Wesley "Scoop" Nisker

Can you remember anything you did on June 13, 1964?  I can remember getting a lesson about life on that date - with an assist from my first cousin Wesley Nisker.  Wes passed away recently at age 80. 

Wesley "Scoop" Nisker (1942-2023)

Along with my parents and other family members, I was attending Wes's college graduation at the University of Minnesota Memorial Coliseum (seating 56,000).   We had driven nearly 300 miles to attend.  It was a big event in my young life.  I was 12 years old, Wes was 21.

Anyway, a group of family members were walking to the ceremony through a parking lot with the huge stadium looming above us.  I piped up enthusiastically, saying how excited I was that Wes was "finally completely finished."  

"No, David," someone explained, "Wes has just reached the beginning."  Then a pause before the punchline  "Why else would they call it a Commencement?"  

I was dumbstruck.  I had no answer to this.  The huge importance of a college degree had already been heavily impressed upon me of course.  Until that moment, I had never ever considered that I might have a life of some sort beyond the seemingly endless years of school which completely consumed my own future.  This new notion seemed both obvious and bizarre.  My mind was blown.  I've never forgotten that moment.  

Wesley and our Grandmother

Imagine, hypothetically, just then, back in 1964, that the sky had opened and a mysterious voice had revealed the future and told us all about Wes's life for his next 60 years after commencement.  We would have been confused.  Probably we would have understood phrases like "he'll move to San Francisco and get a job at a radio station".  On the other hand "he'll become a teacher of Buddhist meditation" wouldn't have meant anything to a group of Midwestern Jews during the mid-Sixties.  

"A what, now?" we'd ask.  
"A spiritual leader," the voice might explain.  
"You mean, like a Rabbi?"  

Years later, when adult Wes told his actual life history on stage or in books he would mention starting out as the only Jewish boy in a small otherwise all-Christian Nebraska city.  Despite the isolation, his parents (my Aunt and Uncle) still wanted him to be bar mitzvah (call it Jewish "commencement").  He would talk about how his parents hired a "circuit rabbi" who arrived by Greyhound each week to teach him the rituals.   This unique, solitary religious upbringing helped to spark his life-long search for spiritual meaning and identity.  It was the beginning of his origin story.  Here's how he wrote about it in his book "If You Don't Like the News, Go Out And Make Some of Your Own":

"My bar mitzvah lessons involved memorizing long passages of Hebraic script that made no sense to me, in preparation to join a Jewish community that, in my home town at least, did not exist. My entire rite of passage and spiritual initiation were thus almost completely devoid of meaning." (on page 3)

Wes Nisker and his father Jack

I grew up in a different midwestern town, a slightly bigger one with more Jews, one state over, only 75 miles from where Wes spent his childhood.  After high school I also escaped to higher education in Minnesota and eventually lost my use for Jewish faith.  Then, after college, we both left the Midwest  and happened to catch similar trade winds, washing ashore in California.   And that's where we both stayed.

Wesley offers a toast - Thanksgiving 1953
(that's me on the right)

When Wes and I lived in the Midwest, our mothers - who were sisters - kept their families in close touch.  They managed to get us together for holidays and birthdays multiple times per year.  If Wes and I had remained Midwesterners we might have stayed much closer.  I'm pretty sure that neither us would have been the slightest bit happy about living out our lives in the land of cows, corn and conformity to which our Grandparents had emigrated from the other side of the globe.  

Baby Wesley with his sister Jan

Other than the incredibly general similarities which brought us from the Midwest to the Left Coast, our lives were extremely different.  Wes landed in the Bay Area during the late 60s in time to become a hippie; I arrived in Los Angeles in the mid-70s to attend an institution founded by Walt Disney.  Wes got a job doing irreverent anti-establishment news broadcasts on an alternative rock station (which is where he earned his nickname "Scoop").  I got a job working for Frank Zappa.   Wes traveled to India and eventually became what I dubbed a "traveling rebbe", on the road teaching meditation seminars, although I doubt he traveled on buses.  I did different stuff.  

Wesley steadies his nerves
before getting married in 1966.

Wesley and I ended up with very different lives.  We were separated by nine years, although the difference in age seemed less important as we got older.  The Bay Area and L.A. are only about 500 miles apart, but Wes and I followed our life paths as part of very different social groups.  One might sometimes think that we lived on different planets.   

Even so, our early family ties kept us in contact, more or less.  This was a lot harder once our parents passed on.  We met up infrequently, mostly to remember the old days and share quick generalized catch-ups on the lives we had chosen.  He never stopped being my very hip older cousin.  There's a small part of me that never stopped wanting to be like him somehow or other.

Jack, Esther, Rose and Wesley Nisker

As the only child of Wes’s doting Aunt Edythe, I inherited a trove of family pictures.  The trove includes many photos of Wesley during his Nebraska and Minnesota periods.  The pictures run from Wes's early childhood into middle age when he had started his own family.  

Mudita Nisker, Edythe Ocker, Wesley Nisker
in Sioux City Iowa

If you know and love his commentaries about political life and about spiritual life and about just plain life, you might enjoy seeing these snaps of Wes.  But let's face it, I'm really writing about him for my own personal reasons.  He was someone who knew me for my entire life.  He seemed to be someone trying to come to terms with time and change and self-acceptance.  His death makes me think about my own eventual death and leaves me with an unresolved regret that we weren't closer.  I would have loved to have known him better.

David, Leslie and Wesley in 1992

I don't remember ever telling him my Commencement Revelation story in which he played the lead role.   Had I done that, I can easily imagine him responding with a story - or a joke -  possibly about how death was also commencement.   Here's a quote from his book Crazy Wisdom:

"If life is a joke, death is the punch line. If life is a tragedy, death means the show is over and we can leave for home. If we have many lives, as believed in the East, then we must also have many deaths, so we might as well get good at dying." (page 203)

Wes was extremely good at finding correlations between science and spirituality and then finding thought-provoking ways to share what he had found.  While the notion of rebirth never became part of my own beliefs, I figure it's important to try to keep an open mind about such matters - even though, to me, it's a notion from a whole different universe.  

Wesley Nisker - plays guitar, leaves for Europe

So, Wesley, if you're out there - and by some chance you're reading this post - why not get in touch.  Let us know how you’re getting along in the great beyond.  You could blow my mind again by sending a sign from whichever afterlife you've landed in - like a new book or a commentary or maybe a new radio show.  Possibly you'll call it “If you don’t like this heaven, go out and make one of your own.”

Wesley Links:

Wes's Website (with lots of video, audio and writings)

Wes's YouTube channel 

Wes's articles for Inquiring Mind (a journal he co-founded)

John Cage and the Music of Sound (one of those articles)

A Liberal Scoop of Wit and Sanity (an article about Wes which begins with the line "SCOOP NISKER once shot William F. Buckley with a water pistol.")

An obituary by Rod Meade Sperry

Terrence McKenna interviews Wes in a park:

Posts about Wes's and my mutual family on Mixed Meters:

My Mother, My Worm

Reagan Says Give Chesterfields for Christmas

Marion Shuman

Bernard Shuman

Also:

What Is It Like To Be Dead? (far and away the most read Mixed Meters post ever)

Young Wesley Nisker - high school musician (with his sister Jan)

Many of these pictures were colorized using the artificial intelligence at palette.fm 

Albert Marsh (1930-2017)

Leslie and I were very saddened to learn of the passing of our friend Albert Marsh.  We met Albert and his husband Johnnathan through an accident of real estate when they moved into the house next door.   That was nearly 25 years ago.  For a few years our lives met figuratively and literally over the back fence.  They became our adopted family, a relationship which has persisted in the years since we moved away from that street.

Albert grew up in a Texas border-town and, after college in the fifties, settled in New York City, then San Francisco and finally in Los Angeles which is where he met Johnnathan.  He worked as an architect and designer.  He was also an artist.  I really like his geometrical three-dimensional paintings - or maybe they should be called wall sculptures.  Later in life he became interested in shamanism, drumming and designing jewelry.  Some of his art and his necklaces can be seen in the pictures below.

Here's a caricature by the otherwise unidentified B.J. from Albert's time in San Francisco.  Then an apparently blissful moment I snapped over dinner one recent evening.

Here are two shots of Albert visiting our home.  In the first he is sitting with Leslie's Aunt Rose.  In the second he is investigating my new iPad, completely unaware that he is shooting selfie after selfie with his thumb.  Later I combined the shots into this animated gif.

A Halloween costume and striking a pose in his backyard.

Leslie and I send our profound condolences to Johnnathan Korver, Albert's husband.  Johnn wrote about Albert on Facebook and he kindly gave me permission to reproduce his thoughts here:

Dear Friends—It is with extreme heartbreak that I write this post today. My beloved husband, Albert Marsh passed away quietly and comfortably early yesterday morning. As I knew he was transitioning soon, I held his hand and played his favorite music with my IPad placed on his pillow. He was listening to some Sarah Vaughn, Ella Fitzgerald and Karen Carpenter.

Albert and I have been together since March of 1989. We had a commitment ceremony in June of 1994 and were married in Pasadena, Ca in March of 2014, two days before our 25th Anniversary. 

As many of you know I always referred to him as My Sweet Albert. Although we were 19 years apart, our two generations were perfectly matched as we learned so much about each others experiences, and opinions. He was a spiritual being with so much to teach me. One of the first things he taught me was to not define myself by tragic experiences and take responsibility for being the only one to be able to change my circumstances should I not like them. I’m certainly one to bitch and moan about the same thing too many times. He said to me quite clearly, “if this is a new story or problem, I’d be glad to listen and perhaps give some advice…if it’s something I’ve heard before, and you haven’t done anything about it, I’m not interested in hearing it”. That’s great advice.

Thank you all for the wonderful and kind emails, messages and phone calls. I’m truly touched by them and I know he would be too. So take care of one another, listen to one another, and work together to solve problems and issues that put you both on the same page. Write your life screenplay together and Star in the Film of your lives. You will be rewarded with The Academy Award of your life.

Oh and one other thing, put the hammer, nails and other tools away after you’re done using them…..Trust me on this one.  I love you all.

Once same-sex marriage became legal, Albert and Johnnathan held their marriage ceremony in our living room.   To commemorate the event and to thank us, they gave us this work by Albert.  Everyday the beautiful piece reminds us of him and of the happiness he and Johnn shared.  On the back it says:

"Twin Flames" collage by Albert Marsh, circa 1985

Reframed February 29, 2014

to David and Leslie

From Johnnathan and Albert

On the occasion of our wedding day

March 1, 2014

One more picture because of the big smiles - Albert and Leslie making a ring around the tree.

The Toy Drum (Summer 1953)

Few people remember that I began my musical career as a percussionist.  In fact, even I had forgotten this fact until just recently.

I was reminded of this when I had a pile of old family home movies converted to video.  These date from the late 40s, when my father must have purchased a 16mm camera, to the early 60s, when - given my absence in the action - I must have been old enough to be entrusted with the role of cameraman.

If these videos prove anything, it's that I am descended from a long line of cinematographically challenged ancestors.  Exposure is random and framing is laughable.  There are countless shots of people without heads.  Also occasionally heads without bodies.  No sound of course.  Lots of classic home-movie embarrassed movement.

Here's a photo of one of thsee film reels and the box it came in - this one is labeled only "Summer 1953".    It says Kodachrome Daylight Type Double 8mm Magazine - which held a whopping 25 feet of film.

The transferred video has 3 minutes and 48 seconds of nostalgic action.  I appear the most often - making me the nearly 2-year old star.  Well, I was cute, wasn't I?  There are also shots of my parents, my Grandmother and Great Aunt Kate, my uncles Ben and Carl and Carl's wife, my Aunt Esther.  (I had two Aunt Esthers.  How many did you have?)

Fear not, brave Mixed Meters reader.  I am not posting the entire video for you to endure.  I have excerpted a few scenes.  The first is an unusually high quality shot of  me with my parents outside their apartment in Sioux City Iowa.   Here's a still.

(The brick apartment building and the wooden one behind it are still visible in Google maps.  Pan the street view shot to the left and you can see my eventual high school - complete with stone turrets - up the slight hill.)

The other shots in this following video show me with what was apparently my first musical instrument - a cute little toy drum and cymbal combo supported by a neck strap.  And I appear to be having a great time banging away at it.  Yes, I was the center of attention when I was hitting that drum.  Ah, lost youth.  Cute and talented!

In the last scene you'll notice a huge drop in video quality.  It was very underexposed, almost solid black.  I adjusted it as best I could because I wanted to include the final frame of the film - my father, looking plaintively at the camera and covering his ear with his hand, as if to say "Take the drum away from the boy, please."   Or maybe he was unhappy being pigeonholed in conversation by my Uncle Carl, whose suit-coated wrist can just barely be seen.

Oh.  I also added some music and titles to the video in a futile attempt to enhance the home movie experience.  You should prepare yourself in coming blog posts for more blasts like this one from my early history and even pre-history.

Here's an early MM post about my Mother and Ronald Reagan - and her last pack of cigarettes.
Here's an MM post called My Mother, My Worm.
Music in Sioux City, Iowa?  Here's a post called Me and Mahler, Me and Iowa (there's a picture of me and my Dad)
You could also read Forty Years in California - there's another pic of me with my Father.

Rose Room

The title does not refer to your grandfather's Rose Room.  This post is about my own piece entitled Rose Room.

In this case "Rose" refers to Leslie's Aunt Rose Harris, who, after one of her gravitational accidents, very briefly stayed in our guest room.  That would have become the Rose Room.

This happened in September of 2009.  That's also when I wrote the music.  I've never posted Rose Room because I wanted to change it very slightly.  Now I can't remember what changes I wanted to make.  Something about the final chord.

Musically, Rose Room is about the conflict of accelerando and non-accelerando.  The drum sounds stay at a constant tempo while, simultaneously, the other music gradually gets faster.

Also there are ducks.

Click here to hear Rose Room by David Ocker Copyright © 2009, 2014
83 seconds

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And now, variations on a theme:

Here's another piece of mine with duck references:

The blog post Water With Ducks has links to my other bird related music.

A book review:  Moby-Duck

The Ocker Scale is another piece I posted after forgetting what changes I wanted to make.

Marion Shuman

Last month my Aunt Marion Shuman passed away in Jerusalem Israel.  She was 88.  Leslie and I send our profound condolences to her children, Ellis, Debby and Judy and their families.

I first met Aunt Marion nearly 60 years ago.  It was 1954.  I was three.  Engaged to marry my Uncle Ben, she visited Sioux City, Iowa, where I lived.  That would have been about a month before their wedding.

Don't imagine that I remember her visit.  I've refreshed my memory with old family albums.  Here are two pictures of Marion and Ben dated 1954 and 1955. (The boy in the second picture is me - age 4.)  Those are among the earliest pictures of Marion in the albums.

After they were married Ben and Marion made their home in Sioux City.  They had three children while Ben worked at the local newspaper.  In 1972 Ben and Marion moved the entire family to Israel, leaving the mid-West for the mid-East.  Their hope was to raise their children in a more Jewish environment.

Their departure was covered by that same local newspaper.  The article, Sioux City Family Leaving for New Home in Holy Land, quotes Marion:

I have a very religious feeling about this including the timing.  We were meant to go. The good Lord has been watching over us.  I know we will have hard times ahead, but we are prepared.

Here is a picture showing all five Shumans in 1972, soon after arriving in Israel.

Photo albums tell many stories.  Over time things change - cameras, fashions, people.  One story that the pictures tell about Marion is the strength of her marriage to Ben.  Most of her pictures show them together.  I had to look hard to find shots of her alone.  These are dated 1973, 1977 and 1983.

Once the Shumans were nearly half a world away, communication with friends and family back in the Old Country (i.e. Iowa) became much more difficult.  Many letters were written.  Along with the photo albums I have an envelope stuffed with letters from Israel - spanning more than 20 years - a collection saved and cherished by my Mother.

Early letters, written with a manual typewriter on light-weight Israeli Aerogrammes, were intended for many different State-side readers.  These might begin with a salutation like:

Shalom from Jerusalem to Mother, Edythe, Al, Esther, Jack, family and friends!

Gradually, as people passed on, the salutations shortened one by one.  Later letters are addressed only "Dear Edythe".  After my Mother's death this becomes "Dear David".  The trusty manual typewriter was replaced eventually by a spiffy electric which soon gave way to a mysterious computer with dot matrix printer.  And then the letters stop.  Email had arrived.

The letter writer-in-chief was, quite naturally, the journalist in the family, Uncle Ben.  Letters from Marion were few.  These letters focus on daily life in Jerusalem - schools, jobs (Ben worked for the local newspaper), military service, weddings, births, trips, visitors from America.

Here are a couple more pictures showing Ben with his arm around Marion.  (These are vintage 1974.)

One letter from Aunt Marion stands out.  When my Mother passed away in 1986, Uncle Ben traveled from Israel to Iowa for the funeral.  Marion had to remain in Jerusalem but sent a personal letter of condolence.

Here are two short excerpts in Marion's own words on the subject of the loss of a mother.
Hopefully her children, her children's children and (someday) her children's children's children (when they learn to read) will take some comfort from them, as I repurpose them to reflect back on the woman who actually wrote them.

I guess what I am trying to say is that I really share your loss - but in my way.  A mother can never be replaced and you will remember how much she loved you and took pride in all that you have accomplished.  You surely must know that she shared this pride with us, and we loved hearing about it.

I hope you have been warmed by the respect and love many people had for your Mom, she was vital all her years, never showed her age, and was interested in people - a very important interest!  Keep her wonderful image in front of you always.

Judaism was important to my Aunt Marion.  Family was important to her.  Those two things infused everything she did.  She had purpose and determination, good qualities to have when moving a family with three teenagers half a world away.  Such a move must have posed one new challenge after another.  

Marion knew instinctively that Israel was a better place than Iowa to raise a Jewish family.  Looking back on her life and on the family she raised, it's pretty clear that her instincts were right.

Here's a picture of Marion and Ben dated 2006, 52 years after the first picture in this post.  It's not surprising that Ben still had his arm around Marion.

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Ellis Shuman has inherited the mantle of Shuman family writer-in-chief from his father.  He has published a novel and a collection of short stories.  Check out his Amazon page.  Ellis also writes a blog called Ellis Shuman Writes.  

He wrote a blog post called The Comfort of Jewish Mourning Customs which describes Marion's final days and the Jewish traditions her family fulfilled to mark her death and remember her life.  She would have been proud to know these traditions continued after her.  Of course she did a lot to make sure that happened.

Blog posts about the recently departed are not traditional Jewish customs.  However Mixed Meters has been around long enough to make a few of its own traditions.  You can read my 2007 post remembering Marion's husband of over 52 years, my Uncle Ben Shuman, here.  Plenty more pictures of the two of them together.

One more memory ...  in 1992 I married Leslie Harris.  Since both of my parents had already passed away, Ben and Marion graciously traveled from Israel to California to serve as my honorary parents.  Here's a picture of the three of us, taken 37 years after the snap above (the one which shows the three of us slouching on a couch, just about the time of their first wedding anniversary.)

My Mother, My Worm

Don't be fooled. This post is really about Mexican food.  I have two reasons for writing it.  These will be revealed.

Here's a picture of my Mother on the day in November 1948 when she married my Father.

Next is a headshot of "my worm" - Flabelliderma Ockeri.  Well, it's an example of the species of worm which is named after me.  Cute, huh?  It even has its own Wikipedia listing (which is more than you can say about the human me.)  Curiously, the listing is in Dutch.

As some of you may know I come by my scant biological knowledge solely through my marriage to a marine biologist Leslie Harris.  To be more specific, Leslie is an invertebrate taxonomist.  To be downright precise, she's a polychaetologist - a worm expert.  She doesn't deal with just any worms - certainly not with earth worms.  She only deals with worms found in the ocean.  (Personally I had no idea that worms even lived in the ocean until I met Leslie.)

And there are, it seems, an awful lot of worms in the sea.  Leslie works at one of the world's largest collections of polychaetes, housed at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County.  People come from all over the world to study these worms and Leslie and I have offered our guest room to many of these worm people while they're in LA.

One such visitor has been Dr. Sergio Salazar-Vallejo, a polychaete expert and professor at Ecosur, an institute of biological studies in Chetumal, Mexico.   He visited us enough that not only did he become our friend but we made him a member of our family.  (We even gave him a certificate to prove it.)  Sergio arranged for many of his worm students at Ecosur to study worms at NHMLAC.  All of them stayed in our guest room.  Not all at once of course.

Sergio apparently believed that I should be rewarded for allowing this steady stream of biologists into my home.  That is where the idea of naming a worm after me got its start.  In his scholarly paper cleverly entitled Revision of Flabelliderma Hartman, 1969 (Polychaeta: Flabelligeridae) published in the Journal of Natural History, he described Flabelliderma Ockeri.  In that paper he explained why I deserved this honor

Etymology: This species is named after Mr. David Ocker, in recognition of his long-standing generous support to polychaete workers, most having come from Chetumal. Thanks to his support, many extremely productive research visits have been made to Los Angeles.

This happened over six years ago.  You'd think I would have blogged about this long before now.  One of the purposes of this post is to belatedly thank Sergio for this signal honor.  Thanks, Sergio.

Here's another picture of "my worm".

If you have no idea what you're looking at in these pictures, don't feel bad.  Neither do I.  At my request Sergio provided an explanation.  I felt it was too complex for Mixed Meters.  He obligingly provided a second, simpler paragraph.  I felt that was still too complicated.  Here's his third revision.

Living specimen of Flabelliderma ockeri, anterior end, dorsal view. The thin filaments are branchiae and the thick ones are palps. The dark brown central area is the group of eyes.  The family name, flabelligerids, indicates that their members carry a fan (L. flabellum). The fan is made up with fine chaetae, often included in a thin layer of a fibrous matrix, which can also include some sediment. The genus Flabelliderma was proposed because the body wall or skin (Gr. derm, skin) differs from other species belonging to Flabelligera.

I needed to look up some of the words:

• anterior - front
• dorsal - top
• branchiae - organ of respiration (kind of like a gill on a fish)
• palp - organ of sensation or feeding
• chaetae - bristles, organ of locomotion  ("polychaete" means "many bristles")

By the way, F. Ockeri is a Southern Californian.  It has been discovered only in the area roughly from San Diego to Santa Barbara.  Here are more pictures - including a full body shot - which were included with Sergio's paper:

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This Spring Sergio and his wife, Emilia Gonzalez-Salazar (she studies molluscs) visited us again for several months.

In this picture you can see Dr. Luis Carerra-Parra (another polychaete person and one of Sergio's students), Emilia Gonzalez, Sergio Salazar and Alejandro Salazar (he's an offspring of Emilia and Sergio.)  Notice that they are sitting at a dinner table.

When Emilia and Sergio stay with us they take over our kitchen.  Leslie and I don't mind.  We are not particularly familiar with their strange idea of preparing an evening meal and then gathering the entire family around the table to eat it together.  Very curious.

Naturally, when gathered around the table in the presence of a freshly prepared meal, the discussion often turns to food.  That's how it happened at one meal that I told a story about my Mother's Midwestern encounter with Mexican food sometime in the early '80s.  (Remember my Mother?  Check back to the beginning of this post.)

Here's a picture of me with her in Sioux City Iowa in June 1986.  Sioux City is where I grew up and where she still lived.  We're standing in front of the Green Gables Restaurant on the corner of Pierce and 18th Street.  I wonder if they still serve kreplach soup one night per week.

Here's that story about my Mother and Mexican food that I told at dinner:

At that time I was living in California and periodically she came out from Iowa to visit me.  Although Sioux City has an airport of its own, flying to California was cheaper if you first drove to Omaha Nebraska, about 100 miles south.  

When I grew up there weren't many ethnicities in the Midwest.  Beyond a few Jews (that was us), a few black people and a very few Native Americans (who mostly kept to themselves on reservations), there were only seemingly countless varieties of Northern Europeans.  

Sometime after I moved to California apparently things began to diversify.  Latinos began moving to the Midwest, many of them to take the difficult, dangerous jobs in meat processing plants.  As their population increased, services geared to Latino customs followed.  I remember the surprise while visiting of seeing not one but two Latino grocery stores in Sioux City.

And that's why my Mother could have the experience of eating at a Mexican restaurant in Omaha Nebraska before she flew to California: because there were Mexicans running restaurants there.  Later I asked her what she had eaten.  Her answer - she pronounced the unfamiliar polysyllabic word very carefully - she had eaten an entomatada.

I told her that she must have gotten the name wrong.  I had been living in Southern California for nearly 10 years and thought I knew all about Mexican food.  I rattled off a list of the possibilities for her.  Could she have had an "Enchilada" or even a "Burrito" perhaps?  "It had to be one of those other things," I told her.  "Entomatadas don't exist."

Now, cut back to the present, a few weeks ago.  Twenty-five years or so have gone by.  Leslie, Sergio, Emilia and I are having dinner.  I tell them this story.

Imagine my surprise, my astonishment, when Sergio replies that my Mother had indeed gotten the name correct, and that entomatadas are not some mythical culinary chupacabra.   Entomatadas are a Mexican speciality made by dipping lightly-fried tortillas into tomato sauce and then filling them with cheese or meat or something.  The word tomato is easy to find in "entomatada".

I asked Emilia and Sergio if they could make entomatadas for us some night.  And they did.

Here's a plate of entomatadas ready for consumption in our kitchen.  They were very good.

And so the second purpose of this blog post is to apologize to my Mother.  Sorry, Mom.  I should have believed what you told me.

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For Further Reading:

My Mother, were she still alive, would turn 101 next month.  Click here to see a genealogy which lists her.  (It also lists Leslie and myself.)

Sevens, a MM post, has one story about my Mother's pregnancy with me and another about the massive pile of manure in Sioux City.

Reagan Says Give Chesterfields for Christmas, a post about my Mother's cigarette habit.

An obituary of Ben Shuman, my Mother's brother.

Yelp lists 19 Mexican restaurants in or near Sioux City Iowa right now.

About growing up in Sioux City and listening to Mahler.

About Oscar Littlefield, an artist I knew in Sioux City.

Google search for entomatada.  (lots of recipes)

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Mother and Worm Tags: polychaete worms. . . mexican food. . . Sioux City Iowa