PROP THE PITA open by squeezing the ends between your finger and thumb, then rest it in the palm of your hand. This makes it easy to fill and keeps it stable. Put a dollop of hummus at the bottom. Not too much, otherwise the bottom of the pita will get mushy and tear apart. Insert two falafel balls and mash them a little with a fork so they are easier to bite into. Scoop up a little more hummus and put it on top of the falafel and the side—that way you get a taste of hummus with every bite. Last, drizzle with tahini sauce and sprinkle minced parsley on top.

This was the routine at Falafel King, the fast-food restaurant in Boulder, Colorado, where I worked for a few weeks during the summer of 1994. I was living there after my first year at college with Bianca and Laura and I needed a job to pay the rent. Finding a summer job in Boulder was as easy as walking out your front door. You saw a Help Wanted sign in a window and went in and asked for the job and it was yours. I found Falafel King by walking down Pearl Street, where buskers strummed guitars and hippies sold Tibetan jewelry and ceramic pipes. Falafel King was renowned for its delicious sandwiches, rightly so. The falafel still ranks among the best I have ever had—the very best was at a street stand in Beirut in 2010. (The best hummus I ever tasted was at a tiny, crowded Palestinian restaurant in Jerusalem in 2000.) But Falafel King, which was owned by a Syrian guy, made the best falafel in the US.

Aside from learning how to assemble a perfect falafel sandwich, I also learned how to slice shawarma, which I hated doing. I will never order shawarma again out of solidarity for the person preparing it even though it is delicious. At Falafel King, I had to raise the electric slicer at an uncomfortably high angle to get a decent purchase on the meat cylinder and then carefully lower it so that each slice was the exact same correct width. It was a huge pain. If someone came in and ordered shawarma, it was all I could do not to make a face.

If you have ever been to a falafel restaurant you can probably imagine the set up: a narrow strip behind the counter where, behind protective glass, were all the fixings for the sandwiches. When we needed to pour a drink from the soda machine or slice the shawarma, we had to turn around, away from the customers, and face the counter on the back wall. The space between the back counter and the front counter couldn't have been more than two and a half feet. The back counter held not only the soda machine and the shawarma but also a deep fryer for the French fries. And this was where I learned that oil and water do not mix. On my first day, someone ordered French fries, and I did as I was told and put a handful of frozen fries into the fryer basket and lowered it into the hot oil only to be immediately showered by sizzling drops of grease which burned my arms and made a ferociously loud noise. I couldn't even yell, I was so startled. My boss was an older guy who looked like a philosophy PhD student (he wore glasses and had a beard) and he came up behind me and grasped my shoulders and said in a low voice into my ear: "Oil and water do not mix." I know that sounds like borderline harassment, and that is because it was. I regularly had to endure him and another supervisor closer to my age compliment my smile and my “beautiful” eyes as I served customers and sliced shawarma. Given all the other awful impacts of sexual harassment no one ever really talks about the energy toll from having to pretend to like the person in charge who is also constantly sizing you up. It is exhausting, but you kind of get used to it. It's just another part of the job. On the other hand, in the moment of the scorched oil, I appreciated knowing that my boss had my back—though I would have preferred he had my back figuratively rather than literally.

In any case I quit after a few weeks for a babysitting job that had better hours and better pay—and no creeps. But I kept the t-shirt I had to wear when I worked. It was a rich purple color with silver lettering that said Falafel King and I held onto it for years and whenever I wore it I got compliments.

A fast food restaurant we liked in Cambridge served Middle Eastern-inspired cuisine. Falafel, baba ghanoush, tabbouleh, and so on, but often using local ingredients that made it feel more American. They made a sandwich that quickly became Michaela's favorite: a pita filled with peanut butter and bananas and drizzled with honey.

Now we make that sandwich for Michaela as an after-school snack. At Whole Foods I discovered an excellent pita brand that holds up well against goopy spreads. Every time I make the sandwich, I hold the pita in one hand, propping the sides open the way they taught me to do thirty-odd years ago at Falafel King.

Three Things Keeping Me Going This Week

1. Adam McKay, are you looking for ideas for a new movie? Please, please turn this article into a movie. Who knew that free tax filing software could be so thrilling? Matt Ribel traces the heroic efforts of a team of questing hopefuls who built Direct File, a free and easy tax filing system—which is now defunct. "My mom sacrificed repairing the roof, insulating the windows, fixing the walls, all in hopes that one of her weird-ass sons could be something other than a factory worker," said computer engineer Paul Eriksen. "I wanted to build a tax system that works for people, that doesn't make them hate themselves. I wanted to get people their money.”
2. Here Where We Live is Our Country: The Story of the Jewish Bund, by Molly Crabapple. I am not even fully a quarter of the way through this book and already am recommending it to everyone. It explains the rise of the working class in the Pale of Settlement which led to the Russian Revolution. I generally understood that my ancestors left Poland, Romania, and Belarus because they were sick of being persecuted but I never understood exactly why and how they were persecuted. The word "pogrom" was more of an abstract idea than a real thing. But Crabapple explains the cruelty so plainly–and also covers the split between diasporic and Zionist Jews. Which I never even knew about! Is there a name for the genre of nonfiction or history that narrates major political events through the eyes of working people? I am thinking of Prairie Fires by Caroline Fraser, which was ostensibly about Laura Ingall's Wilder but really covered the brutal experience of desperate pioneers on the frontlines of the Westward Expansion. If you know of any other books like this, please send them my way!
3. The Sheep Detectives. We saw this on Mother's Day. So good. So sweet. Yes, it is about sheep who solve crimes, but it is also about grief. I don't know that I have ever heard a better explanation for grief, at least in a movie, which is that remembering a loved one is hard, but forgetting them is worse. I had to compose myself before I left the theater, I was crying so hard. But it is also very funny! So don't let my tears dissuade you from seeing it.

This is the 100th issue of Mushroom Head!

Thanks for coming along on this ride with me. It started as a way of keeping in touch with people and has morphed into...well, a way of keeping in touch with people. You are always welcome to unsubscribe (others have, and no hard feelings from me). But if you like Mushroom Head, please share it. Also, I recently learned that the best way to ensure that Mushroom Head stays in your inbox is to click on a link in the newsletter. Incidentally, link clicks are the only data that I see about the newsletter—I switched off all the other data so I have no idea who is reading this or whether the email is opened at all. (I would have switched off the links but the Ghost platform doesn't offer that option.) And of course, most importantly, I will never, ever, ever share your data with anyone or anything.

In honor of the 100th issue I am inaugurating a "letters" section. I sometimes forget to respond to emails and I wish I was better at remembering to do that. But here are a few recent messages that I have been meaning to respond to:

Aunt Susie of Scottsdale, AZ, had this to say about Flower Power:

"Funny to me that you used to find tulips boring - they’ve always been my favorite and I’m not quite sure why.  I Iike the shape, and when they open it’s like they’re expressing freedom or something and the colors can be amazing and so varied."  

Susie, you're right. I should have cut that line about my once finding tulips boring. It was a flat-out lie. I have never once been bored by a tulip. They're gorgeous.

And Jim P. of Oak Park, IL, gently disagreed with my take on Henry David Thoreau in Dance Til You Feel Better:

"As for Henry David Thoreau, I dissent. Yes, he was anti-war when doing so was unpopular and a nonconformist in the best sense. However, Thoreau believed that 'the government that governs least governs best.' I think the type of government that we had during the 1930s governed about as well as we ever had, of course, other than the inexcusable racism that was endemic. Thoreau did envision a society with no government 'when men are prepared for it' but I’m concerned that 'governing least' before that utopian time, when everyone shares everything, leads us to where we are today."

Jim, I have read elsewhere that Henry David's views are proto-libertarian. But from what I know about libertarianism, and Thoreau (and I am not an expert on either), I would say that were Henry David alive today I can't imagine him being a libertarian any more than I could imagine him taking a torch to his beloved woods. I think that he hated slavery more than he hated anything in the world and consequently he hated a government that condoned enslaving people, and so that is where most of his anti-government rhetoric was directed. One of my favorite Thoreau quotes is: "The law will never make men free, it is men who have to make the law free. They are the lovers of law and order who observe the law when the government breaks it." That does not sound like a libertarian to me. It sounds like someone who wants to live in a just and free world and wants a government that enforces that.

Finally, from Daria T., in Lille, France, on At The Movies: "I loved this last newsletter! I like them all, but I feel like this one was very inspired 😊 I like to hear about “old time stories”, and NY stories, and of course the 2 together …. "

Thanks Daria, you inspired me to write more "old time stories" like the one above. I have many others and think I'll start writing them down, too, because I agree that they're fun.

Again, thank you for your kind words over the past three years since I launched Mushroom Head!

Happy Memorial Day! Enjoy the long weekend.

Love,

Claire