Sneakers and Salad

and a new podcast episode

Maira Kalman’s ‘A chair holding the plumpest raspberry tassels’ - Mary Ryan Gallery

Hello from the airport in NYC where I’m waiting for a flight back home to Halifax. I want to tell you about The Flavour of Comfort, the latest episode of The Food Podcast that went live earlier this week. We all have different ideas of comfort; for me it shifts daily, but I’m always reaching for it, trying to make time for it, to prioritize it. It can mean a hot water bottle in bed, a book read over and over or in the case of Sherrie Graham, our guest on the episode, it’s a never-ending loop of old episodes of Murder, She Wrote. She watches it while making soap at her dining room table; Jessica Fletcher’s cluttered Cabot Cove kitchen, the neighbours who pop in for pie and the click of an old typewriter take Sherrie to a soothing, nostalgic and comforting place. 

Maira Kalman’s work brings me comfort. Earlier this week I marched twenty blocks to see her incredible show Women Holding Things at the Mary Ryan Gallery. Her whimsical, colorful paintings stretch the boundaries of what holding means: there’s Virginia Wolfe ‘barely holding it together,’ ‘Woman holding hand on hip,’ a ‘chair holding the plumpest raspberry tassels.’ My sneakers held me after that show, all the way to Chinatown where I took a yoga class. Horns honked, sirens wailed and pigeons took flight outside the seventh floor window as we breathed and twisted. After class I put my sneakers back on and weaved through the market where live crabs crawled around in buckets and pigeons ate whole slices of discarded pizza. Those sneakers also took me to the MCC Theatre, where singer Kate Nash narrates the Off Broadway performance Only Gold. To Via Carota for ‘the best salad in the world’ and to the Kings Theatre in Brooklyn where Ina Garten was on stage with Nigella Lawson (in hot pink high heeled boots) talking about their latest cookbooks. 

I’m wearing those sneakers now at the airport, with the last of my clean socks. From the point where I sit I see Adidas, Nikes, Pumas, Vejas and Solomons. They’re a universal comfort.

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