Saving Fire Station No. 19

Fire Station No. 19 is part of our neighborhood.  We often see the firefighters sitting outside when the weather is nice and they are not out fighting a fire. They take the fire truck to neighborhood events - they came to National Night Out on Wessyngton a couple of years ago.  We've taken cookies to the station on Christmas Eve a few times, and been to lots of neighborhood 5K runs that have started there.

A few years ago a campaign was started by the firefighters to raise money to removate the station.   An architechural firm put together an plan, and we all bought Fire Station No. 19 T-shirts to support the cause (plus, they were really cool, although Tom sometimes got mistaken for a firefighter when he wore his).  This is from the flyer from years ago:

Built in 1925, Station 19 has served and protected the Virginia Higland community for 85 years. Standing proud at the heart of the neighborhood, the building is the oldest fire station in Atlanta still functioning as a firehouse.  Old buildings, like this firehouse, need to be preserved in order to continue to function and serve.  After years of deferred maintenance, the firemen of Station 19 led by Sargent Ian Allum, are initiating the restoration and renovation of the historic structure.  Company 19 is committed to the health and welfare of the neighborhood, offering car seat installation & safety check, blood pressure monitoring, being a safety shelter for women, and hosting monthly story time for the children.  Restoring the firehouse will allow Station 19 to serve the community for years to come.

Fast forward to 2015.  The Morningside Mile is tomorrow,  It's a nice neighborhood event that benefits the fire station,

There's a one mile run ("Dude, it's only a mile") and what they call a block party, although it's not what I would call a block party; I think of a block party as neighbors in lawn chairs, and this is more crowds in a parking lot - but it's still a nice neighborhood event.

This year, the rhetoric about the fire station has been racheted up several notches.

This reflects what is on the firefighters' website, which states that the City plans to close the station in 2016.  The Virginia Highland Civic Association has a subsidiary organization, the Virginia Highland Conservation League, that is accepting donations to save the station.  Here's what the VHCA says about this on their website:

The City of Atlanta has plans to close the station in 2016. This decision has not been announced to the community at large, though, and key constituents in the neighborhood are very concerned about the possible loss of this historic resource that is central to our safety and community life. Interested citizens can help protect the station by donating funds to help renovate it.

The fire station’s building is in good structural condition but needs basic repairs. A neighborhood committee – consisting of architects, historians, preservationists, community leaders, and contractors – has made recommendations to renovate and update the building in partnership with the Atlanta Fire Department and the City of Atlanta.

Protecting out station will require community support. To date, nearly $80,000 has been raised. Another $220,000 is needed to keep No. 19 operating in a safe and efficient manner for another 50 years. Our goal is to raise those funds by December 2015.

I saw this a couple of weeks ago and shared it with some neighbors,  one of whom asked if it could possibly be true, that the City would actually close a station because it was in need of a $300,000 renovation, or did the plan to close it have to do with reducing operating costs.  Those were good questions and I didn't know - I just knew that for years they've been trying to raise money for renovations, and now there seems to be some urgency to the matter because "the City of Atlanta has plans to close the station in 2016."

Monday night was the Morningside-Lenox Park Association Annual Meeting and there were presentations from several of our elected officials.  Alex Wan, who represents us on the City Council, talked about the infrastructure proposal that had been approved by voters on March 17. There's extra effort being made to be good fiscal stewards of that investment.  The final list of projects is still being finalized, he said, but it does include the needed repairs at Fire Station No. 19.

This seemed to be very good news, and I emailed him later to confirm.  Here's the reply I got:

We have confirmation from Interim Fire Chief Joel Baker that Fire Station #19, post renovation, will be taken off the "Replacement" list and put onto the "Renovation" list. That's the fire department's way of saying that it won't be slated to be closed.

Regarding the funding, the infrastructure bond amount should more than cover the renovation cost for the building. There is a group of citizens that would still like to do supplemental fundraising to help purchase other incidentals for the firefighters that might not be covered as part of the construction budget (I'm thinking things like accessories, decor, electronics, etc.).

So...if you want to sign up for the Morningside Mile, by all means head on down to Highland Runners today and do it, but I think the fire station is probably going to be fine.  I already donated to the Virginia Highland Conservation League, and hopefully that can go toward "accessories, decor, electronics, etc."

It actually would have been nice to have known this *before* the special election -- it might have gotten some neighbors out to vote who didn't -- but now, it would be good if both the firefighters and the VHCA could update their websites.  The station's been saved by the 17,791 citizens of the City of Atlanta voted "yes" on Question 2 on March 17.

On Learning History

Last week I started a new course on EdX on Reconstruction, the period after the American Civil War, taught by Eric Foner, at Columbia University.  (It's actually the third part of a three part series on the Civil War, but I didn't take the first two parts.)  Last week he talked about how even today many people, if they know anything at all about Reconstruction, have a very negative view of it that was influenced by the work of historians in an earlier era who in turn were influenced by what had been contemporary anti-Reconstruction propaganda.  As an example of how Reconstruction was portrayed in the early 20th century, he showed excerpts from the 1915 film "Birth of a Nation."  However significant the movie may be in the history of American film, as history it is not correct and reflects the racism of the era in which it was made.

The week's assignment on using primary sources included an editorial written by James Weldon Johnson, the Executive Director of the NAACP, which was published in the New York Age in May 1921 following the re-release of the film.  Mr. Johnson wrote,

"Whatever other reasons there may be for the revival of “The Birth of a Nation” at this particular time I believe that one of the reasons is a determination to offset the shocking revelations that have just come out of Georgia.  The whole country has been stirred by the accounts of barbarous brutalities committed in connection with the Jasper County peonage cases; now comes this picture to instill the idea that no matter how brutally the Negro in the South is treated, there are justifications for the treatment."

I had no idea, on reading this, what had happened in Jasper County, Georgia, and I was curious.  Google turned up several good summaries, including one by Marshall McCart.  A man named John Williams was keeping 11 African-American men as involuntary indentured workers (the law calls it peonage).  One man escaped and made his way to Atlanta and talked to the Bureau of Investigation (the forerunner of the FBI).  Federal agents visited Williams' farm and talked to workers, who knew they had to lie.  But the visit was enough to prompt Williams to order his African-American overseer, Clyde Manning, to kill the men, a few at a time.  Several were killed and their bodies dumped in the Yellow River, and it was the discovery of those bodies in Newton County that led to an investigation that ultimately resulted in the convictions of both Williams and Manning for murder.  The investigation and subsequent trial was followed by the national press; this headline is from the New York Times.

This is a piece of Georgia history I certainly didn't know, just like most of us don't know much about the lynchings that occurred throughout the South, except for a few of the most famous ones.  A group called the Equal Justice Initiative has documented almost 4,000 "racial terror lynchings in 12 southern states during the period 1877 to 1950.  There is an effort now to place historical markers or memorials to mark some of these sites.

I've been thinking about this just as there have been stories in the news about pushback by some state legislators, including in Georgia, about the revised AP History curriculum, which is described as being insufficiently pro-American, and overly focused on the negative aspects of our country's history, including slavery. This makes me glad that I no longer have children in public schools, who could be impacted by directives from state politicians to leave out the bad parts of our history, but I do worry about the kids who wil be impacted.

As I write this, President Obama is about to speak in Selma, at the commemoration of the attack on peaceful civil rights marchers by state police,fifty years ago.  Iain is there, right now, with a group from school, and Tom was there last night.  He said that he heard lots of moving stories from people in Selma, about the police chief who spent the night in his car outside a house where Martin Luther King was staying, about the editor of the local paper who opened up his office to international press who had come to Selma.  There were a lot of good people there, he said, and those are stories that you never hear.

Our history is tumultuous and full of contradictions.  We can't understand the present unless we understand the past.  Leaving out the parts that make us uncomfortable is not patriotic; it's a lie, and we under estimate our young people.  I just heard the President say this, in Selma:

What greater expression of faith in the American experiment than this; what greater form of patriotism is there; than the belief that America is not yet finished, that we are strong enough to be self-critical, that each successive generation can look upon our imperfections and decide that it is in our power to remake this nation to more closely align with our highest ideals?

Exactly.

A Prime Lot

They're back - the real estate people who want us to sell our houses, even though we are living in them and have no intention of going anywhere.  There was this:

And there was this:

These both came in the mail, maybe they didn't mean it; it was just a mass mailing, and John and Dan didn't really mean *my* house -- it was a mistake, they really just meant to send these to people who actually wanted to sell their houses.  There was no mistaking the intent for this one:

This was an interesting communication, with the handwritten note, and "Please" underlined three times.  "my client would like to purchase your home for her sister name your price" suggests that (1) there is a client with a sister, (2) the client is in the market for a house for her sister, (3) and the client specifically wants *my* house.  It's a sister who needs a place to live, and she wants to live in my house.  She's probably a lovely person who would come to block parties, pick up the neighbors' mail when they are out of town, and babysit in a pinch.  

Except I don't think she does want to live in my house.  I think she wants to buy my house, reduce it to rubble, and build a custom dream home, just like the card says.  On their website, Mikel Muffley describes the program as offering "Prime Lot Location & Acquisition." That's what my house is, it's a prime lot.  That's where Justin works, for the Lot Acquisition Team, not the Team That Finds Nice Houses for Clients' Sisters Team.

In the meantime, the incredibly large house with the nice views of the neighbors' back yards is nearing completion, there's not much obvious work going on at the duplex since they took the trees down, and the lots where the apartments used to be are still empty.  There's a small pond there.  When it gets warmer, maybe we should put some fish in it, to eat the mosquito larvae.  

If the sister really wants a house on my street, there are lots up the street.  It's not necessary to knock down any more houses and cut down more trees.  Really,

More on the Symphony and Soccer

It was the weekend before last when I saw the posts on Save Our Symphony's Facebook page about Cameron Carpenter's guest appearance with the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra.  If you missed it, Cameron Carpenter is young organist who plays a digital organ that fits in a trailer truck that he takes on tour.  It sounded like it was going to be a good concert, so I decided to go, even though I couldn't find anyone to go with me.

I'm glad I did. Mr. Carpenter is a great performer but he doesn't look like the usual visiting soloist, with his mohawk and rhinestoned shoes.  He was the featured soloist in Poulenc's Organ Concerto, and then played the Overture to Candide as an encore; there's a video on line of him playing this piece that pretty well captures the flavor of the performance.  And -- this was my favorite part -- instead of disappearing after the intermission the way every other visiting soloist I ever have seen has done, he was back after the intermission for Saint-Saens' Symphony No. 3 as a member of the ensemble.  The organ console was moved off to the edge of the stage, and in spite of the haircut and the shoes, he was just another musician, playing with the ASO.

Last fall, while the Symphony was locked out, there were demonstrations and pickets and musicians' association-organized concerts that kept the issue visible, and kept the pressure on the Woodruff Arts Center to actually find a solution.  Although I don't know who all the players were (no pun intended), the information I got about what was going on came from the musicians' association and Save Our Symphony Atlanta.  Since then, most of the news I've gotten about the Symphony season is from SOS Atlanta via Facebook.  It's a supporter group, and like any good supporter group, they now have a scarf for sale.

Speaking of scarves, the last time I wrote about the ASO, I also wrote about the Atlanta Silverbacks, Atlanta's minor league soccer team, which was also facing an uncertain future last fall.  The Silverbacks have supporter groups too, and when it looked like the team might not be back this year, they all got together and organized a demonstration in Centennial Park. The team owners wanted out and in December, the North American Soccer League announced that it had bought the team.  In the announcement, NASL Commissioner Bill Peterson said, “Silverbacks fans are among the most passionate in the league, and they deserve a committed ownership group that will run the team at a high level for years to come.”

Under NASL's leadership, there's a new coach and a bunch of new players.  They did lose a favorite player, midfielder Kwadwo Poku, to the MLS (just like the ASO lost their Principal Bassonist to the Chicago Symphony).  But NASL's doing a good job of rebuilding the roster, as best I can tell, and certainly is doing a good job of marketing -- otherwise, I wouldn't know any of this.

How's the marketing going for the ASO?  Not so well.  What I know about the symphony mostly comes from SOS Atlanta.  When I tried to buy a ticket on the ASO website to the concert featuring Cameron Carpenter, I kept getting error messages, and when I tried again, the seat I'd just tried unsuccessfully to purchase would be shown as unavailable.  Finally I gave up and called the box office.  The person there said they'd have to charge me a service fee for a telephone purchase but there were plenty of seats and there isn't an extra charge for an in-person, at-the-box-office purchase.  So that's what I did.  This does not seem like a very good way to sell tickets.  Then, there's the matter of the terrifying naked flying nymph brochure, which pretty much speaks for itself.  SOS Atlanta posted a strong statement in late January as an open letter to the ASO Board about the marketing problems, including website issues and how social media is and is not being used.

Of course, there could be a reason it's so terrible.  The Woodruff Arts Center is currently recruiting a Vice President of Marketing and Communications (thanks to my neighbor Sarah for sharing this) and they are also recruiting a Marketing Coordinator.   This might suggest that they currently don't actually have a marketing director.  I would hope they wouldn't have to wait for a new marketing person to fix the website, so you could actually buy tickets on line.  Once they have their marketing people hired, a marketing strategy would be good.  And ASO management needs to get started on rebuilding the roster.

The new owners of the Silverbacks are doing a pretty good job, as best I can tell.  Maybe they could share some ideas.

Why Dogs are Good for the Neighborhood

Leonard, the dog we adopted from Atlanta Lab Rescue last summer, is doing better.  Tom says he's now "doggier" than he used to be, and I think that's right.  Even though he still doesn't ask to go into the backyard regularly, he does occasionally, and we can now get him to go outside with the promise of a treat (he's not big on dog biscuits, but he'll do anything for Pupperoni).  So we end up walking him at least twice a day and sometimes more frequently. 

Although I still have one child living at home, somehow it works out that I end up doing the preponderance of the dog walking, at least when I am home.  Tom certainly helps out -- often walking him while I'm at work or sometimes while I'm making dinner -- but when I'm around I do most of it.  And being out on the street with the dog once or twice a day, I've seen the changes day by day in the new house that's being built and the one that's being renovated, and the lack of anything at all happening at the corner, when the apartments used to be.  I've seen babysitters arrive early in the morning and leave at the end of the workday, and I've met neighbors I'd never met before, even though I've lived here a really long time.  And there are other neighbors -- almost all neighbors with dogs -- that I now see regularly enough that I know them better than I did.  If you see the same people enough times, you know them well enough to talk to them, and if you know them well enough to talk to them you might get to know them better.

Caroline gave me a copy of  "Life Between Buildings:  Using Public Space" for Christmas.  In about two hundred pages of text and photographs, Danish architect Jan Gehl picks up where Jane Jacobs left off to identify specific features of the built environment that create places where people want to be.  There are things we have to do -- go to work, go to the grocery store, go home -- that we will do whether they are fun or not.  But if there is something interesting along the way-- if on the way home, you walk by a neighborhood bar or coffee shop and spot friends -- you might linger or take a detour,  Then there are things that you do just for fun, that you don't have to do at all.  And if we are making a choice, we prefer lively streets to dead ones, a shopping district with interesting, unpredictable things to see and lots of people and musicians on the street corners rather than a mall, and places that are pleasant to be rather than, say, walking along Buford Highway.  A common denominator here is there being other people around who might be doing something interesting, or with whom we might strike up a conversation, or we might already know and could catch up on what they've been doing since the last time we saw them.  This is what the book is about,  It sounds obvious, but it's not, or at least it wasn't to me.

"Low-intensity contact is also a situation from which other forms of contact can grow," according to Gehl.  

"Contacts that develop spontaneously in connection with merely being where there are others are usually very fleeting -- a short exchange of words, a brief discussion with the next man on the bench, chatting with a child in a bus, watching someone working and asking a few questions,and so forth.  From this simple level, contacts can grow to other levels, as the participants wish.  Meeting, being present in the same space, is in each of these circumstances the prime prerequisite."

If "being in the same space" is the prerequisite, getting out of your house and not being sealed up in your car is really important.  He continues,

"The possibility of meeting neighbors and co-workers often in connection with daily comings and goings implies a valuable opportunity to establish and later maintain acquaintances in a relaxed and undemanding way....Frequent meetings in connection with daily activities increase chances of developing contacts with neighbors, a fact noted in many surveys.  With frequent meetings friendships and the contact network are maintained in a far simpler and less demanding way than if friendship must be kept up by telephone and invitation.  If this is the case, it is often rather difficult to maintain contact, because more is always demanded of the participants when meetings must be arranged in advance."

Every once in a while, someone goes crazy on one of the neighborhood message boards or email lists about dog waste left in their yards, or in plastic bags in their trash cans.  (Trash cans?  Really?)  (My favorite recent one included a long post about what a health hazard dog poop was, full of coliform bateria and other microbial agents, followed by a response to the effect of "I can see why people don't pick it up after their dog - they are afraid.")  Dogs are good for the neighborhood because neighborhoods with people who walk their dogs are going to have closer social connections with their neighbors.

I have to stop writing now. I have to go walk my dog.

Everyday Life in Color, 1956

A couple of weekends ago, the girls were both still home for winter break from college; Tom wanted to go on a hike, but the weather forecast wasn't promising.  So we (and apparently everyone else with relatives in town and the day off from work) went to the High Museum instead.  Before we left we had taken a quick look on line at the current exhibits.  There was "Cézanne and the Modern," including a van Gogh painting, that was closing the next weekend.  We walked through that while a choir sang in the adjacent Florence Cathedral exhibit.  

Sarah wanted to see and hear Janet Cardiff's Forty Part Motet, a sound installation in the contemporary art galleries.  Cardiff recorded 59 individual singers as they performed composer Thomas Tallis's Spem in Alium Nunquam Habui(1556), which (according to the High Museum's description of the exhibit) translates to "In No Other is My Hope."  Walking around the large circle of audio speakers, it was like you were walking through the choir.  You could hear the individual voices.  Most of the visitors to the gallery fell silent and listened, transported to a 16th century cathedral by sound.  It was wonderful.

What else was there to see?  We asked a guard where "the photography exhibit" was, meaning one that I no longer remember the name of, and getting instead directions to the exhibit of photographs that Gordon Parks took for Life Magazine in the 1950s of everyday life in the segregation era south.  We did find the small exhibit I had asked about, and that was interesting, but then we continued to the Gordon Parks exhibit.  

Gordon Parks grew up in Fort Scott, Kansas, and attended a segregated elementary school.  He became a photographer and during the 1950s worked for Life Magazine. Later he became a film director; Shaft is his best-known film.  Much of his work for Life Magazine had not been exhibited before, but now several exhibits from Parks' archives have been assembled.  One, on what happened to his classmates from his segregated elementary school, includes photos that were never published.  They are now on exhibit at the Museum of Fine Arts in New York.

Most of the photos in the exhibit at the High Museum were taken in Alabama.  Some of the pictures were included in a photo essay that was published in Life in 1956, entitled "The Restraints:  Open and Hidden"; others in the exhibit weren't published before.  The exhibit focuses on the ordinary lives of ordinary people, including Mr. and Mrs. Albert Thornton, Sr., of Mobile, Alabama.

Writing about this exhibit for the New York Times, Maurice Berger wrote,

More than anything, the “Segregation Series” challenged the abiding myth of racism: that the races are innately unequal, a delusion that allows one group to declare its superiority over another by capriciously ascribing to it negative traits, abnormalities or pathologies. It is the very fullness, even ordinariness, of the lives of the Thornton family that most effectively contests these notions of difference, which had flourished in a popular culture that offered no more than an incomplete or distorted view of African-American life.

The photos speak for themselves.  A few examples.  This is Joanne Wilson, one of the Thorntons' daughters, with her niece, standing outside a movie theater in Mobile, Alabama.  Above this well-dressed young woman and small girl is a neon sign, "Colored Entrance."

In this untitled photo from Shady Grove, Alabama, a family orders at a window at a drive-in restaurant.  Between them and the wrap-around sign announcing shakes, sundaes, and cones is the sign designating the window as "Colored."

"Outside Looking In, Mobile, Alabama, 1956" showed children looking through the fence at a whites only playground.

These pictures were taken almost 60 years ago, and a lot of things have changed since then.  The pictures are jarring to see now.  We still have plenty of issues around race and inequality in the United States, but we don't have the kind of segregation any more that we had when these pictures were taken.  I also wondered, seeing these photos, what became of the people in them?  What about the children looking through the fence at the playground?  They are not much older than I am.  Where are they now?  

We do know something about what happened to some of the people Gordon Parks photographed.  Some of them paid a price for their participation in the photo essay.  The Thorntons' daughter Allie Lee Causey was quoted advocating integration.  She lost her teaching job soon after the piece was published and, fearing for their safety, she and her husband left Alabama.  Her sister Joanne Wilson, the woman standing outside the movie theater with her niece, was interviewed by Maurice Berger for the Times in 2013.  She married in 1956 and she and her husband had two children.  After she graduated from college, she became a school teacher and taught American history and economics at a high school in Prichard, Alabama. According to that article, "Like her father, Albert Thornton Sr., she believed in the power of education to uplift African-Americans and prepare them to overcome racism and segregation. Each year, she organized a bake sale to finance a trip to Atlanta for her female students and introduce them to the city’s historically black colleges."

And there's another link to Atlanta.  The exhibit includes a photo taken at the Atlanta airport in 1956.  In this photo, an African-American woman in a starched white uniform holds a white child, while a well-dressed white woman sits nearby.  Since we visited the exhibit, the Times' Lens blog on photography had a feature on this photo, soliciting information about the people in the photograph.   Assuming the two women were from Atlanta, there may still be someone in the city who knows them; they might even still be alive.  According to James Estrin's post,

"In the notes he sent with the film to the Life magazine lab, Mr. Parks wrote about Roll 24: 'These shots were all taken candidly in the Airlines Terminal in Atlanta.' This image, he said, 'shows the continuous matter of servitude which extends into the terminal around 2 a.m. Here, a white baby is held by a Negro maid while the baby’s mother checks on reservations, etc. Although the Negro woman serves as nurse-maid for the white woman’s baby, the two would not be allowed to sit and eat a meal together in any Atlanta restaurant.'"

The last time I saw at the High Museum that moved me and made me think as much as this one did was back in 2008, when Tom and I saw "Road to Freedom: Photographs of the Civil Rights Movement, 1957-1968."   According to what I've read, Gordon Parks saw empathy as an important tool in ending the injustice of segregation; he hoped that photographs that demonstrated the essential, shared humanity of people who were relegated by law and custom to second class citizenship could lead to social change and justice.   "Gordon Parks:  Segregation Story" will be at the High Museum until June 7.  Don't miss your chance to see it.

The Great Good Place

Caramba Cafe is closed again.  We got the news via Facebook on either Christmas Eve or Christmas Day, I can't remember which.  We went there last Friday night and again on Tuesday.  We tried to make it there early both evenings because we expected them to be busy.  On Friday night, when I took the picture above, they weren't so busy yet, but on Tuesday night we got the last table that was available; there were several multifamily groups there already and they kept coming - all of us wanting one last dinner at Caramba.

Caramba Cafe used to be in Morningside, where Timone's now is, and we used to walk there.  They closed in 2010, and when they reopened on Decatur Street, some of the Morningside regular customers became regulars there.  There were people we saw there almost every time we went.  We saw our neighbor Marian there frequently, and Caroline's reading teacher from early elementary school and his wife seemed to be there all the time.  I've taken out of town colleagues there for dinner and margaritas, and we've had dinner there before being dropped off at Irwin Street for the last two lantern parades on the Beltline (this one and this one).  We continued to celebrate birthdays and report cards and the girls coming home from college there.  I celebrated the last couple of my birthdays with shots of tequila with Mia.  We took our German exchange student there several times during the six weeks or so that he was at our house; he discovered that he really liked fajitas.  There were kids there Iain's age who he'd gone to elementary school with, and the two of them would wander off to talk to other high school kids who were there.  Sometimes we sat at the bar and talked to people we didn't know, but more often we were at a table by the window.  We watched one of the protest marches following Michael Brown's death from that window; the kids took off to watch, and I stayed long enough to pay the bill.  There almost always were hugs before we left from George and Rachel and Mia.

A couple of years ago I started reading a book that I never finished, The Great Good Place, by Ray Oldenburg.  (This was one of those books that would have been a great article in The New Yorker or The Atlantic, but there wasn't quite enough for a whole book).  The idea is that the public places that you and your neighbors go to regularly, whether it's a neighborhood tavern or a diner or a coffee shop or a barber shop, are important to neighborhoods and communities.  They are places you can go where they know you, and they facilitate strangers becoming acquaintances and acquaintances becoming friends.  It's a safe environment for sociability in a society where many people live alone or are far away from family and may not know their neighbors.

Back when I was reading this book, the example from my own experience that kept coming to mind was Caramba Cafe.  This was our family's great good place, and we are going to miss it very much.  If there's a great good place in your life, go there often and take your friends.  Appreciate it with your presence and your patronage.  

The last night we went to Caramba - the next to the last night they were open - I went through the piles of books next to my bed, looking for this one.  I was going to give it to Mia, but couldn't find it. 

Best of luck to la familia Caramba, and to all of us who felt at home there.