Scowl, Nu?

Anyone who saw us before we left San Francisco for the East Coast knows that one of the things that was stressing me out the most was the fact that our two always-inside-never-have-gone-outside cats were going to have to fly with us. Here's how it all turned out:

It took us going through and discarding 4 pills before Odie (the skittish cat who wouldn't go anywhere near the brand-new, sheepskin-lined $50 cat carrier we bought for her, even when it was simply sitting on the kichen floor) finally swallowed one ("You have to just throw it down her throat" I said to Avery.) Cried because it felt like I was torturing her. Got a big cat scratch. Mu (the mellower of the two) calmly swallowed her pill.

Got to airport. Had to hand the cats over to the United people right away, and they were just like, yeah, whatever, sign here please, no, we've never heard a complaint. I start to cry again. Odie starts to yowl in a funny, drunken-sounding way.

Some maintenance-looking guy puts the cat carriers on a dolly to bring them to the "Holding Area" whatever the hell that is. He lets us go with him, up until the point that he has to go through some restricted door. I am hysterical at this point, what with my drugged cat meowing this fucked-up, scared meow which I have never heard before and hope never to hear again. Not to mention all the people in the terminal yelling "OH! A KITTY! KITTY! MEOW! MEOW! Look it's a KITTY!" making the cat even more agitated. Fuckers.

The guy comes back from the holding area with an empty dolly. We're still there because I can't move because I'm still crying and gulping for air. Avery keeps trying to get me to stop. I stand with my back to the crowds at the baggage carousels because I don't want anyone to stare at me being hysterical. I buy a Pizza Hut Personal Pizza, which doesn't make me feel any better.

On the plane, tears come to my eyes when we take off (because the cats are scared), every time there is turbulance (again, cats, scared), etc. I have a big fat stress headache by the time we land. The pilot tells bad jokes for what seems like ever ("Why does a chicken coop have 2 doors? Because if it had 4 doors it would be a chicken SEDAN.") Oh, and before I forget: a big, giant Thank You to everyone that felt compelled to tell me their fucking airline terror stories about their friend's aunt's ex-husband's housekeeper's dogs freezing to death, or about the airline people abusing the animals for fun, or how the airline personnel just throw the pets down into some dark baggage compartment of the plane…that's all I could think about the whole way there. Once again, thanks!

Aside from Odie having to sleep off the drugs for the next two days and Mu weaving around the apartment as if she had just consumed six-and-a-half beers, the cats were — and are — fine. But I'll never travel with pets on an airplane again!

You'll never be able to get good sushi out there.

That was the general reaction from all of our friends in San Francisco when we told them that we were moving back east to Hartford. Of course, most of the people making this statement had never been to Hartford before, but they brought up a good point. Over the last five years, we had become quite the sushi conniseurs. Janet and I made a point to go out for sushi at least once a month, and had tried over 20 sushi restaurants since we first arrived in California (over 10 in San Francisco alone).

That's not all. When we would go out to sushi, we were at the bar for at least two hours at a time. Between our college Japanese classes and the time we spent with our friend Toshi, we knew not only how order in Japanese, but we could carry on a conversation with the chef and even knew enough of the customs so that we didn't come off as ignorant gaijin. We were sushi fanatics, but now we were moving to a uncharted sushi territory. Would we be without our favorite food now that we were moving to the East Coast?

When we first arrived in Hartford, we made a point to immediately start our search for a good sushi bar. The first restaurant that we tried was Osaka in West Hartford Center. Osaka had been around for 8 years, so we figured that it would be a safe choice. We were mistaken.

The first problem was the music. For some reason, they were playing Indian music. Usually, a Japanese restaurant will play Japanese music… or at least classical music. But when you hear Indian music at a Japanese restaurant, you feel like they're trying to pull one over on the white folk. Still, it wasn't a clear sign that the meal was going to be a disaster.

When we sat down at the bar, they presented us with a full menu and a little check-sheet ticket for the sushi. Two bad signs in a row. First, when you sit at a sushi bar, you should only be eating sushi, soup or a light appetizer like chawan-mushi (egg custard with tuna) or hamachi-kama (salted broiled yellowtail neck). You shouldn't ever order cooked food like chicken teriyaki, as the smell of the sauce overpowers the fish. So, if the restaurant expects people to order that kind of food when they sit at a sushi bar… there's a problem. The sushi ticket was a bigger problem.

The interaction between the sushi chef and the customer is an integral part of the sushi experience. You're supposed to order a couple of pieces of nigiri, then wait for a little while… ask what else is fresh, maybe buy the chef a beer and then order your next round. You're supposed to develop a rapport with the chef. Places that use the "card" method where you're instructed to just check off the fish that you want are usually suspect.

I addressed the chef in Japanese and asked if we could just order piece by piece. He didn't understand me. Figuring that I was speaking with a horrid American accent, I asked him again in English and he said that we could order piece by piece from him.

As we continued with the mediocre meal, I noticed that the chefs were speaking in something other than Japanese. I knew I had heard that language before… what is it?

Shit. Cantonese. I was in a Chinese-run Japanese restaurant that was playing Indian music. I wasn't speaking poorly, they just didn't speak any Japanese. A few directed questions confirmed that the chefs had never worked for a Japanese chef before, or had even gone through any formal sushi training. They were just ordering "sushi grade fish", using a cookbook recipe for sushi rice and were making a go of it. That's why their fish was not prepared properly. I don't know what offended me more: Chinese chefs impersonating Japanese chefs, or the fact that the patrons never knew the difference. Our usual two hour sushi meal was concluded within an hour.

Disappointed but still optimistic, we tried another restaurant the next weekend: Fuji. When we walked in, we were greeted with the traditional irasshimase and were immediately seated at the bar… which was a good sign, and hopefully a good omen. The chef then directly greeted us with a konnichiwa (good day), to which I responded konbanwa, o-genki desu-ka (good evening, how are you)? He immediately started speaking to us in Japanese. A good sign.

After we were seated, the waitress asked for our drink order and passed us a menu and one of those check-sheets. The chef immediately told us that we didn't need to use check-sheets and that they were there to make it easier for people who had never been out for sushi before. The menu was there in case we wanted appetizers (we ordered the edamame (boiled, salted soybeans)), but it was expected that we were not going to get any cooked food. The edamame was fantastic, and the first round of fish was excellent.

Still, something seemed a little wrong… but I couldn't put my finger on it. I asked the chef what his name was, and he responded "Ko"… which is not a traditional Japanese name. I asked what prefecture (state) he was from, and he said that he was from China.

My heart sunk. Were there no Japanese owned sushi bars in Hartford? What were we going to do? I mean, the fish was good, but if the chef wasn't trained in the traditional Japanese manner, the fish selection would probably be hit or miss. Ko continued as I wracked my brain in a mild sake-induced panic, saying "but I apprenticed for five years in Nagoya" which is the town in Japan where our college Japanese instructor was from. He went on to say that he lived in Japan, went through the standard apprenticeship and was a licensed sushi chef in Japan. He was fluent in Japanese, had a Japanese wife and was working in Boston as a sushi chef until 1998, when he bought Fuji from the retiring owner. Ko had his fish delivered in by his personal fishmonger that he used when he was a chef in Boston, and went up there occasionally to work in his friend's sushi bar, Yama (which has a phenomenal reputation).

Over the next few hours, we ate and talked and listened to his stories of trying to educate the locals about good fish. When we left, we were ecstatic. The food was great, the chef/owner was superb and the experience ended up being as good as any place in San Francisco.

We went back to Fuji Friday night for a two hour meal of sushi, sake and biiru (beer). We ate and ate and drank (Ko even let us buy him a beer) and put ourselves in his hands as he created some oishii (tasty) and kawaii (pretty) dishes that he knew we would appreciate. Once it was ika (squid) sashimi with cucumber, another time it was chopped tako (octopus) with salmon roe. He even brought us a broiled sake-kama (salted salmon neck) which was the best I had ever eaten.

But the most touching part of the evening came when we asked for the check. Ko gave us one of the check-sheets and asked if we remembered everything we had eaten and then to mark our orders down on the sheet. The fact is, he trusted that we were going to mark down everything honestly… and when I told him that we marked down everything that we could remember, he told us that we were his friends and that it he was sure it was close enough.

I now have a favorite sushi restaurant in Connecticut… and it only took two tries to find it.

Before we bought our lovely new car, we had to deal with a car that overheated if you even so much as thought about driving it. What would start out as an innocuous little drive to the mall would turn into the Car Ride of Terror, complete with me panicking and yelping "It's going to the 'H'…It's at the 'H'…Oh, phew, the needle's going back down…oh shit! It shot right back up to the 'H'! Shhh! Do you hear any hissing? Is it hissing? I think there's something wrong with the needle. This doesn't make any sense! Should I pull over? What do I do? It's still at the 'H'! Stupiddumbuglypieceofshit car!"

One recent Sunday, the car was at it's very worst. It was overheating after mere minutes of driving it, and steam was pouring out if the hood. We decided that enough was enough and tried to find someone to tell us exactly what the hell was wrong with this deathtrap of a car. Ha! It was Sunday in Connecticut. Evidently, no mechanics work on Sunday. They do all kinds of things with tires, but no mechanical work, as we found out when we drove our steaming car into the Pep Boys parking lot.

Going to Pep Boys is bad enough; I mean, the three guys on the logo look friendly and smiley enough, but the actual Pep Boys staff can't be bothered to lift a finger to help you. They either strut around yelling out things in Car Part Code (the mechanic-type people) or they stand behind a counter looking very bored, won't acknowledge that you're standing there until a good five minutes have passed, and then attempt to be as non-helpful as possible (the sales staff). Everything you ask for is either out of stock, is backordered, has to be special ordered, or they plain just don't have it. When they really don't feel like doing anything, they tell you to "go look it up in that book over there." When you inform them that the book only goes up to 1987 models and you own a 1993, they respond, "Look, if it's not in the book then we ain't got it." Gee, thanks.

The last time we went to Pep Boys, we pulled into a parking space next to the ugliest color turquoise pseudo sportscar I've ever seen. It was surrounded by a group of men and boys yammering in Russian and admiring the handywork of yet another man who was installing something under the car. As soon as we started walking away, they start yelling at me, "Hey! Escuse me! Escuse me! Hey!" and gesturing for me to come back to the car. I do, and they start grunting and pointing — first at a scratch on their car door, then at my car door. Their door, my door. I get the point. Now, I know the door on our used car was a little rusty and kind of dented, but I also sure as hell would have noticed if I had opened the door and bumped their door. Especially with a huge group of people standing around it.

I argue with them and they keep speaking broken English and gesticuating at the door with their little cigarettes that they have smoked down to the point of hardly being able to hold the things anymore. Avery sees that I'm still over there, comes back and sticks up for me by demonstrating that if I open my door, it doesn't come anywhere near their door at all. One of the Russians obviously doesn't buy it and swings my door back and forth, back and forth as if trying to force it to hit their door. Ha! They're wrong! "Thanks for accusing me" I say. "Next time get your facts straight." One of them holds his hand up to me in a kind of Russian version of the "talk to the hand" motion, complete with cigarette, which at this point is just basically just the ashes of the cigarette. "Asshole." I say, for good measure. They don't respond, which was the most frustrating part of all. They probably don't even know what "asshole" means.

Yesterday, Janet and I decided to make the hour-long trek up to Northampton, MA for the Great New England Brewers Festival.

The GNEBF is the largest regional craft-brew festival in New England, showcasing 40 local breweries and a number of international brews, giving beer aficionados over 90 beers to choose from over the three day festival.

As beer festivals go, the GNEBF is a bit pricy. It cost $6.00 per person just to get through the door and to get the cheap plastic souvenir cup, and six ounce samples were $1.25 a pop each (except for the international beers which ran $2.50 for six ounces). Add $3.00 for parking and you end up with an expensive way to spend the afternoon.

The primary reason that Janet and I went up to the festival is because we are horribly uneducated on our new local beers. Sure, I can rattle on for hours about the differences between an Anderson Valley Hop Ottin IPA and a Lagunitas Maximus IPA… but ask me the difference between a North East Brewing Lobsterback IPA and a McNeill's Dead Horse IPA and I'll just shrug my shoulders.

So, we figured that we could go to the festival and try 10 or 12 different local beers and get our local brew bearings. However, as I sit here in my lonely computer room, I realize that I could have picked up full 12 ounce bottles of most of the beers available at the GNEBF for $1.00 each at Crazy Bruces, and enjoyed them without having to worry about the car crapping out on the way there (or the way home), or having to deal with the crowds or anything like that.

But there is more to a beer festival than just drinking beer… it lets you spend time with the brewers themselves so you can get an idea of what they are trying to accomplish with the beers that they chose to showcase. That's why they call it a brewers festival, right?

Wrong. In the State of Massachussets, the brewers were not even allowed in the festival due to some archaic laws about brewers and the specific type of alcohol permits required to serve their beer… so instead of having them at the festival milling around to answer questions, the festival organizers simply banned the brewery staff from the premises.

In other words, there was no benefit to driving out to Northampton over buying 10 or twelve singles at Crazy Bruces and kicking back on my porch to enjoy them. What a gyp.

Basically, we drove two hours (round trip) to sit in the middle of a dusty fair ground to drink beers with Budweiser-clad college boys and drink overpriced samples of beer at a brewers festival that didn't have any of the brewers in attendance. Even seeing a familiar face from the 1999 Barleywine Festival at the Toronado and bumping into another ex-San Franciscan with a Toronado t-shirt isn't enough to justify the time and wear-and-tear on the ol' Civic.

One of my concerns with us moving back to Connecticut was the family situation. For the last ten years, Janet and I have lived far away from our parents. It was a 6-10 hour haul to see us in Pennsylvania or West Virginia, and Boston was a long enough drive away to deter our parents from making any surprise visits. Oh, and nobody was coming out to San Francisco without at least a 14 day advanced purchase… so we never got a knock at the door from a blood relative that we weren't expecting ahead of time.

But now that we live in Hartford, both my mother, Janet's mother and Janet's sister all live within a 10 mile radius. Heck, we probably all use the same grocery store, which means that the chance that we'll bump into them without warning is very likely.

Now, I don't want this to come off like I don't like being this close to relatives. It's just that now that we have less privacy than ever before since we've been married. It's not like we do anything illegal or anything (and even if we did, I wouldn't admit it on this public website)… but do you really want to bump into your mother-in-law on the way back from the package store or for your anti-smoking mother to see you puffing on a cigar while you walk around the neighborhood? The privacy that we took for granted is now gone.

This brings up another major issue for me. My parents have been divorced for the past 22 years or so, but there is still a tension between them that will probably never go away. I'm not sure what the cause of the divorce was, but it seems that twenty-two years of guilt, anger and hostility has created a situation where neither of my parents seem to care to be in the same world as each other, let alone be in the same room with each other. Living away from Hartford made it easy to keep my relationship with my mother completely separate from my relationship with my father.

But now that has changed.

My father has been making an effort to see me as much as possible. For the last three years, he has come to San Francisco twice a year for a week-long business conference, and Janet and I have flown down to his national futon marketing trade show for the last few years as well. Ok, we went to the show not just to visit, but because the last show was in Las Vegas and the show before that was in New Orleans, but now that we live $125 dollars away from him (Southwest Airlines), he is probably going to come to Hartford more frequently. This increases the chances that my father's and my mother's lives are going to cross again in the near future exponentially… and if they don't bump into each other by chance this year, they'll certainly be in the same room on our 10th wedding anniversary next June.

The indirect contact between my father and mother has already started. At the futon trade shows, Janet and I made friends with Bruce, one of my father's long time friends. He's known my father for 25 years, and used to move in the same social circle as my then-married parents.

Bruce is close friends with Lillian, who is a also one of my mother's good friends.

Since we now live in Hartford, Bruce now lives 10 minutes away and Lillian lives across the street. The four of us went out for pizza last week, and Bruce and I are making a concerted effort to hang out together. For someone who old enough to be my father, we have many things in common: we both like beer and cigars, and he's one of the best read people that I know. Bruce is our personal friend, as well a friend of the family.

See the dilemma now? Lillian is probably going to tell my mother that we went out to dinner, she'll mention that Bruce was there, and suddenly my mother's life is intertwined ever so slightly with my father's… and I have a sinking feeling that this is somehow going to cause bad blood between my mother and me.

Before we got here, my mother and I had a long discussion about expectations on our time and schedules. I mentioned my concerns about her and my father, and she acknowledged that she would try to make things as comfortable as possible. I'm afraid that this sort of relationship with a close friend of my father is going to poison the well, so to speak.

My mother is a trooper, and she'll take my friendship with Bruce in stride… but I just can't bring myself to tell her about it. I'm not ashamed or anything… but the last thing I want to do is hurt her after all the help that she has given us on our relocation. Still, I'm not going to abandon a friendship just because she might be sensitive about it. I mean, we're all adults now. Right?

It's funny, no matter how grown up you are, you always feel ten years younger when you're around your mother.

I have a sister. The last time I saw her was in May 1994, on the day of my college graduation. Since then, we sort of fell out of touch, what with me on the West coast and her still on the East. Needless to say, I was apprehensive about seeing her again…I mean, five years had gone by! When she found out that we had moved to Hartford, she weaseled our street name (but not the street number) from our mother, and proceeded to basically stalk Avery and me by driving around our neighborhood at random times of day, hoping to catch us outside. Last Friday, as we came home from a dinner out, we were standing on the porch for a couple of minutes when all of a sudden we heard someone yell "Hello..!" It was my sister, successfully stalking.

My sister and I cannot be more opposite. She is super-thin and flat-chested. I am not. She is a waitress. I work in the financial industry. She has a 10-step hair-styling process ("It's all John Frieda! First you wash it with the shampoo and then the clarifying shampoo and after that you have to put in the conditioner, but only after you get out of the shower because it has to stay on for 20 minutes, and then you rinse it, and after that you need to put in the hot oil and then the serum for the curls, you finish up with the hairspray…and after an hour, I'm done!") and likes to coordinate her outfits down to the last detail (on Friday, it was head-to-toe Tommy Hilfiger. Even the socks. The sneakers too.) I'm lucky if I remember to put my deodorant on in the morning.

We decided to go to the Spigot to have a drink and catch up. With her skimpy tank top, skinny body, fake tattoo, and shiny, long curly hair courtesy of the John Frieda styling line, a lot of men seemed to be looking her way. (That, and she ordered a Zima as her first drink. I mean, what does that say about a girl?) I asked her, "what the hell is a Zima, anyway?" "Clear malt beverage" she replied. A guy drinking a Corona (which, in my opinion, doesn't belong anywhere other than on a beach in Mexico) came over and "accidentally" bumped into her, then started making small talk: "What's your puppy's name?" (motioning to the small stuffed puppy on her keychain.) "Oh, it doesn't have a name" she told him. "OK, then what's yours?" asked the guy, who then introduced himself as "Ed." Of course, she starts talking to him. Then he starts trying to involve me in the conversation. He keeps drunkenly babbling until my sister gets up to get another drink (which Ed offers to pay for.) Avery goes with her to try to coax her away from the Zima, leaving me alone with poor, desperate, pitiful Ed. Good Lord. I position myself facing away from him. He keeps talking. I ignore him. Trying to establish some sort of connection, perhaps, he then starts acting as if he's in the final round of the $10 Million Dollar Pyramid Game, saying things like "Chinatown." "Fisherman's Wharf." "Alcatraz." (THINGS YOU CAN FIND IN SAN FRANCISCO! YES! JOHNNY, TELL ED WHAT HE'S WON!) I keep ignoring him. He starts saying "I know you're ignoring me." "You're ignoring me, huh." You are ignoring me." (Very observant, this Ed.) After annoyingly repeating himself, like, nine times, I finally stop ignoring him. I turn to him and say, "Look, I'm married and she's engaged" which is kind of a lie because my sister isn't engaged, but she's had the same boyfriend for six years, so whatever.

He says, all crazy-like, "I know! I'm not trying to pick up on anybody!" God damn it, Ed, get the fuck away from me! You don't just buy drinks for people out of the blue because you're a Good Samaritan! And you don't keep talking to someone who obviously wants you to Go Away! What's with these men who do that — talk to people who are obviously ignoring them? Anyway, Ed eventually finished sipping his Corona and left, a couple of other guys stared at my sister and she batted her eyelashes at them a few times, but nothing else of Ed-proportion really happened. Maybe we'll just go for pizza next time.