Make Chicken Great Again--a Recipe Fit for a Functioning Adult

Serve it with Veuve Cliquot Yellow Label if Nancy Pelosi wins:

Buy a corn-fed chicken or a bunch of chicken breasts or chicken thighs. Salt and pepper them--or add the rub of your choice (I recommend one with sea salt, garlic, paprika, parsley, caraway seeds, Fenugreek, marjoram, nutmeg, chili powder). But anything you like. Salt and pepper are the only essentials.

Put chicken in a baking dish in the fridge overnight, or at least a couple of hours. The skin will be crispier when you bake it.

About half an hour before you want to bake the bird, remove it from the fridge and put it on a plate. Pour a few tablespoons of olive oil into the baking dish and add the following:

coarsely chopped red onion
coarsely chopped white onion
at least half a cup of cherry tomatoes
two small sliced zucchini (or bell peppers, any shade. Or both)
slices of lemon--use a whole, large lemon
drained, pitted black or green olives
drained artichoke hearts

Stir the ingredients so that they're covered with the olive oil, put the chicken on top and bake at about 430ºF or 220ºC for about an hour. Enjoy with rice or potatoes. And the hope of a newer, nicer POTUS.

Adventures of the 98-Year-Old Narcissistic Mom, Part One Thousand

So bad it's good: She sent (I give her credit for her handwriting--spidery, but legible) a Get-Well card to my husband. He's Catholic, and it's a Happy Hanukkah card featuring a menorah assembled from dreidels--one she's sent before on numerous occasions.
She must have bought a gross of those Happy Hanukkah cards. Seems to me she sent one as a first communion card to my firstborn.
In this card, she advises my husband that she thinks I must be "stuffing" him with "vitamins" and hopes he's feeling better, but remarks that she thinks "what you need" is a trip to the city in which she resides, because "we have vitamins too!" I did mention to her that he's in the hospital, but I give her credit for probably not remembering because of her age. 
But to tell the truth, when she was forty or fifty years younger, she also didn't remember stuff like this.
She would love a visit from us. In each and every one of our phone conversations of the past few months I have apologized for not being able to visit her right now because my husband's lungs are seriously compromised and I need to take care of him. What I haven't told her is that he has lung cancer on top of two other lung diseases.
She sends "lotsa love," encloses photos of my children as toddlers (they're teens and young adults now) and demands photos from us.
"I hope you'll be feeling better and better," she tells my husband.
Then there's another card. He's had a birthday, and she's commemorating that occasion. Brownie points for remembering at all. This card says, "Long may you thrive!" and is decorated with hearts and exclamation points. If you didn't know, you might think she was his girlfriend. A position she tended to assume with any boyfriend of mine she liked before I was married. And now, since she likes my husband . . . well, thank goodness she's 98 and lives very far away indeed.
I think I'll pour myself another glass of red wine right about now. 
P.S. Finished that one. Reaching for the bottle. I'd forgotten the punchline. I phoned the 98-year-old because lately she's been bragging about a gift she made to Ivy League University X, which she attended in her glory days. "They even gave me an annuity!" she crowed--a remark leading me to believe the gift is large, and indeed it is, she confirms: "They'll get a whole lot more when I die!" 
Here was our recent conversation:
Me: "Mom, since my son B. is applying to Ivy League University X, it would be good to know how much you gave them. Do you remember?"
Mom: "Let me look it up." (absent for five minutes. Rustling, crashing sounds. She returns).
"So, you'd like to know how much money you'll get when I die?"
Me: "No, Mom. That's not what I asked. Since B is applying. . . .  " (I repeat myself).
Mom: "Can I call you back?"
Me: "Sure!" (I assume she won't call)
Ten minutes go by. The phone rings.
Me: "Hello?"
Mom: "I just found my will. You're getting ________."
She gave me the figures, what she's doling out to me, my husband, and each of our three children. It's not enough to cover a year's tuition for Ivy League University X.
Mom. "Of course, I'm leaving something to my nieces and nephews, too!"

In the Wake of the Halle Murders

Many in my Western German city are probably, like me, relieved to be at some distance from the young man who tried to gun down a synagogue. The East has long been known for poverty and trauma. Before the wall fell, the repressive regime did all it could to substitute itself for the family, and largely succeeded. The children and grandchildren of the former East Germany seem to fall prey to racist ideologies at a higher rate than they do where I live. 

Which is not to say that such problems don't exist where I live. I had thought of my city as freer of the tribal divisions afflicting the former East Germany, until a visiting pastor  mentioned the regular weekly prowl of neo-Nazis through a working class neighborhood. He told us that when his parish was preparing for a march on tolerance and acceptance, the neo-Nazis succeeded in blocking it, legally, as a "disturbance of the peace." Neo-Nazis are getting louder in a neighboring city. Another neighboring city is divided into Italian mafia, anti-Western Arab groups, and neo-Nazis. Each of these tribes offers something that feels like family. A neo-Nazi group is nothing if not a substitute for a real family--and therein lies its unfortunate source of power. Try persuading a young man who likes to wear a uniform and carry a stick that better, more satisfying things exist in life than a selfie portraying his boot on the neck of a refugee. 

My children came home from Gymnasium with a few stories. A girl who'd decided to wear a hijab was told it "didn't go" with the uniform required for choir, and she couldn't wear it to performances. The instructor in question got told off by other students, was pressured into apologizing, but the girl apparently quit choir, not wanting to belong to a group led by someone with that teacher's attitude toward her religious identity. Another student from an African nation was asked--by a different instructor-- if she could since a song "in African." This teacher--who has a Ph.D.--referred to Africa as "a country," even when students remonstrated, and when the student whom she'd asked to sing pointed out that she did not speak the language in the song. 
These students did not complain. The teacher is the teacher. Or maybe the students feel they have to put up with these incidents, that they should not make trouble. I think we should all talk more. I know the teachers, know they probably have no idea how much their words hurt. I doubt they remember offending. 

Speaking as a teacher, I would advise any young student who has experienced a moment of mindless racism--which is about how I'd classify these incidents--from a teacher to write up the incident with their own interpretation of it and with pointed, but friendly, suggestions to remedy the problem.

Whistleblower in the Dark: Linda Tripp Versus Our Current Hero

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