nationalism and somber reflection have a difficult time occupying the same space.

The Big Easy, Part Deux

What else is there to say about the Big Easy? Probably most importantly, the city is anything but self-pitying. It's full of chintzy t-shirts, a wonderful variety of beads, pralines of every imaginable variety, Abita beer, and of course, the omnipresent fleur-de-lis (which is not, as it turns out, just the symbol for the local football team).

Of course, there's more than natural resiliency at work here. Whatever the best way to move past a natural disaster is psychologically, if you have a city that earns a large part of its revenue from tourism the best way to move forward economically is to get things back to normal, and quickly. Someone told me the first businesses to open on Bourbon Street following Hurricane Katrina were the strip clubs. I'm purposefully choosing not to find out whether or not that's true, though it certainly is interesting.

The other thing about New Orleans is that it's hot. Even in May, the temperatures were in the mid-80's with a stifling humidity. What I enjoyed more than anything (besides seeing Irene) about coming back to New England was the brisk spring air. Always good to be home again.