Choice Difficulties

Saturday I rolled out of bed later than usual, went along with my routine visit to the farmer’s market, and then languidly prepared for my weekly long run. A glorious fall day was out there for the taking, and I wanted to spend it sipping something crisp and cold, like hard cider, while wearing a sweater, seated. But if I am to do this marathon I’d need to do the run, so I eyed my responsibility resentfully, letting it badger me into grumpiness. I put on my shoes in slow motion, checking my email between each one, then checked my email again. I mapped a run to Fort Tilden, which is 14 miles away from my apartment, but I made sure that the route I took never veered too far from a train station. This gave me license to cut it short if I felt the need. I had Monday morning free, I could postpone my long run until then.

It was a perfect run, as such things tend to be when you literally drag your feet, and from the moment I set out I wasn’t once tempted to cut it short. I took Bedford Avenue all the way south, through Prospect Heights, Lefferts Gardens, and Midwood, past Brooklyn College, through Sheepshead Bay, until it spit me out at the sailboat-flecked marina down there. Then I continued east along the water, making my way next to the Belt Parkway and past a group of enthusiastic wind surfers until I got to the Marine Parkway Bridge. Once I crossed that, only the girth of the Rockaway peninsula remained between the Atlantic Ocean and me. This was probably the most difficult stretch, due to an incline and an unrelenting head wind, but also because the ocean—my finish line—didn’t come into view until the very, very end.

Yet all of it was worthwhile. Arriving at a mostly empty beach on a warm fall day is a great way to finish a long, dreaded run, because it’s impossible to have any regrets. I stood there stretching in the sun for a while. Then I soaked my feet in the ocean, massaging them into the wet sand as I walked the length of the beach to Rockway Park. From there I hopped a subway back home.


On Monday morning my friend A., a friend who’s about twice my age and who I met when I sublet a bedroom of her apartment, called me to offer an extra ticket she had for an opera at the Met. I know very little about opera, and even less about the culture of the Met, and the way she presented her offer was so offhand that I could have very well been invited to her niece’s flute recital. She gave me our seat assignments and told me to meet her there. “I don’t need a ticket to get in?” I asked. “Nah,” A. replied, “just tell them that I’ve got it, and if they give you any trouble tell them some bullshit story. They just want to fill up the seats.” I went along with it.

You probably know what type of affair the Met Opening Night Gala is, but until Monday night I did not. I arrived to find women decked out in dresses only suitable for a televised awards show, men in breathtaking tuxedos, not a one looking cheap or ill fitting. A red carpet was spread out along the left-hand side of the plaza and the people passing through it were getting a lot of attention. I couldn’t believe A. didn’t warn me about this. She knows that my “nice” clothes are basically just my normal clothes, with my shirt tucked in. This is what I was wearing: turquoise J. Crew khakis that’d been given to me by a fashionable friend (and that I thought suitable for an opera, though I'd never actually worn them in public before), a pale red Oxford shirt—tucked in—a black leather belt, and my black Wallabees. Also I carried my blue canvas backpack. I sheepishly made my way to the ushers—Rene Fleming was swept past, then Patti Smith—and tried to explain, but I was cut short. “Sorry, I can’t let you in without a ticket. Try the ticketing booth.”

I should add that A also doesn’t have much of a functioning cell phone. She tried calling, once it was obvious I was either late or having trouble, and explained that she was sending an usher out to find me. But then the phone died and was never to be resuscitated. I was very tempted to head back home to Brooklyn, but out of responsibility to A. I went back inside to the now empty lobby and reapproached to the usher once I heard the opera begin. I explained more slowly, feigning obliviousness to my contextual deficiencies: my friend, inside, ticket, seat number. With no interrogation or silent scrutiny, he led me to a man with a laptop. After some typing this other usher issued me a handwritten ticket. Then he led me to a screening room to watch the first part of the opera and twenty minutes later out to the lobby to be ushered into the opera house with all the other latecomers.

I filed inside before Zac Posen and stepped out of the way as Courtney Love exited. As glamorous as this might sound, I don't think I could have felt less uncomfortable. I didn’t know what to do with my backpack, so I mostly dragged it like Linus with his blanket, hoping the lower latitude might conceal it somehow. Then A. wasn’t sitting where she said she’d be, and someone else was in the seat she’d said was mine. I wanted to beeline out those gilded revolving doors. The attention, the impossibility of my just blending in and belonging, was painful. I was mucking up an otherwise glittering landscape. Also, I didn’t care much about seeing the opera. But an usher, sensing my despair, came to my side. I whispered to her the seating issue I was having and she gently put me in a random empty aisle seat, assuring me that she’d help me find my friend at intermission.

During the intermission, I searched for A and had no luck. I left her another voicemail while standing against the wall in a corner of the lobby, afraid even to accept a glass of champagne for fear of any kind of interaction threatening to rock my visibility. Then after a few more tries and just as people were heading back inside for the second act, I gave up entirely on this test of my self worth. As I walked down Broadway to 59th street to catch the train, my pulse was racing, my joints twitching, and my breath was short. I couldn’t sit still until after I passed through home to collect some cash, went straight to the neighborhood pub, and I was served a beer and a turkey burger. Those things calmed me.

Here's what happened, why I couldn’t find A.: For opening night, the Met also projects the opera on a big screen out in the plaza and sets out several dozen rows of folding chairs. Those are the seats that A. got for free, the seats that they make an effort to fill. There, the patrons are bundled up in quilts and wearing jeans, rather than tuxedos and gowns. That’s where I was supposed to be and it's from there that A. sent an usher looking for me. Later that night, when I finally connected with her on the phone, she took a lot of pleasure in how this misunderstanding played out. (Only now am I beginning to.) A. found out that the seat I sat in for the first half of the opera was worth $1,500.


Bean soup doesn't have to be difficult. I’ll just call this a Slow and Simple Black Bean Soup.

In the morning before you leave for work, or at least 4 hours before you want to start cooking, cover about two cups—a pound—of black beans with lots of water in a bowl. They're going to double in size, maybe more than that, so use plenty of water, at least 5 cups. When you get home or are ready to cook, drain off the soaking liquid.

Put the beans, half an onion, 2 medium or 1 large chunked carrots, 2 halved stalks of celery, 2 smashed garlic cloves, a bay leaf, and a dried chili in a soup pot, and cover with 2 to 3 inches of cold water. Bring it just to a boil, then add 3 tablespoons of olive oil and 1-1/2 teaspoons kosher salt and turn the heat down so that it simmers gently. Partially cover the pot with a lid and find a magazine to flip through.

Nothing about this soup is fussy, but you don't want to be too passive in this step. Here you’re creating the foundation of the soup: the beans, which are the backbone, and the broth, which is the heart. The olive oil quantity might seem like too much, but its not. If anything it's too little, I just don't want to scare anyone away. Add another tablespoon or two if you’re up for it, especially if you’re fond of the flavor of your olive oil; it both gives the soup a luxurious richness and allows the beans to absorb its flavor. The vegetables will saturate the broth and beans with the earthy perfume of carrot, celery and onion—a combination that’s technically “mirepoix,” a flavor base that’s as well tested as they come in terms of western culinary history. And then the salt—you'll probably need more salt.

So what you have to do is taste frequently. Add more salt to the broth as you think it needs it. Taste it for salt when you begin testing beans for doneness, after a half hour, and then every 15 minutes, adding big pinches or quarter-teaspoons as you go. When finished, the broth should taste rich and scrumptious. It ought to fill your kitchen with pleasant, palpably comforting aromas, and you should be able to chart its progress as the flavors and aromas develop. Add more water if it looks thicker than you like, adjusting the salt as necessary.

I've ruined so many bean dishes by undercooking the beans. If there's anything I can persuade you not to do it's that. Start checking them, as I said, after a half hour, though they'll probably take more than twice as much time. I always plan for the beans to take at least 50% longer than I think they should, which forces me to be patient. The beans are cooked when you can squash them in your mouth using only your tongue. Taste a bunch of them, and if there's a single one that puts up any resistance, keep cooking the pot. When I last made this, it took about an hour and 20 minutes.

After the beans are cooked, pick out and discard the vegetables, particularly the chili and bay leaf. If there are remnants of onion, carrot, celery, or garlic, try to fish them out, but don’t worry too much about it. Leave the beans to sit in the delicious broth over low heat.

You could stop there, because if you've done it right those beans in their broth are perfectly good like that. But if you wish to step it up as soup, you can toast 1-1/2 teaspoons of cumin seeds in a small skillet over medium heat for a few minutes as the beans cook, until the seeds are darkened a shade and aromatic. Watch and smell them carefully so that they don’t burn. Then grind them up in a mortar or a spice grinder. (If you have ground cumin on hand, you can use the same amount of that instead. But when you run out of that and are replacing your cumin, buy whole seeds. They'll last longer and consistently taste fresher.)

Dice up the other half onion, 2 stalks of celery, 1 good size carrot, and mince 2 more garlic cloves. Heat a tablespoon or two of olive oil in a skillet over medium heat, then add the vegetables along with the cumin, a teaspoon of dried oregano, and a big pinch of salt. Sauté until just soft, 6 to 8 minutes. I don't mind a little bit of crunch and always err on the side of undercooked here since this is going back into the soup, where it’ll continue to soften. Stir in the garlic and a heaping tablespoon of tomato paste. Cook, stirring, for a minute or so until fragrant, and taste, adding another pinch of salt if needed. Ladle in 1 or 2 splashes of the bean broth—which is all you should need to loosen up anything that's sticking to the pan—then tip everything from the skillet into the simmering soup pot with the perfectly cooked beans. Simmer for 10 or 15 minutes, after which I like to stick an immersion blender in there for a couple pulses. This gives the soup a creamier consistency.

And then you’ve got soup. It’ll give you at least 4 good-sized servings that can be shared, refrigerated, or frozen. Like most soups, this one improves in flavor as it sits.

If the beans are the backbone and the broth is the heart, your garnishes are the fun glasses. Fun glasses serve an optometrical purpose, but appearance-wise they do much more by allowing the person wearing them to hone some sense of self. Similarly, a garnish can do a lot to lend distinction, offering sharp, bright versions of the deep, slow-cooked flavors already in the soup, or an interesting contrast, or bring to the surface some inner zaniness that you wouldn’t have noticed otherwise. Just as fun glasses are frequently unnecessary, this soup, given its simple and solid quality, doesn’t really need any garnishes. But being a fun glasses type, I sympathize with the soup and therefore garnish it lovingly.

Whatever you like on your taco would probably be good here: grated cheese, shredded lettuce, diced tomatoes, salsa. You could serve it over rice or some other grain. The first night I garnished mine with finely diced Serrano, some cilantro, a spoonful of plain yogurt, and some corn tortilla chips. The next time, at lunch, I coarsely mashed up an avocado and stirred that in. The other night I heated up a single serving in a little saucepan over gentle heat, made a divot in the middle with a ladle, then cracked in an egg and let it gently poach there. Then I threw together a salad of salted and drained sliced celery, which I seasoned with cumin and lemon juice and added a handful of quartered cherry tomatoes. I stirred the celery salad in as the yolk oozed into the soup. These were all good, they were all frivolous, and they were not difficult.