Remembering Easter at Aunt Mary's House

Easter in Dundalk at the Dundalk Maryland Shopping Center

On Easter Sunday, Aunt Mary's house on Peachtree Street in Watersedge looked like Santa's North Pole chocolate factory. She purchased every seasonal candy confection available in the
Dundalk Read's Drug Store and beyond.

We visited Aunt Mary Ash every Easter because, franky, that's where the Easter Bunny lived.

Every sort of Easter variety candy and "peep" known to exist wound up in Aunt Mary's buffet display.
Especially enticing were the hollow milk chocolate eggs with little Easter scenes inside and our names
written in icing on the outside.

I have no idea how long it took Aunt Mary to consume all that cand,y because even with two adolescent
nieces and a nephew visiting, there was enough left over to open a candy retail outlet. 

She and Uncle Joe didn't have children of their own, so we were extra special.

God Rest Her Soul, my Aunt Mary Ash made Easter into more of a cholcolate, rather than a religious, holiday. Indeed, if heaven doesn't serve chocolate, then it's likely she isn't going to be there.

Honestly, Baltimore enjoys some of the most beautiful Easter retail exhibits as anyplace I've ever
been, and I've been to a few places. At least, I recall when we were growing up in Baltimore, the Easter
offerings were as varied as the colors in a jelly bean factory.

Easter at Aunt Mary's cannot be replicated or duplicated, but the memories she created for us will always be appreciated. Happy Easter to all the Aunt Mary's and Uncle Joe's among us, who created family memories, with or without draining the entire chocolate inventory at the historic Dundalk Read's Drugstore.

Loved this creative article "Paris Postcard" from The New Yorker

It's seldom that I reprint the creative writing of other writers, but this particular essay caught my attention.

French has tried to hold back the infection of the language by outside influences, but some words are impossible to translate.

Lauren Collins writes about "Dog's Dinner", in the February 8 and 15 edition of The New Yorker.
"C'est marrant!" A funny read!

Collins writes, 

The latest stage in the decline of French civilization began in the summer of 2009 at a Thai restaurant in Los Angeles. 

Arash Derambarsh, a book editor and criminology student in Paris, was visiting his twin brother, Sia, who was in California working in film production. Derambarsh ordered chicken curry. It arrived in a bowl big enough to mix a cake. “After that long flight, I couldn’t eat it all,” Derambarsh recalled. “So my brother asked me, ‘You want a doggy bag?’ I thought, Is he talking about ‘Reservoir Dogs’? My brother said, ‘No, Arash, here in the United States, when someone can’t finish his meal he takes it home in a doggy bag and eats it at 2 A.M.’ ”

Derambarsh was sitting in a café in the Seventh Arrondissement of Paris, steak and potatoes steaming in front of him. In 2014, he added local politician to his professional portfolio, winning a seat on the city council of the Paris suburb of Courbevoie. (In 2008, in what TechCrunch called “probably the biggest hoax in the history of Facebook,” he managed to convince much of the French media that he had been elected the president of Facebook, but this was the real deal.) His issue is le gaspillage alimentaire—food waste. Le Monde recently called him an “hyperactiviste” for the cause. Two weeks earlier, a law for which he had lobbied tirelessly—petitioning lawmakers and posing with cast-off carrots—went into effect, requiring French restaurants that produce more than ten metric tons of food waste a year to recycle their scraps. 

Last year, Derambarsh successfully promoted a measure obliging supermarkets to donate unsold food to charity. The recent legislation merely suggested that restaurateurs offer to-go containers to clients, but word had circulated, instantly becoming urban legend: doggy bags à l’américaine were now mandatory in France.

“The literal translation is sac à chien,” Sud-Ouest explained, in a tutorial. “It’s a bag in which the client of a restaurant wraps up the food that he hasn’t finished, in order to serve it to his dog once he gets home. This practice is very well known in Anglo-Saxon and Asian countries, but still in the embryonic stage in France. Of course, if you don’t have a dog, you can also consume the remains of your most recent meal yourself.” Judging from the comments section, diners were not entirely won over. “Impossible for me, I’d be too ashamed,” one wrote. Another declared, “The ‘mutt bag’ in which you mix starter, main course, and dessert?? If I give him that, my dog is going to bite me!!!”

Derambarsh acknowledged that, among his countrymen, the doggy bag suffered a stigma: “People think it means that you’re hungry or you’re poor.”

The proprietor of the café—belly, suspenders, glasses on a cord—sidled up to the table. He knew Derambarsh, a regular. He said that he had overheard a snippet of the conversation.

“Between us, it’s not real, this law,” he whispered.

An American fond of takeout vessels in all their forms—pizza boxes, oyster pails, aluminum-foil swans—asked how many doggy bags he’d given out.

“One, since the beginning of the year,” he said. “Without doubt, foreigners.” He paused for the punch line. “And it was salad that they took. Fuck, salad!”

Derambarsh couldn’t help taking the debate to the adjacent table, where a distinguished-looking woman was eating (a salad) by herself.

“What do you think?” he said.

“I adore the U.S. and I adore doggy bags,” she answered.

She was a professor of English, it turned out, who’d seen her first doggy bag (barbecued ribs) on a pier in San Francisco around 1979. “It didn’t exist chez nous,” she recalled. “Americans are pragmatic, but the French are very conservative.”

In addition to being tacky, the doggy bag, its opponents argue, devalues the work of the chef. A person who puts his leftovers in a hot car might get food poisoning. Consider tartares, seafood, chocolate mousses, dishes with mayonnaise! Restaurateurs could be sued. To combat such worries, the Ministry of Agriculture has come up with a name change: le gourmet bag, “a new appellation, more prestigious and gourmande.”

“The doggy bag won’t change the world, but the supermarket law will,” Derambarsh asserted. He said that he would like Barack Obama to pass the same law in the U.S.

Derambarsh ordered an espresso. He didn’t ask for a doggy bag. His entrecôtewas history. Neither did the American, who had cleaned her plate down to the last caper. ♦  Lauren Collins