A Ginger Beer Factory

I don’t like beer, and I don’t do alcohol, but I do like ginger beer. If I close my eyes, I can conjure an image of happily sipping ginger beer in the sun. Sort of like my images of restfully, calmly drinking tea. It’s a symbol.

So when Anchorage Community House offered a class on Natural Sodas – to include “probiotic honey lemonade and ginger beer” – I was hooked at ginger beer. Not to mention “walk away with final instructions and full bottles.”

I re-discovered my friend Laura as the teacher of the class, too. She assigned us to stations to mix up our varieties. I grabbed the ginger beer station, and my job was to boil sliced up ginger for 15 minutes. Someone else was squeezing lemons, and all of us were sterilizing old kombucha bottles.

After I added sugar, cool water, and lemon juice, Laura poured in her Ginger Bug. Ginger Bug is like sourdough starter; it has to sit and ferment. Since we were doing the make-it-in-2-hours version, we relied on Laura’s homegrown Bug to kick off our natural fermentation.

Then, proudly carrying our bottles of sodas, we went home with instructions to place them in a warm spot and keep a good eye on the pressure. Laura had several stories of bottle explosions in her garage or in someone’s backpack. As long as the soda remains warm, it will keep bubbling and bubbling. You have to get it cold to slow down the process.

This was a Sunday. We were told to check on our bottles on Tuesday, that the plastic lids might bulge a little so we’d know they were building pressure. I stuck my bottles in the laundry room, on top of the boiler.

And forgot about them on Tuesday.

Wednesday morning, the plastic lids were pretty bulgy. Wow, I had made them on Sunday and now, easy as pie, I had soda in three days! This was a miracle! This was even better than the Grand Sauerkraut Experiment. My friend Jinnie says it was the elation of feeling “I can sustain myself” when she grew her first lettuce. I had made soda!

I opened the Honey Lemonade Soda and WHOA! I had a spouting champagne bottle of Honey Lemonade! Foaming bubbles all down my elbow. I raced for the kitchen sink.

Where I tasted some pretty terrific Honey Lemonade Soda.

Fortunately, Ginger Beer wasn’t as out of control. Ginger Beer was perfect. Ginger Beer was terrific! Ginger Beer was a total and complete success!

I have to become a ginger beer factory. Visions of bottles and bottles and bottles happily – yes, happily – dance in my head.

But first, I need to make my own Ginger Bug. I need organic ginger root. I am not sure where to find it, but my friend Judith phones, “I found it at Carrs. It’s right here: organic garlic.” We both think this solves the problem. It takes us a while to realize that, even though they both begin with G, garlic is not ginger. Never mind: Costco has a big tub of organic ginger.

I grate my two tablespoons. I add my tablespoon sugar and two tablespoons water. I make two jars of this because I am an aspiring ginger beer factory. I put it on top of the boiler.

My factory will need bottles. I need lots of empty kombucha bottles with plastic lids. Note to readers: I will take your old kombucha bottles.

The next day, I add more ginger-sugar-water to my Bug. It’s called feeding, but my Bug is listless, decidedly unbubbly. I examine it. I move a chair into the laundry room so I can reach the top of the boiler and watch the pot not boil. The next day, I feed the Bug. I pepper Laura with questions.

I watch my Bug.

I go to Costco, where I notice they have cases of the right kind of kombucha-in-bottles for sale. I notice that the food ladies throw out the jars of whatever they’re offering, so now I have to figure out how to get Costco to offer samples of kombucha so I can get all the throwaway jars. I spy a woman with a case in her shopping cart. It takes all my strength to muster the correct social prohibitions so I don’t give her my phone number and ask for her used bottles.

Laura suggests I dump the Bug and start over again with organic sugar and stale water left out to de-chlorinate. Maybe that will help. Even Laura has occasional Bug flops.

It will take me a while to get the Bug going, but it will also take a while to get all the kombucha bottles I need. After that, I’ll worry about the refrigerator space. Because I am going to sip ginger beer in the sun.

The grapes of ... New York

My first order of business was getting a New York Public Library card. Now, after two days, I realize I’d better leave some time for reading or else my feet are going to break. I have covered ground! One block of interesting things leads to another block of interesting things. By the end of the day, my feet are screaming.

So my second order of business was getting my Metro Card. But that was also because of the grapes.

I love my grapes. I can go through a Costco 4-pounder in two days. So here I am in Midtown Manhattan. I stopped a man with a dog and asked where a grocery store was: “Right on the corner.” It was a little fancy, but it wasn’t till the checkout line that I realized how fancy: $11.62 for two pounds of grapes!

So the next day, I Googled “Costco.” There was one in Manhattan, in East Harlem. I could take the #6 subway to 116th Street (where I could also visit the Hot Bread Kitchen, one of the sites for New York’s best challah and a women’s employment bakery to boot). I’d load up at Costco with my daypack and big cloth bag and take the M-15 bus back. Too exciting for words!

I got off in East Harlem and realized this is the New York I love: ethnic, “un-sanitized,” full of nooks and crannies that aren’t designer clothing shops. There are real things, like real grocery stores. And even the Costco was a little different: it has Jewish food. I stocked up on Gabila’s potato knishes. The food ladies had samples of … Marinated Wild Alaskan Salmon, 6 pouches! I realize that I’m going to be cooking in servings rather than meals; I think that’s how New Yorkers eat, or at least how they shop. I don’t have all my ingredients, and though the kitchen is well-equipped, it wouldn’t even be able to hold my spice rack from home.

Four pounds of grapes = $9.99

Back at the apartment, I decided I’d look for the East River for a running route. So instead of turning left out the front door, I turned right. I was in Dag Hammarskjöld Plaza, where on Wednesdays, there’s a Greenmarket … with the Hot Bread Kitchen! I looked around the corner, and it was the United Nations! I am right on the corner of the U.N.! No wonder it’s Dag Hammarskjöld Plaza! I looked back, and there was The Trump World Tower. And condos starting at $2.1 million. Oh, yikes.

Still in search of the river, I turned left and the street sign said “Beekman Place.” No, NOT Beekman Place! In The Way We Were (the only movie I have seen four times), glorious, brash, Jewish lefty Barbra Streisand discovers that husband Robert Redford has had an affair with a wealthy, WASPy woman whom she calls “Beekman Place.” I am living right off Beekman Place! Horrors! No wonder their grapes are so expensive.

So I have to neutralize my proximity and head downtown, towards the Lower East Side. I made it to Kalyustan’s acres and acres of spice store. I just needed oil and vinegar but that took hours of browsing hundreds of bottles, types, and ooh, that looks interesting over there. Then I had to hustle to the library for my first author program.

As I walked back to the apartment – feet just screaming yet again – I noticed a crowd on the sidewalk. A fruit vendor was doing a fiery business. Of course, he had grapes for $1 a pound ... and they looked just like my Costco grapes, in the same packaging.

I have a month to learn how New Yorkers do things.

I don't know how many underpants to pack!

There’s a great Doonesbury comic I think of often. Joanie Caucus is packing to start law school at Berkeley, and she freaks to Zonker, “I don’t know if I’ve got enough toothpaste!” He calmly, Zonker-ishly replies, “Don’t you think there are probably drug stores out there?” And this is Joanie’s response:

“I don’t know! I don’t know what the drug store situation is like out there in California! I’ve got to be prepared!”

Whenever I pack for a trip, I think of Joanie. Ridiculously, because this time, I know the drug store situation in New York. I visit New York twice a year. So why am I having conversations with myself like this:

“How many underpants should I pack!?! I don’t want to get stuck doing laundry too often, but I don’t want to run out.” (Never mind that the apartment comes with a laundry, as does my mother’s place.)

“How much contact lens solution do I need!?!” And this despite measuring how many ounces I needed when we were in New Orleans for ten days. This is complicated by the Costco factor: I own big containers of contact lens solution, and I’m always reluctant to transfer them. You never know if your transfer container is as sterile as it’s supposed to be.

Tim spied me adding my pumpkin flax cereal to the bag, but I don’t know what the grocery store situation is like in Manhattan!! I know Manhattan as a visitor. The whole reason for this trip is to know it as a resident, but that may take a while, and I’ll want my pumpkin flax cereal for breakfast. With raisins.

This whole thing is mystifying me. Where did all this goofiness come from? I have gone to other countries for months and traveled the U.S. nomadically for an entire summer, never knowing where I was going to sleep. Here I’m going to a place with no currency exchange, a place I have visited often, a place where I already have my own personal subway map, several relatives, and a laptop with Google.

I think it’s because I am just incredibly excited!

Biggish adventures from smallish quests

This is why it’s so hard for me to get through my piles of reading matter: there is always something interesting. So if I just toss them before perusing, I’ll miss out. What if I had missed the Signals catalog with Light Up Balloons? I would never have heard of Light Up Balloons!

We were launching the New Year with friends over and suddenly I wanted Light Up Balloons. In this snowless Anchorage winter, life is very, very dark. I really wanted Light Up Balloons.

But sudden isn’t how catalogs can deliver so I went on a quest. First stop, Party World. They didn’t have Light Up Balloons, but the woman there said she’d seen them at Dollar Zone. (pause for a yippee)

Now things were getting really exciting! My book club had read the book The Book of Unknown Americans by Cristina Henríquez. The two star-crossed lovers, Mayor and Maribel, meet in a Dollar Tree Store. I had never heard of a Dollar Tree Store … but now I was getting to go to … well, one like it. I guess a Dollar Zone is like a Dollar Tree, but really, I wouldn’t know.

First Dollar Zone: no, they don’t have Light Up Balloons, but the woman there definitely knew they were at another Dollar Zone. She’d seen them. “Oh, but I think I’ll look around while I’m here.”

A Dollar Zone store is like going to a flea market of brand new things. Along the side, it’s party land. That’s where the balloons are and all sorts of decorations. In another section are the soaps and shampoos and hair doodads. Then there’s the wall of kitchen gadgets and plastic things.

Do you remember the first time you ever went into a Costco? There’s a sort of nuttiness that took over – my sister, who lives in Berlin, said they had a word for it in German: Konsumterror. It’s about the pressure for materialism, like a consumer frenzy. All over Costco, that first time, we discovered what we called “orphans,” products that people had picked up and then abandoned later, when they came to their senses.

Well, I’m now immune to Konsumterror, both because I’m a Costco regular and because I’m in my Third Third and anti-acquisition. But I could see that the Dollar Zone was built to feed Konsumterror. Oh, oh! Could they have the little bottles I need for my raspberry liqueur? And my hairbrush handle broke; look at all these hairbrushes. And – not to be believed – they have the exact calendar I’d been looking for for only $1.75! (Too late, I’ve already written about that quest – but I’ll be back next year!)

I fought off any balloon-related Konsumterror by acknowledging that I had to blow up whatever I bought, so I only bought six. Inside the neck of the balloon is a little plastic thing: you click once for a fast blink, twice for a slow blink, and again for a solid light. It took one balloon for me to realize that it was hard to poke through an inflated balloon so I had to turn them on before blowing them up.

Tied on to the mailbox, they were everything I could have hoped for: bright, blinking, colored lights on a dark, dark night, welcoming friends to our home. Well, for a while. Only the blue and green stayed bright the length of the evening. Green is still going 24 hours later. The others are still pulsing but … dimly.

I feel such optimism for this new year. Two New Things right off the bat: Light Up Balloons and Dollar Zone. There’s no way to feel jaded when there are still discoveries to be made and adventures to be had. Adventure is a state of mind.

(PLUS, I figured out how to put Our Third Thirds on Facebook!)

Ailments R Us

Okay, it’s time to discuss our ailments.

I’m kidding.

No, I’m not. But before I get to ailments, let me remind you of a few things. I remember back in our Second Thirds, I went to a dinner and said, “Listen to us. All we’re talking about are mortgages!” Later in my Second Third, my two sisters and I went on a road trip with (poor) Sophie. Ten minutes in the car, and my sisters were discussing menopause. I had to declare a moratorium before Sophie threw herself from the car.

So I’m trying to chart our life spans by the conversations we beat to death. Somewhere in the first two Thirds, I know every man in America would put “relationships,” as in “Do we have to discuss the relationship again?”

My friend Janet, after visiting Alaska, once pointed out that every conversation included “ordeals we have faced outdoors.” But I think that topic is geographically specific and just rises to the surface when faced with visitors who need to be scared to death. It’s not a topic that is so embedded in the human condition that it arises from our collective unconscious.

Okay, so what ailments do you have? A bad knee? Diabetes? Receding gums? Hearing loss? Do you want to hear about mine?

I remember spending time in a preschool. The children discussed their owies in great detail. They showed them off, inspected them, rehashed all their symptoms.

Just watch someone in a hair salon and the obvious pleasure they get from having someone work on their hair. Then look at apes grooming each other, picking the insects out of each other’s hair, and you wonder, how deep does that pleasure go? To our very DNA? So is it the same with our preoccupation with ailments? Is it embedded in us? Are we programmed to talk about our ailments?

So when do you want to hear about mine?

My guess is that the ailments discussion morphs over time, depending on the life stage. I used to tell visitors to my family’s home in New York that no matter what the occasion, somehow menstrual cramps were going to be discussed at the dinner table. It happened every time … in a house with three girls. Or maybe I just remember it so vividly because it was so monumentally embarrassing.

Pregnant women, new mothers, and nursing mothers share no end of stories: labor and delivery, sleep deprivation, colicky babies. Hmmm, I remember those conversations fondly. It’s how I got suggestions, how I felt like I wasn’t the only inept mother. Those conversations weren’t beaten to death; those conversations were lapped up like balm to the suffering.

So is it time to talk about our ailments yet?

Sometimes the discussion starts at a back door: a discovery of a new remedy. How many conversations about coconut oil were just a lead-in to a discussion about memory loss or … whatever coconut oil is supposed to cure? Costco has things like CoQ10 and 5-HTP and I know they’re supposed to cure something, but I have no idea what. I’m sure if I mention one in conversation someone will have the appropriate ailment to match with it.

Wow, that could be the memory matching game for Third Thirders! But since memory loss is a major, unfunny ailment to most of us, how much fun could that game be?

I’m thinking now that some health problems aren’t even what I’d call ailments; they’re life-threatening. I don’t have really detailed conversations about cancer, and I don’t know if that’s because the folks with cancer don’t want to talk about it and/or don’t want to talk about it with someone who doesn’t have cancer. Same with mental illness. That one really only works with someone who’s been there, but there’s also the stigma that’s still attached to it. Can I talk about it with you without you treating me differently tomorrow?

I’m not sure if injuries are a subset of ailments. Injuries bear no relation to mortality (as long as you survive them). You can tear a ligament skiing and not be any closer to dying. But arthritis means you’re starting to deteriorate. So talking about the former may mean telling an adventure story – right up there with “ordeals we have faced outdoors.” But talking about the latter may ease fear, be a way of reaching for comfort, like all those new, inexperienced mothers did.

Maybe you need to talk about your ailments. Maybe I do. Oops, out of space. Can’t do it here. Have to run. Catch me later.

No butts about it

I know I’ve mentioned that public radio used to introduce my commentaries by saying, “Barbara Brown, whose daily collisions with life leave her with great stories and a grateful heart.” Boy, did I collide Wednesday!

It started with a doctor’s appointment. After 1½ hours in the waiting room, I walked out. I’d missed a Literacy Program training so you could say I was a tinderbox, alive with fuel. I was bristling and pissed. Then, I remembered I had to go to Costco so that would set me behind even more.

I needed plastic wrap, way back in the corner I barely ever go to. I was just noticing hey, they have school supplies back here, when there was a loud human roar. The two guys next to me were suddenly grappling, wrestling, throwing each other around. It was a major fight. It’s the one you heard about on the news, the one where the shoplifter pistol-whipped the undercover security guy.

Now, if you’re friends of mine, you will tell me that my fuel could have sparked the negativity that exploded. That I had so much fury in me that it spontaneously combusted and blew up the guy in Costco. You’ll laugh uproariously over the image of people exploding as I walked the aisles of Costco.

I’d laugh, too, except that the only image stuck in my brain is of the guy’s butt.

The two guys fighting it out next to me were HUGE. I had a mental thought of Sumo wrestlers. And they were FURIOUS. One guy’s face was pure rage. But then his sweat pants started falling down. At first, it was just a plumber’s butt crack, but then it was his WHOLE BUTT. If you’re my friend Linda, you’ll ask, “Wasn’t he wearing underpants?” and I’d say no. I remember thinking he wouldn’t be able to run away with his pants down around his knees, but I decided it was time to depart before he turned around and I was exposed to frontal nudity. Not to mention all this thrashing was happening about a foot away and it was just me and them.

So I raced to move north, looking for a Costco employee. A red-vested woman was already in the aisle on a walkie-talkie, and she said he’d pulled out a pistol. Costco employees were racing to the corner, and I thought, Look at that, they’re all going towards the danger. I kept moving away, gathering others to get them out of the area. We ended up at the food ladies, who already knew what was happening and were passing out food samples and saying “stay here.”

This was only about four minutes into the action. So I’m supposing that even the food ladies are on some sort of walkie-talkie thing. And then, when it was all clear, the food ladies told us we could go back. Other customers started streaming in from the frozen food area and the outside; I guess employees had mustered them there.

All in all, Costco had done a superlative job of handling the situation. Obviously they had a plan, were well trained, and remained calm. When I went back over to get my plastic wrap, it was cordoned off with yellow tape. Costco employees were at the perimeter, asking what we wanted and then fetching it for us. Kudos to all of them.

They asked if I should talk to the police, and I thought of all the police shows I watch and what an unreliable eye witness I’d be. What would I say, that the only thing I could really pick out of a line-up was the guy’s butt?

At this point, I still thought it was two customers with anger-management issues. It wasn’t till I heard the news that I discovered one of them was the undercover security guy who’d spotted the guy (allegedly) shoplifting. They both looked pretty rasty to me so I have no idea which was which. That’s what undercover is all about, I guess.

And now, if you’re my friend Connie, you’ll say, “The one without the underpants is not the Costco employee. They have to wear underpants.”

I’m going to leave you with that bit of wisdom.