Food, pandemics, and heat waves

By Oliver B. Pollak

LAGUNA WOODS, California — Our editor has opened SDJW pages to contributors of  fiction. What follows is true, but has the hallmarks of incredulity. We are wending our Pandemic way from August in Wyoming with the lowest Covid rate in the nation, to Richmond with a detour staying with my sister and brother in law in Laguna Woods. It is 2 pm and 104 degrees outside, and today, Sunday, is predicted to be 108 with “Very Unhealthy Air Quality.”

The four of us are house bound, all seated near the air conditioner set at 78. Karen and Judy are at the kitchen table going over old, current and future recipes. Discussions about meal planning have become a feature of our pandemic; sustenance turning into the cuisine of joy, a way to meet, sit and eat together. Chickens come up in the conversation; their growing size, stewing and soup chickens, and the merits and demerits of Canes, Chick-fil-A, KFC, and Blue Apron. The words disease, recalls, organic, and antibiotics pepper the conversation. I recently read the amazing Where the Crawdads Sing by Delia Owens, deservedly a multiyear player on the best sellers list. Her story of solitude is full of grits and grit, and hardly anybody to talk to.

I am comfortably seated, 12 feet away, working on my project, “Omaha Jewish Cook Books, a Trilogy, 1901, 1916, 1928,” with an ear to their conversation.

I turn them to the Nebraskan Ander Christensen’s recent impassioned presentation to the Lincoln City Council about the great misnomer “boneless wings.” I email them the Washington Post and New York Times articles about Ander who concludes the appropriate word for this morsel is “Chicken tenders.” I get lost temporarily googling Kosher chicken.

The subject of passports and citizenship has come up periodically since November 2016. Our parents have German, Austrian, Canadian, Czech and English roots, and have worn the uniforms of three of those countries. And of course there is the Aliyah option. Some cousins have claimed German passports, with EU advantages. A friend is working her way through Austrian regulations. I wore the American uniform and have written about war. Fake news is flabbergasting. I don’t know how to credit the truthfulness of the allegations against POTUS about the much more serious blasphemy and denigrations about the military deaths, prisoners of war, and disabilities of my fellow servicemen. Disclosure, I have an Agent Orange disability.

My sister asks, “Have our lives really come to this?” Yes, food is a common denominator for life. Life is stranger than fiction, I could not have made this up. How to accommodate dining desire of the four of us, the cornucopia of American possibilities, Mexican, Chinese or BBQ. We cannot go to the Golden Corral. Do it all. There are nice restaurants close by and we can pick up. Cooler heads will prevail, lest the combined leftovers leave a potentially unalluring scent in the refrigerator.

Fortuitously we are in with my sister on the day her daughter, our Chinese Jewish American schoolteacher niece, announces her engagement to a Lebanese American attorney, proving life does go on, there is joy in family, complexity is normal, and there are more opportunities to get together and feast, hopefully coiffed, intimately and not distanced.

I close with the prediction of  108 degrees today with “Very unhealthy air quality.” We plan to go to our cousins in Santa Clarita for lunch where tomorrow’s temperature prediction is 116. My father, of blessed memory, who was in Palestine in the late 1930s would call it a hitz or chamima.

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Oliver B. Pollak, Ph.D., J.D., a professor emeritus of history at the University of Nebraska Omaha, and a lawyer, is a correspondent now based in Richmond, California. He may be contacted via oliver.pollak@sdjewishworld.com