New Notes on the Branch Family

When my grandmother was a little girl, she used to play in the governor's mansion with her cousins. Her grandfather was John Branch, governor of North Carolina, Secretary of State under Andrew Jackson and the first governor of Florida (as it moved from territory to state).

My mother has various antiques in her house from the governor's mansion that were bequeathed to my grandmother and passed down to her.

I thought I knew everything there was to know about my Branch family history (incidentally, my sister proudly has Branch as her middle name, as does her daughter), but the other night I picked up my old paperback copy of "Main Street," and read Sinclair Lewis' dedication was to a James Branch Cabell.

I got curious and did a little checking on Cabell. He was a noted author, popular in the early part of the 20th Century and a contemporary of the likes of Lewis and H.L. Mencken. And it was a pleasant surprise to discover that we are from the very same "branch" of the Branch family, my grandmother's grandfather was his uncle.

The (big, fat) Turkey has landed (in Algiers)

(Once again, the annual re-telling of my now famous Algerian Thanksgiving story --Patti)

I'm in the back seat heading downtown while Nadir (interpreter) is in the front seat discussing with the driver details about the turkey. Jim and Shari are having Thanksgiving at their place and have given the driver the task of getting a turkey.
Jim said he wanted a big one ("and dead and plucked--you have to be specific here"), so the driver is explaining to Nadir that he got a sort of big one, and thinks it should be enough.

Nadir turns to me: "It's 20 kilos. Do you think that will be okay?"

20 kilos, 20 kilos. Sounds like a lot. I start to calculate. Let's see, 1 kilo is slightly more than 2 pounds, so that's.... that's....

..."What?!?!?! You're buying a 45 POUND turkey? Is that even possible?"

Yea, sure, I hear from both in the front seat. No sweat.

"Forty five pounds. Forty. Five. Pounds. In one turkey?"

Yes, this is nothing, Patricia. We eat this all the time. You know, especially after Ramadan when we are very hungry from fasting.

I ask Nadir if we are talking about the same animal.
"Are you sure this isn't an emu?
Or an ostrich?
Or a sheep? " I say.

Nadir starts to laugh while I get on the phone to my sister in England.

"Hi Joellyn. It's me. Have you ever heard of a 45 pound turkey?"
While Jo is huh-ing and what-ing, and expanding her brain to fit the cartoonish idea of a turkey the weight of her 9-year-old kid, I lose the connection.

Having stunned England, I call Jim.

"Hey Jim, it's me. Nadir and the driver are talking about the turkey. They are saying it's 45 pounds."
Jim yelps "WHAT?!?!?!" so loudly they can hear it in the front seat.

While Jim and I discuss the possibility of cutting the turkey in half so that we'll have half a bird at 22 pounds, the driver jokes that Jim could put the turkey in the washing machine and shrink it.

In the front seat, they start miming about shoving an obese bird into a small oven, while Jim and I ponder the mechanics of how one would go about stuffing half a turkey.

Shari, meanwhile, remains unaware of the giant, jurassic beast which is about to enter her kitchen. I imagine it arriving on a Harley, leathered and tattooed all around, with a marlboro hanging out of it's giant beak.

We want to save Shari from this horror.

"Nadir, tell the driver that we don't want a big bird, we only want a small one. Something around 10-12 kilos."
The driver is skeptical that he can get one that small.

He calls a few hours later and says he can get a 10-kilo bird (about 22 pounds), but that it'll have to be delivered in the morning, as it is still unaware of the fate that awaits it, and the duty will not be performed until this evening. Plus, the farmer is in the countryside, and it takes awhile to get it into Algiers.
But this won't do because of the timing (needs to go in the oven pre-dawn).

So it was, that when we sat down to our Thanksgiving feast, the silence of thanks was be shattered by the sound of the table cracking with the strain of the heavyweight centerpiece.

Where the Streets Have Changing Names

I lived in Prague for a couple of months in, when was it, 1993? '94? Oi, something like that.

Anyhow, it was a few years after the Velvet Revolution, and things were definitely in a state of transition.

And I remember this: you'd get into a taxi and tell the driver the name of the street you wanted. Say, for example, Ulica Londynska. The taxi driver would listen to you sound it out, and when he finally figured out what the hell you were saying (it sometimes took a few tries), he'd then look it up on a cross-referenced book, and recognize it only as its earlier incarnation known by another name.

It turns out, that after the Soviets packed up and went home, one of the first things done was to change the street names back to the way the Czechs had them in the first place.

Poor taxi drivers.

Remembering the Velvet Revolution

There was, among some, an unsettled disbelief.

Yet the crowds in the Main Square continued to swell, the growing swarms ballooning into the small arteries and alleyways that fed off of the already-packed plaza. Thousands upon thousands flocked to the center of the city, ignoring the circles of police outfitted in riot gear ready to stand against them. They were believers, all of them.

The disbelievers, the unsure, huddled in their bloc apartments, tuning into their televisions and transistor radios to determine how this might all end up. State broadcasters dished party line propaganda, if any information at all, but they tried to glean something from the tone.

I met Roman when he was 22, five years after the Velvet Revolution had unchained Czechoslovakia from Soviet control. It was my first visit to Slovakia, and we went on foot through the center of town (Bratislava), ending at the Square of National Uprising, where those demonstrations a few years before had eventually moved. I asked him if he had been there among the crowds during the Velvet Revolution.

He told me that at first, he had not.

"We really weren't sure what to think," he said. "I didn't think it would last. I was scared to believe it."

 Then--he didn't know what--but something shifted, and he found himself joining in the crowds. The numbing sounds of the mass of demonstrators was everywhere, as they rattled their keys in the air and shouted repeatedly "Unlock the door, let freedom in! Unlock the door, let freedom in."

At 17, Roman became part of a human tsunami of peaceful change.

I asked him what it felt like.

"Euphoric," he said, shaking his head. "Absolutely euphoric."

Jacks

My dog constructs blanket coves on sofas. What does your dog do?

For the less discriminating among us....

(Velky Biel, Slovakia--near Trnava)

Wild Sau Dirt Run... and MUD!!!

Yesterday, Georg Melzer (brother of a friend of mine) hosted Austria's first ever "Wild Sau Dirt Run" --a mud-caked, 10k, obstacle course in the mountains of Niederoesterreich.

It was just some idea he thought of a couple of months ago. So he laid out the course, got the word out, printed some flyers, and everything else you have to do get 350 people to run in the mud. The TV stations showed up, and emergency services were on call.

Seeing as Halloween isn't really celebrated in Europe, it was a nice surprise (for an American) to see Superman, Batman, Vikings and Cows enter the race.

Here's a look:

At the start of the event, everyone is clean. Including the cow-- proudly showing off his utters -- and Superman.

But let the games begin....

 Superman ahead of the pack, but looking brutalized.

A viking lends a hand

A muddy ballet

Mud. Mud. And More Mud.

Along with haystacks to climb, there were also logged trucks to get over, and rubber tires to wend through.