The Greatest Hits

Before we buy back-to-school school supplies, I ask my kids to shop in the house. We have years of binders, pens and packs of graph paper stuffed into drawers, calculators under beds and a pencil sharpener strapped to the kitchen counter. 

My youngest emerges with my old inspiration binder filled with torn pages from magazines. He wants the binder for math class, so he empties the contents onto the kitchen counter. Images of kitchens, moody Farrow & Ball rooms, stone floors and brass sconces slide across the counter. 

A friend once told me to always start with old magazines when looking for design ideas. Notice what you’re attracted to despite the years since publication, she said, and notice what looks dated. I flick through the torn pages, remembering the dream phase before the room I’m standing in was a kitchen. I still like the images on these torn pages. They’re evergreen, designed to last.

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Last week we drove our eldest son to University. He was ready. But as he stuffed his bags filled with school supplies, sheets, favourite thrifted clothes and posters for his dorm wall into the car, I floated somewhere far above it all. Our family was shifting, growing smaller and cracking open. It hurt. 

We listened to Michael Jackson’s album Thriller from the Sackville River through the Wentworth Valley. Michael isn’t usually on heavy rotation, but Beat It was on my sixteen year-old’s Spotify mix, which led to a need to hear the whole album, start to finish. We never do that anymore, experience an album the way the artist intended us to. 

Thriller came out in the fall of 1982. It’s been forty years, but we all belted it out, despite the various ages and stages in the car. My sister-in-law (who came along for the ride) always knew which track was up next. Listening to the album five times in a row while babysitting in the ninth grade baked the flow into her memory. And just around the Cobequid Pass, I found myself at Robin’s Bat Mitzvah, where I danced to Billie Jean in the sailor dress my mom bought for me on a trip to Florida. The song had been out for a few years at that point - long enough for me to have Princess Diana’s impish haircut, long enough to question the coolness of my sailor dress, long enough for my friends and me to know all four minutes and 54 seconds of that song. 

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All of this has me thinking about the greatest hits of the summer, the food I keep making, again and again. There’s the side of salmon brined in water mixed with equal parts coarse sea salt and brown sugar, then patted dry and cooked on a cedar plank on the grill. Or the spicy green ranch dressing, based on this New York Times recipe that we toss over fresh greens, corn, feta and a handful of crushed tortilla chips. My version of the dressing includes whatever herbs I have on hand, and doesn’t use garlic powder. I haven’t liked it since I first tried it at my friend Sarah’s house, when her mother stirred it into our Kraft Dinner. Sometimes it’s best to leave well alone. Which leads me to the greatest hit of late summer, the tomato sandwich. There’s nothing better than fresh bread,¹ mayonnaise, thickly sliced tomatoes and a sprinkling of sea salt. I hope my son eats this sandwich in forty years, while listening to something classic, something designed to last.

1. This is a favourite, the molasses seed bread from Local Source in Halifax.