My Big Apple
It is that time of year. Labor Day behind us; school buses find their way back on the roads; kindergarteners bid farewell to their parents as they board them for the first time - fall is unofficially here!
Goodbye summer whites and flip-flops; no more excuses to eat burgers and hot dogs...it's time to go pick some apples!
Being a New York City kid who was never let out of the apartment except for school and back (and of course, church on Sunday mornings..and if we were lucky - a visit to Authur Treacher's Fish and Chips afterwards on West 72nd street and Amsterdam)
Two golden crispy pieces of fried fish, big hunks of chips and a hush puppy (for those unlucky and unfamiliar, hush puppies are little balls of seasoned fried dough usually made of corn meal and served as a side dish in the South) and of course, my sister, brother and me could never get enough..even to this day when Authur Treacher's is no longer a chain restaurant, we can find them sometimes in food courts. Not quite the same as we remember from the late 70s and early 80s..but decent enough to bring back a little taste our NYC childhood.
Long John Silver's deserve an honorable mention but could never come close to our beloved Authur Treacher's. I was in the fourth grade; just old enough to be able to tell the difference between good spaghetti and bad spaghetti (and sometimes we just want the bad spaghetti with its thin liquidy tomato sauce); definitely wise enough to distinguish good fried fish and soggy bad ones. Yum!
Anyway, during this time of year, everyone talked about apple-picking. The news, our friends went here and there over the weekend and had their bushels filled with apples that they themselves pulled right off the trees; how we envied them and wished that our parents would take us.
My parents never left the city. They hardly traversed out of the five block radius that we lived in. What made us think that they would pile us all in a car and drive an hour or two out of Manhattan to go pick some apples that we could have easily had from Fairway down the street?
So that was that and the very first time I got to go apple picking was when I was 21 years old. My husband, sisters and a friend and me drove out to an orchard in Long Island and stayed the whole day picking. Rows and rows of apples. By the end of the afternoon, we had enough apples to feed a small colony.
And we never did it again until years later when our oldest son was three and a half years old. It was to be a school trip with the Japanese pre-school in Greenwich, Connecticut that he was attending.
We were very excited. My husband took the day off. It was an absolutely beautiful morning. The date was September 11, 2001. I was seven months pregnant with our second child. And then we heard the news. We didn't believe it. Howard Stern was playing an awful joke. Still, we boarded the bus that took us to an apple orchard in Easton, Ct and then the news unraveled. We arrived at Silverman's Farm in a state of disbelief. Cell phone calls to my parents and sister in NYC didn't go through; all the circuits were jammed!
I kept thinking, NO! NOT MY WORLD TRADE CENTER! NOT ALL THOSE THOUSANDS THERE! NOT MY BIG APPLE! I was feeling the ravages of war again for the second time in my life. It remains one of the darkest days in my life.
We still go back to pick apples there every early September and I always think of the correlation between the two events each time. We were there to purchase today because the picking time was over for our favorite apple - the Ginger Gold. Our second son got on the school bus today with his brother for the first time. They were safe and sound in their classrooms when my husband, baby daughter and I drove up to Easton to fetch our apples. Like the safety of our children, there are so many things we must treasure, protect and preserve; this IS the land that I love. This is the country that opened up its arms and welcomed the thousands of Vietnamese refugees (approximately 130,000 in 1975 to four large US military bases in California, Arkansas, Pennsylvania and Florida) We appreciate every single bite of our apples. I am a grateful American.
Goodbye summer whites and flip-flops; no more excuses to eat burgers and hot dogs...it's time to go pick some apples!
Being a New York City kid who was never let out of the apartment except for school and back (and of course, church on Sunday mornings..and if we were lucky - a visit to Authur Treacher's Fish and Chips afterwards on West 72nd street and Amsterdam)
Two golden crispy pieces of fried fish, big hunks of chips and a hush puppy (for those unlucky and unfamiliar, hush puppies are little balls of seasoned fried dough usually made of corn meal and served as a side dish in the South) and of course, my sister, brother and me could never get enough..even to this day when Authur Treacher's is no longer a chain restaurant, we can find them sometimes in food courts. Not quite the same as we remember from the late 70s and early 80s..but decent enough to bring back a little taste our NYC childhood.
Long John Silver's deserve an honorable mention but could never come close to our beloved Authur Treacher's. I was in the fourth grade; just old enough to be able to tell the difference between good spaghetti and bad spaghetti (and sometimes we just want the bad spaghetti with its thin liquidy tomato sauce); definitely wise enough to distinguish good fried fish and soggy bad ones. Yum!
Anyway, during this time of year, everyone talked about apple-picking. The news, our friends went here and there over the weekend and had their bushels filled with apples that they themselves pulled right off the trees; how we envied them and wished that our parents would take us.
My parents never left the city. They hardly traversed out of the five block radius that we lived in. What made us think that they would pile us all in a car and drive an hour or two out of Manhattan to go pick some apples that we could have easily had from Fairway down the street?
So that was that and the very first time I got to go apple picking was when I was 21 years old. My husband, sisters and a friend and me drove out to an orchard in Long Island and stayed the whole day picking. Rows and rows of apples. By the end of the afternoon, we had enough apples to feed a small colony.
And we never did it again until years later when our oldest son was three and a half years old. It was to be a school trip with the Japanese pre-school in Greenwich, Connecticut that he was attending.
We were very excited. My husband took the day off. It was an absolutely beautiful morning. The date was September 11, 2001. I was seven months pregnant with our second child. And then we heard the news. We didn't believe it. Howard Stern was playing an awful joke. Still, we boarded the bus that took us to an apple orchard in Easton, Ct and then the news unraveled. We arrived at Silverman's Farm in a state of disbelief. Cell phone calls to my parents and sister in NYC didn't go through; all the circuits were jammed!
I kept thinking, NO! NOT MY WORLD TRADE CENTER! NOT ALL THOSE THOUSANDS THERE! NOT MY BIG APPLE! I was feeling the ravages of war again for the second time in my life. It remains one of the darkest days in my life.
We still go back to pick apples there every early September and I always think of the correlation between the two events each time. We were there to purchase today because the picking time was over for our favorite apple - the Ginger Gold. Our second son got on the school bus today with his brother for the first time. They were safe and sound in their classrooms when my husband, baby daughter and I drove up to Easton to fetch our apples. Like the safety of our children, there are so many things we must treasure, protect and preserve; this IS the land that I love. This is the country that opened up its arms and welcomed the thousands of Vietnamese refugees (approximately 130,000 in 1975 to four large US military bases in California, Arkansas, Pennsylvania and Florida) We appreciate every single bite of our apples. I am a grateful American.
posted by cream cheese dreams at 10:24 PM
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