Cheap Motels and a Hot Plate

We have watched hundreds of cooking shows on television. One of our early favorites was Top Chef, in which a group of talented cooks compete in an elimination format for a large monetary prize and designation as “Top Chef.” The chief judge on the show is Tom Colicchio, a noted chef who has won five James Beard awards. Colicchio has parlayed his cooking prowess into a career as an entrepreneur and is now the owner of the Craft group of restaurants, with venues in New York City and around the country. On the show, his opinions matters most; if you watch carefully, you soon see that what he says goes. To the aspiring top chefs, Colicchio is imperious and demanding, critical to a fault and not accepting of excuses, no matter how valid they might be. The contestants usually seem to fear him; it certainly is true that they challenge him at their peril. Read More

My father took me to one movie, in 1957, when I was eleven years old. Our small town had two movie theaters then, the Roxy and the Ford, but we went to the State, in the larger town three miles north. This might not seem worth noting, but back then a trip to Kittanning, with its riverside park, imposing courthouse, and shop-filled streets, was an adventure. The movie was Gunfight at the OK Corral, starring Burt Lancaster as Marshall Wyatt Earp and Kirk Douglas as “Doc” Holliday. I still have a vague memory of the famous shootout. Great stuff. The good guys bring the outlaws to justice. Holiday, the sickly notorious gambler, comes to the aid of the Earp brothers, doing one good deed before he goes to Colorado to die. Read More

We’ve been living in Tucson, Arizona, for nearly a year. We came in January to escape the winter, planning to stay for two or three months and then move somewhere else, maybe Boulder, Portland (for a second time), or Berkeley. But family matters forced us to stay in the desert. Tucson is a typical city in the arid southwest: a beautiful natural setting marred by barbarous human intervention. The city is surrounded by mountains—the Catalinas to the north, the Rincons in the east, the Tucsons in the west, and the Santa Ritas to the south. The flatter spaces in the middle, about 2,000 feet above sea level, used to be desert. Some of it still is. In 1933, the federal government established Saguaro National Monument in what is now the Rincon Mountain District of Saguaro National Park, to protect the saguaro cactus, the stately sentinels of the Sonoran Desert we all know from western movies. Decades of cattle ranching had threatened the survival of the cactus (even afer the Monument was set up, cattle were still allowed to graze on the public land and did so into the 1980s). The monument was designated a national park in 1994, and today it consists of the Rincon District, comprising 67,000 surprisingly green acres east of the city of Tucson, and the browner, drier Tucson Mountain District, made up of 24,000 acres to the west. Both parts of the park are worth visits. We’ve hiked many times in the Rincon District, enjoying the songs of the numerous bird species (I like the thrashers best), the gorgeous spring flowers, especially the blooming cacti, and the running water in the washes after winter rains. When you climb out of the desert floor and into the mountains, you are amazed at the changes in the terrain. The saguaro disappear at about 4,500 feet, replaced by pines, including the vanilla-smelling ponderosa, aspen, and oaks, among many others. A trip to Mt. Lemmon, in the Catalina Mountains, takes you from 2,000 to about 9,000 feet, and the effect in terms of ecological dynamics is the same as making a trip from the Mexican to the Canadian border. Read More