James C. Laurence (9/17/1909-7/25/2007)

My dad called last night around 9:45 to let me know that his father, my grandfather, had passed away. While I think we'd all expected that his journey would come to an end sooner rather than later, and while I think each member of my family had tried to prepare for this in his or her own way, the finality is still stark.

Mina and I are heading back to Cleveland today to help out with whatever we can. While there isn't a great deal to actually "do", It feels to me like going home is the right thing to do. More than anything, I suppose, in these times it is best to be around family.

Photo 1: 1995 (Takaoka, Toyama Prefecture, Japan)



I arrived in Nagoya, Japan for teacher training at AEON (one of the "Big 4" English Conversation School companies in Japan) on January 7, 1995, 10 days before the Great Hanshin Earthquake (阪神大震災). It seems so long ago, but I remember that week of training pretty vividly, especially a couple of nights eating out at a little Yakitori (grilled chicken bits on sticks) dive that was under the railroad tracks at Tsurumai Station. That was really my first "wow" experience in Japan.

I moved from Nagoya up to Takaoka, along the sea of Japan coast, a week later and it turned out that the big Kobe earthquake happened the morning of my first day of work. We shook in Toyama, but as it was my first earthquake I had nothing to judge against in terms of deciding whether it was a nearby quake, a small or big one, or an aftershock of something that had happened before I arrived. It was pretty shocking to wake up the next morning and see scenes of Kobe on fire (of course, I couldn't read or understand Japanese, so watching TV the fires could have been right outside my window for all I knew...!)

In any event, this photo was taken months later at a party we had at my colleague and friend Susan's (2nd from right) apartment. My students Hiroki (1st on L), Fumi (3rd on L), and Kaoru (1st on R), and Fumi's younger sister Junko (2nd from L in Kimono) were there, as was my friend Dan, who took the picture. Junko had been to have a formal picture taken prior to her "coming of age ceremony" (成人式), which was to be held the following January, hence the Kimono.

Hiroki got married in 1997, or so, and now has two children. Fumi got married in 2005 and she and her husband have recently moved into a new house in Toyama. Susan got married in 2004, I think I heard from Dan (who got married in 2004 as well, if memory serves, and now has a son). While I have no idea what happened to Kaoru, I do know that Junko got married and moved to Tokyo and recently nearly died due to an illness.

Looking at that photo, you'd never know it about any of us, of course.

Next time, a memory of 1996, the year I turned 25.

An Interesting Summer Project

This summer I have been going through old photographs and negatives and scanning them into digital files. Anyone who has looked at old photos from their parents and grandparents eras has seen how colors fade and I figured that now that digital memory is priced so reasonably, it would be a good time to preserve as many of my pictures as I could.

Part of this that has been interesting has been putting the pictures into some semblance of order. Part of the metadata that is attached to each photo when it gets digitized is the date and time it was scanned (when you import photos from a digital camera, this data comes from the camera's internal clock, so you know when a picture was taken). Software like Photoshop reads this data as the date and time the photo was shot, and since this is obviously not true, I have been changing this date for each and every photo in my collection. Since I have scanned in something over 1,500 photos, this seems like something of a small mountain to overcome.

Anyway, what I find interesting about this is looking at a picture and trying to remember when it was taken. Most of my pictures start in 1995 when I moved to Japan, so things are broken down into '95-'96 in Toyama, '96-'99 in Gifu, '99-'01 in Kochi, '01-'03 in Syracuse, '03-'06 in Tokyo, and '06-Present in Syracuse again. Mixed in there are trips and vacations that I took to firtually every corner of Japan, Southeast Asia, Hawaii, California, Cleveland, and various other locales and trying to place month and year has been an interesting exercise. Obviously, it has also brought back a ton of memories.

Let's see if I can post a year by year account of my photos here.

The Lovely Mina and her Lovely Herbs

Mina and I spent some time on the balcony today repotting a couple of our herb plants. Actually, she repotted, I watched, and thought about which herbs to use for dinner (I ended up using tarragon and sage).

Coming from Japan, and from a reasonably traditional Japanese family, Mina hadn't had much, if any, experience with herbs before we moved in together. Actually, I think she was pretty shocked at the number of spices, herbs, sauces, and other condiments that I collected for our kitchen. In Japan a kitchen with soy sauce, sugar, mirin, miso, and the makings for a good fish stock will do for most people, so having 4 kinds of mustard in the refrigerator is pretty much unheard of (yes, I have at least 4 kinds of mustard on hand at all times - smooth dijon, chunky dijon, Cleveland Stadium, and plain old yellow).

In any event, we're up to 10+ pots of herbs, with basil, marjoram, thyme, tarragon, sage, pineapple sage, chocolate mint, peppermint, lemongrass, cilantro, shiso, red shiso, and others in the collection. It makes me a happy cook to be able to step out on the balcony and grab some fresh herbs for almost anything I am making for dinner. Yum.

Thanks, Mina, for taking such good care of the herbs (and of me, ね)!

Maine - The Rest of the Trip

Back now from MDI, Southwest Harbor, and the rest of our trip to Maine. All in all, we had a lovely time, ate some incredible seafood, and saw a really impressive part of the U.S.A.

As I posted earlier, we arrived there on Friday afternoon and enjoyed a snack of wine, cheese, fruit, and some nuts on the veranda at the B&B we stayed at (http://www.cranberryhillinn.com/) in Southwest Harbor. We had dinner at Beal's Lobster Pier (http://www.bealslobster.com/), which was a nice, down home lobster pound with picnic tables and lobster on plastic cafeteria trays. Saturday, we did some hiking in Acadia National Park and had lunch in Northeast Harbor, a picturesque, more swanky little town than Southwest. Dinner was at Thurston's Lobster Pound (www.acadiainfo.com/thurstons.htm), a place with a nicer view than Beal's (though you pay a little for it), where I had a pound of steamed clams and a crabcake sandwich to go along with Mina's lobster.

Sunday, we spent the morning doing a little hiking and then wandering through Bar Harbor looking for lunch. We chose a local bar and had some clam chowder and a crab salad sandwich. Following that, we went over to the Atlantic Brewing Co. (http://www.atlanticbrewing.com/) for a tour and tasting. Mina especially liked their Auld Ale, while I thought the Island Ginger, which is made with an amount of pulverized ginger, was particularly interesting. After the tasting, we had a sample of the beers and a little snack. For dinner we went to a third lobster pound, which was a BYOB place, so we had to make a run to IGA to get some beers after putting our order in.

After dinner we dropped by a wine bar in Southwest called Sips that my parents had recommended. A had a taster of three reds, one of which in particular stuck with me. Easton's (http://www.terrerougewines.com/eastonwines.html) 2002 Amador County Zinfandel was one of those wines that you have once in a while that changes your perspective. I long ago became a fan of zinfandel, and would guess that 1 of 3 bottles of red wine that I drink is a zin, so it is always exciting for me to find one that is really impressive. The Easton struck me immediately with a nose that I can only describe as smelling of the ocean, that first whiff of it that you get when you come in sight and roll down the windows. I don't know if my impression was based on actually being near the ocean, so I bought a bottle on Monday morning and will pop it open with my parents the next time we are in Cleveland.

Finally, on Monday, we drove down U.S. 1 along the coast, stopping in Brunswick, Bath, Freeport, Camden, and some other points along the way to do some browsing. The big enchilada, as it were, was a stop at the Kittery outlet mall for a look at the Le Creuset store. Mina grabbed up a butter dish and another little ramekin type pot, and we also picked up a burgundy colored griddle pan that looks like it could be pretty useful. We stopped in Lowell, MA on Monday night and arrived back home in Syracuse on Tuesday afternoon. It was just a nice vacation and I look forward to our next one, whenever that might be.

The First Anniversary - Maine, Day 2

Some spectacular weather, more lobster, and a nice sunburn on the back of the neck. We spent our first full day in MDI checking out some hiking spots and thinking about what to eat for lunch and dinner. The view from the top of Cadillac Mtn. was spectacular as the sky was clear and there was little humidity.

For lunch, we stopped at a little pub in Northeast Harbor for a lobster roll and some steamed mussels. Both were excellent. For dinner, it was Thurston's Lobster Pound in Bernard, where we shared a lobster, a pound of steamed clams, and a crabcake sandwich. A couple of Bar Harbor Blueberry Ales washed that down and we headed home.

On the route home the fog had rolled in and really socked in one of the little harbors along the side of the road, so we stopped to take some photos. There's a pretty good chance one of these will end up on my wall at home...

The 1st Anniversary - Maine, Day 1

Up at 4:00, 10 hours in the car, and here we are 550 miles from Syracuse in Southwest Harbor, Maine. I used to come up here to Mount Desert Island on summer vacations as a kid, but it's been 20 years since I was here last. It's nice to be in another place with strong family ties and good memories with Mina.

Anyway, we arrived and checked into the B&B and popped the cork on a bottle of Riesling we brought with us and had a snack of some nuts, fruit, and cheese on the deck outside our room. Looks nice, don't you think?

With the preliminaries out of the way, we were off for lobster at Beal's Lobster Pier. Fantastic. Better than I remembered. Lobster wrapped in parchment paper with some cole slaw. Beer.

Sated, I think we can last 18 hours till the first lobster roll for lunch...

Not the Most Traditional 4th of July Dinner, but...

The weather in Syracuse on the 4th was something less than perfect. It struggled to get to 70 degrees and was cloudy and raining pretty much all day. Somehow it felt more like a perfect late September afternoon for college football than a day for fireworks and barbecues.

I spent part of the morning looking at cookbooks for something that inspired and I decided to go with something from one of my most interesting books. It's called Murakami Recipe and is a Japanese cookbook that contains recipes based on the food prepared in Haruki Murakami's novels and short stories. If you've never read any of his books, I recommend them highly (especially The Wind-up Bird Chronicle, A Wild Sheep Chase, and Dance, Dance, Dance) and food and jazz are often woven into the narratives. In A Wild Sheep Chase our main character is stuck in a house in Hokkaido with nothing to do but cook and prepares a roast beef. I decided to make a dinner based on that recipe.

We had a boneless roast in the freezer, so I thawed it and prepared a paste of roasted garlic. I got some rosemary and lemon thyme from our herb garden and chopped those up and mixed them with sea salt and black pepper. I rubbed the garlic paste over the top of the roast and coated as much of the outside as I could with the herb mixture. Uncovered areas I seasoned with salt and pepper. The beef went into a 375 degree oven for 40-45 minutes (until the internal temperature of the roast hit 125 degrees). In the meantine I chopped up some zucchini and yellow squash and roasted it with sage, salt and pepper, and prepared some mashed potatoes with cheddar cheese.

The roast came out of the oven and we popped the cork on a nice, if reasonably priced, bottle of Carmenere, a Chilean red. The meat was tender with a nice garlic and herb crust on the top side. An easy recipe with satisfying results.

A Seafood Dinner:




The other night, Mina and I had a nice, relaxing mid-summer seafood dinner at home. We'd done our usual shopping and decided to stop by the best supermarket for fish here in Syracuse (surprisingly, it is Price Chopper, rather than either Wegmans or P&C) where they had Cherrystone Clams and Softshell Crabs on sale.



The Softshell Crabs we coated in seasoned cornmeal and flour and fried, then served with a yuzu scented mayonnaise. These were lovely. The Cherrystones were the star of the show, though, and we steamed them in white wine, some old bay seasoning, and lemon juice. Served with some homemade bread to sop up the broth, there couldn't have been a more satisfying mid-summer seafood dinner. I think it warmed us up for our upcoming anniversary trip to Maine, now only 10 days away.

One thing about living in New York, I guess, is that seafood is just a little bit more reasonably priced here than in Ohio. Coming back from Japan, though, one of the toughest things to adjust to has been the relative difficulty in finding good, reasonably priced fish of various types (of course, when I was in Japan I always had a hard time finding an interesting, reasonable supply of meats). I guess everything is relative. In any event, it was nice to have this lovely seafood dinner at home with Mina.