RECIPES & REVIEWS: 7/8/25

MAPLE COFFEE OLIVE OIL CAKE, "STICK," "ECHO VALLEY," "DEPT. Q," "MURDERBOT," "MATERIALISTS," and TWO MEMORIES OF MOM

I made that first cake on Sunday. It was an experiment. I had some peaches and apples in the fridge and thought I’d chop them up and throw them in the olive oil cake batter with just a bit of orange juice. It didn’t work the way I had hoped. It was okay but not good enough. I gave away a couple of pieces anyway but felt bad about being kind. Even kindness has its standards. I felt dissatisfied.

So on Monday I made another cake. It too was a bit of an experiment. I looked around the kitchen and came up with a maple coffee olive oil cake that is scrumptious. I gave some pieces away yesterday and felt the satisfaction I can feel at doing so return. Selfishness can incongruously raise the standards of one’s kindness. Indeed, I often thank people for allowing me to feel kind - which is sort of different than actually being so. Narcissism more nicely nudged along. But that’s for another column.

I was heading down the hill yesterday with my pieces of maple coffee olive oil cake in their baggy in my backpack when I ran into a lovely young Moroccan woman and a handsome young man with her who greeted me with a friendly familiarity knowing that I was on my way to take photos of a small studio I am thinking of renting next year for six months which is off the Petit Socco with views of the marina and bay from its kitchen window. They said they were just visiting the building themselves because they were in the process of setting up Airbnb accounts for the two apartments per floor in the five-story building. I have learned to play along when someone obviously knows me as I try to figure out how they do. I couldn’t quite place the woman but then she told me that she was Hana, the wife of Yassine who had told me about the apartment. Together they created the Kasbah Collective one of my favorite boutiques in my neighborhood. Yassine has more often been in the place when I visit than she has been but I did suddenly remember meeting her once when I went in to shop and visit. Yassine’s father owns the building where the apartment is located and it is in the last stages of its renovation. He volunteered to ask about the place when I told him about how I was falling more and more for Tangier and was surprisingly feeling at home here. The instinct with which I live my life - the one that nudged me more nicely along toward this pilgrimage the last few years - has been leading me toward spending half a year here to see if I could do a whole one at some point - probably in 2027 into 2028 - with jaunts to Europe and London when I need them. It is also based on budgetary realities as well since I am hoping to find something for $500 a month if possible in order to save up some money. I think it’s feasible to find something for that amount, but we’ll see. I have offered to pay half right now for the six months I’d like to spend here from July 2026 to January 2027 and the other half next July so all the rent is paid upfront. But as I told Hana and Yassine, I have learned to surrender to what I can’t control because I can only control my reaction to such things. And I’m already living in their own kindness no matter where I end up physically living if my plans work out, or if they don’t.

“I love Moroccans,” I also told Hana and her young colleague yesterday. “You’re all so nice. Well, that sounds too generalized as a statement, almost condescending. Some of you are shits. But most of you are really nice. And you’re certainly aesthetically beautiful. So there’a that if that’s not objectifying you too much. I mean, look at you and Yassine and what a cool beautiful couple you are.” She smiled. “Like everybody else, I have to admit I kind of have a crush on your husband.” Her smile faded a bit at what I thought had been a compliment, not a curdling of it but the befuddlement that serves as a buffer at times between people from different cultures which turned the curlicues of the smile into a crisper grin just short of its cousin, the grimace. We made small, then smaller talk before they headed up the hill and I down it.

As I later sat in a cafe to do some reading and writing after giving the baristas, Mohammed and Ishmael, some pieces of the maple coffee cake - it was a big hit - I realized that in my slight nervousness in the midst of trying to figure out how I knew Hana I had maybe overstepped culturally past that buffer by telling her that I had a crush on Yassine. So I headed back up the hill after finishing my coffee and several paragraphs to the Kasbah Collective to give her a piece of cake - I had forgotten to offer her one in my nervousness - and apologize if I had insulted her instead of complimenting Yassine and her in my gay way. But the Collective was closed on Mondays. I’ll head back there later today after I finish this first part of this column and then work out at the gym which is part of my Tuesday morning routine now.

Before I headed down to the gym, I went to lower the automized aluminum shade on the terrace doors to block out the heat and brightness of the morning sun once it rises to a certain point while I’m having breakfast and working on this MacBook Air. But this morning the aluminum shade got stuck and wouldn’t budge about a fifth of the way down. I thought I had broken it. I texted my friend who is letting me stay here this summer to let her know. I was so upset that I might have screwed it up by being too careless with the controls or something. When you’re staying at someone else’s place - well, when I am - I cherish it even more than if it were my own. I don’t want to harm anything in it. She called while I was down at the gym to tell me it wasn’t my fault and that it, the shade, had indeed been a bit faulty itself. She wanted to put my mind at ease since she had sensed rightly from my texts that I was distressed. “My grandmama used to have a saying when she was upset about something” I told her. “She’d say ‘I’m beside myself.’ I have been beside myself all morning.”

When I got back upstairs I sat staring at the brokenness and thought of Mom, my grandmama who raised me. “I’m beside myself,” she said once when I found her in the kitchen trying to concoct one of her lemon cakes my brother and sister and I loved so much. She had suffered a massive stroke almost two months before and was still mostly paralyzed down one side of her body. Her walking came back much quicker than her arm and hand movement so I had been helping her out with her hand exercises. But when I went into the kitchen to heat up the paraffin wax that she immersed her hand inside (which I then would encircle with Saran Wrap to keep the heat in) before we did her ball-gripping exercises, I found her at the kitchen counter trying to make that cake to no avail. It was a mess. I cleaned it all up and wiped away her tears with a paper towel. “You want to try and make some of your date loaf?” I asked after looking around the kitchen for the ingredients that might work and thinking that making date loaf would double as a hand exercise since we had to roll the log of candy into a dish towel for it to cool. And that is what we did. I placed my hand atop hers and watched her roll that towel around that sticky loaf once we’d put it all together then led her back to her bed with such a look of satisfaction in her tired old eyes. I was 12 years old. Maybe 13. Sometimes when one cake isn’t good enough, you look around the kitchen and come up with what you can. In some way, my whole life has been about looking around a kitchen and coming up with what I can. Sometimes you bake a better cake. Sometimes you make some date loaf. Sometimes you take a hand that is not yours to help it heal. Sometimes that healed hand is your own.

Years later, Mom would be diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. I was living in New York by then. I was 22. Maybe 23. Pop, my grandfather, had fallen and broken his hip. So they were both laid up out in the Mississippi countryside where I grew up. My Aunt Jo and Aunt Peg were rotating living with them to care for them but I, full of guilt for being away in New York, volunteered to come home for a week or two to relieve them and take care of Mom and Pop by myself. Mom was pretty far gone at that point and full of morphine most of the time before she headed to the hospital for one last time where she died. I had to take her to the bathroom when she had to go. The first time I sat with her while she defecated and smelled what the morphine did to her insides, I thought I might throw up inside the tub on the edge of which I sat while she sat on the toilet right in front of me. We were both embarrassed by the intimacy of the moment when I had to take a warm rag and wipe her clean. I had never seen her naked from the waist down until that moment. I was the one with tears in my eyes this time. She took a piece of toilet paper and offered it to me to dry my eyes.

Mom, who could cry so easily but not as easily as Pop, was not crying that day. I grew up around lots of tears from these grandparents who maybe thought of our dead parents each time they looked at my siblings and me, or maybe they were just exhausted by what it took to raise us and not just by the grief. Whatever the reason for their frequent crying jags, my brother and sister and I learned to ignore them and go on about our little lives watching television or playing a board game or eating a snack. That day in the bathroom though Mom had a steely look in her eyes that her imminent death might have embedded there. She seemed safely past sadness by then but not yet stoic. Steady, I guess is the word. There was an eerie steadiness to her. A dignity she summoned from somewhere to display for me in such an undignified moment.

“You remember when we made that date loaf after my stroke?” she asked me and actually chuckled as I helped her pull her panties back up over her nakedness.

The stench lingered in the toilet behind her.

I reached around her and flushed it away.

“You were beside yourself,” I said as I washed out the rag I’d used on her and then washed my hand that had cleaned but not healed her.

“That’s right,” she said. “Lord, I hate that kitchen but I sometimes we need what we hate.”

“We’re beside ourselves right now, aren’t we, Mom,” I said. “We’re beside each other.”

“That’s where we are,” she said. “That’s where we are exactly. Thank you, honey.”

I took her back to her bed.

Pop was sleeping.

I pulled the cover over her and lay down on the sofa that had been moved into the room next to them.

I opened the novel, Henry and Cato, I was reading that week.

“Who wrote that book you got your nose stuck in?” she asked.

“Iris Murdoch,” I said.

"I never knew an Iris in my whole life,” she said, and then too fell asleep.

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