My Crazy Family: Raisin and Little Bit

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As many of you know, I picked up a little dog on my long walk around Texas. I named her Raisin, and she regularly pesters the members of this household for walks and extra servings of food.

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A few weeks ago, I heard crying outside my window all through the night. I finally investigated in the morning and discovered a little kitten near my neighbor's side door. I took her in, and she's been with us ever since.

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I was a little scared by how excited Raisin was to have another animal in the house. It was akin to a kid's excitement over getting a stuffed animal that could also run, talk, and play. In short, my dog went nuts.

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Oddly, the kitten did not freak out, and further she actually seemed to enjoy the torments my dog originally put her through. The kitten went a step further and went on the offensive! I was nervous at first, often separating the two, but now they both play regularly and unmonitored.
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My mom, who was pretty much against the kitten, was the one to name her Little Bit. She is allergic to cats and doesn't play with her at all, but my dad makes up for that. I caught him playing with Little Bit by hanging his belt from high and letting her chase it.

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So now we are a family of three humans and two animals. Who knows? Maybe one day it'll go up to 50-50.

The Baking Life: It's All About the Hat

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Well, I got a part-time baking job. The place I work at is Le Succes, a bonafide French bakery located on Staples just south of the Saratoga intersection. I just couldn't stay away from the flour, I guess.

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I hadn't realized this when I chose this picture for the blog, but the small hat makes my head look out of place, sort of like the kids on Weezer's 'I Want You To' video. I don't handle customer service, so I don't get an opportunity to freak anyone out.

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The owners Daniel and Alicia Louis are a lovely couple. As far as production goes, Daniel is the meat and bones of the operation, though Alicia does do quite a lot when she's on. When Alicia arrives to work, Daniel calls her "babe" and usually tries to give her a kiss and a squeeze. It's very easy to work for a happy pair.

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I primarily work with Daniel, though I have on occasion taken notes from Alicia and another employee at the bakery. I handle baguettes, batards, and shorter loaves of French bread. I shape a few boules with Daniel (he doesn't yet trust me shaping all of them), and usually do a few roll-outs of either croissant or danish. Unlike my former baking job, I am working without break the entire time (though I do squeeze in lunch).

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Every employee wears the uniform, owners included. The hat, direct from France, is part of it, as well as a Le Succes shirt and plain white apron (in the picture, I'm just wearing the hat). Daniel complained to me that when he and Alicia went to France last year that they couldn't find any hats. The way he said it, you would've thought the whole country had sold out.

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I'm getting paid crap, which is okay for the time being. I'm learning how to make several pastries, as well as mastering various shaping techniques. Daniel is an extremely strict teacher, making sure I gather up unused flour and getting the details of this job just right. He's a sort of Miyagi-san. He's fair, so I go along with it.

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There are so many related tales, so I'll save them for another post. I work Wednesdays and Thursdays, so drop on by if you want to say 'hi.'

Killing Time: The Corpus Christi Jazz Festival

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The Jazz Festival has come and gone, but I stopped by for a few hours. There were tons of people, which is always a welcome thing, though I hardly knew anyone. I recognized one person from high school, just a familiar face, and that was it. There were the usual food and informational stands, but it was easy to pass all of that. I'd brought Raisin along for the fun, so we wandered from tent to tent looking at all the bands and listening to the sounds.

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The first thing I did was catch the last few songs of a fantastic Tex-Mex-Jazz band. Such good music! These guys were out of Houston and really had the audience going. Unfortunately for them, the announcer at the end was hardly intelligible. I couldn't understand what the band's name was. I wanted to find out from one of the pamphlets that were floating around, but a new one costed five bucks! I suppose I could've asked someone, but I soon lost interest in finding out.

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Wandering around with Raisin, I was surprised by how many people pointed and smiled. Raisin had fans! She's small and cute, of course, but the amount of attention she got was unreal. Perhaps a dozen and a half people, mostly women, tugged on their spouse's/partner's arm and pointed at Raisin while we passed. Crazy.

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The musician above was from the second band I visited. While the announcer of this band was perfectly understandable, I forgot to write the name down. There were about five men, and the last song they did was a long John Coltrane number. I closed my eyes a few times and just enjoyed the rhythms. Again, a real polished performance.

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Finally, Raisin and I were tired of walking around. I found a grassy knoll, and we sat and chilled. A military group got up and blasted the night away. They were enjoyable, but my mind was elsewhere, far from the festival and the people and all the lights. It was just one of those moments in which it's easy to slide away.

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Happy 50th Anniversary to the CC Jazz Festival! This was an all-around good time.

The Baking Life: Flour Power

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One of my many jobs in the past several years has been baker (thanks, UT English degree!). I was lucky to get a slot at Sweetgrass Bakery in Helena, Montana with no inside contacts (I'm told that three members of the same family are currently working there.). They taught me the basics of shaping dough, which is surprisingly tricky at first, and how to bake a variety of bread using unreliable ovens. Among the many highlights of working there were dozens of interesting conversations, a connection to the town locals, and a story I'll have for the rest of my life concerning Montana celebrity Ted "The Unabomber" Kaczynski.

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I have since made lots of baked goods on my own. I frequently make croissants and danish, but I have also made loaves of bread, cookies, and miscellaneous treats.

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Tonight, I botched some French baguettes. I'd take a picture, but instead I'll focus on the scene of the crime: the flour jar.

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This jar has been in use for what seems like my entire life. It's hosted cookies mainly, but when we have a surplus of flour and a scarcity of cookies, you can find it filled with the former. Oh, it's probably not a great idea to have a glass container, but until we break it, we're going to use it.

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Tonight the flour jar oversaw my tortuous project. I really don't have any good excuse for messing up, though I was trying a few different things. First, mixing French dough is the very first thing the good folks at Sweetgrass teach a newcomer. Sure, the newbies screw it up for a few months, not realizing that the morning crew spends a commensurate amount of time cursing their very existence, but they eventually get it right, or at least okay.

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Well, one thing I tried was mixing active dry yeast with weak wet yeast. This shouldn't matter at all, but I mention it for accuracy. I added warm water at first to active the dry, then added lots of cold water.

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Then I don't think I added enough flour, as I was shooting for the wet end of okay. You see, I'm experimenting not only with doughs but with my family's mixer. It doesn't touch the bottom of the bowl, so I have in the past added too much flour. I swear, you can't win in my house.

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Finally, I spaced out on the rising process. That is, I let it rise too much and dry out. Yes, I did this.

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The thing that's great about a bakery is how many different projects you can have going at one time. They all require you to stay in or near the kitchen.

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At home, I don't want to stay put for the requisite amount of time to let something rise and wander away, usually to the demise of the bread. I used a timer in this case but ballparked too high.

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Double finally, I burned one tray of bread and did okay on another. The stuff did NOT turn out like French bread AT ALL, but it didn't taste half bad with butter. The burnt loaves will go to the birds, and my dad and I will eat off these half survivors. C'est la vie.

Killing Time: Coffee at the Coffeehouse

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I play a lot of chess at Cafe Calypso. I wish I could claim some great games, but really it's just to get out of the house.
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I usually get either a cookie or a coffee. They make some pretty good cookies there. However, the coffee lasts longer and even when empty makes me look legit.
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Coffee tastes like crap. I've always thought so and have added a ton of milk/cream and sugar to compensate. My dad drinks it black, and it got me to wondering if there's some hump I have to get over to enjoy the plain unadulterated taste.
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Tonight, I had some coffee and a biscotti. Having the cookie offset my plan to get used to the bitter drink, at least while I had both. Soon enough, the biscotti ran out, and I was left with my cup of jo. There's nothing I dislike more than paying for something and leaving it, so in spite of not actually liking it, I drank it.
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I guess the real question is this: Is the chess worth it?

It's All in the Details: The Little Sign at H.E.B.

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I've been looking at this sign for some time now. It can be found at a small H.E.B. on Alameda, close to my family's home. You walk in under the pharmacy side and hidden off to the side near the carts is this sign.

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There's no story here. I just really like this sign.

My Crazy Family: My Mother's Quilt

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Okay, I got some negative feedback on the gymnastics I described in the last post, so I decided to take this one to a place even the littlest old lady would feel comfortable entering: quilting.
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My mom habitually cuts up old clothes and makes rags out of them (I did this in Guinea, West Africa, by the way.). Well, a couple of weeks back, she decided to make a quilt from all the old fabric lying around the house. In a fury she put the entire thing together in two or three days.
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The light blue denim is all from my dad's old pants. All the rest is from scraps from who-knows-what. She also added a red trim around the entire thing. It's quite nice.
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Now, my mom is putting the finishing touches on the thing. She is cutting the sewn sides of the squares (shown above) to give the quilt a soft-looking frayed appearance. At the time this picture was taken, not much of that had been done.
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It's not a big quilt, maybe 4' by 5', but I asked for it nonetheless. Viola! I've got so many colors now, I can now hit the streets like Joseph hit the cities of Egypt. I sleep on the quilt or under it, depending on if my parents have the temperature at 72 or 75. Raisin likes it too. I've seen her dragging her behind over it a few times for the rough surface; this doesn't please me too much, but she licks me afterward, so we're all good.
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And for the toilet naysayers, may I add that there's more to this blog than potty aerobics. I had hoped to establish a range of topics within my little slice of Corpus. After a few more posts, you'll get a better idea of what I'm up to. Hopefully, I will too.

It's All in the Details: Toilet Gymnastics

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This is the bathroom toilet that saw the life cycle of me and my three siblings. By the time I came along, a good ten years after the pack, I had it mostly to myself.
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Now, I normally wouldn't blog about something like what's written below, except it seems to me something of the extraordinary.
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Yesterday, I was peeing standing, as guys often do, when an unstoppable urge hit me from behind. I needed relief of a different sort, and immediately, but I was standing. What to do?
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Normally, I would exercise those beloved hidden muscles somewhere in my nethers, stop peeing, turn around, and sit down. Unfortunately, I was already trying to keep one crack from causing a landslide. If I had tried to plug the river, who knows where the stuff would have come out of.
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So while peeing and feeling as if the world were about to turn brown, I carefully put one leg on the wall and managed to turn around. You try it with your shorts halfway down. It's only funny now, but I knew then what was at stake.
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I managed to turn all the way around, while peeing in the commode, and sit down. I'll spare you the rest.

Killing Time: Chess at Cafe Calypso

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A lot of my time in Corpus is spent playing games. I find a measure of comfort in gaming that I don't find in much else with the exception of hiking and biking. I play a lot of checkers and backgammon at MSN's "The Zone" in which you don't have to log in. But more on that later.
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After a trip with my parents to see The Social Network (great film, by the way), I wrote some more thank-you notes and then headed off to Cafe Calypso. Cafe Calypso is one of the few places in Corpus that has a real unique flavor to it. (I should hedge a little here: I don't get out that much, so what do I know?) There's usually a musical act twice a week, and tonight there was a great quartet playing Latin American beats. As a result, the ambience is great, but it all takes back seat to the chess. I've been playing chess there off and on for years and see a lot of the same folks.
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I found a couple of guys playing a game, then another, but after ten minutes, they were through. I stepped in when one had to go and met Lonnie, the fellow pictured above. Lonnie is a good guy, kind of mumbly and usually avoiding direct eye contact, but polite and to the point. He won one game against my five or so wins, and as I'm ranked higher than he is, that's pretty good.
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After winning our last game, I said something like, "Well, that was good." Lonnie immediately countered, "No, it's not." He then pointed out that I had three entire pieces along with my king versus his king and pawn. In the picture, you can see that my bishop was covering my rook in the far back corner, which forced checkmate. He was friendly about the losses and had been up for repeated poundings during the course of an hour.
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I took off as Lonnie was putting up his pieces, said goodbye to another player George who was just relaxing and enjoying the Saturday evening music, and headed home. When I arrived, I went straight into making some rolls from a dough I had refridgerated earlier in the day. I found my mom still up, and she and I chatted while the rolls baked.
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When the bread came out, we were waiting for it with butter. Warm bread at night. What a great way to end the day.

Post-Hike: Thank-You Cards

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As you might already know, I have recently finished walking the outline of Texas. It took me the better part of a month to snap out of a zombie-like state, and now that I have, there is a pile of things waiting to be done. Who knew that walking entailed so much extra work? Not me, I guess, and the biggest chore that stands before me and tranquility is an enormous stack of thank-you cards.

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I don't remember much about the gifts I received for my high school graduation, but I do vividly recall the stack of thank-yous I had to write. My mom pestered me every day, but I could only do a few at a time. I really put my heart into them. Years later, my mom admitted that several people had come up to her later mentioning those thank-yous.

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Before me lies the very same task, only this time without the nagging. And instead of twenty-some-odd letters to write, I have closer to seventy. In this age of constant emails, my hands hardly know what to think with all this actual writing.

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I took the time to start a Snapfish account, so I could make my own thank-you cards (shown above). It was so easy. Within a week, I had specialized cards to use. (I don't take credit for the idea. I received a thank-you from Annie several months back when I was hiking for contributing to her PEARS fundraiser. She had made her cards from Snapfish.)

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Tonight, I wrote nine cards. Tomorrow, I'm hoping for nine more at a minimum. I've written perhaps thirty so far and have barely covered the Gulf Coast region and East Texas. I met so many people on my hike who helped me out; I hope to touch bases with most of them. It's the least I can do.

My Crazy Family: Grandmother Read

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Let's get one thing straight before I go any further down this road. When I write the adjective "crazy" in the phrase "My Crazy Family," I am in fact speaking only of my nuclear family: my parents and siblings. However, I am not going to start a separate column called "My Extended Family" just to illustrate the finer points of the family tree. My grandmother is family, but she is not crazy, nor is the grandmother I mentioned in the previous blog column. They have played their roles in the raising of my parents, but I am largely unaware of the precise details of their influence. Bottom line, they're family, so they get lumped up with all the rest of us nuts.
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Today, my parents and I drove up to Austin to visit my grandmother, uncle, and aunt from the DFW area. They met us halfway. In a few days, my grandmother will turn 95, and the family is both thrilled and impressed. I bet she is, too.
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Grandmother Read is still entirely self-sufficient. She lives alone and takes care of her basic needs, such as cooking, cleaning, and paying the bills. She drives to the store and to church, though I do wonder about her behind the wheel. Her car which she purchased in the 1980s barely has 30,000 miles on it.
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Grandmother doesn't talk a whole lot. The conversation at the lunch table passed mainly between the two husband-wife pairs and me. When the food came out, it was entertaining to see my dad and uncle fuss over my grandma's food, making sure she had what she wanted on her plate and a little extra. She ate for the most part in silence.
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Our visit lasted just over two hours. The above picture was taken while things were winding down, and we were smiling and laughing about little nothings. I caught her in a quirky pre-smile pose, about to laugh but perhaps holding it back for the seriousness of the photo shoot. So often, my grandma is reserved, quiet, almost invisible to the hubbub of family action, but this is how I prefer to think of her, as a woman who occasionally lets the little girl of her youth bubble to the surface and spill over for the world to see.
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Happy Birthday, Grandma.

My Crazy Family: Grandmother's Change

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With the exception of my sister, my family is naturally disorganized. Oh, sure, we know where things are, but to the unaccustomed eye, our living area (be it in Corpus or anywhere else we have dominion) is a sea of clutter - paper, books, and junk, stacks of gonna-woulda-shoulda-didn't. It's a lifestyle choice as much as anything else.
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I am a messy person, but even I have my limits. I went crazy in my parents' den, eliminating needless piles of books and trying to make sure that most books were vertical and actually in the bookcase. Then I attacked a cupboard with duplicate cinnamon and sage, empty salt shakers, and a whole bunch of miniature metal pans, the purpose of which has yet to be satisfactorily explained to me. Finally, I turned my attention to the pantry.
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Several months ago before my Texas hike, I stared in fascination as my brother Charlie emptied my parents' fridge on the kitchen table and painstakingly organized it and cleaned it up. He was a maniacal, unreasonable tyrant, throwing out outdated salad dressing, mustard, anything that threatened his vision of perfect organization. Looking at the fridge today, you wouldn't suspect he'd done anything at all.
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Starting in on the pantry, I felt a wave of empathy for my fool of a brother. He spent a good amount of time pushing the boulder of my parents' mess up the mountain of cleanliness but to no avail. I knew I'd be doing the same, but for the moment, it felt good to push.
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This was no simple job as I learned two seconds into the dusty ordeal. There was an exploded can of fruit on one shelf and related cockroach droppings all over the place. There were bottles and bottles of medications mixed in with the jello packages and tea. There was a Santa cake mold way in the back, plastic still on, something I'm sure my mom smiled at upon reception. Then there was the change.
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My mom took out a little Clabber Girl Baking Powder container filled with quarters, dimes, and nickels. She told me that it had belonged to her mother, my Grandmother Bonilla. "It's a habit she picked up from the Great Depression," she told me. "She was determined never to be caught unawares again."
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My grandfather lost his job, as so many others did, during the 1930s. Living out in Central Texas, the opportunities to recover through one's own hard work were slim. There was a time when both my grandmother and grandfather scoured the house in search of misplaced money and didn't find a single penny.
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My mom dug up another container, this one filled with pennies. She gave them both to me.
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Grandmother Bonilla had squirreled away $24.22 in mixed change. In a few months, it will be twenty years since my mom helped clean out her home, inadvertently hanging on to a can and jar of coins which would one day give a young man pause. This home harbors chaos like a blanket harbors dog hairs, but in looking closely, I can find the occasional family story hidden in its folds.
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This is history, the stuff of real value, these echos of chinking coins made by a woman afraid of not being able to feed her family, the saving of a woman driven by love.

Welcome to The Corpus Blog

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My name is S.Matt Read, and I was born and raised in Corpus Christi, Texas. Most people just called me Matt growing up, though Steven Matthew, Mateo, and Jean-Pierre were all used at one time or another. The above picture is a family portrait. There's my sister Maria sitting, then my brother Nick with a moustache that would turn into a small creature by the time he turned thirteen, my mom Esther also sitting, my dad Nolan during his last few years with a solid head of hair, and my brother Charlie in the Tom Hanks "Big" suit.

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That's me in the lower left, a separate picture pushed into the frame. I was alive at the time, deemed too incorrigible to take to whatever outing the family attended. My mom, later embarrassed by the thought of an incomplete family picture, tried to make amends by adding the photo. It's been hanging in my sister's old room ever since.

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I left Corpus at eighteen to attend college at UT Austin and got a worthless degree in English (shame on UT for charging me). Afterwards, I joined the Peace Corps in West Africa, hiked the Appalachian Trail, became a bookseller, managed a game store, revisited Africa, and was a baker for a year. After having hiked the outline of Texas (read more at texasperimeterhike.blogspot.com), I find myself living, once again, at home with my folks in the sparkling city by the sea.

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Living in Corpus (or anywhere for that matter) is all about the details. For my lifestyle, there's not a lot to do here, but that's not to say there isn't anything to do. I hang out with family and friends, walk the dog, visit the local coffeeshop to play chess, and have most recently been pestering a Frenchman for a job at his bakery. I have at best a vague routine, but in its rhythm I find comfort.
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The Corpus Blog is all about the little things which make living in this town interesting, fun, or wacky. My goal is to put to words some of these glimpses of life to stand as a testament that my family and I were here. For better or worse.
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Each column will be straightforward: one picture, one story. Given the short list of time-killers, you can expect several themes to take shape, and perhaps an overall narrative will emerge. Then again, if this is blog is as random as my family, you might brace yourselves for an exercise in chaos.

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Enjoy.