Don't build your house on sand

and other rules of stability. [recipe]

My uncle was a builder in the years after World War II, and he taught me three things:

Never buy a house that is built below the level of the street, because it will flood.

Never buy a house with a flat roof, because the weight of the elements will collapse it.

Never build your house on sand, because sand moves, and it will lack stability.

My uncle was the kind of guy who sized things up long before anyone knew what had hit them. Famous family story: when he was shipped over to France right after the Allied Landings as a captain in the Army Corps of Engineers, he discovered that his platoon leader suffered from alcohol abuse disorder. He was inebriated morning, noon, and night, and in the precarious days after the Allied invasion, he would most likely get everyone killed. So my uncle found someone selling cognac on the black market, bought cases of it, retrofitted an abandoned German trailer with the Remy and a chaise, and kept his platoon leader three sheets to the wind for (as he put it) the rest of the war. There are, of course, moral implications here, and this sounds particularly cruel, especially if one has a complicated relationship with alcohol. But my uncle was far from cruel, and he was a problem-solving kind of man, and, moral implications notwithstanding, he managed to save his own life and those of his platoon members, including his long-suffering leader. My uncle came home at the end of the war and went on to become a building estimator whose direct competitor was Fred Trump (who, with his wife Mary and teenage son, Donald John, came for dinner to my aunt and uncle’s house in Jamaica Estates, Queens; this kind of thing was commonplace in the late 50s, and my uncle’s memories of that night are unprintable here). But, his job meant that my uncle could look at architectural renderings of anything — house, gigantic apartment building, whatever — and figure out how many bricks it would take to build it. Down to the last brick.

He was also the kind of man who could not sit still, and was known, when bored at parties, to remove swollen doors from their hinges, plane and rehang them because the sticking drove him crazy. He loathed willful ignorance, imprecision, and vagueness more than anything else. In his opinion, there was a right way and a wrong way to do everything. This led to many arguments and many tears (on my part, and probably on the part of his kids and grandkids, and sometimes even my aunt), but all he was asking was this: have a plan, understand why you are engaging in the plan, proceed with the plan, and if — midway through — an evaluation shows that you might have been wrong, step back and reevaluate, hopefully before too much loss is incurred. And then, as the Buddhists say, Begin again.

I tell this story — the hospital, the chicken, the unmovable plans, the demand for control, the fight between generations, the Piperade — because it is one of planning, of organization, of expectation and respect, of presumed safety providing you just stick to the rules.

He also believed that every person had to maintain a solid knowledge base about something — anything — that they were passionate about, no matter how obscure. He didn’t care if that thing was of no importance to him. He insisted that all of us — my cousins, my father, my aunt, myself — were passionate about something. This was not always easy, and it was hobbled by many preconceived notions: we were, for example, a highly musical and artistic bunch, but he believed that musicians generally starved and artists lived in garrets, and neither would be able to support families and live with some semblance of financial security. Having grown up during the Depression, this was a non-negotiable.

My uncle, somewhere in Bavaria, 1944

I was the only person of my generation who ever pushed back on him — hard — and it changed the scope of our relationship dramatically. When my father had to have emergency quadruple bypass surgery in October 1982 while I was away in college, my aunt and uncle (and older cousins) made the decision not to tell me, because I was in the middle of midterm exams. The night before my humanities midterm and his surgery, one of my cousins slipped, and it came out during a phone conversation: my beloved dad was going to have surgery the next day, while I was taking my exam. I was enraged; they knew how much I loved my father and they knew how much he loved me, and yet, in my uncle’s opinion, the exam came first. My college friends — people who are still very dear to me all these years later — said You are never going to do well on this exam, and we need to find a way to get you home. See if you can take a make-up when you come back to school. So I did: I called my humanities professor (who is now a close friend and the woman to whom Permission, my next book, is dedicated) and she agreed. You need to go home; the exam can wait.

I threw some clothes into a bag and fled to the airport. My uncle picked me up at LaGuardia two hours later; he was furious that I had disobeyed him and the elder members of my family, and on the short ride from the airport to his house, he explained to me in great detail how, when he was in the army, he was not allowed to not do things just because he didn’t want to do them. I was irate; I am not in the army, I told him as we drove along the Brooklyn Queens Expressway, and I expect that when something happens to my father while I am away at college, someone will have the basic common sense and decency to tell me. He invoked the army thing; he invoked discipline. I invoked kindness, and added that sometimes, the tables would be situationally turned: sometimes, he would have to do something that he didn’t want to do, in the name of compassion. I was a nineteen-year-old little pisher. The two of us fought like hungry wolves in the front seat of his car that day. And then, instead of taking me directly to the hospital, he took me home where my aunt had a lovely lunch of sliced chicken sandwiches on white bread waiting for us, and she served it very, very slowly. I kept looking at my watch. She poured me a cup of tea and offered me a slice of honey cake. I drank the tea, stood up, and said Take me to the hospital now, or I’m calling a taxi.

No one — no one — had ever spoken to either of them like that, and certainly not I, the family member who lived at the very bottom of the totem pole. But it seemed obvious to me, and I could never figure out why they didn’t get it. They were good, very smart, often decent-to-a-fault people who had been through the hell of the Depression, war, and, in the fifties, the horrific loss of a teenage daughter. But they also wanted to control the situation in the name of predictability and its sister, safety, and they wanted me to behave in an expected manner, which I very much was not planning to do.

When we finally got to the hospital and my father saw me, he cried and said I didn’t know if I’d ever see you again. I cried. The nurses cried. My grandmother, then in her eighties, cried. The janitor might have cried.

I’ve been waiting for you, my father wept. Where have you been?

Like my father, I have the smallest amount of a temper, and when our visit was over, my uncle and I got back into the car, and went back to my aunt’s house, and we fought again; I finally said On what planet is it okay to not tell someone that her father is having open heart surgery and may die and you need to get home NOW? On what planet is it okay to make her chat politely over chicken sandwiches and tea when she needs to get to the hospital asap? He couldn't answer. When we arrived at the house, my aunt pleaded with us both to stop yelling at each other. But I had made my point, and nothing like it ever happened again. He had had a plan, and he couldn’t not stick with it, but I had pushed him far, far out of his comfort zone and forced him to.

The problem here is one of assumption, control, and impediment: presented with a particular situation, the senior members of my family assumed that I would follow their guidance and not argue, but I saw things differently because I was older, and I needed to do what I needed to do.

A few years later, I drove down to Virginia with them and a cousin to see a younger cousin perform the role of Brigitta von Trapp in the Rockville Civic Centre’s The Sound of Music. We stopped halfway there, for lunch in New Jersey. I was already working in food by then, and when the server handed us menus and my uncle scanned it and said What is a PIPERADE and I said, reflexively, it is a sauteed Basquaise dish containing red pepper, onion, and tomato, sometimes with egg and sometimes with ham, he lowered the menu, looked at me doubtingly, and then asked the server What is a PIPERADE and she said it is a sauteed Basquaise dish containing red pepper, onion, and tomato, sometimes with egg and sometimes with ham.

Our relationship changed on the spot; I knew this bit of gastro-historical information that he did not, and at least I succeeded in being an expert on something in his eyes.

I tell this story — the hospital, the chicken, the unmovable plans, the demand for control, the fight between generations, the Piperade — because it is one of organization, of expectation and respect, of presumed safety providing you just stick to the rules. If you do all of these things, you, theoretically, will be able to predict the outcome. If you know the exact size of the structure you have to build, you’ll know the exact number of bricks you’ll need. But sometimes, the rules have to change because of compassion and common sense, and, having been so stuck in our ways of doing things and living our lives, we are called upon to make shifts where we don’t want to make them — our college-age niece pushes back on us, with our war medals and toughness; she refuses sustenance of chicken and tea and politesse — because, up until that moment, what we’ve always done has always worked. Until it doesn’t.

We are in a similar situation right now. Nothing is the same where I am writing this from, in my little office in my little house in New England. We have mostly all just proceeded with our lives, doing the same things the same way, having our little chicken sandwiches and cups of tea while the world crumbles around us as it did for me back in 1982, and assuming and predicting that everything will work out just fine because it always has; we have it figured out, down to the last brick. But this is simply not the case; the old rules no longer work. The old rules that always existed have been thrown out. Even the really bad old rules have been thrown out. My uncle made certain assumptions: if his platoon commander was going to be smashed while everyone was being shot at by N**zis, they were all likely going to die, because 1+1=2. If someone says they are God-fearing (and even if not), they will understand the concept of mercy, because 1+1=2. They will not take it as a taunt and a cause for investigation and threat and bullying. If someone says they represent The People, they will listen to The People they represent, otherwise they’ll end up with a whole lot of tea floating in the harbor. In Germany, under Strafgesetzbuch section 86a — the Na*zi salute has been illegal since the early 1950s. I have German friends who are a little older than I am, and they have all said to me: This is not going to end well, unless something changes. But it’s too late because you’ve all spent too much time doing other things, like looking at your phones, and watching reality tv.