Simple Pleasures: Comfortable Socks

Despite being way down there at the ends of our legs, feet are remarkably sensitive appendages. When struck or stubbed, they smart viciously, and over many centuries of mutual exploration, lovers all over the world have discovered the unique erogenous electricity of the tender regions of the foot.  But in the cooler months of the year, few things can compare to the soft caress of a good pair of socks. They protect us from hard edges and unyielding surfaces and hold our most distant parts in a warm embrace. Whether slipped into a shoe or worn alone, good socks are good friends.

Simple Pleasures: Grape Jelly

Particularly when generously applied to French toast. Far superior to syrup.

Simple Pleasures: Ode to Pero

Two and a half years ago, in a post called “Ode to Postum,” I waxed romantic about the beloved coffee substitute. I reported that I and my partner of the time had come to enjoy a hot cup of Postum after dinner and that, no more than six months after we had established this pleasant routine, Kraft Foods had discontinued Postum. A product first introduced over a hundred years ago had been snatched from our hands just as we had fallen in love with it.

Much has happened since Ode to Postum. I am now drinking my hot beverages alone. But, especially as the weather turns cooler, I find myself yearning for a Postum-like beverage in the evening. When tea is not enough and something heartier and a bit sweet is required, I miss my Postum.

It has taken a while, but I’ve made the transition to Pero, a Swiss-made instant coffee substitute. Soon after the demise of Postum, I sampled a few of the other Postum imitators on the market. Most were undrinkable. Pero was acceptable but suffered by comparison with the memory of Postum. Pero was smooth and rich tasting. Its primary shortcoming was that, unlike Postum—which contained molasses—it was not naturally sweet. But sweetness is easy to accomplish. I typically drink both coffee and tea black, without sugar, so adding sweeteners does not come naturally for me. But a hot cup of Pero with a teaspoon of brown or white sugar is a very pleasing beverage. It may also help that, two and a half years after my last cup of Postum, the memory of its deliciousness has faded somewhat. Now, if the Pero and sugar are mixed just right, I can imagine I am drinking a cup of C.W. Post’s wonderful elixir.

On one level, the forgoing represents an unsolicited product endorsement (“I’m not a doctor, but I impersonate a PhD in real life”), but I hope you will see that is it much, much more: another installment in a long series of sonnets in appreciation of simple—in this case, domestic—pleasures.

This American's Dream: Please, May I Never Be Rich

Recent research shows that wealth diminishes a person's ability to savor and enjoy simple pleasures. Other studies show that inadequate income is associated with both immediate unhappiness and more general life dissatisfaction.

I am lucky enough to know I will never be poor, but, please, may I never be rich.

Simple Pleasures: Taking Group Pictures for Tourists

Amateur snapshot photography has been popular since the introduction of the Kodak Brownie box camera in 1900, but the recent emergence of digital photography seems to have greatly increased the popularity of picture-taking. Most of the developing and printing costs have been eliminated, and pictures can be distributed over the internet with a click of the mouse. Many—myself included—believe the average quality of snapshots has decreased, but this flaw is overshadowed by the benefits of digital pictures. Nowadays, many people seem to bring their digital cameras wherever they go—just in case something memorable happens.

Lately, I have taken great pleasure in a simple act of photographic kindness. Couples and families who are traveling together often find themselves in front of a scenic backdrop, unable to create a photo of the entire group. They go through the ritual of assigning one member after the other to be the photographer, but unless they are assertive enough to ask a stranger to take a picture—and willing to hand over their camera to someone they don’t know—they never get the shot they want. Recently, particularly if I am traveling, I have begun to be much more forward with offers to take photos of couples or families together.

Many of my most cherished family photos were taken at distant locations by strangers recruited on the spot. Naturally, the quality of these photos is quite variable, but having a record of the entire group is very important. For any couple or family, the sights and sounds of traveling are an exciting experience, but encountering them with others is a memorable part of the event. The group photo records that sense of shared travel in a way that separate photos cannot.

In the summer of 2007, I spent a few days in Seattle alone. It was a nice trip. The city is quite beautiful and exciting, but at various points I felt a little lonely. One day I took the ferry to Bainbridge Island and back, an inexpensive excursion that affords beautiful views of Seattle across Puget Sound. This is a West Coast equivalent of using the Staten Island Ferry as an inexpensive Manhattan tour boat. On the return trip, I wandered around the large, modern vessel, and when I arrived at the bow, I found several couples and families taking photographs of themselves with Seattle in the background. Without hesitation, I began to offer to take pictures of several of the groups. Naturally some people were a bit hesitant to accept my offer, but no one turned it down. In several cases the travelers were very appreciative as I patiently took multiple shots when necessary.

It is just a simple act: offering to take a picture. But knowing how much I value my own family photos, made it seem important, and for a few moments far from home and work, taking those pictures gave me a much needed sense of purpose. I stepped off the ferry in a far better mood than I when I got on.

Adventures in Television Land: Dry Lips and Echoes

Last Monday I appeared on The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer. The six-minute interview was taped the week before, but based on my prior experience (see Adventures in Television Land: Osama bin Laden and Me ), I told almost no one that the appearance was in the works. I thought the taping had gone pretty well, but once your interview has been recorded, you never know for certain that a radio or television show will use the material until they do. Fortunately, this time they did, and the reviews from family and friends have been quite good.

Being a pure talking head—a face in a box on the screen—is a daunting experience. In this case, I was in a small studio in New Haven, CT with bright lights shining in my face, staring at the black eye of a TV camera, and Jeffrey Brown, the correspondent for The NewsHour was in a studio in Arlington, VA. The video and audio of me were going to VA via satellite to be recorded on that end, and Brown’s questions to me were coming north over a phone line. There was no video signal coming back to me from the Arlington studio, so I could not see Brown. I just had his voice in my ear.

To be a successful talking head, you have to learn to make eye contact with the camera eye, or else you look like you are not really paying attention. This turns out to be a somewhat challenging skill, and the technicians at the Yale University studio reported that some inexperienced interviewees have spent the whole time looking at their shoes.

So under the best of circumstances, being recorded for television in this manner is a challenge, but I had two additional problems. First, I got dry lips. This is a problem I had once before while being interviewed for a video, and I learned how deadly it is to get caught licking your lips on screen. But my worst problem did not become evident until it was too late. The interview started very suddenly, and as I listened to Jeffrey Brown’s questions and tried to construct intelligent responses, I discovered that I could hear myself in the earpiece. However, because what I was hearing was my own voice playing in the Arlington studio and coming back to me over the phone line, the sound was delayed. So my powers of concentration, already strained by the demands of the situation (“...stare at the camera; don’t lick your lips....”), were further challenged by having to ignore my own voice echoing in my ear.

Somehow I managed to get through it without looking like a complete fool. After hearing the report of my ordeal, my brother gave me a great piece of advice for the future: lip balm.

Simple Pleasures: Soft Ice Cream

A while back I wrote an op-ed piece (“In Praise of Cheap and Local Eats”) extolling the virtues of eating at local diners, pizza places, and other inexpensive neighborhood eateries. No matter the venue, I consider eating out a luxury, and my appreciation for simple forms of restaurant food has been expressed in earlier blog posts.

Now that summer is well underway, I am reminded of one of my most abiding simple pleasures: soft ice cream. Soft serve is an odd product. I am not sure that the mix it is made from is entirely food, and then there is the wafer cone. What is that made of? I’m not sure I want to know. As a teenager, I worked at a Dairy Queen in Urbana, Illinois, and things went on there that I would rather not describe.

But I love the stuff. Vanilla just plain or dipped in that waxy chocolate coating. Chocolate soft serve or a chocolate vanilla twist is also very satisfying, but I steadfastly resist the new methods of injecting exotic flavors into the standard vanilla cone. This is soft serve trying to be something it is not, and I prefer the simple purity of vanilla and chocolate.

Soft ice cream is a less pretentious dessert than hard or gourmet ice cream, and it is strongly associated with summertime vacations and automobile travel, in particular. Here in the East, most soft serve is found at the roadside seasonal clam shacks and take-out ice cream places that close when the warm weather and tourists disappear. Your cone is likely to be handed to you by a high school or college student working for tuition money, and in my case, each lick conjures up memories of summers past.

Simple Pleasures: Folding Clothes and Washing Dishes

I am a lover of simple domestic life, and two of its common chores are favorites of mine: folding clothes and washing dishes. Interestingly, I am not particularly good at either one of them. I regularly discover—or more embarrassingly, someone else discovers—smudges on glasses and bits of dried food on plates that I am supposed to have cleaned. When I am folding, oddly shaped clothes, undergarments, and smaller items often resist my efforts to flatten them.

Over the years, I have known two women who were very skilled folders. In their hands, piles of t-shirts looked like neatly stacked playing cards, and laundry that was naturally inclined toward chaos and entropy was soon molded into cloth monuments to order and efficiency. One of these women taught me how to fold one of the the laundry worker’s biggest problems: the fitted sheet. I stand in genuine admiration of people who show such masterful command over clean laundry. I have tried, but I am unable to match their skills.

Particularly in light of my meager abilities, it is curious that I like these activities as much as I do. I can think of several reasons. First, they are domestic chores. Daily chores. Small parts of the business of making a home. When you live—or, at least, eat—with others, these chores also represent service to another, which can be very gratifying. In addition, dish washing and folding have something in common. They both involve dipping your hands into something warm and clean: dry—and often warm—clothes from the dryer and wet, sudsy water in the sink. These are very pleasant sensations for me. Finally, both these chores are most often done alone, which allows the worker to recede into his or her own thoughts while engaged in a mantra-like, repetitive task. If there is a window at the sink, the dish washer’s contemplations are accompanied by scenery.

My habit of daydreaming while washing and folding is undoubtedly part of the explanation of my poor performance. If I gave greater attention to the job at hand, I might produce cleaner dishes and more neatly folded clothes. True enough. But I am not likely to change. Daydreaming is a large part of the appeal, and I am unwilling to give it up.

Simple Pleasures: Coffee in a Paper Cup

It occurs to me that an entire blog in praise of simple pleasures might be a wonderful thing. I am somewhat reluctant to take on another project, but I promise to devote much of this blog to the simple things that bring happiness—to me, at least. Many of them run along a gustatory theme: I have already shared my love of Postum and my fond remembrance of fish sandwiches at The Deluxe in Champaign, Illinois. For those who want to learn more about my philosophy of simple foods, I humbly recommend a piece I wrote a couple of years ago entitled “In Praise of Cheap and Local Eats.”

I love coffee and drink more of it than the average Joe (sorry), but this piece is not really about the coffee. It’s about the cup. Styrofoam may be lighter, but it is a stiff and squeaky substance that—when assigned to carry liquids—is far too clunky and slippery for the task. Furthermore, styrofoam’s fossil origins and virtual indestructibility add a heavy moral burden.

Paper cups are also very light, but I find them much easier to hold. I also like the cup’s comparatively ancient origins. Indeed, this year marks the centennial of the invention of the Dixie cup, the first paper cup, which was born out of concerns for the spread of disease, particularly in schools. The paper coffee cup’s only drawback is that it can burn your hand, but even before the introduction of insulating rings, this problem was quite manageable and always temporary.



For me the paper cup has a democratizing effect on coffee drinking. I love a fine cup of coffee like those purveyed by Peet’s of Berkeley or the Coffee Exchange in Providence, and when making coffee at home, I tend toward the gourmet varieties. But out in the world where coffee comes in paper cups, my coffee drinking transcends class barriers. I do my best to avoid the pretension of Starbucks and the drive-thru car culture of donut shop coffee. I also drink my coffee black and never order lattes, cappuccinos, or Coolatas. I often buy relatively good quality java at independent coffee or bagel shops—especially my local haunt, The Yellow House, in Stonington, CT (shown above). But to me, any kind of coffee in a to-go cup is something of a treat, and often the standard Maxwell house brewed at a 7-Eleven, XtraMart, or Cumberland Farms is perfectly acceptable. In exchange for a little more than a dollar, you can have a stimulating, warm drink in a compact and highly portable container. A simple pleasure indeed.

New Hope for Postum

It turns out that the disappearance of Postum has not gone unnoticed. NPR’s Weekend Edition Saturday ran a feature “Postum Postmortem,” and many bloggers have been waxing poetic about the lovely warm grain elixir. A Yahoo group aimed at saving Postum has been established, and the recent Christian Science Monitor story “Can Postum Fans Revive Their Beloved Beverage?” suggests a miracle might be possible. The goal would be to have some smaller company acquire the rights to the formula from Kraft. Popular opinion has spurred this kind of resurrection in the past. Many brands, once orphaned, have been saved, including my favorite candy: Good & Plenty.

Ode to Postum

My partner and I began our relationship with Postum about six months ago. The caffeine-free roasted grain coffee substitute was invented by C.W. Post in 1895, and we two, one a coffee drinker and one not, found the slightly sweet instant beverage was a nice way to end the day. So in the Fall of 2007 we started buying it on a regular basis, often sharing a cup over the phone from our respective abodes. But in December and January we began to have difficulty finding Postum in our local stores. In early January, I found a few jars at the C-Town grocery in New London, CT, and bought three. I recall that there was at least one other jar on the shelf--maybe more--and I now wish I had bought out the entire stock.

It seems that in December of 2007, over a century after it was introduced but just a few months after we became enamored of this hot drink, it was discontinued by Kraft foods. A cruel turn of events for two true Postum lovers. As I write this, there are several jars of Postum being auctioned off on eBay for $20 and up. Also as I write this we are both enjoying mugs of Postum, some of the last few we will have. We are savoring every sip.

Postum, you will be sorely missed. You left us far too soon. We are now forced to search for a surrogate, but so far no suitable substitute has appeared. Wish us luck.