Yes. They ARE all out to get you

This is a mommy Sheltand pony and her 1-week-old baby. They came walking by when we had breakfast Sunday with Lindsay and Ryan at the Farmer and Cook in Meiners Oaks. It was just a happy moment.

It started right after the New Year when our health insurance was inexplicably canceled out of nowhere. We'd been paying the premiums on time, but somehow they thought we owned them even more than the obscene sum we send them each month for CalCOBRA health insurance coverage. In California, workers are guaranteed health coverage even after losing their jobs if they work for a company with 25 or fewer people. COBRA covers people working for companies with more than 25 people.

They figured it out, reinstated us and jacked our bill and then jacked it some more. It costs as much for health insurance as it would to pay rent for a studio apartment. Of course once we got that all straightened out, it got all screwed up again.

If that weren't annoying enough, our health insurance Kaiser Permanente seems to be going through a rough spell, especially when it comes to customer service. They keep billing me for random amounts for procedures that have long been paid for. I did get them to reverse a $500 charge, but they keep coming back like inexorable flesh-eating zombies.

I started thinking maybe it was just us. That maybe we were extremely unlucky. It took all kinds of irate phone conversations to be upgraded to an iPhone because AT&T had screwed up our eligibility. I mean here I am locked and loaded, ready to spend a good sum of money and they won't even let me.

But as we were slogging though yet another day of calling rude customer service agent after rude customer service agent -- right now the insurance billing company needs to send us back our payment, and we can't seem to get them to do so -- I realized our housemate was on the phone having his own irate conversations. In the past couple of weeks he's had a couple of bureaucratic snafus that make our little problems seem trivial.

I started thinking that if what we are experiencing is actually becoming more and more normal, as companies cut back and customer service people, who are paid next to nothing and aren't usually the brightest bulbs in the socket, are overworked and as workloads become overwhelming and people make more mistakes, then we're all going to be spending more and more useless hours undoing the damage the idiots are causing.

Isn't this yet another one of those intangible drags that are threatening to suck us into a vortex of failure? As Cher said in that movies that she inexplicably won an Oscar for, "Snap out of it!" People have to start spending money and remembering basic economic principles of good customer service and good quality products. It's hard for all of us. Everything's been cut back and that sucks, but seriously, people still need to try a little harder.

My very favorite thing about the U.S. is that we're a scrappy country. Compared with the stodgy Europeans and the tradition-bound Asians and Middle Easterners, we tend to roll with the punches with greater agility because we don't tend to be governed by ancient mores. I'm just hoping that we can focus on rebuilding and going forward.

Our new president is right, we can make this a time of tremendous opportunity. But it will take a little hard work and a lot better attitude. Times are tough for everyone and seeing as we're all in it together, let's try to be a little nicer. This especially goes for those "customer service" people, but I'm also sending it out to that guy in the big white pickup truck who rode four inches from my rear bumper and is now swerving around me.

And I want to thank the people who are being nicer, like the bakery lady at Von's who saw me leaving the sorry-looking display of cookies. "Wait. I have some freshly baked ones," she said. I'll take a warm cookie any day.

Zen: In memorium

I found out yesterday that my stepfather died. My sister, Zizzy, with whom I have a tenuous relationship at best, sent me her annual Christmas card. I usually get it in March, but she was later than usual.

In the card she wrote "The big event of 2008 for me was the death of my father. He died of complications of a stroke and Parkinsons. Fortunately he had done some traveling in 2007/2008 and we saw him in Vermont, Ohio and NY." And with that, Zen is dead.

I'm not surprised I wasn't told more. It's not as though Zen liked me and would have wanted me to know (or comment) about what happened to him. But he was my stepfather since I was 10, having met my mom when I was 8. This behavior is normal for that side of my family, in which people stand ready to cut you off for life for so much as a missed thank you note.

I've spent many an hour with various therapists to be told that, basically, my mother and stepfather didn't like me at all. Every time I saw Zen he was furious with me for one reason or another. I would say "So what are you up to these days?" and he'd say "as little as possible" with as much hostility as he could muster, as though somehow it was MY expectations of him that were too high.

The last time I saw Zen was at my brother Lawrence's lavish New York City wedding (reception-at-The-Pierre lavish). My youngest Lindsay had somehow gotten into the tractor beam of some weird guy who kept grabbing her saying "I need to dance with her." Lindsay was about 7 at the time, and I ended up having to physically grab Lindsay and take her to the bathroom to escape this guy. I mentioned it to someone else there, that I was really creeped out by the inappropriate attention being paid to a 7-year-old. Zen found out and went ballistic. He wanted the guy arrested on the spot. For what? I thought, dancing too much with a 7-year-old? The guy hadn't done anything and I was making sure he wouldn't.

Mr. Delcol (sp?) -- the father of the bride -- reassured me that the creepy guy in question "was gay" (as though that would make it OK, which it didn't). I just wanted him away from my kid and wanted no more further embarrassing scenes and told DelCol that. Zen was apoplectic. He wanted the guy taken out in handcuffs and he was furious with me that I didn't share his fury.

That's the last time I saw Zen, but it pretty much defined our relationship. He tended to be furious with me. One year when I went to Colorado to spend Christmas with my dad and asked him to pick me up from the Newark airport, he was so angry at my "thoughtlessness" he drove the entire way from Newark to Princeton at about 95 mph, missing the mailboxes on the side of the road by inches. I've never been so terrified in my life.

So, I suppose that I would find out that he died sometime in 2008 in a belated Christmas card is fitting.

My brothers and I called him Zen after we met him. The first conversation, which became part of family legend, went roughly like this. "This is Mr. Zenowich," mom said.
"You look like Clark Kent," one of us (probably me) said.
"No. I'm more like Mighty Mouse," he said. Hilarity ensued.
We struggled with the name and he said to just call him "Zen." So we did.

Zen had a huge effect on my life and the way I think. He was one of the most intelligent people I ever knew and he shaped me intellectually. He once -- during a moment of honesty -- mentioned that he only liked me intellectually and he would nurture that. I guess what I got from Zen was the gift of original thinking. Zen was an iconoclast, always ready to shatter conventional wisdom.

When I lived at home, he was still struggling to make a career in the publishing world. But he hated it. And he would have fits of temper and quit his jobs, even though he was a really good editor, at least according to those authors he worked with. He had always bragged that he could live "perfectly happily" renting a room, with a bathroom down the hall, in New York, with no job or responsibility. My mom and Zen would have huge, ugly fights, made even uglier the greater the wine intake.

The fights used to freak my little sister Zizzy out. It was just her and me at home because my brothers ran away to my dad's because of the generally abusive nature of the household. (Zen actually broke his had once slamming it on the wooden table because he was angry at my brother.) I assured Zizzy that the marriage was OK. But it wasn't and Zen and my mom lived a kind of twilight marriage, where he would live with her for a while and then sometimes not.

I have no idea how Zen spent his final years. I have been estranged from my mom for a long time, after it became apparent that she planned to take the abusiveness that was her childrearing with me and apply it to my girls. The last time she saw my daughters, she spent most of her time drunkenly yelling at my youngest daughter for being "lazy, just like your mother." The girls made plans to to run away and escape her in the middle of the night. I could only think that I never wanted my daughters to experience what I had had to live with for the first 18 years of my life, so I decided enough was enough.

Zen pretty much was complicit with my mother and all I have left of my childhood are memories of desperately wanting to get away to where I wasn't despised. One time, I was trying to have Zizzy come visit me at college, but Mom and Zen wouldn't allow it until they talked with the psychologist I was seeing. After he spoke with both of them, in separate conversations, the shrink declared them to be the the most "awful" people he'd ever dealt with and his advice to me was to have as little to do with them as I could. Zizzy was never allowed to visit.

So I'm struggling with how, exactly, I deal with such a death. I never really hated Zen that much. But he always made it clear he didn't like me, despite mom's efforts to make us call him "dad." (Um, I already HAVE a dad, I blasphemed.) I can see his contemptuous smirk as I write this "what does this matter to YOU?" he'd say.

I wonder if my sister will let me know that my mom has died via a belated Christmas card.

Hammin' it up

We had a great Easter this year. The entire local family showed up, nephews, daughter, and we had assorted friends. It was a beautiful day and everyone had fun. Sean and Colin managed to fly the remote control bug that I got Rob for Christmas -- and has incidentally turned out to be one of the best presents I ever got him -- over to the lemon orchard. But they got it back. Kaia was delighted with her Easter egg hunt and made Rob find eggs that she hid. She also loved the musical jump rope Lindsay bought her. Kaia's been fixated on jump-ropes, and this one was perfect. even the dogs had a blast.

Our oven was broken, but I was able to use Lindsay's and she lives about 2 miles from here. I would have used Kim's but her oven is also broken. Despite the oven glitch, or maybe because it caused me to be more organized, everything came out on time and was tasty.

Because we're watching money these days, I've switched from the Honeybaked Ham, which I still love, to making my own because I can buy a 10-pound ham for $.77 a pound, and who can pass that up. I used a new method to make the ham and it came out great. I cooked the lamb on the grill. I've had problems with flare-ups and was running to get Dena from work, so I threw a big piece of aluminum foil on top of the grate under the lamb leg (which was on the top grate) and this solved all the flareup issues and the lamb cooked well.

I had made the scalloped potatoes a couple of days ahead and had Lindsay cook them ahead of time. Scalloped potatoes can be very hard to cook because they resist cooking through, especially if you make a big bunch, as I do. In warming them back up, they finished cooking and were at the perfect consistency. I got a bit carried away and bought too much asparagus, (which I served lightly cooked with melted butter and fresh-squeezed lemon) but I am having a great time eating all the leftover spears. I also served baby potatoes with butter, parsley and chopped scallions, which is a perennial favorite.

Gen brought garlic bread, which people devoured, and Kim brought a carrot cake from a local bakery. Lindsay also brought over an orange coffee cake she'd made that was quite delicious. In fact, it was what I broke my diet to eat.

I'm not sure why I had so much fun. I think it has a lot to do with the fact that -- for this moment in time -- we're all OK, we're together and we can enjoy each other's company. And as we've learned in the past few years, that's saying a lot.

Coke-baked ham

I had wanted to make ham with Coke for years because every Southerner swears by it. I bought a Mexican Coke -- made in Mexico and formulated with sugar, not high fructose corn syrup -- and poured that under the ham, which was placed big side down on a roasting rack in a roasting pan. I added about 1/2 cup of water, although looking back this probably wasn't necessary. I trimmed all the skin off the ham and cut the skin into diamonds. I studded the ham with whole cloves, stuck in at the intersections of the diamonds. The entire ham was covered with aluminum foil, which was extended to the pan edges forming a tight seal. I baked it in a 325 degree oven for about 20 minutes a pound or three hours for a 10-pound ham.

After the ham was done I glazed it with a brown sugar, apple cider vinegar, mustard glaze poured all over the ham and cooked uncovered for another hour.

One thing Rob always loved in Ohio was the Dorothy lane market Heavenly Ham(TM) salad. I have yet to see a ham salad in California that holds a candle to the DLM delicacy. So I have had to resort to making my own version. In fact, I've made two version. The first version is designed to taste as much like the DLM original as possible and the second one is designed to be low-carb, so it's made with dill pickle relish, not sweet relish.

Devilishly delicious ham salad

Leftover Coke-baked ham cut into 1/2 inch cubes
Mayonnaise, to taste
Yellow mustard, to taste
Sweet pickle relish

Place all of the ham in a food processors fitted with the big blade and chop fairly fine. Place all of the chopped ham in a bowl and add enough mayonnaise and mustard (I use about 2 tablespoons mustard to about a half cup of mayonnaise)to moisten. Add pickle relish to taste. I add about 3 to 4 tablespoons for two cups of ham salad. For the low-carb version, use dill pickle relish in place of the sweet relish.

Gettin' down in the kitchen

My grandparents had big aspirations. They had reinvented themselves, my grandfather shrugging off his immigrant Irish background to become a much more refined Scot. They had lost their humble Minnesota beginnings and lived a life of privilege. But my grandfather, a devout Catholic, was never truly content with his wealth and there was always an underlying air of fear -- fear that he didn't deserve his riches.

My grandparents had a grand house in Greenwich, Conn., and our holiday meals were always formal affairs, with a multitude of dishes served to us by the live-in couple David and Ethelyne, who wore uniforms and served us out of sterling silver dishes.

Our meals were served elegantly. The conversation was light, interesting and very proper. Table manners had to be scrupulously adhered to. My grandmother had a little bell she would ring when it was time for the next course, and David and Ethelyne would come in and clear plates and serve the next dish efficiently and gracefully.

For a child, these were exhausting affairs. You always had to look out for the dirty look, which mom tended more toward with each glass of the copious wine. I could never wait until the dinner, with each portion kept carefully modest, would end and I could escape to the kitchen and hang out with David and Ethelyne.

Because I was a child, they felt no reservations about sliding into their natural black patois from the carefully modulated and unfailingly polite tones they used with my grandparents. David would laugh and dance and tickle Ethelyne, who would giggle, and gesture reprovingly at me, over picking at the turkey. And David would make some kind of inclusive statement like "Oh she doesn't mind" or something and I would laugh -- real belly laughs, as they went back and forth, and feel a sense of inclusion.

David and Ethelyne lived in the half-finished attic (it was kind of summer house-y, exposed lumber walls) with their two children, who were both born while they worked for my grandparents, Dennis and Denise, who I dubbed Niecy after a girl in my class. I had found out -- because I had asked, I was always asking questions -- that my grandparents gave David and Ethelyne a home in exchange for their work. I was incensed. I accused them of being "slaveholders." It was so unbelievably unfair to me that these people had to live in the unfinished attic, while my grandparents lived in their elegantly appointed, tastefully decorated, antiques-filled home below.

Eventually David and Ethelyne also decided that this wasn't the way they wanted to raise their children and they moved out. I had heard that Dennis got some awful disease and my grandfather made sure they had money to pay for treatments. My grandfather always made sure the people he hired in his home were taken care of. He gave the young Filipino grandson of the couple who lived with him and helped care for him at the end of his life the same amount of money as he gave his grandchildren. I say that totally without rancor -- it was HIS money -- but as an illustration of my grandfather's egalitarian impulses toward the end of his life.

By then the guilt of his money had become overwhelming and my grandfather ended up giving most of it to the church. He was very defensive about this when I last saw him. But, hey it was his money to do with as he pleased. By this time I had discovered real poverty first-hand and was even more cynical about my grandfather's infatuation with "the poor." There is absolutely nothing noble about poverty. It is ugly and demeaning.

Eventually I was too old to be dismissed from the table, besides we did our own cleaning and serving after David and Ethelyne left. And there was no fun kitchen where I could sneak turkey bits. Holidays lost a lot of their luster.

But one of the things that always intrigued me was the dichotomy that David and Ethelyne had. In front of my grandparents they spoke one way and when they were in private they had an entire different way of speaking and moving. They laughed. David would do his George Jefferson walk with the dip, way before it was on TV. I always felt so comfortable and happy when I was around David and Ethelyne, much to my grandmother's chagrin.

Later I noticed the same thing when I worked with a bunch of black journalists at the Dayton Daily news. Blacks are hugely under-represented in the newspaper business, as are other minorities. But in Dayton there was a pretty good-sized group of blacks there, which was good seeing as there is a very large black population on Dayton.

I never felt any tension with my black colleagues and never even would have noticed a difference, except for one thing: When they would get together, they would slip into the black patios, the easy drawl that they reserved just for each other. The minute anyone of another race would approach, the speech would slip back into the educated modulations they all used professionally.

It's not one of those things where I can start using a black-ish drawl when I approach, as I've seen many idiots do. I'm not black and it would look like a silly affectation and it's insulting. But I was always so hurt by it. I always felt excludedl.

I've never known how to even approach this with any black people I know without sounding stupid. It's the same exclusion, although this is more subtle, as the ban on any white people using the "n-word," while blacks call each other that whenever they want.

Frankly, I think that giving any word such extraordinary power is ridiculous and just begs for abuse. That's why I'm very much against the whole "retard" movement, trying to get that classified as "hate speech." There should be no such thing as hate speech. Giving up that much power by allowing yourself to be devastated by certain words uttered by any ignorant moron is just stupid.

But back to the black speech dichotomy. Here's my question. Do the Obamas, when they get alone with their friends behind closed doors, do they slip into the easy black drawl, and if I came in the room would they all stop?