Living with Gerry

I spent a good part of yesterday re-doing the 1962 scrapbook, gluing all the loose stuff back in it (the glue is Martha Stewart's own, so it should last the rest of my lifetime, right?). It's not quite as good as new, but nothing falls out of it now. I made the mistake of choosing the next scrapbook in line, 1963-64. This one is in worse condition than 1962, but I hadn't looked through it in a long time, so I started looking through it and will probably get it fixed during the coming week. It records a very busy period in my life.

I was living with Gerry at the time (the Gerry whose 45th wedding anniversary we celebrated a week or so ago).

Gerry and I shared a Berkeley apartment for 6 months, until her graduation (I think I was already out of school and working for UC Berkeley then). It was a shabby apartment that seemed to be uniformly various shades of brown, perhaps the result of decades of human occupation. Brown walls, threadbare brown rug, tired looking green-brown furniture. It had probably been a fancier apartment building in its day, given the marble facade and faux ornate entry way. It was situated over a Mexican restaurant and though our windows opened on the side street, the place still smelled like Mexican cooking most of the time.

I had moved my things in before Gerry came up from Los Angeles to join me. Char, Mike and Walt helped me move. The night I moved in, the landlords, an elderly couple (they were probably 50. LOL) sat on the marble steps, rocking back and forth silently watching us unload the car and take it all upstairs to the apartment. At some point some piece of furniture we were moving hit some of the marble and chipped it. They just looked at me with deadpan faces and observed "you broke it" and continued staring off into space, rocking back and forth, not saying anything else. (We found out later they had been fired, so I think they didn't care about the building any more...we laughed about this for years. A "you hadda been there" moment.)

The apartment opened into a living room and there was a bedroom off to the left with a pocket door that closed it off from the living room. The small kitchen was off to the right of the living room. Both rooms had Murphy beds, which folded down from the wall. Gerry slept in the bedroom and I slept in the living room.

We learned a lot about cooking in that apartment. I didn't really know much about cooking when I left home. I don't really remember my mother teaching me much, or letting me cook. I had cooked for the guys at "Newman Inn," where Walt lived, for several months, but I still didn't know much. Gerry and I bought our first garlic press and were very excited about it. We also learned a lot about cooking with bananas. Gerry loved bananas and we made so many things with them that at Christmas, I put together a banana cookbook. (Ever had banana meat loaf?) I've lost my copy of that cookbook. I'd love to look through it today, so many years later and see what recipes I included.

Even in those early days, I was already showing an interest in what would become cake decorating. In the photo below, we had a football game party and I made the cheese mold in the center of the table, shaped and decorated to look like a football.

We had lots of parties, I think, in that apartment. The funniest thing I remember happening was the night that during a party we looked out our kitchen window and discovered that someone in an upper apartment (we never found out who) had lowered a pancake on some fishing line and it was just hanging there outside the window. We did the only logical thing--we poured syrup on it.

We also discovered cheese fondu and I made a cake for our friend Ed's birthday (he wasn't there, but we all blew out the candles for him.

(Gee--look at how cute I am, all thin and in a dress and wearing an apron!) This party was held in the early part of November, 1963. In only a couple of weeks, the world would change and we'd never quite be the same again.