Parties

Eastside Road, October 18, 2013—

FOR THE FIRST party we drove down to San Francisco, where seventy or so survivors of the old KQED Newspaper of the Air, from the late 1960s, and the somewhat later Newsroom, which continued that emergency broadcast throughout the 1970s, had gathered to bless, collectively, not without perhaps a bit of nostalgia for Those More Interesting Times, the debut of a new daily news program on that public television station.

Whew. Sentences like that no longer thrive on public media.

Well, we had a good time; the bar was open; the four-piece jazz combo played smoothly; we marveled at one another's competence still in our later years. And we were served lasagne, both meaty and vegetarian; and a kind of Caprese made with little balls of a kind of mozzarella and cherry tomatoes; and a green salad. The wine flowed like water, white, red, domestic, imported, who knows or remembers.

DESSERT WAS ANOTHER matter altogether. A son-in-law is celebrating his sixtieth birthday; asked what he'd like, Lemon pie he said, and it was forthcoming. Doesn't hurt that baking runs in the family! The meringue had a beautiful texture and was baked to just the right degree, and the lemon curd was smooth and full of flavor, and the bottom crust was short and tender and very nice indeed. First lemon meringue pie I've had in years; hope I don't have to wait sixty years for the next!