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The Twentieth Best Email We Wrote This Past Weekend

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The Twentieth Best Email We Wrote This Past Weekend


The Twentieth Best Email We Wrote This Past Weekend: THE HMM WEEKLY PREMIUM NEWS-LETTER

Good morning! Here is the latest edition of the SUBSCRIBERS ONLY Hmm Weekly Premium Newsletter, distributed exclusively to you, our paying members, supporters, and patrons. Thank you very, very much for your interest and support! If you're feeling even more generous of spirit, please share this message with your uninitiated or laggard friends, so that they too can take the opportunity to join us, and please spread the word about HMM DAILY DOT COM any way you see fit. We also have a YouTube. If you find yourself on that web tube and could see your way clear to hitting the SUBSCRIBE button, we would appreciate you even more. Thank you!


LAST WEEK ON HMM DAILY

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GUIDANCE DEP'T




Who Is the Purple Car in Your Life?


We were walking back home from the market, where we'd gone to buy some sausage to cook for dinner and had also impulse-bought a box of Russian tea cookies, off an impulse belonging to the seven-year-old, who had agreed to come along on the errand. He has a certain amount of drive, intermittently, to be helpful—volunteering to chop vegetables, tidying up the landslide of books at the foot of the bunk bed—and this seemed like a good use of that drive, bringing him out on household business, a little low-key character building. Although the cookies probably canceled that out. Although although they did take care of dessert.

We reached the folding table on the corner of 71st Street with crappy toy cars for sale, and as we went by a new one caught his eye. It was purple.

I want it, he said.

No, I said.

It wasn't as bad as it sounded. He asks for stuff more than he really wants stuff, so that I've learned, over time, that it's less an expression of greed than of enthusiasm. He wants a digital watch from the rack in the Rite-Aid the same way he wants a Bugatti Veyron: he wants to think about it and talk about it. I'm trying to train him out of the habit. But he was really fixated on the car.

You don't want it, I said.

I do, he said. It's purple.

He wasn't being whiny about it, and we'd kept on walking, but I felt like I needed to crack the problem. Look, I said. Here is the situation. You're saying you want it because you noticed it, because it looks better to you than the other cars on the table, which are junky cars that sit out in the dirty air by the street all day.

If you were getting any toy car in the world, I said, you wouldn't get that one. I had only set out to tell him we weren't going to buy the cruddy toy car, but accidentally and to my surprise, I was closing in on a larger point. It seemed like a pretty good larger point. I never really pictured myself giving a Dad Lecture in the middle of the street, but when you start trying to knock the rough edges off a kid's behavior, you notice things you might never have noticed and articulated. Hey, I said. There's a lesson here. Something you need to know for the rest of your life. Are you listening?

I'm listening, he said. We were performing a little at each other, parent and child, the lecturer and the lecture-ee. Also we were crossing the street. But we were onto something.

Here it is, I said:

You need to learn to tell the difference between something you're distracted by and something you're interested in.

Between the asphalt and the sky, my mind suddenly pictured a row of floating browser tabs. What had I done, myself, with my 40-year head start on figuring this out? Hey, I said. Do you hear me? Do you understand what I'm saying? Did it go in your ears, to your brain?

YES, he said. I understood what you meant in FIVE SECONDS.

This isn't just about toy cars, I said.

I KNOW, he said.

I quick-scanned a condensed version of my entire life. It's also about PEOPLE, I told him.

I couldn't figure out what else to possibly add. We went on home and ate some of the cookies.

***
We're having fun writing to you, but a one-sided epistolary relationship
can't help feeling a little weird. Is there anything you want to write to us?
Send questions and suggestions to newsletter@hmmdaily.com. ***
NINETEEN FOLKTALES: A SERIES

Illustration by Jim Cooke


19. The Count and His Pond

A count had on his lands a small pond, on which a few small wild ducks made their home.The count would sit in a little pavilion beside the water, in the shade of willows, and drink tea while admiring the ducks, as they paddled and dabbled.

As much delight as he took in the ducks, however, the count gradually grew dissatisfied with the little scene. He summoned a crew of laborers and set them to work digging on the far shore of the pond to expand it. When they were done, the pond was twice the size it had been.

Before long, as the count drank his tea, he saw geese, stout and long-necked, swimming in the enlarged waters. Now, he thought, the pond had become not just lovely, but impressive.

As the weeks went by, though, more geese arrived, and they began to bully the smaller ducks. Their droppings fouled the turf under the willows. Eventually the ducks were nowhere to be seen.

Dismayed, the count called in his gardener and the chief of the laborers to ask what might be done. The two men agreed that the only course of action was to make the pond even larger. Again the crew set to digging, longer and more extensively, till the pond had grown into a small lake.

Soon after the lake had filled its new boundaries, the count arrived at his pavilion to see a pair of swans on the water--pure white, graceful, and immense. The swans claimed the center of the pond, and the geese retreated to the far shore. With the geese in check, the ducks returned to the waters by the pavilion and dabbled in the shade of the willows once again.

One morning, setting down his just-emptied teacup, the count stepped out of the pavilion and went right up to the water's edge, full of pride at his accomplishment. A sudden bugling broke his reverie: the swan cob was charging straight toward him, in a rage, intent on driving him from its nesting ground. Its huge wings buffeted the count, and the nobleman broke and ran.

From then on, he only dared gaze at the pond from afar, from a window of his house. Weeds grew around the pavilion, and the ducks were distant specks. Eventually he stopped looking at it altogether.

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This week, we have reached the conclusion of our series of 19 Folktales. We hope you have enjoyed them. We particularly want to thank Jim Cooke for his extraordinary illustration work.

We have a very clear image in our minds of 19 Folktales: The Book. If you are a publisher, or you know someone who is a publisher, we'd be eager to talk about how to make that image into reality. Otherwise, we may just have to figure out how to print it up on our own. Stay tuned, either way!

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RECIPES


We present here for your (and our) continued amusement, delectation, and possible irritation a selection of recipes for archaic but 100 percent reproducible sandwiches, culled from The Up-To-Date Sandwich Book: 400 Ways to Make a Sandwich, published in 1909 and now in the public domain for all to enjoy. Try this at home!


OYSTER LOAF SANDWICH
Cut Vienna rolls into halves and spread lightly with butter; on one half lay four fried oysters, cover with the other half of roll, and serve with a pickle.

SHAD-ROE SANDWICH
One set of shad-roe that has been cooked and pounded in a mortar, the yolks of five hard-boiled eggs chopped very fine, two teaspoonfuls of finely chopped capers, a dash of paprika, and two tablespoonfuls of tabasco sauce. Mix and place between thin slices of lightly buttered white bread.

LOBSTER SANDWICH
On thin slices of lightly buttered white bread lay a crisp lettuce leaf; on top of that place shredded meat of a boiled lobster that has been mixed with a little mayonnaise dressing. Cover with another slice of bread and press together.

LOBSTER SANDWICH NO. 2
Cut the meat of a cold boiled lobster into dice. Sprinkle with a little salt, red pepper, and a tablespoonful of tarragon vinegar. Add three tablespoonfuls of melted butter. Place mixture on slices of lightly buttered whole wheat or brown bread, cover with another slice of bread, press the two together, remove the crusts, and cut into triangles. Garnish with an olive.

TOMATO AND HORSE-RADISH SANDWICH
Slice a tomato thin and sprinkle with salt. Mix one-half cup of horse-radish with two tablespoonfuls of mayonnaise dressing. Spread thin slices of lightly buttered white bread with the horse-radish mixture, and put the sliced tomato between.

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JOE MACLEOD'S SUPERMARKET SWEEPIN'S™

Each week, Joe will present an item he saw at the supermarket. Not to suggest that you buy it, or eat it, or anything like that, it's just to show you an item of interest available at the supermarket. Clean-up on all aisles!



This week's item: CHEF BOY-AR-DEE® throwback recipe PREMIUM Beefaroni PASTA IN TOMATO AND MEAT SAUCE, which is part of a whole group of "throwback recipe" items, along with beef ravioli and spaghetti and meatballs.



So I cooked up a can of the Beefaroni, and right off the rip I can tell you there's a big difference from regular Beefaroni with the smell. This "throwback" stuff has a strong garlic odor, which made me optimistic that it might be some sort of revelatory taste treat!



Maybe the chefs at Chef BOY-AR-DEE® made some sort of time machine breakthrough, and if they could journey back to retrieve this retro innovation, they could go forward in time to bring back my Beefaroni future dream, namely, beefless Beefaroni! I have long argued for a version of Beefaroni to be constructed from textured vegetable protein or maybe some of that newfangled Impossible™ burger.

This retro-roni did not send me on a Proustian journey, transporting me back to being a latchkey kid sitting in front of the TV slurping down Beefaroni while watching The Edge of Night after school, but really all I was looking for was a good junk-food experience.

Other than maybe the "throwback recipe" macaronis being a little smaller than regular Beefaroni, and the taste being not as sweet, more garlicky-bitter, and somewhat less greasy, it still left me with a vague feeling of dissatisfaction with myself and some seriously stank breath, just like the regular Beefaroni.

Thank you, and see you at the self-checkout where I will ask you to move your cart so I can get by.


Hmm Daily is a website in the Civil Network, offering commentary and news and other things. This email newsletter is written by Tom Scocca, the editor of Hmm Daily, and Joe MacLeod, the creative director.

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