A rising tide lifts all boats

A rising tide lifts all boats This aphorism, coined by John F. Kennedy, describes the idea that when an economy is performing well, all people will benefit from it.

American expressions, so I have found, differ from the French language, which is particularly rife with culinary-inspired idioms. Stumbling onto a French blog, Chocolate and Zucchini, I found that edible expressions abound, as thier love for food is used to reflect life.

Having a long day? "Long comme un jour sans pain." A literal translation would be, "As long as a day without bread," and it is used to express that something is very long -- in reference to physical length (a long road, a long list) or, more frequently, to the duration of an event (a long speech, a long wait) -- and dreary, like the news last year, when it was all so dreary.

A good way to reach a compromise: "Couper la poire en deux." It means, literally, "cutting the pear in two," if two people want the same pear, halving it is the most equitable way to settle the dispute.

Running out of steam in the middle of the day? The French expression would be - "Retomber comme un soufflé." Literally translated as, "Falling back like a soufflé," or running out of steam in a quick and sudden way.

Not feeling well?"Ne pas être dans son assiette", translated as, "not being in one's plate," it is a colloquial expression that means feeling under the weather, being out of sorts, physically or emotionally.

What would be the equivalent American expression of this?
"Ménager la chèvre et le chou." Translated as, "Accommodating the goat and the cabbage," trying to please both sides in a situation where the two parties are in fact irreconcilable. It is equivalent to the English expression, "running with the hare and hunting with the hounds," but it is a lot more common.

Julia Child always used cooking to demonstrate her delight in life. As she once said, "If you're afraid of butter, just put in some cream." I love her for that!

Chasing James Coburn Through SoHo

I used to regularly visit New York City and somehow, over time, I have stopped doing that. During the 80s, I used to go at least once a month. My friends and I would go mostly to look at art but also for the shopping and the general, hectic and crazy ambience.

Sometimes we would go to one of the museums to see a really good exhibition but mostly we would visit galleries. Not so much the staid and hushed uptown galleries but we always made a beeline for SoHo.

Endlessly appealing and fascinating with its many cast iron buildings, street vendors, and beautiful architecture, there was never a dull moment there for me. The place was noisy, maybe a little dirty, and filled with people of all sorts, young and old. But as opposed to the uptown galleries, the places I loved in SoHo had their doors flung open right at street level and the inside and outside really were meshed. I always felt welcome there. And there was so much to see.

One night, while at Leo Castelli, we spotted James Coburn. He was there with a young and beautiful model on his arm and they only had eyes for each

other. Because we remembered him from our teenage years in those movies Our Man Flint and In Like Flint, James Bond spoofs, we had some sort of connection to him.

Of course, he looked older and grayer, but he was very recognizable. We followed them from gallery to gallery until we tired of it and went for dinner in Chinatown or maybe Little Italy. We never had any intention of speaking to him and there was no point to it. But somehow we had such fun doing absolutely nothing of importance.

I probably would not follow a movie star around now just for fun and knowing that has made me think that I have changed in more than the obvious ways. When did I get so boring? So bored? I think it must be time for an adventure!

Thanks for Giving

This year Thanksgiving means more to me. My husband and I both have good jobs, our children and parents are healthy, the cars start every morning (knock on wood), and we have a roof over our heads. But many of our fellow Rhode Islanders are not so lucky.

Across the state many of my friends are out of work. Every day the local newspaper is filled with foreclosure notices. And this year families everywhere will struggle to put Thanksgiving dinner on the table. The amount of need in this state is almost paralyzing.

The Newport Office of Lila Delman Real Estate has again decided that this year we will make sure one less family will go without a Thanksgiving dinner. We are adopting a family through our local Child & Family Services and will supply them with a basket full of non-perishable goods for their holiday dinner. Our office is large so we are adopting a family of 8-10 people, but there are families of all sizes in need.

If you’d like to help, here are a few agencies on Aquidneck Island participating in the Thanksgiving basket program:

Child and Family is seeking donors for both of their Holiday Giving Programs. If you would like to donate food baskets for Thanksgiving to families in need and/or toys and gifts for children during the winter holiday season, then they would love to hear from you. Please call or e-mail Landa Patterson, Coordinator of Volunteer Services, at lpatterson@childandfamilyri.com or 401-848-4210 to learn more and sign up.

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Community Center Holiday Basket Program, 401-846-4828.

If you’re unable to adopt a family and just want to drop off some food, contact your local shelters and food banks. The RI Community Food Bank is a great place to start. www.rifoodbank.org

Thanks for Giving!

Hip to be poor

I feel like I’ve been waiting for this day all my life…it’s finally hip to be poor. Celebrities, industrialists, investment bankers all feel the sting. Waitresses, lawyers, fishermen, brain surgeons, we all share the same leaking boat now. Almost exactly a year ago, the entire country sat mesmerized before the sight of the stock market in freefall, frozen like deer in the headlights at the sight of our retirement funds, college accounts, life savings, hopes, dreams & reasons for living dissolving into thin air. Hello…Can you say "new reality"? Today you can’t open a magazine or newspaper without being bombarded by inane suggestions on how to save what little money you have left – switch from Starbucks to Dunkin! Shop at Wal-Mart! Buy generic! Olay instead of La Mer! – stratagems with about as much effectiveness as trying to stop an incoming tide with a sieve, and which offer the added stupidity of relying upon the same consumerist paradigm that got us here in the first place - buy this instead of that. Save more by spending…less. Discussion of dwindling finances is the subject du jour in the public forums, and if you want to participate in the conversation, you’d better be prepared to talk poor. It’s the chic thing to be. Poor is the new green. In the red is the new black.

This new hipness takes many forms. Some people are of course really poor. Homeless poor, hungry poor, street person poor. People sleeping on subway grates, wearing plastic garbage bags instead of clothes. Others are newly desperate, the foreclosure & short sale & unemployed poor. Many are recent arrivals to poordom, members of the struggling and debt-ridden middle class. And then of course there are the relatively affluent but still less-rich-than-they-were upper strata. Regardless of where you stand on the scale, you’ve probably had some sort of unpleasant reality to adjust to over the past 12 months. If you’re lucky, you’ve done some thinking as well.

Because that’s the one thing that no one has really been addressing – the thinking that landed us in this mess. Buy-spend-buy-spend-buy-spend…what passes for contemporary American “culture” - and its value system - depends entirely upon consumer spending. It’s the engine that makes our society run. We measure our worth by our net-worth, our success by our financial assets, who we are by what we have. If this recent crisis forces us to do nothing more than examine the structureless underbelly of what we believe, it will have served a useful purpose. Raise your hand if you’ve spent your adult life in the service of a financial lie, presenting a prosperous face to the world, while all the time running as fast as you could to keep up. I know I have. Expensive shoes, jewelry, travel experiences, beauty products. Name brands. Never a dime to my name, little in savings, everything leveraged and borrowed against and perpetually in motion, Peter paying Paul paying Peter. I refinanced my house 3 times in the past 8 years. My current mortgage is now three times what my house’s original asking price was. I am not a stupid person. My IQ is 130. The New York Times is delivered to my door daily. I re-read War & Peace, just for fun, ha ha. But wait a second…if I’m so smart, then how come I’m so poor? And didn’t I KNOW better than to get sucked into the machine? Didn’t I read Thoreau and Emerson in college? Didn’t I swear I’d never adopt the shallow materialist values of my parents? Didn’t I have IDEALS? Didn’t me and my friends who grew up in the sixties utterly reject the whole shallow consumerist paradigm?

The truth is that none of us have escaped it. I doubt anyone in this culture CAN escape it. It’s too pervasive. We can no longer even string together our thoughts in non-economic terms. We are “consumers”. We are “products”, products of our culture and products of our times, flipping through magazines, surfing 150 channels, defining ourselves by the aptly-named “goods” that we buy and the purchases that we make, our $1500 handbags, our $900 shoes, our adjustable rate mortgages. We live it, we breathe it, we dream it. We are it.

Well, now the alarm clock has gone off. And unpleasant shock that it’s been, it feels good to finally be awake again. There’s something bracing about finally facing reality. It’s like I always knew this was going to happen, that my past “success” was a triumph of smoke and mirrors and empty values, that it would all come to an end one day, but now that it has, oddly I don’t feel all that bad about it. I’m still here. So are you. No fear, no regrets. Now move on.