My decades-long food colleague and friend Daniel Young, who lives in London and does many things, including posting on substack about past and present hungers, asked me if I knew of an old egg store on East 7th Street between Second and First avenues in the East Village, Manhattan, the same block where another Daniel and I live in a tenement built in 1893.

The egg store is in a 1984 film by Paul Mazursky, Moscow on the Hudson, London Daniel emailed. Russian-circus saxophonist Robin Williams, who defected while his troupe negotiated a final, surveilled splurge at Bloomingdale’s, occupied an apartment above it. Was the shop real, or did filmmakers slap together a storefront set, and what was its name, Dan asked?

When we streamed Moscow, I saw that wry costar Elya Baskin resembled our Dan, had the same open-hearted smile. Did someone tell him to watch this because of that? Immediately, I worried about my memory, because part of me went yes! to his egg-store question, but I had erased the sidewalk details. Where exactly was it?

Trying to solve a pregnant problem, I found a part of my youth online, in the form of the stark photo by Ann Sanfedele at the top of the screen. She has lived right across the street since 1968, I learned in an interview with her on Jeremiah’s Vanishing New York.

Perhaps her place sits over Big Bar, where the Dizzy Ventilators, an avant-garde percussion duo, performs Sundays at 10 p.m. This red-lit, cash-only dive is a fav.

The phantom egg store had been a few buildings east, on my side, open only on Thursdays to sell white and brown from Shady Hollow Farm in Whitehouse, N.J., unmarked, undated. That wasn’t strictly legal then, as it wouldn’t be now. Neighbors lined up early to gossip, and 500 dozen (eggs) were gone by early afternoon. Some said they were still warm from the nest, a proper urban fantasy.

I do recall that I rarely got eggs there, because I worked on Thursdays. I love eggs; eggs were cheap, I was poor.

I moved to East 7th Street from San Diego, back to my hometown, in early 1977. When I look at the chilly chickens in Sanfedele’s picture, pale, goose-bump versions of fat, tan Chinatown ducks, I assume that I must have bought one and made soup. But the kosher poultry butcher closed soon after I arrived.

Maybe chicken, maybe eggs; maybe not.

The egg store relocated to East 9th Street, renamed itself “No More Eggs” and peddled muffins and scones, but fewer eggs, probably because of the Great Cholesterol Scare. It closed too.

I never connected the local chickens to the local eggs, perhaps because neither had to cross a road.

In 1979, I got a job at the nearby Village Voice. Sweet VV dance critic and editor Burt Supree also lived on East 7th Street, two buildings east. He smiled and nodded and sometimes said a hushed hello to me when we passed. I’m told he collected wooden duck decoys and displayed them on shelves in his apartment. In the ’60s, he performed, and later wrote children’s books and a column about kids and dance. When, in 1992, he collapsed suddenly on the subway and died, we knew a special gay spirit had left our place.

I’ve never been sure of my place, in spite of my rent-stabilized luck. Our apartment is almost the same as the former top floor of the Tenement Museum on Orchard Street, although surrounding restorations make the plastered past even more wrinkled.

I found Sanfedele’s photo and others that she took and collected in an I-remember calendar. She had been urged to group the images, she emailed me, by an owner of our block’s premier coffeehouse, Abraço, which opened in the creepy, vacant Thursday store in 2007 and moved to larger digs across the street. The aforementioned Dan Young, as it happens, was one of the first to write about Abraço and its beckoning caffè macchiato.

I just reread his piece, filled with his voice, and nudged by age, fell asleep.

Wandering on a brilliant day, I knew I was on Second Avenue. Where was East 7th? My same body was light, unencumbered.

Nothing was right, though, because I was foreign, looking for home, alone. Sun hurt me, and after blocks with no signs (I hate this city, I said aloud), I saw my street, where it should be.

The whole vista, all the to way the river, housed a gleaming, cinematic power-plant, a million stories high, growling with electric malevolence. Ancient devils Frank Gehry and Thom Mayne built it together, so obvious, earning dead money on this visible future.

(Mayne actually said, after erecting his Babylonian Cooper Union satellite a bit west on East 7th, that he couldn’t care less about the tenements next door. I was there.)

We were out. I looked and walked, hoping for another home, as we do in dreams, and was taken in by teenage fellow travelers. But crusted razor blades and busted crimson syringes were strewn in piles under their filthy cots, where they put me to rest, imprisoned.

I woke on East 7th Street to barking outside, drenched.

No, no eggs. Not now.

I’ve been absent and errant, for many reasons, but global tumult has sifted through everything I am. The other day, I admitted to a friend who masters a special bookshop — which, if forever ambered, could be an Ashurbanipal or Alexandria for our rickety future — that my daily reliance on cooking as thinking, hand-ballet, and even small achievement was waning, and I wanted to end my relationship.

He stopped, struck. As we spoke, he had been sorting books and ephemera in his store’s exploded back room. I already knew that New York City remained an exploded back room.

“Don’t you get [he said, I’m paraphrasing] that those foods you scout, cook and put into you become you?”

I’d just bought a pound of bok choy ($2) from a stall next door (we’re in Manhattan’s Chinatown), but I think he meant that bringing one’s belly to the knife and stove results in a sort of culinary spiritual cycle. He’s probably right — assuming there’s enough food for a worldwide become-you.

Had I thrown my apron down? No, because something perverse happened when, goaded by an online recipe, I sought and purchased an ordinary pasta, perciatelli, or more commonly labeled, bucatini, that was a type I’d never cooked before.

Ronzoni Sono Buoni ?

James Beard plagiarized himself as well as others in his cookbooks, as John Birdsall’s passionate biography, The Man Who Ate Too Much, elucidates, as well as tells so much more about the pain Beard received and later perpetuated in a shadowed queer life that, as his “friend” Julia Child may have said to anyone else, was de rigueur. Beard wasn’t penalized for stealing, though journalists have been fired for repeating themselves, as most of us do in writing or not, which is arbitrary and cruel.

Colleagues, all you need to put down is, “I may have said this before.”

(“Said” is often used when the right word would be written, the devil on my shoulder who is a copy editor reminds me. And do I need these shoulder parens?)

So, I may have said, written this before:

My childhood pasta was Ronzoni. We lived in Brooklyn, it was made in Queens. Dark blue box, still on shelves. Occasionally, when I wake up, dream-fuddled, I sing: “Ronzoni sono buoni means Ronzoni is so good. Yes it’s clearly understood, Ronzoni is so good. …”

Then I crawl from bed and whisper the rest of the jingle, making tea. Daniel, roused, is not amused.

As I grew up and out, I tasted new things.

There’s at least two kinds of “new” in food: stuff you’d never seen in front of you before, jicama or dahl, iceberg lettuce or mashed potatoes, depending on who’s you and where you’re from. Also new are novel versions of what’s familiar: homemade floppy or doodle-shaped dried pastas made from peculiar wheat and cinematic water in time-immune slices of neo-Duce Italy.

The Ronzoni story is an immigrant success-cliche. But no bronze-died, ridged product filled Ronzoni’s cartons in our Ukrainian-Italian-Irish-Scottish frozen-food kitchen. If you buy the bronze-die propaganda, and I mostly do, my mom’s all-day sauce, sighing on the stove, should have slid off the company’s silicon macaroni and puddled at the bottom of our bowls.

The Repeat

Diabetic Jeffrey Ian, age 8, forked up every pre-weighed Ronzoni morsel and swirled it in our apartment’s sweet, oily red. And this is where I suggest that you view my previous two posts, in which I discover, after a life of baffling lies, that my mother’s father was Sicilian. Unknown to me, I was born into pasta.

Here I go, repeating myself.

Every Saturday I receive a link from an Italian-food blog, Memorie di Angelina, that I cook in my head. One alluring recipe a while ago uses poisonous beans — here’s a piece about my boyfriend and I surviving them. This week, Angelina grabbed me by sleight of hand: autumn bell peppers, plucked by farmers nearby, stuffed not with rice and meat, New Orleans style, but with pasta.

I’m not doing a blind test, but bell peppers, any size or hue, don’t cry local to me. Yet I did scrounge the Tiffany greenmarket at Tompkins Square Park in the East Village for dirty organic.

The Memorie recipe, blanched bells spooned to the top with perciatelli twisted in a loud puttanesca (I doubled the garlic, anchovies), graced with grated cheese and baked, is pictured at the top of the post. You’ll either want to realize the recipe or allow its words to create a liminal, artwork-ish state: Pleasure with distance. Desire minus experience. Time without clock.

Someone, somewhere must have hungered and passed away while reading recipes in a siren cookbook.

The Tube Test

Hundreds of recipes have claimed with certainty that searing a steak before cooking “seals in” juices. Nope.

Some writers too have claimed that the center hole of perciatelli/bucatini soaks up the sauce in which it’s bathed.

The perciatelli strand’s a ten-incher. The hole is darning-needle, maybe broom-straw size. You’d have to lip-suck sauce through each piece to fill it. Tried that, didn’t work.

Did I mention that you can stick an uncooked piece of our pasta into your Mezcal Negroni to use as a straw? That was supposed to have ignited, yes, a bucatini shortage.

“Adds a hint of gluten glimmer.”

(My quote.)

A blind test is really eyes wide shut. No one tastes things alike, as we know secretly, but don’t publicly believe, because if we did, we’d no longer wonder why we don’t all get along or want to have sex with just anyone.

Company arrives, a couple, distracted but expectant, and is served colored balloons bulging with noodles. They truly or pretend to swoon. As we eat, we have a messy time dishing the state of contemporary opera and the serial, interminable failure of the government of Italia. Fig dessert, then affectionate, cautious farewells.

We can’t know what our invigorating visitors thought about what they ate. It’s not etiquette: they simply may not be able, for every human reason, to decide. Perhaps they fell further in love, one fastening on a strand of Ronzoni hanging from the other’s mouth. Or fought to the point of tears while walking home, because something, someone, disagreed with them.

“Could I make that?”

That thought shoves a placid memory into an active role and turns the pot upside-down, so to speak, not onto but into one’s head.

Coda: How the Three Stand Up

Three pots of bubbling water. Added equal amounts of De Cecco, Ronzoni, Severino. Salted, boiled 10 minutes. First portions were tried just drained, then with simple red sauce.

Plain: Ronzoni and De Cecco chewed al dente, Severino thicker and soft.

“Rubbery,” Daniel said of that one. “The least wheat taste.”

I disagreed: Little difference between R. and De C., both middle-lane, which surprised me. Quite good grain flavor in Severino.

With sauce: Stuck like mucilage to all of them. Daniel liked Ronzoni best. De Cecco was toothy to me, I preferred snakier Severino, and not just because it was softer. Later I boiled portions of R. and De C. for 12 minutes, and they bloomed but were unevenly toothy, thinner selves.

When, job done, we stirred all together with added oil and cheese, the mess went down fast.

Nothing goes without saying, and I have said and written many times that my father, Harry Weinstein, was crucial to my cooking and eating life. If you have browsed this blog over the last decade you might recall his salami and eggs, or my watching him delicately prize open and slide down steamers in the clam bar at Brooklyn’s long-gone shore-stadium, Lundy’s. He took his food seriously, with concentration I’ve rarely seen elsewhere.

To be sure, my mother, Edythe, cooked more food for us than Harry did: it was her task and responsibility, made more taxing because her first son, “Jeffrey Ian” (as she called me when angry), was diabetic at so young an age.

Although she said she was French, raised Catholic and indeed converted to marry Jewish Harry, Edythe managed to master Southern Italian: a two-day ragu, theatrical overstuffed artichokes that looked like inverted flared skirts, and a painstaking braciole: beaten-thin slices of beef (flank steak, I think) spread with who knows what blend of cheese, herbs, crumbs rolled into tubes, tied, baked in orange juice, sweet Marsala, olive oil and blanketed in mom’s tomato sauce. We pronounced them bra-zhawl, and our Midwood, Brooklyn kitchen on those red-letter nights smelled so much better than the result tasted, which was puzzling to a child, when aroma trounced flavor.

Edythe also assembled a clear, golden chicken soup, usually with celery, carrots, onions and noodles added at the last minute, wide bowls of it placed in front of us before she lit the Friday-night candle with a Diamond kitchen match and paper napkin on her head. Brother Leslie and I would giggle, even though we worried that her comical tichel could catch fire.

Mom had told us, in hushed confidence, that she had an aunt who died when her gauzy frock caught a fireplace ember.

“Did you see it happen?” I asked, but didn’t get an answer. No name, place, date, merely a scary, cautionary story .

Dad was forever (and intentionally) late, and we were told to sip our Sabbath soup before everything got cold.

I cannot recreate that silken broth. Here’s what I wrote a few years back after trying to match it many rueful times:

I probably could have duplicated my mom’s when I was 8. Can’t talk about skill here, I had none. Cooking, when you’re young, is watching a chore that’s a dance, before you can dance.

Edythe learned Jewish chicken soup how? From Mrs. Simon Kander’s Settlement Cook Book, the 1938 edition, bought after she moved in with Kiev-born Harry, before they married. Our Settlement was properly stained (which recipes?) when I paged through it: a sickish boy excused from school, set to do homework on a kitchen stool, eyeing the white-enamel stove.

For this recipe, you started by choosing “an old hen.” Dad told us that as a boy, he learned to chop the heads off squawking chickens at a Catskill farm the Weinsteins visited some summers. His father, Aaron, died before I was born; mother Mary when I was 10. Distant and caring at the same time, grandma fried us pumpkin seeds every autumn.

Who were Edythe’s parents?

You can read my last post, which explains a recent genealogical discovery. Not one of her family was French, spoke French, cooked French, as she often claimed with natural conviction. Her Irish-English-Scottish mom, Anna Greenwood, early on skipped out on her husband, my grandfather, Vincenzo Ciraldo.

He was born September 28, 1889 in a Sicilian village called Bronte and came to Ellis Island in 1906 or ’07, a stalwart teen. He stayed with family or former neighbors, can’t tell, in Sheepshead Bay, Brooklyn — near that later restaurant, Lundy’s, my father and I shared.

Bronte, on the slopes of belching Mt. Etna, was and still is known for one thing: world-famous pistachios — as far as food can be a star. Marketers call the small biannual hoard “green gold.”

So, I can repeat Harry’s kosher Hebrew National frittata (wait, he added milk!) and make a stab at Edythe’s sweet, stolid red sauce, which I don’t much like now.

“Mom, how did you learn Italian food?”

“Neighbors.”

Her given name was Edith, Edith Ciraldo. She never once said that name to me.

Why would I, a skittish Jew moored in Italian foodways by accident or preference, envision and dream about what my newfound Sicilian grandfather may have eaten before he boarded a Hamburg liner at Napoli?

Eataly is a chain of food stores established in Torino that has imports you can’t get elsewhere in the U.S., so I visited the local one to score some Bronte product. Luckily, I bumped into a buyer, who plucked three things from his shelves: a cloying “Cream of Pistachio” that mimics Nutella, dessert wafers with no I’m-special nuttiness, and a tiny jar, Pesto di Pistacchio (at left), of chopped, maybe-Bronte nuts, nearby olive oil, black pepper, salt. No basil or cheese.

Food historians make professional hay from specific quandaries: who cooked what, when, why. Still, their task is statistical, unless a particular medieval feast, served by serfs, made its way onto royal parchment and a goblet-hoisting narrative could be constructed.

But what about you, adolescent grandfather? Did you spit out those god-awful green things that look like bugs, reject their chewy chalkiness the same way I threw up when forced to eat Kraft macaroni and cheese? Had you been compelled to strip and gather nuts in the deadening heat?

Nonetheless, I planned an Etna supper, one young Vinny may have eaten, to be served in our late-19th century East Village tenement apartment, bathtub in the kitchen, a place my escaping relative might have slept in with a half-dozen others. What would he have been offered, have scrounged, or himself put together before or after he left his volcanic home?

Wish I’d seen his face then, or later on, whether he smiled after he swallowed.

The winter greenmarket had glowing finocchio the size of thumbs, so I bought a handful, found promising oranges, black olives, red onion and dressed them with unfiltered olive oil from a Northern California grove. I’d made a similar salad for Thanksgiving dinners, but now it accompanied an enigmatic celebration.

All I had to do was find past pasta, and I looked with my new, quarter-Italian eyes and chose not dried and Sicilian, but what was fresh: pappardelle, a Tuscan ribbon. Boiled the pile, spooned on most of the pesto jar, added pecorino as I stirred in drips of pasta water to meld a sauce, sprinkled on fresh chopped mint, offering Catanian red-pepper paste for those who needed awakening.

My personal, yearning meal was simple. Pistachio shards bloomed in the oil and wet heat; guests were puzzled and perhaps pleased. I should admit that I later tried a more elaborate 19th-century possibility, using raw green pistachios from California that I blanched, ground, and stirred energetically with fresh ricotta from Aleva Dairy in Manhattan’s Little Italy (“America’s Oldest Cheese Shop Established 1892”). The fatty, grassy cheese stuck to my palate when I sampled, but its easy pistachio sauce, with rosemary and cliche parsley, turned sodden, almost gluey. All of this is to say grandson didn’t like it.

Failure can be corrected, but imaginary food comes with no second chance. Ancient Mesopotamians awoke to bread and beer, yet we can’t ascertain how their breakfast actually felt, tasted, or what it meant to any of these remote, sympathetic beings, even with records and reports. That’s the nature, the doubt, of retrospective cooking and eating.

Without his writing or voice, I can never know exactly what one special Sicilian put on his plate, ate, or thought when he did. To my regret, I will have to live with that.

“Nunzio” sounds sexy, no? nOON-zee-oh, not mechanical, like TAHJH-e-oh, although Rufus — his Canadian name has a “woof” — made his “Grey Gardens” sung Tadzio warm and confectionary, a wistful vanilla-cream.

I can see my mouth opening to say “Nunzio” for the first time. Did I do it right?

Nunzio Ciraldo was born in the same Sicilian village, Bronte, as his older brother, Vincenzo, my mother’s father, whose name and person I discovered just this year.

The Bronte Brothers. As it happens, I’m a few years older than my brother, Leslie, too.

“Bronte, a village on Mount Etna, is known for its green gold and also for a history of mythology, love, betrayal, and cowardice.”

Goodness gracious, that’s from a promo piece on the website Visit Sicily, and it’s true, especially the betrayal and cowardice, as those would be anywhere.

I’ll mine the “green gold” in my next post. Can you guess what it is?

The Ciraldos and their neighbors left in droves, as they say, for Ellis Island in the late 19th century. My teen grandfather roomed with friends from the same village in Brooklyn’s Sheepshead Bay. He met his wife-to-be Anna Greenwood there and for some reason moved to Westfield, New Jersey, where son Vincent and daughter Edith, my mother, were born.

Grandmother Anna, whom I never met, was a piece of work, but that’s another story. These weren’t the famous Brooklyn-cemetery Greenwoods, yet Anna’s grandfather, “Captain” John Greenwood, a fisherman, was interviewed by one E.K. Titus of the Brooklyn Eagle in June, 1928. Captain John must have had some hook, or charm.

My great-great grandfather gave his age as 95, but census records have him born in a younger 1842 or 1845. Guess he liked being the oldest guy on the block. The Eagle processed photo shows him gaunt, mustachioed, with a fisherman’s cap.

From the Titus piece:

They call me ‘the old pirate,’ ” Captain Greenwood explained. “But it’s all wrong. Neither my father nor I was ever a pirate.”

His dad, John went on to say, was Robert Greenwood, and his grandfather, Nicholas, with the same name.

It checks out. These are my forebears, English and Scottish colonial New Yorkers siring dozens upon dozens of great-great cousins, often with wives driven from Ireland by poverty. A lovely, unmet Greenwood, in fact, tossed me the Ancestry.com hint that opened this Pandora coffin.

I can’t keep count of how many greats should be attached to these fathers of mine. I expect that if they had seen me at almost any age, they would have spat and laughed. My actual Ukraine-born father never laughed at me, though he did offer an Alfred E. Neuman wallet-picture from Mad Magazine as though it were his first-born son, Jeffrey, to innocent customers at his used-car lot when the bonding opportunity came to compare family photos.

Dad was a Jewish redhead, like his joke son. My hair was silky black, and as I know now, Sicilian, if such things can be said.

Did grandpa Vincenzo have the chance or even the wish to meet John, his fiancée’s not-pirate grandfather? The young marrieds repaired to New Jersey, where V. made and repaired shoes and boots in a shop on the town’s main thoroughfare. I can’t tell you yet what my mother told me who her father was, or did. Not one of her stories was true. I do know, because newspapers never lie, that her older brother, teenage uncle Vincent, set fire to their father’s store. It’s in print. Mischief? Accident?

At this stage of the game I’m surprised that anything not made of flesh and right in front of me could evoke a ghost of lust, or ardor. Two young brothers, sweating on Etna slopes, filched jug wine to go with their honeyed nuts. Would I be attracted, then or now, to Nunzio or five-foot-three Vincenzo?

There’s no photo I can find to prove my grandfather’s height, marked on an immigration form, because his daughter destroyed the one image, black-and-white, that I remember: a portly, gray-haired man kneeling in a garden, hydrangea background, chucking an infant’s cheek. She tossed out all memories, even some of mine.

Father and daughter both lived long lives, but I needed a genealogy site to learn that about the man. Never met his son, her brother, my uncle Vincent, or his “Nazi” wife (what my mother called her, without naming any of them), or their kids, my cousins Gregory and Rich, who are alive, at least online.

Hi, guys! Rich is an artist who changed his name.

Edith, later Edythe, said she was French: I heard decades of elaborate lies. All of us have stories of sadness, loss, maybe trauma. Her sweet third husband, Alfredo, was Sicilian too.

I’ve long passed the age that my father, Harry Weinstein, born in a Kiev shtetl, died. He came over at age three and grew up in Williamsburg, Brooklyn with three brothers and three sisters. Harry loved pistachios, brought bags of them home to us, in another part of Brooklyn, and we argued about whether the natural tan or red-dyed ones were better, leaving the shells we pried open in paper napkins or on little plates while we watched his favorite, Gunsmoke, on our black-and-white TV.

No green gold. No past allowed. My strawberry-blonde mother didn’t like the “mess” these nuts made.

It was very little mess.

The lede reads: “Daniel hoped he hadn’t made a big mistake. It was a birth day present coming fr om Europe. Shipping was a big part of the price.”

I’m copying from the page above, so it’s all [sic].

The package arrived from the U.K. weeks before my Virgo birthday.

” ‘What if you don’t like it?’ I got nervous, but he said he could send it back.”

Sure, I could retype the whole first page I wrote on my gift on my MacBook, or scan and copy a doc that would come close. But any accuracy would be challenged by age: mine and the fractured planet of typefaces, fingers, sounds.

My boyfriend and partner, Daniel Felsenthal, chose for me my first typewriter, an Olivetti Lettera 22. Not the same object with my fingerprints on it, which may be rotting in a toxic landfill or be the exact gift to someone else. In case you’re curious, the 22 is considered sleek and clever, in the design collection of New York’s Museum of Modern Art.

It could also be in the Museum of Torture.

I was excited and ripped open the box: identical model, identical color, in the identical dirty-brown case.

That sentence is almost the same as the one I manually typed right after I replaced the original dried ribbon it came with. Changing the ribbon, my fingertips borrowed the ink, just like it rubbed off when I was 16, or later, reading the Wednesday Voice or Sunday Times arts section that I got on Wednesday — black and later color. Washing dishes in a tenement sink got them almost clean. A person who types in the past is never completely clean.

I was off to college and they said I needed a typewriter. My dad walked into my brother’s and my bedroom (Harry rarely did that) when I was alone and handed me this thing with handles. Dad was a car dealer and bookie who had “friends” who found him stuff.

“What is this?”

“It’s special.”

He got it, as they said then, “off the trucks.”

In September, 1964, he drove me from Howard Beach, Queens, to Waltham, Mass., my crummy Beatles clothes and untried Olivetti in the borrowed white-Thunderbird trunk.

A few years before, I was handed a bulky Japanese “portable” radio, my first no-label alien object, which enabled me to listen to the Democratic nominating convention late in bed, lights out. Adlai went down this time, and I went to sleep modern and sniffling.

My likely used Lettera 22 was portable. I hope I thanked my father, grateful.

Now, when I lift it, I can’t imagine I carried it anywhere: it weighs more than three Airs.

I never took typing, so hunted and pecked. You had to cobble keys to make an ! : apostrophe, reverse, and period under it. (Perhaps there was less printed enthusiasm then.) A bell rang when one reached the end of the line, like a trolley. Then I moved my hand to swing back the carriage. Clang, clang, clang. Typing was an endless Judy movie, dialogue to come.

An aside: In the ’80s I wrote a piece for the Village Voice with this headline: “In German, Gift Means “Poison,” typed on an early newspaper computer system called Atex. Not long before, I had filed a restaurant review of a novel but dreary Mexican place in the East Village and asked my readers if they could tell it was composed on a computer, the first digital Voice article ever.

Lame joke, though it rippled.

“If a union steward like you uses the new keyboard,” my boss said, “maybe others would give up legal pads or Remingtons and save time.”

Should I have stopped? I liked the quiet, the screen. It was happening anyway.

That’s what I thought then, sweating in my seat.

The gift is a vision, but a challenge. When I glance at it, in the case or out, I’m flushed with simultaneous gratitude and apprehension. My lifelong deadline monster, waiting for opportunity, grasps my throat.

Can I type an assignment on time? I know I did in college: why Lolita makes so much highway sense, how Keats’ “Ode To Autumn” layers sounds and smells in a way that a sad, swoony teen could tear up over. Professor Onorato returned that paper, having written, in dark, curly script, “you finally understand.” He was my first and true college crush.

Not long ago, digging around, I discovered these same college papers, water-stained but legible, typed on onionskin, which may have been on sale at the Brandeis bookstore or I thought was classy.

Why not retype them on my new machine in a wasteful exercise? But who would pen the comments…

Cleaning the case, I saw this signature: W.J. Paul. That’s the name of the author of Modern Irish Poets, published in 1894. Fowey is a small town and port in south Cornwall, England, with a high school, Fowey River Academy. If you, W.J. Paul, happen to read this, I’d be so pleased if you got in touch.

Can an object miss its owner?

Typing now is odd because I have arthritic fingers in my right hand, which I’ve written about (on my Mac) in a recent post. Striking old keys seems like a prescribed exercise to strengthen me, as if writing itself could not.

I’ll give it a try.

Stuck like a plum in a pound cake for a decade at the Philadelphia Inquirer, I wondered where to eat. Of course I cooked or defrosted and was lucky to have the progenitor of Whole Foods, Austin, Texas’ Fresh Fields, walking distance from both my desk and apartment — I lived right across the street from Walter Annenberg’s Inquirer castle, a footstep commute. The Rodin Museum was a few blocks away, but you can’t eat marble.

Most of my colleagues had homes in the suburbs, so I rarely got invited. I didn’t understand why they were there, because the city was a capital-C city, with creaky, magnetic charm. Yes, things have changed, a bit. Urban prices have gone acrobatic, but I’m a dunce at property things. If I thought that racism was the problem … well, I’m usually a snail at getting to the big picture.

But I’m here to talk queer chicken.

Two competing memories give the lie to solid reminiscence. Inquirer music critic Peter Dobrin (he’s still there) knew I needed a spot to eat that would make me feel like myself, so he took me — so I recall, maybe he recommended it — to Judy’s Cafe, on South 3rd and Bainbridge in, yes, Queen Village.

My engineer friend Chris, who ran an Amtrak locomotive up and down the East Coast, said I needed a “decent and cheap” gay spot, Judy’s. Christopher John-Sebamala Card today said yes, I took you there.

I can see myself seated, long bar to the right. Clamorous not glamorous families and queer gals and guys fill tables. My picture of this, in the late 1990s, has been bounced to light by a recent New York Times recipe for “Ritzy Cheddar Chicken Breasts,” actually thick cutlets, by Eric Kim.

Judy’s Cafe, opened in 1974, has closed permanently. It was known for punchy cocktails and especially for two entrees: veal and pork meatloaf, spinach and provolone tubed inside, with mushroom gravy, and Ritz Cracker, cheddar cheese-crusted chicken cutlets, horseradished sour cream on the side.

So glad to find the photo above. Can anyone recognize the queerish, Neelish or Sylvia Sleigh-like painting of two affectionate women and splayed kitty between them?

Meatloaf is one of the many things random cheese destroys. I think I liked the chicken. But what I must have really enjoyed was something else, because I just cooked Kim’s recipe. It was moist, yet tired, ordinary, probably like the one at Judy’s.

Anyone ordering Judy’s big stuff was given a coupon that, if you came back four or five days later, entitled you to a dish up to the same price for free. Think of what that meant for anyone counting Washingtons (Philly slave-owner), not Ben Franklins (he possessed just two).

That paragraph above could be six letters: “drinks.” Lose money or break even on food, make it back on booze, that’s the professional explanation. Here’s what I think.

Some very few restaurants are utopias. You enter and see that you’ve landed on your planet, where you can breathe, wave, sparkle.

Did I write sparkle? Double the order: sparkle sparkle. That’s how I felt at Judy’s, even when alone. Lifetimes ago I wrote a showy story for a national queer magazine, The Advocate, about the wispy concept of gay food, gay cooking, gay restaurants. Fairy pudding (YMCA hot-plate tuna casseroles) and “the entree that dare not speak its name” took ironic bows.

The “gay restaurant” still shimmers, shimmies and disappears when you put a headline on it. Sure, certain bartenders and servers beam sincere welcome when they enjoy mixing drinks or bringing food to those of us who have walked in. And we, queer eaters and readers, happen on our uncommon doors, pull them open, and sit down.

What will we have?

Didn’t notice until I pressed flat on a table and wondered if that hand were mine.

Right index finger flirts into its taller, straight neighbor. What caused this? All my fingers hurt, especially when I pretend to play Bach or Scarlatti on my desk, a constant teen, not knowing a thing about real or phantom musical keyboards.

My hands are so tiny I wear only “women’s” gloves, which has given this queer cis male a slip-on drag pleasure. I hope anyone out there finds something they like that hugs like skin, even over mottled, wrinkled flesh.

When left hand gets lonely and squeezes, rubs the right to say we’re together, it seems like strangers being introduced. Strangers on a … no puns, though I’m tempted. When the two index fingers go side by side, it’s as if one twin went a bit berserk, not like dyeing half their hair indigo or running away with someone else’s thumb, but striding quick in opposite directions when I need them most.

The X-ray told the new, solid doctor what I already knew: arthritis. It’s what my mother had when I was just growing leg hair, and she took to bed. After a year she got up, suddenly. Never happened. In that time she got me to do all sorts of challenging homemaker things.

I can handle pain, even enjoy it in arranged situations, but this is about the shape of me, how, when you look at your hands, you see yourself.

For so long I’ve embraced my cooking, typing, stroking hands and took comfort in their ordinary concert. Now I’m bent — what I always was.

Why feel surprise? We have been tossed sketched and painted bouquets of gnarled fingers in caves, temples, museums. Placid hands brushed into a future by ruined ones. Realistic hands, sentimental or, in Alice Neel’s case, warped into crucial, intimate disclosure, as much as eyes, lips, shadows.

I’m rubbing my right one as I type, greeting my stranger again.

Is disease my future? Yes, as I work and think. Here’s where I wanted to talk about all the artists, writers and lovers who have listened to joint alarms, but strove to move pens to paper, paint to canvas, bodies into others. Yes, the words sound trite, but some certain pain survives.

Fill in the proper creator names. My hands are talking, in a way, signing. Left is giving right, who was primarily top, permission to bottom, or at least be versatile. (“Stiff” has many meanings.) Right’s wondering who will hook up. The keyboard mattress, flat and passive, doesn’t really care, but who can tell, because plastic buttons don’t talk back.

Actually, they do, but my new, different hands and I can’t hear. Left rubs right once more, trying to connect. Right sighs, wondering if a breakup is in order. There’s no shrink or advice columnist to correct fingers into a domestic parallel.

“He’s bent, I’m not.”

Handshake divorce? Best of luck. Yet, with the way age works, left will get bent, too.

There’s no Nobel for candy, hard or soft, which is too bad. It could bring peace, by pieces. That prize is an elite exercise, yet, as a teen science nerd, I shivered when introduced to one and then another Nobel winner, gracious, patient elders with remarkable Erlenmeyer memories.

Lucky in Manhattan to have a Japanese market nearby, and because I’m enticed by anything in a post-Pop package, I fell for Nobel’s Super Cola, three ounces for $3, a dozen or so globes of hot surprise. I told myself that I sprung for my candyphile boyfriend, but they were really for me. When artists such as Lichtenstein or Indiana (not Gary) are ripped off for the package, I grab it.

Each tooth-shattering marble is wrapped in planet-bomb plastic. Never had anything like ’em. Passion for defunct or novel sweets is tiresome even to me, in an affectionate graveyard way. Still, my guy and I sucked one after another in a who-are-we way, and they are gone.

Nobel may seem an unusual name for a Japanese candy company, but here’s what Japan Candy Store says:

Nobel is a Japanese candy manufacturer specializing in gummies, sour candies, and other sweet treats. It was first known for its cough drops but these days it has become popular for its Japanese sour candies, Nobel Sours Gummy. The company got its name after one of its founders, Dr. Hideki Yukawa, received the Nobel prize in Physics.

Now, there’s another candy guy, from USA, in the same name game, Edward J. Noble, who popularized another’s invention, the white peppermints with holes that looked like the things they had too few of on the Titanic: Life Savers. He’s been called a “candy industrialist.” This Noble also started the American Broadcasting Company, ABC, but that’s another story.

Dr. Hideki Yukawa, below, born in Tokyo in 1907, did indeed receive the Nobel Prize in 1949 for his prediction of the existence of mesons, subatomic particles composed of equal numbers of quarks and antiquarks.

I was a mite puzzled. Why no Quark or Antiquark Gummies? Meson Mints? Four years after the end of a searing war, with radiation deaths, scars, and cancer Japan’s ongoing misery and the whole of Asia suffering, a native atomic expert was honored internationally. Collegial photos of him and grizzled Albert Einstein walking and talking are copyrighted, but searchable.

The Nobel peace prize that year was handed to a Scot, Lord Boyd Orr, for his work on world hunger. Plenty of that to go around.

Of course, I found no evidence that the winsome Japanese scientist had any role in starting the Osaka confection company, established in 1929 (when he was 22), first fashioning caramels. It changed its name to Nobel in 1949, probably in patriotic commercial celebration for his award. Maybe I’m wrong; Nobel Candy Company has not gotten back to me.

I have never been to Japan, although during the 1980s I was the New York City restaurant reviewer for two of that nation’s glossy monthlies, one called Bacchus, described to me as its GQ or Esquire. I’m sure I’ve mentioned somewhere that Bacchus translations, to be kind, had an oblique relationship to what I wrote. A column on diverse city food, which appeared just after David Dinkins was elected mayor and including as many compelling Black, ethnic and regional places as could be squeezed in, was efficiently bleached for Bacchus‘ mostly male readers. But I was paid well — until, soon after, I quit.

Candy isn’t dinner, although I have eaten at least one or two totally candy meals. All the time I’ve written about food, I found it difficult to select words for how things taste as I eat. I’m grateful that few readers have complained, but I was aware that if prose were batter or dough, I couldn’t fold flavors in naturally, the way you would with chocolate chips. I thought a food critic’s routine adjectives and frilly adverbs were dulling weights.

My job here is to say how this Super Cola ball explains itself in my mouth.

First, I must admit that I lost some sense of smell and taste about a year ago, when I got COVID-19. (I’m now fine.) Music critics get muffling ear infections, and art critics are faced with similar brakes on their confidence if they discover, occasionally by accident, that they are color-vision impaired.

It’s not easy for me to know if my doubt is “in my mind.” Why is this yogurt so bland? That apple tart has no pungency, no bite, something I frequently thought when eating out decades ago. In my case, COVID-19 has mixed itself up with aging, so I can’t tell what’s doing what.

Super Cola’s coated with immediate citric acid, causing a pleasant pucker, which dissolves into a sweeter candy with a vague taste I’d never recognize as “cola.” Flavors are often advertised suggestions.

Then you fall into one of two camps: the patient sucker, who over 10 minutes works it down to the middle, or the impatient, who goes “crack” and chews.

A kernel of baking powder, called Shuwa-Shuwa, sits at center. The name “Shuwa-Shuwa” supposedly mimics the fizzy sound a can of soda makes when clicked opened, according to a site called The Daily Meal, which also claims the same white stuff coated Pepsi-Flavored Cheetos, once sold in Japan. They didn’t last long.

In my book, you have to shake your can to get a sound like that.

There’s not much more to say. I found a hard-to-get item that makes me question my ability to taste, that moves me to feel 15 and 85 at the same time. A fountain of youth can also be a fountain of age, pretending always to fizz.

I’ve had this reaction before when I’ve been offered rare sounds from the past, oddly recorded. An incinerated Pompeii on TV in which fictional lava held screams of the dying. The first recorded song, “Au clair de la lune,” using soot, in French.

I’ve written about these in 2008. Some would have every reason to think that whatever of my own voice I may have recorded, tremulous and needy, would be a sonic fossil, too.

But this voice today is a shell’s, of a conch (pronounced “conk,” at least now) from a Pyrenees cave, assigned as Paleolithic, 17,000 years old. It’s one of those enticing discovery stories, but not quite as sexy as tales of loving Neanderthals mating with the likes of way-early Ancestry.com humans.

Seems the shell, thought ordinary and placed in some little-seen vitrine, had been gouged to be made an instrument. At least, that’s the analysis, and then, I mean then now, a fella with the musical name Jean-Michel Court blew into it.

You can hear three hearkening sounds if you click the last link above and find the recording.

Small, humanoid cries? A child’s try, maybe, for attention, pleasure.

Once in my life, someone said I had a voice worth hearing. His name, my high-school music teacher’s, was Mr. Rosa. He married a classmate of mine, clarinetist Marilyn, just after we graduated. Congratulations! He said I was “a soprano,” and I must have blushed; I also lisped and stuttered. Couldn’t read music and still can’t, though I listened to Schubert songs on my RCA Victor phonograph. Countertenor was a word I hadn’t heard.

My only other, earlier music teacher, disheveled from Brooklyn College, told my disinterested father, who paid him with my grandma’s money, that I was the worst student he ever had. I must have overheard that, or maybe the thin, brusque guy also said that offhand to me, as my one-ton pearlescent accordion bent my shoulders and collapsed my chicken chest.

“You’re the least talented student I’ve ever had.”

Dad sold the accordion and probably put the money on a horse with a musical name.

Turns out I have a reasonable voice, often on pitch. My boyfriend, who knows music the way infants know milk, tends to agree. When he plays singers on Spotify or CD, I chime in, showerwise, or even harmonize. I pretend to know lyrics, because I like the lying aspect of it and also because I may have heard them before, and it’s not hard to be a millisecond behind. It just occurred to me that I occasionally and naturally twist myself into the person who could write them. I’m sort of in a moderate heaven when that happens.

Sure, it “happens.” I have no control.

As a writer and editor in my 70s, I wonder about what I haven’t sung and haven’t done and have predictable regrets. Yes, I should have agreed to join that chorus in college when I was asked. They must have considered me a bit nuts because I went to almost every campus rehearsal of Beethoven’s Mass in C major, sitting as far back as possible. Said boyfriend just reminded me that any writing life is always new.

What I can do with my voice is mimic. Give me an animal, especially one I may cook.

I have learned to cook, but that’s another story.

Sitting in the car, driving to nowhere: moooo, baaaahh. Me, an owl at heart, because of who, I can do most all creature screeches.

And I feign theatrical, typecast voices, albeit much less well. Vaudeville is dead, lucky for that.

In the early ’70s, I sang on stage — quotes around “sang.” Cosseting friend Peter Gordon somehow knew my wavery top-notes and asked me to squeal and shout Motown album-jacket notes, while his avant group (it’s been “Love of Life Orchestra” for a while) played in some San Diego black-light club. We did this twice, maybe three times.

Applause confused me, my first and only public bow.

Oh, I was fucking a tall, once-sweet guy in that cohort who became a composer of art songs. After many cryptic woo notes and months, he kicked me out of bed one sunny morning, saying he was bored.

Even though my hands are bent five decades later and I’m fearful of slipping on snow, my high, faggy voice, the one I hated to hear recorded, seems to have escaped time. Because of an acute partner and the open spaces of age, my listening has gone haywire. The yowl remains.

I danced to this in my 20s with another mobile Martha, an already furious artist, and with Melvyn, a burning writer who wooed me to join him in his trade, my dear, persistent friend.

It was 1970s San Diego. The only big gay bar was oddly northly named: the Barbary Coast, right under the flight path to single-runway Lindbergh Field. Workaday jets rattled rafters as much as we shook the dance floor, and almost everyone knew we could have been incinerated in a strobe-second by a premature landing: not with Dow’s stick-to-skin napalm, but a shower of plane kerosene.

Flaming queens! Like those who were set aflame by a hater arsonist in a New Orleans gay bar in 1973 — 32 dead, 15 injured — at just the same time we Sunrise-sotted drunks were a loud proud crowd.

And aware of that airplane risk, we danced up a, yes, storm, though daily drang always darkened our Miller- and Marboro-scented air. Any cruisy sailor, in or out of uniform, could be deployed the very day after he and I bumped and ground and got to know each other, in the way frictional intimacy works.

“Bye, sweetheart.”

I dropped him at his numbered berth right at midnight. He was worried he’d be late, so delicious sweat bloomed his underarms.

No kiss. He ran. Best of luck! Our Pacific was black and smooth.

Maybe I drove back to the Barbary Coast because I had some time to end my sorry luck. Then, at 2, when loners and losers were disgorged onto the asphalt, I gave myself a drive home to Del Mar, burning my fingers lighting a roach left in the ashtray and sobbing.

We’re not in a Big War now, but we are. That’s why these ordinary glandular memories — what’s the phrase? — “rise up.” What would be next, I asked, and I’m asking now, in the same high voice and with decades of dancers gone.

You needn’t be old when you’re old. Sure, don’t trip, fall, break. But your brain was wrinkled when it was born, and eyeballs water and cry just like before. I comforted myself when younger, thinking that Kubrick had pictured all of that at the closing of 2001. Dylan lyrics, too.

This particular flesh package squirms through, or tries, tossing waiting and dreading with cooking and writing. Loving, as well.

An -ing life, I suppose. Fighting back? Never giving up?