Praise then darkness, and creation unfinished

via various people, details of phrasing via kazzanos

1) What is the oldest thing you own?

Probably something from cattitude's family, like the ceremonial sword, if we don't count a potsherd someone gave me.

1a) I was interpreting this as "artifact." If I interpret it to include things of any sort, there's a polished gray stone containing a fossil, on the shelf above me. And some undated and probably undateable small gemstones in jewelry: amethysts, and little cut diamonds in some earrings from my grandmother that I haven't been wearing, other bits but not worth waking cattitude to look at the rest of my jewelry.

2) What is the oldest home you've lived in?

Probably Vanderbilt Hall, on Yale's Old Campus, which was built in 1893. The house I grew up in, and the one I live in now, were built in the 1920s, and I think our apartment building in New York is about as old. (It's what NYC real estate calls a "pre-war" building, referring to World War II, meaning high ceilings, thick walls, and out-of-date wiring.)

[Not included in this, but the newest building I've lived in was our apartment building in Bellevue, which was built around 2010.]

3) What is the oldest book you've read?

The oldest content? I'm not sure, are the Iliad and Odyssey older than the Bible? (The oldest book I've read in the original language is Plato's Apology, though I did manage part of the Iliad in Greek.)

Oldest physical book? Probably one of the Anti-Masonic almanacs kept at Yale's Beinecke Rare Book Library, which were from the late 1820s. Those are the oldest books I've needed or wanted to consult that hadn't been reprinted in the 20th or 21st century.

4) What is the oldest electronic device that you still use?

Nothing very old, since I gave up on the old Palm Pilots. I haven't used my digital camera in years, since my last couple of phones had significantly better cameras. I recently plugged in an iPod mini (and saw that the "current" playlist was dated 2011), but that was to check that it still worked before giving it to carbonel.

5) What is the oldest work of art/architecture that you've seen?

Oh, this is fun. I keep typing things and then thinking "but wait..." The oldest art I can remember seeing is the Varna Gold Treasure. Before that I thought of
Cleopatra's Needle in Central Park, which dates to the Egyptian 18th Dynasty, and then Stonehenge and Avebury. For architecture specifically, maybe the walls of the City of York, which are intact enough that I walked along part of the circuit.

The oldest human artifacts I've seen in person were probably at either the French National Museum of Archeology in Saint-Germain-en-Laye, which I visited in 1999, or something at the American Museum of Natural History.

Having heard that someone I know is thinking about a trip to Hong Kong, and looking for places that serve goose, led me to a bit of reminiscence in email:

It didn't occur to me and L to look for places we could have goose—we didn't quite live on roast duck over rice and roast duck noodle soup, but we did eat a lot of duck, mostly just walking into places we passed that had roast birds hanging in the window—but our planning consisted mostly of getting plane tickets and a hotel reservation, buying guidebooks, and making sure to get transit passes right away. (The man who didn't seem to know what to make of two white women walking into his otherwise empty restaurant at 4 p.m. and asking for duck seemed reassured that we weren't going to make unreasonable requests when we asked for a refill on the pitcher of hot, weak tea that he had put on the table as a matter of course.)

browngirl asked me to write about apples. Since this is supposed to be somewhat personal, I’m not going to take us all to Kazakhstan for the history of apple cultivation, or provide a nutritional analysis—though I am amused at the recent British advice that everyone over fifty should add an apple a day to their current diet, because on the population/epidemiological level it will save lives and have fewer side effects than statins. There doesn’t seem to be anything special about apples compared to oranges or pears or blueberries; “apple” is synecdoche for fruit, a role it’s played for a very long time.

I grew up eating apples the way a lot of kids did, it was something my parents handed me now and then as a snack or dessert, either whole or in applesauce. Once in a while we got my grandmother’s homemade applesauce, pink because she left the skins on while she was cooking it down. We’d go visit, and she would send us home with a prune juice jar full of applesauce, which I liked a lot. I think there was occasional Mott’s applesauce as well, but that wasn’t a big deal—it’s like getting chicken soup from a can, which is food, when once in a while you get the homemade stuff.

I was well into adult life before I started thinking about kinds of apples. I think it was mostly Macintosh and the occasional yellow or red delicious when I was growing up, because those were the default New York area apples. I added Granny Smith for cooking when I started using apples for cooking, and Gala after I tried a few that I got at Byerly’s after a Minneapolis con. (I was surprised to discover recently that people have been raising Gala apples since the 1920s; it apparently took a while for New Zealand to start shipping them to the United States north, and then for American farmers to start growing them.)

Somewhere along the line I noticed the variety of apples at the Greenmarket (the NYC-area farmers’ markets, run by an organization that makes sure we’re getting only local produce). The market in my old neighborhood is small, but two of the farms that come to it are orchards. One of those orchards grows a lot of varieties of apple, old and new; there will be more kinds in April than the supermarket used to have during the harvest season, and a dozen or fifteen varieties in September and October.

We started trying different kinds of apple partly because they were there: it’s late August, and along with the remains of the stored Macintosh and such, there’s something I never heard of, but the sign says “new crop.” Apples keep in nitrogen, more or less, but they’re not going to taste as good after several months. Somewhere along the line, I realized that my memory wasn’t up to keeping track of all of this. I can remember that I like Macouns and don’t care for Red Delicious; that doesn’t mean I’ll remember that I liked NY652, or was it 562, and was unimpressed with NY428. (Cornell University has produced a lot of apple varieties; some of them got onto the market—for sale to people with apple orchards—without ever getting names other than those numbers. )

It’s a little weird writing this in Washington, where I’m having to relearn most of this. It’s not just that the market here has varieties I’d never heard of, instead of the Macouns and Macintoshes I’m fond of (I never expected to find Esopus Spitzenberg, that heirloom variety is apparently susceptible to every known apple disease). It’s that climate makes a difference, not just in whether something will grow, but in what it will taste like. I like New Zealand or Hudson Valley Galas better than Washington Galas, for example, but Honeycrisps grown here are a lot better than the ones that turned up in New York.

The farmer’s market near me doesn’t have as many apple varieties as I was accustomed to—but there’s a tomato farmer who labels all the varieties, so I can pick “Mortgage lifter” or “Paul Robeson” instead of just “heirloom tomato.” Someone else was identifying their nectarines, and having samples of three different kinds so I could decide which I liked best.

There are a few farmer’s market apples left in my refrigerator, which have probably been sitting too long, given that the last market was at the end of November. After that, it’ll be Safeway or Uwajimaya. (Trader Joe’s and the Pike Place Market each have their virtues, but neither is big on varietal apples.)