Introducing Beale Street Cafe (or How does JBOLC measure success?)

How does JBOLC measure success? Can we measure it by the length of the line to our booth at last Sunday’s Fungus Fest?

Ok, ours was the only mushroom related food being offered at the event; still, we witnessed a long line at the Fungus Fest on Randall’s Island start to form as we began to set up. We were late on arrival but got right to work. We knew what we had to do – didn’t have time to think too much and before you know it, we were into “the zone.” Femi said I was moving like a robot – I’m sure he was as well - and indeed I was in that humming place – in a rhythm of joyful labor. The pizzas were coming out about every 3 minutes with rolling and stretching, dressing, and paddling pies in and out of the oven at a steady output. Sung at my side cutting and serving. Babafemi, Juju and Joyce had their own momentum and system in place and meanwhile Japanese TV is looking through a camera’s eye over our shoulders. A line of people began forming and because they were mushroom lovers – foragers – either aspiring or practicing walkers and observers of the forest floor - they were perfectly calm and patient – just like at a church service awaiting an offering – a blissful sight to behold. It all lasted about two hours, until we all ran out of dough! We are grateful to the New York Mycological Society for inviting us to the First Annual Fungus Fest and agreeing to produce our inaugural Beale Street Café banner – illustrated by my daughter Ahna Pultinas and displayed for the first time at the Fest. When you see it this weekend at the market hanging from our tent or near our Welcome Table it might appear small, but in my mind – it is an enormous step! With this banner we are also expressing our desire to take it further – we imagine the JBOLC Beale Street Café becoming a mobile food prep operation – a food truck! We dream of being able to pull up at the invitation of any community garden in New York City – to help gardeners and their community utilize their harvest for community suppers and gatherings. That’s roughly the concept and with the introduction of the Beale Street Café banner– another seed has been planted.

I also want to stress that the joy I feel from labor – whether it is cranking out pizzas or digging trenches in the garden or chopping food scraps to make compost – is part of who I am, my roots so to speak. As a child of Great Depression-era children who themselves were the children of Lithuanian immigrants, I grew up respecting labor. I had better. My father clearly prided in the accomplishment of laborious tasks: shoveling the driveway, building sheds and furniture, and what have you. He worked as a pressman for Eastern Color Printing Company for most of his life – remember the Sunday Funnies insert in your newspaper? Well, if you were on the East Coast, it most likely came hot off the press in the presence of my father. My mother and her sister were waitresses who eventually started their own successful catering business in Connecticut. I was working parties, washing dishes and serving hors d’oeuvres from age 13. That’s where the pleasure of serving food comes from in my background. My parents were working class through and through – neither went to college and my father’s only degree, an 8th grade diploma, was granted to him at 17 years old. His widowed mother had relied on all her 3 children – who would have had a better grasp on the English language - to help provide for their household. My mother’s parents were farmers, and my mother would often tell the tale of when, during the Great Depression, my grandfather could not find a single nickel to pay the milk man. It took 3 generations for our immigrant family to begin earning college educations. But then each of us six children went to college and my parents were exceptionally proud of that fact. Though, even after I graduated UCONN with a bachelor’s degree in English and a minor in Fine Arts (Printmaking) my father still held out that I might finally choose a more practical occupation that paid well (something he himself dreamed of doing) – drive a truck! [br] Inspired by my Professor Maxine Greene in my days at Teachers College and her readings and teachings of her own professor and mentor, Hannah Arendt, I began to feel that for my life to be most fulfilling, I would aspire to lead an active life or “Vita Activa,” (as outlined in Arendt’s The Human Condition). Perhaps at that point in my life, in graduate school, I had been aiming towards a Vita Contempativa or Life of Contemplation. Nowadays, I don’t believe that an active life and a contemplative life are incompatible. Nonetheless, I aspired in my life to manage a perfect synchronization of the components of an active life: labor, work and action. I will elaborate more on what this means in a subsequent blog, but I will say for now that the Beale Street Café banner appears as a sign to me that a Vita Activa is once again within my grasp. Please share your comments

Thoughts on 63

Thoughts on 63 JBOLC – driven by joy! Indeed, No other motive. Surprises me that our reverence to and for our mother earth, our daily (if not hourly) practice might be seen by some humans, even today, as odd or misplaced. Most times, it feels like it’s all going to come about anyway, awaiting miraculous displays and flowering soon. What is resilience but willingness to Adjust, Adhere, Adapt, Love? Understand, you can’t hold it back. I could be hoping for rain to sprout the mushrooms in the forest and hope for no rain so the miller can come with his trailer and not sink in the mud. Hoping is what matters – happy rain will come again someday. Like at the market the other Saturday. There were no farmers - meant we had to make more food than usual and then donated so much more after. The way we run our market, no matter how much business, it’s always good. Thanks for the love my brothers and sisters, I have so much to be grateful for. Yet I still detect in me some aching and some lacking, benevolent patience, keep holding it all together. Please share your comments

Nothing Against Restaurants, but....

There is nothing like an occassional dining out - sharing a meal in a restaurant setting with family or friends, a bottle of wine and enjoying what someone else's hands have made. But, to be honest, the best restaurant I've ever been to, including the one that cost over $500 for two - where the chef sat at our table before preparing our meal to jot down our nuanced preferences - is our own home. Nothing beats the restaurant we call home and our home cooked meals. At home we sit on our terrace surrounded by cherished plants - including many that are native and wild - black swallow tail butterfly caterpillars nearby munching on the parsley and picking it clean - a praying mantis hopping on through - maybe carried here by the wind? Always plenty to see and witness - a lettuce plant completing its lifecycle is a beautiful and towering specimin to behold - clusters of downy white and yellow flowers leaning or is it yearning towards the sun and wind like a dancer.

Sung and I delight in our home cooked meals - stews, savory pies, lasagnas - the kind of meal planning that makes use of every last fresh vegetable and fruit we buy from the JBOLC Garden Community Farmers Market - there is a joy in leaving nothing in the refrigerator to spoil - and if that occassionally happens, though rarely - it is food scraps for the compost process. We sit on the floor, crosslegged or stretching our legs in the midst of a thriving garden - and we almost always lick our plates. That's something you can't do in restaurants! (Though we have begun to question that protocol - why shouldn't we be able to?) So, I walk into Joe's Italian Delicatessen on 187 near Arthur Avenue the other Saturday to get another pint of grated right in front of me Parmesian Cheese for the weekly corn roast, after picking up our order from Terranova Bread. A customer is telling Kurt how great a cook his wife is and says "it was so good, we could lick the plates." And I can't help myself but interject, "Why not lick the plates? My wife and I always lick our plates at home. In fact, I think we should all start licking our plates more often, why should dogs have all the fun? Licking plates should be a thing, I say we need to start a campaign to encourage people to lick their plates!" To which Kurt replies, "Maybe you're right, but not during Covid!" "I mean, licking our own plates! Not everybody else's!" As we have revealed and some of you may know this, we aspire to start a Vegan/Vegetarian slow food truck - we even have a name for it - Beale Street Cafe - named after one of James Baldwin's stellar novels and one that I taught as an English Teacher at DeWitt Clinton High School many times. One of the signs I'd like to see on our truck would read, "Feel Free to Lick Your Plate" or "Plate Licking Allowed Here!" That's how good we want the food to be at Beale Street Cafe! And yea, licking your plate is a sensual experience. It gets you the last taste of a great meal. We encourage you to try it! (At least at home, for now!) Please share your comments

Sensuality in the Garden and the Earthly Sexuality of Corn

It has been pointed out to us several times by several people that James Baldwin, though undoubtedly a great writer, essayist, poet, speaker, commentator and playwright - was not a gardener. He had a garden where he lived in St. Paul-de-Vence and while he most certainly enjoyed and relished in its beauty, he hired a gardener who watered and tended the plants. No where in his writing that I know of has he ever disclosed an ambition to garden or be a gardener. Nonetheless, I have found myself responding to those who have questioned naming an outdoor learning center in honor of James Baldwin that, if he were alive today during this time of unprecidented ecological peril when environmental disaster wreaks havoc especially among the poor and powerless, that he would approve of the James Baldwin Outdoor Learning Center and what we are attempting to achieve. In The Fire Next Time, Baldwin dwells on an aspect of experience that he found supressed in his day and that I feel is still only emerging in our own. He wrote, “To be sensual, I think, is to respect and rejoice in the force of life, of life itself, and to be present in all that one does, from the effort of loving to the breaking of bread.” I think most gardeners would agree that gardening, growing, watering and caring for and nurturing plants is a sensual practice in the way Baldwin describes. Hence my delight and joy in reading about corn in Robin Wall Kimmerer's beautiful and wise book Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants: "There is an earthly sexuality to a garden, and most of the students get drawn in to the revelation of fruit. I have them carefully open an ear of corn without disturbing the corn silk that plumes from the end. First the course outer husks are pulled away, then layer after layer of inner leaves, each thinner than the next until the last layer is exposed so thin and tightly pressed to the corn that the shape of the kerels show through it. As we draw aside the last layer, the sweet milky scent of corn rises from the exposed ear, rows upon rows of round yellow kernels. We look closely and follow an individual strand of corn silk. Outside the husk it is brown and curly, but inside it is colorless and crisply succulent, as if filled with water. Each little strand of silk connects a different kernel inside the husk to the world outside. A corncob is an ingenious sort of flower in which the silk is a greatly elongate flower pistil. One end of the silk waves in the breeze to collect pollen, while the other end attaches to the ovary. The silk is the water-filled conduit for sperm released from the pollen grains caught there. The corn sperm swim down the silken tube to the milky-white kernel - the ovary. Only when the corn kernels are so fertilized will they grow plump and yellow. A corncob is the mother of hundreds, as many children as there are kernels, each with potentially a different father. Is it any wonder she is called he Corn Mother?" Braiding Sweetgrass is filled with this kind of poetic description of plants and nature and is a book I would highly recommend to anyone seeking sensuality in nature and in gardens. It also reminds me of the pleasure that I receive from working in the garden, despite the heat, the sun, the sweat; I am happy to be one of James Baldwin's gardeners. And next time you bite into the luxuriously crisp sweetness, remember to enjoy the sensuality of this very generous flower we call corn.

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A New Era For JBOLC and Meg's Garden

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It is a new era for JBOLC and our gardening and our practice. As a concession to continue to be permitted use of the space on campus the entire front fence of Meg's Garden has been removed. After being unpermitted to garden there from March of 2021 to just this past month - it has been yet another awakening for sure. We knew full well that this was coming eventually - especially after there was an attempt to take down the fence during our Saturday market. However, imagine if what you felt was your protection for what you've been doing for the last 6 years has suddenly been removed. Kind of a naked feeling for sure. Not only are plants and trees exposed, but our market set up equipment, our seating and tables, childrens' learning materials - arts and crafts, paper, boards, everything now left to the good intentions of our neighbors to not steal or destroy. The timing of this removal means more work for us, more worry and concern and anxiety. My previous request for a postponement until after the growing and market season were completely ignored - not ever responded to. Having worked in these gardens and experienced needless destruction, time after time, I know enough that this is also about my own body's vulnerability. I feel it when the plants I have been caring for and observing as an expectant gardener are butchered. I have been writing like crazy because after all of the drama over this garden for over a year I need to let out my anger and disappointment in meaningful and constructive ways. I have experienced enough surprise attacks and threats on this garden for a lifetime, whether intentional or by default, it amounts to a kind of top down, hierarchical and abusive management protocol that places "cleanliness", order and ease of maintenance (ie. use of small gas engines presently banned in different parts of the country) above any concern for the actual natural ecosystems in place. I have witnessed, in this past month alone, two pollinator gardens - actual sites of citizen study - at the mercy of weedwackers and the men just doing their jobs wielding them like destroyers from another planet. As a career educator, I am appalled by this waste of opportunity. I have also seen our constructive and collaborative decision making and countless outdoor learning opportunities ignored or eliminated because of what's been decided by maintenance personnel and obnoxious administrators. And maybe this is all reaction on my part and people are merely acting out of ignorance (or what James Baldwin and others refer to as innocence) - but there is nothing more vicious to the environment than this kind of innocence or ignorance - and this is what I feel and care about. But the picture is not all that bleak either and it serves us no purpose, beyond stating our outrage, to dwell in our anger. The fact is that we have a garden back and, though we have real challenges, we can still operate as we have been with compassion for the earth and plants in our care and for our garden community. We can garden without fences! And we could address the unforeseen with inquiry, problem solving, collaboration and cooperation and truly make something new. We can continue to seed for a better and more just future. That's what JBOLC is all about. We're open to suggestions but sign making has already started.