I wouldn’t even call it a game, what I do when I select celebrities as my surrogate family; it’s more of a ritual, something I lean into when I want to imagine myself into different timelines, all of which are of course impossible and therefore beloved. If only! There I would be, smashing it as a full back on the U.S. Women’s National Soccer Team. We win gold; in my speech, I credit all my success to Bend It Like Beckham.
Paul McCartney has a lock on being my father, in part because as Sir Paul has aged, he’s come to resemble him. They even have similar mannerisms, being as they are easily excitable men with white-gray hair nests. They both have two daughters (in Paul’s case, Stella and Mary McCartney), and a proclivity for explaining things.
Last year, in an interview that Paul, Stella, and Mary did to promote the release of Linda McCartney’s Family Kitchen cookbook, he spoke at length about his approach to sandwiches. This is Very Important Advice. After opening with “I do a very good sandwich,” he explained that he takes two bagels, which he then cuts into three—“so you’ve got a top and a bottom, a top and a bottom, and three middles”—so he can have three sandwiches.
His starting line-up of sandwich fillings: marmite (“Love marmite,” the interviewer nods) and “a little bit of lettuce” (“Love lettuce,” the interviewer murmurs), “because I’m gonna put hummus on, but it’s gonna go through the hole if I don’t put lettuce on.”
He added, almost dismissively, that one might add “a little slice of'' cheese, tomato, and / or a pickle—“or two”—before returning “to your lettuce barrier, because there’s another whole on top, so you’ve got to protect that as well. Then I put honey mustard.”
Cool guys don’t look at explosions; cool guys build lettuce barriers. (Or they vocalize as an electric juicer, as Paul did on a segment of Mary McCartney Serves It Up.)
In short, Mary explained, “In the McCartney family, we are not afraid of a condiment.”
The reliability of a good bagel is important in life. Bad bagels are a recipe for The Big Sad; whereas a good bagel sets you up, at whatever time of day, with comfort and a sense of accomplishment. You have had an excellent carbohydrate.
Bad bagels, meanwhile, are a study in disappointing paradoxes: chewy to the point of soggy or so hard they’re a tooth liability; absolutely flavorless or salt-laden upper cuts to the stomach. Bad bagels provide false confirmation that it’s true: strangers despise you and want you to suffer.
But as Waymond explains in Everything Everywhere All At Once, a beautiful, overwhelming onslaught of a movie (I sobbed non-stop throughout its final 45 minutes):
You tell me it's a cruel world, and we're all running around in circles. I know that. I've been on this earth just as many days as you. When I choose to see the good side of things, I'm not being naive. It is strategic and necessary.
It is not a spoiler to say that earlier in the film, Jobu Tokapi explains that in her religion, “I put everything, on a bagel.”
While I acknowledge that the invention of the everything bagel is a crowning achievement for us human animals, I have to say I prefer pumpernickel bagels. Chock-full of caraway seeds, gleaming from molasses, moody with dark rye—give me all of that, give me that every day and I will call you glory.
In my neighborhood, the bagel place lets you pre-order, which is less about kindness and more about necessity, given that they have: 26 varieties of bagels, one croissant, two “flagels,” three types of bread, a wrap, a bialy that is always out of stock, and four types of mini bagels. A flagel is a flat bagel, which is English for how dare you.
You can also choose to violate common decency and have your bagel “SCOOPED,” where some of the bagel is removed. Do not do that.
There are seven types of cheeses available, 18 varieties of cream cheese, and my personal favorite: “NO CREAM CHEESE OR SLICED CHEESE!!!!!!” And if you have made it that far, you can choose up to 12 toppings on your sandwich.
Given the sheer amount of choice available, you would be stupid not to pre-order, because who wants to walk up to a counter and demand 12 toppings? Better to endure shame from the comfort of a screen, then breezily wait between 10 minutes and an hour and a half, depending on when you placed your order, to snatch your paper bag from the counter.
I get overwhelmed by these choices, even though I can’t eat most of them (I am lactose-intolerant, and the tofu cream cheese they use tastes like liquified rubber), to the point that I seriously believe that the decision to add pickles and cucumbers might be the deciding factor in whether my brain stays intact that day.
So, I order the same thing: a sunny-side up egg and avocado, with cucumbers, pickles, and hot peppers, on a pumpernickel bagel, toasted. NOT SCOOPED—a decision that marks me as “(Normal),” a refreshing change in scenery.
When I was growing up, my family would decamp in the summer, for two weeks, to an island in Casco Bay, just off the coast of Portland, Maine. Caso Bay is home to one of the forts where my grandfather was stationed during World War II, which says a lot about what my family defines as relaxing. But it was relaxing, those two weeks, because I could see my parents and my sister unwind themselves—not always, but often enough that I could ease up on myself, too.
The island maintained a brisk business of people renting out their homes for the summer, which at the time was relatively affordable, for us. It allowed us to explore a whole host of places, with names like PEAK TIME and HADLOCK COVE. Unfortunately, we never did get around to staying at WHALE OF A TIME.
On Peaks Island, the prime retail stretch is the road that led up from the ferry dock. First is Jones Landing, a hybrid lobster-trapping operation and dance hall / wedding reception venue. Jones Landing was where the island drinking happened, or so I heard from my mother, who somehow had the authority in this matter.
A few paces up from Jones is Peaks Cafe, no accent over the E. Its menu offers bagels, deflated pastries, sandwiches, sad croissants, bad coffee, sometimes good coffee, and a host of other foods that glared at me through the glass counter. There was always somebody typing—‘writing’—on their laptop; I mistook that for glamorous, and have been doing so ever since. Lobster men grabbed their donuts and talked loudly about water conditions or politicians, depending on how the water conditions were.
I wish I were there now.
When we stayed at CARTER’S COTTAGE, my sister and I would sometimes be sent on reconnaissance missions to procure bagels. We were about a 5 minute walk to Peaks Cafe, and the population of golf carts convinced my mother that her pair of unaccompanied minors would be safe to walk in the morning.
In hindsight, I don’t think my family understood the concept of a bagel sandwich. All I can remember any of us ordering is a bagel, toasted, with butter or cream cheese. That does not a sandwich make, as Paul McCartney tells us; that is a carbohydrate with a spread.
But if I’m being honest? I still can’t think of a more delicious bagel (sandwich) than the one I got from Peaks Cafe: a plain bagel, toasted nearly to scorched, swimming in butter and kept hot in foil. I would use the foil as a tablecloth for my bagel, which I carefully unstacked from each other, and inhale the butter.
Neither of my parents cooked with or ate butter; they had lost their respective gallbladders to surgery, and since they were parents of the 90s, they thought fat was awful. (I believe my mother’s order was a croissant. When in proximity to your father-in-law’s World War II fort, I suppose.) Having butter on a bagel was golden luxury, melted.
My memories of Peaks Island are some of the clearest ones I have: I can’t remember what I ate a few days ago, but I can hear the seagulls and their high-pitched, incessant gossip. The sharp sting of saltwater air, which feels almost electric if you’re out long enough. The salt clusters on seaweed pods. Walking around the island: an exercise in gulf cart avoidance. Running around the island, all five miles, coming out of the woods with “Who’s Gonna Ride Your Wild Horses” playing in my ears: You’re dangerous, cause you’re honest. The bird who shat on my mother’s hair. Amazing aim.
Now I’m 27 and refer to 20 year-olds as kids, which they are, even though when we stayed on Peaks, I thought 20 was an impossible, intoxicating land where you understood life and especially yourself. It’s sweet, hindsight; I want to tell the girl I was, You were so wrong about so much and also, I owe you a lot.
On Yelp, I tracked the evolution of Peaks Cafe over the years—or rather, its worthy refusal to change, at least interior design-wise. It looks exactly like what I remember. Even the handwriting on the chalkboard is the same.
I clicked through the photos and found one from 2013, the last time my family went to Peaks (I think?), showing that a bagel with butter was $2.50. Now, according to a photo from 2022, it costs $4. I thought that was outrageous—yes, we’re dealing with unprecedented inflation; but come on, it’s a bagel and butter—until I remembered that 2013 was nearly 10 years ago, not two.
What’s your small good thing of the week? Is it a bagel sandwich? And if so—do you follow the Paul McCartney Method?
Let Me Tell You About Gidget
Sometimes she puts herself in time-outs in this, her proofing basket, and contemplates the meaning of existence.
The meaning is not good.
A Continual Note of Gratitude
Like everything I write these days, this was written during the 8AM EST session of The Writers’ Hour, an online hourly Zoom writing session hosted by the London Writer’s Salon. LWS is an online writing community so lovely and supportive that reminds me why I love writing in the first place.
have you read david sedaris’s calypso?? that was the first place i learned about bad beach house puns
i really want butter on a bagel now, melted luxury indeed
Gosh there is so much to love about this I forced myself to pick just one line: "There was always somebody typing—‘writing’—on their laptop; I mistook that for glamorous, and have been doing so ever since."
Thank you for another beautiful experience getting lost in your words.