When I was eleven years old my parents gave me what became my all-time favorite Christmas gift: a Panasonic tape recorder. I could now listen to Elton John and Cher’s Greatest Hits on tape in the privacy of my bedroom instead of having to use the little green record player that was also in my bedroom. The advantages of tape seemed to be none. After all, it was a bit cumbersome to fast forward over to a favorite track such as Half-Breed instead of just moving the needle to the appropriate groove on record. But now I could take the tape recorder with me to other parts of the house. I couldn’t sit quietly in the basement and imagine that Cher was singing The Way of Love to me.

Listening to pre-recorded music quickly became the least interesting aspect to owning a tape recorder. I learned that I could take the recorder with me on holidays and record my family’s conversations at the dinner table. True, even those weren’t too exciting, as stories of the latest dog adventures in our house just didn’t interest me enough.

I began taping whole episodes of my then favorite TV shows: All In the Family, The Mary Tyler Moore Show, The Jeffersons, Rhoda, Phyllis, and One Day at a Time. I would listen to these tapes at bedtime. Instead of staying up and worrying about how awful the next day in school would be, I learned to fall asleep laughing as Mother Jefferson gave Weezy yet another zinger.

Since I had taped these shows while watching them, I’d often hear my own voice laughing hysterically at Sue Ann Nivens and Phyllis Lindstrom. The most laughs occurred though when I taped The Carol Burnett Show. The sketches that got me the most were the Family segments with Eunice, Ed, and Mama.

Watching them play Sorry!, Monopoly and Charades would provide great joy to a weary adolescent. Every week I would anxiously await my own issue of TV Guide to see if the Family spot would be included in the blurb under the Carol Burnett Show. Once I found it, my entire weekend would be saved! Saturday evenings would begin with All in the Family, then The Jeffersons, The Mary Tyler Moore Show, and The Bob Newhart Show. Carol Burnett came on last. By the end of the evening I had used three full cassette tapes recording this great line-up. I had a week’s worth of entertainment to fall asleep to.

Because I thought of myself as the entertainment king in my family, I soon realized that I could make up my own programs on tape. I would gather my brother Jeff, my next door neighbor Irene and her cousins Stevie and Guy and develop an impromptu talk show to be recorded live. Usually I preferred to be the leader of all things associated with my tape recorder but since Guy was a little bit older (and tougher, by far) I decided the talk show could be his. The great pleasure here was that we could all play various celebrities being interviewed on Guy’s show. Stevie wanted to be Dick van Dyke who also had had some very popular TV shows at the time. I wanted to be Robert Reed from The Brady Bunch. In my mind and on the “show” Reed had a beagle just like my family did at the time. In fact, it was hard to tell that he was anything other than me. (Interestingly, we’d both come out later as gay…)

Irene decided that she wanted to be Barbra Streisand. When Guy asked her how she liked her new love story The Way We Were her response was simply, “It’s OK.” Very little enthusiasm for an actress who would be nominated for an Oscar for the role. “Barbra” also tried to sing a few bars of the title song, but forgot some of the words (which she didn’t do at this year’s Oscars, some 52 years later…) At least, we know she’s not a perfectionist.

My brother got bored with the initial guest he was playing (actor John Davidson who at the time had a short-lived TV series with Sally Field called The Girl with Something Extra) and insisted on being Tony DeFranco. He was the boy lead singer of the then popular teen group, the DeFranco Family. They’d had a number one hit with Heartbeat It’s a Lovebeat. It was only natural that that someone had to play him.

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The talk show was fun, but I got even greater pleasure from performing plays on tape. I always wanted to be the narrator. It gave me a sense of control over the proceedings. Sometimes we would re-enact (which meant read) plays from our grammar school texts. One time we did Rumpelstiltskin. I got to not only be the narrator but also a female role which I would perform with a high pitch sqeal. I knew how to play women! Jeff had barely learned to read by this time and struggled over every other word. On tape, you can hear my frustration at his slow delivery of complicated lines. I would just sigh and attempt to tell him what the words were.

Often plays would come from the Zoom Catalog, a big book filled with activities from the PBS Children’s TV Show Zoom, a big favorite of ours. The catalogue featured such mini-plays as Ghosts in the Graveyard and The Soup… Once again I was the narrator, but I could also play several other roles. I would change my voice so as not to confuse the future listeners of the production.

Sometimes we’d make up our own plays. One of the best was called “The Strange Family,” based on people I found in the Guiness Book of World Records I had also gotten for Christmas that year. As narrator, I introduced Stevie as Robert Waldow, the “biggest” man in the world at eight feet eleven inches.

To make the story really interesting, Irene played his wife, Princess Pauline, who was only eight inches tall. We decided that Waldow’s brother would be Earl Hughes (no explanation given as to why they had different last names.) Hughes was the heaviest man in the world who would be buried in a coffin the size of a piano case. The best pieces of action in this drama included when Earl fell and couldn’t be picked up by his brother because of his size. The true greatest part though may have been when Princess Pauline, thanks to her height, died by being sucked down the drain after taking a bath. Oh, our imaginations were wild!

A couple of years later after my family moved out of Chicago to the suburb of Palatine, my brother, Stevie and I remade “The Strange Family” as I had accidently spilled a Coke on the original, making it impossible to play. (I still have that messed up tape!)

However, as we know, a remake is never as good as the original. This one was no exception as we sounded quite ridiculous re-enacting parts we did when our voices were much higher. It was even difficult to do Princess Pauline, as Irene was not with us.

We had a great time with these productions though. We even created our own “music.” Being that we were using the tape recorder, we decided to call our band, the Recorders. Stevie, Jeff, and I would sing popular songs at the time. I would buy the latest issue of Song Hits Magazine and we would pick out such gems as Top of the World by the Carpenters, Who Do You Think You Are by Bo Donaldson and the Heywoods, and You’re Having My Baby by Paul Anka. The last of these gave me the chance to sing in my high pitched girl’s voice so that I could do the Odia Coates lines. For Half-Breed we used a jar of nuts and bolts to simulate the sounds heard on Cher’s recording. I dare you to listen to this fine recording:

When we moved to Palatine and most of my old friends were no longer regularly in my life, these tapes gave me a chance to reminisce (at the age of 12) and let me feel like they were still there singing, acting, and laughing with me.

As years went on the Recorders morphed into a new “singing” group of high school friends: the Un-Dumko’s named after a former friend that we didn’t want to be like. By college, the group became Dan and the Harmonettes, featuring my friends Liz and Marlee as members of the new trio. Each new incarnation featured different friends of the time who found it thrilling (?) to hear themselves sing the lastest songs by Juice Newton and Styx. I was good at picking songs.

Yes, my tape recorder provided years of joy and pleasure as I grew up. To this day I still have all of those tapes. When my brother Jeff got married, I played segments from the songs and Rumpelstiltskin to the entire room of guests so that his new wife Shelley would know what she was getting into.

The tapes and the tape recorder were a private place I could go to be the entertainment figure I felt destined to be. I can only wonder what all of this would have looked liked, if we had grown up in the video era. I’m not quite sure “the Strange Family” would have had the same imaginative effect.

Did you own a tape recorder? What did you record on it?

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As a ten-year-old at the time it seemed like a perfectly acceptable Top 40 song. My seven-year old brother Jeff even bought the single. Listening to it now for the first time in decades it’s a strange, children’s song that would never be a hit today. It opens with young children humming what will be the chorus before branching into Clint Holmes’ solid and beautiful delivery of the lyrics. It should be noted that having the equivalent of a children’s choir on a pop song was not unusual at the time. The Carpenters had a big hit with Sing that same year which was basically a song from Sesame Street. They gave it over to the kids for a big rousing “la la la la la” sequence. (It’s hard to imagine pop radio programmers saying, “yeah, let’s add these cute songs to our playlist” considering all the other big rock artists with albums out at the time but for some reason, they did.) Were we giving over the pop reigns to children just a few short years before films like Jaws and Star Wars because Hollywood was noticing that there was a youth market worthy of targeting?

Playground in My Mind is curious though because Holmes is singing about young children like “Michael” and “Cindy.” Would we even allow a grown man to do this today?! Probably not, but then those were more innocent times when maybe the intent was to showcase how important it was for children to have a place where they could be kids away from the wars and political goings on of the time. Plus, Holmes is reminiscing about the playgrounds of his youth that were “left behind.”

This got me thinking about the playgrounds I frequented at the time. Recently, one of the writing-focused Substack pages I follow offered up a prompt to write about a favorite playground memory. I started to consider the various parks near our home in Chicago when I was growing up. I wasn’t a major “playground” type. I preferred watching TV or hanging with the other kids on our street. On occasion though we’d venture out to those parks which seemed geared towards kids with their swing sets and jungle gyms.

There was an elementary school on Strong Street in Chicago, Lucy Fitch Perkins, which I first attended for kindergarten, that had its own small playground.

One of my earliest memories was of my sister running me home after I’d fallen off one of those now considered dangerous bars which begged a kid to hang from. Apparently, I’d hit my head on the ground and started bleeding down my face. Judy quickly (I’d imagine!) picked me up and started the roughly six city block run back to our house. What I most remember about that experience was seeing the face of her friend Mary Sue running a bit ahead of us and turning around with a shocking look in her eyes as she saw my bloody face. When we got home, my mother immediately put me in the car to bring me to the ER at Resurrection Hospital. I remember crying and being more worried that they’d put me in an ambulance than any serious injury I might have sustained. I’m not sure when my fear of ambulances began but years later my mother would remind me that whenever one was around, my grandmother would say, “see, that’s how they took your father away when he got sick.” (He developed terminal cancer when I was 6.) I’d start screaming and covering my ears whenever I heard the siren from an ambulance.

Ultimately, that fall required a few stitches on my forehead, but it didn’t stop me from going back to Perkins and its unsafe children’s equipment. For various reasons, I ended up attending Perkins from 4^th through 6^th grade. One of my favorite memories from that period was recess. I don’t think we were allowed to play on the equipment all the time. Maybe each classroom had their own day. As a result, the days when we could enjoy it, we’d relish every minute of it. Then, when the bell rang to head back into school, we’d do a final adrenaline-fueled dash to get as much as we could out of that equipment in the remaining moments. All the other kids would be almost inside and then, and only then, did we make a mad run to get back to our classroom. (That school, by the way, was later torn down. Houses now stand where the school and playground once were.)

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Sometimes I’d set forth with my younger brother Jeff and/or my neighbor friends to just hang out in a school yard. For a few days, one summer, the temperature in Chicago hit 100 degrees. I can still remember walking another several blocks on Carmen St. towards a lot by St. Monica Elementary School (where I attended from 1^st to 3^rd grade) in the intense heat with my pogo stick across my shoulders. Somehow, I had deemed myself the neighborhood pogo stick champ because I could jump on it longer than anyone else. Of course, I was the only kid in the neighborhood to actually have one so it did give me a leg up. I’m not sure why we went to St. Monica’s since they didn’t have any outdoor equipment to play on, but I guess the parking lot was pretty big for my pogoing.

Then there was Norwood Park. It was a big one on the northwest side of the city that had lots of fancy equipment. I remember the summer when they got this giant contraption that had three slides which seemed to be massively long. One featured humps on the way down. (I guess that was supposed to be fun.) The park was far enough away though that we had to be driven there. It felt like going to Great America before there was such a place. If we were lucky, we might be treated to White Castle hamburgers after our fun in the sun.

One time, the mother of a neighborhood friend took us to a park further into the city off Foster Avenue. I’m not sure what we did but she sat on a bench with her husband’s best friend making out. We didn’t really think much about it but on the way home we were told not to mention that we saw the best friend that day. Of course, we didn’t. (She eventually divorced her husband and married him.)

Parks like these always seemed to have a lot of kids running around, getting wet in sprouting fountains, and playing the dreaded (for me) baseball or softball. When we moved to the suburbs when I was 12, there were a few parks around, but I can’t recall seeing that much excitement happening in them. I recall going to at least one and having the full run of jungle gyms and swings. When I think about it now, most of the other kids were probably in their air-conditioned homes staying out of the heat. At least, that’s what I did on most summer days.

Anyways, those are the playgrounds in my mind. Maybe these memories and playgrounds weren’t the kind Clint Holmes sang about but they’re the “real” ones I experienced back in the good old 1970s.

Do YOU have a favorite playground memory or related song?

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Back in 1979 a group of Iranians took 66 Americans hostage. It was a terrifying situation for the U.S. and then President Jimmy Carter. I was only 16 at the time but the one thing on my mind was, will this lead to a war? I had grown up seeing the images of Vietnam and television and it freaked me out. If we had another war, even if the draft had ended, would I have to fight? It scared me to no end. Fortunately, that didn’t happen and eventually the hostages were released, just as Ronald Reagan was being sworn in as the new U.S. President.

At the time, I knew nothing about Iran or its people. The media made them seem like an enemy to be feared for the next decade. Then, in 1991, we entered a war with Iraq – another Middle Eastern country that had itself been at war with Iran. Again, I feared for my future. But then that war wrapped up quickly and Americans were feeling relieved.

A couple of years later I was somehow drawn to a film that played at the Festival of Iranian films in Chicago. I was beginning to expose myself to new world cinemas, thanks in part to taking a non-credit course taught by film critic Roger Ebert. Where is the Friend’s House? (1987) was directed by Iranian Abbas Kiarostami. The premise was simple on the surface: two friends are playing after school, and one leaves his homework behind. Because the boy had been reprimanded in class that very day for not completing his previous homework, the other boy takes on a mission to get the notebook back to his friend. The only problem is that he doesn’t really know where he lives.

The entire film follows him winding through small village pathways and hillside zig zags to find his home. His family insists he complete chores and his own homework before going to “play,” even though he tries to explain to them how necessary it is to get the notebook to his friend. The film emphasizes how resourceful and responsible the boy is even if adults don’t see it. It’s also a classic Eastern story which focuses on the journey rather than the result, although this film does have one.

Not long after the film was made there was a devastating earthquake in the country. Kiarostami was desperate to find out what happened to the real-life actors who played the two boys. He then makes a follow-up film called And Life Goes On (1992), in which an actor playing Kiarostami goes with his son to the Koker region, where the previous film was shot, to try to find the boys. Shots of the destruction associated with the earthquake reveal how destroyed the villages where the film was shot had become. Again, the focus is on the locals and the rough journey to recovery and locating the boys.

He then follows up that film with Through the Olive Trees (1994), which focuses on the difficulty of shooting one of the scenes from And Life Goes On. Essentially, one of the actors in the scene is struggling with the female actress playing his wife because of their own off-set differences associated with his lack of a home and illiteracy. It’s a great piece of work that showcases how hard it can be to make a movie but also how deeply committed the young man is to convince the woman that she should marry him.

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After these films, I became obsessed with Iranian cinema, particularly the work of directors like Kiarostami, Majid Majidi, and others. When it was time for me to complete a final Masters Paper for my graduate studies at the University of Chicago in 1997, I decided to write about this trilogy of films and how its self-reflexivity compared to that of directors making films about directors in other countries, such as Woody Allen in the U.S. and Federico Fellini in Italy. At the time, the first two films were available on video but the third was not. The University of Chicago, however, was screening the third and I had to get creative with “recording” the film to complete my study. I succeeded.

Over the decades, I continued to follow not only Kiarostami’s work but that of many other directors whose films showed a different side of Iranian culture, not typically addressed in our media. I saw the human side of many of its residents’ modest lives. I fell for the children with the struggles they had with everyday concerns, such as two films written by Kiarostami but directed by others: The White Balloon (1995) directed by his protégé Jafar Panahi, about a girl who loses her money meant to buy a goldfish and Willow and Wind (1999), directed by Mohammad Ali Talebi about a boy who breaks a school window and spends the rest of the film trying to fix it during a storm. There is also Children of Heaven (1997), which was the first Iranian film nominated for the Best Foreign Language film Oscar. Directed by Majidi, the film focused on siblings who must share a pair of shoes to get to school each day until a village race is announced in which one of the winners will get a pair of shoes. Later the country won the category twice, both with films by Asghar Farhadi, A Separation (2011) and The Salesman (2016).

Year after year I’d find small gems of films that would end up making my Top Ten of the year either set in Iran or featured it as a primary subject, such as The Day I Became a Woman (2000) from director Marzieh Makhmalbaf, Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis (2007), Kiarostami’s Certified Copy (2010), Majidi’s Sun Children (2020), Farhadi’s A Hero (2021) Asgari & Khatami’s Terrestrial Verses (2023), and Jafar Panahi’s This is Not a Film (2011), Closed Curtain (2013) and Taxi (2015). These films taught me a lot about the country but particularly its people.

Less than two weeks ago, the U.S. and Israel launched a major attack on the country. The goal seems to be to topple its regime which has had control over the country since its revolution in the late 1970s when it took over and stripped the rights of women, creative artists, and many other groups. On the same day, friends of ours in Palm Springs asked us to go to dinner at a Persian restaurant. I also found myself drawn back to the Koker films and began watching my favorite trilogy again, noting that Panahi served as Assistant Director on Through the Olive Trees and now finds himself nominated for a screenplay Oscar as well as the Best International Film for It Was Just an Accident (2025). Interspersed with all of this I received a screener for the first Oscar-nominated Iranian documentary, Crossing Through Rocks (2025). (You can check out my reviews of both films here.)

Is it just a coincidence that I’m feeling this need to empathize with Iran’s citizens again? It’s clear from all I’ve learned that its people, particularly women, are tired of all the restrictions. Many have been taking to the streets in recent months and years deservedly demanding changes. I don’t know that this war is going to help or hurt the Middle East in the long run. I only hope that Trump and Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu are aware of the innocent people whose lives I’ve watched on screen for decades now that are being devastated by more destruction. Let’s also hope that the artists and filmmakers of Iran can continue their work and expose the world to what’s really been happening in the country. Such work will move everyone and keep us aware of the human costs of power, patriarchy, and war on a people.

In the meantime, I’m planning to dig even deeper into the great well of Iranian Cinema because it offers a much more real perspective on a country that has long been considered one of our great enemies.

Many of these Iranian films can be streamed via the Criterion Channel.

Have you seen many films from or about Iran? Which ones have stood out to you?

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Recently, I read that the chain is actually adding stores again. This is pretty remarkable when you think about how many people, including myself, have switched to e-reading. Yet, there are plenty of people that still like to hold a book in their hands and smell the pages. So, on the night of my 63rd birthday last week, after my similarly aged friends decided they needed to go home after dinner at 8:00, I decided to stop into a Barnes & Noble in Palm Desert, California. I had been thinking about going there for a while because I wanted to pick up a book about the history of one of my favorite TV shows, Curb Your Enthusiasm.

I walked into the store and after briefly browsing the magazine section, I decided to order a nice decaf Americano from the café and wander around like I used to do. There was a woman in front of me at the café who apparently had a big order to make at that hour and it took roughly 15 minutes before the barista was ultimately able to wait on me. I placed my decaf order and looked at a few more magazines until it was ready.

After adding some sweetener, I started walking around the store and soon began hearing the voice of a young girl, apparently on her phone, complaining about her life to someone on the other end of the “line”. Even though I walked several aisles away, I could still hear the girl talking. I found the Curb book I was looking for and began leafing through it. But the girl’s voice was really annoying me, so I went back in her direction and found her sitting in the middle of the store talking loudly on her cellphone.

I said, “you know your voice can be heard halfway through the store.” Her answer was “oh, well, you could walk away.” I said, “that’s kind of what I’m doing.” I continued hearing her voice though. There weren’t many other customers around and apparently the store doesn’t pipe in music they could sell, so her voice was front and center.

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I then noticed an information desk staff member go up to her and say, “you know you can talk as loud as you want, but you can’t be rude to other customers.” When he was done, I went up to him and I said “so is that your policy? Customers can talk as loud as they want and then be heard throughout the store?” His response was “well you know it’s free speech.” I said, “so that kind of free speech is okay in a bookstore? This is one of the reasons you are losing customers to Amazon.” The guy didn’t respond to me. While I was walking away, the young woman said to the person she was talking to, “this white man said I was talking too loud.” I said “yeah, it’s because I’m a white man” as if THAT was the reason why I felt the need to call her out about her phone voice.

I continued walking around the store and considered whether I wanted to purchase the Curb book. Then I thought “you’re not going buy this here, you can buy it through Amazon OR an independent bookseller.” If this was their noise policy, I didn’t need to purchase anything there. I walked around the store a little bit more while the staff member ignored me. The girl continued to talk loudly and eventually I walked out holding nothing but my half-finished decaf Americano.

This is the reason why I’m likely not going back to Barnes & Noble because if this is its policy, well then, it’s not the place for me. Plus, does free speech really mean talking freely and loudly in a bookstore? Going to such a place in 2026 apparently means that people can raise their voices, talk about anything they want on their phones, and annoy other customers because “it’s free speech.” I guess there are worse places a teenaged girl could be at 8 PM on a Tuesday night but will someone explain to her, and others within her generation, that there’s a time and a place for talking on the phone but Barnes & Noble is not it. Couldn’t she do what many others do and just text? Maybe it could be adapted into book form and be sold at a bookstore one day!

Has this happened to you? Do you still go to bookstores? What do you do if someone is talking loudly in a public place?

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As a kid, it was always peanut butter and jelly on white Wonder bread. The brand I remember liking first was Skippy. Maybe it was the name that made it sound so enticing. We had a dog named Skipper too, although I don’t think he was named after peanut butter. If I had any say I probably would have chosen that name for him. At some point I went from creamy to crunchy and have stayed with the latter ever since. My brand also changed, initially from Skippy to Extra Crunchy Jif. I was really obsessed with those little nuts!

I remember a strange girl in our Chicago neighborhood named Pam who once told me she loved peanut butter so much that she once rubbed it all over her body and then licked it off. My adult mind today only wonders what she was really saying and what the real truth of this story was...

When I was 12, we moved to a northwest suburb called Palatine. (Skippy-Skipper, Pal-Palatine – similar names were apparently important to my family.) It took me a few years to find friends, so I spent my summers with a specially programmed set of television shows which kept me busy all day. I’d usually have a bowl of cereal when I first woke up and then sometime around 10:30 AM I’d have my first peanut butter and jelly sandwich (usually with Welch’s grape jelly) and a bag of Doritos while watching either reruns of The Lucy Show or The Brady Bunch. Around 3:30 I’d be ready for a similar second sandwich just in time to watch Gilligan’s Island or The Little Rascals. Sometimes, instead of Doritos, I’d pull out some saltine crackers and smear a little peanut butter on about 4 or 6 of them. As a side dish to the complete sandwich, I’d call this my “peanut butter gourmet” treat. Somehow, I still managed to be ready to eat dinner when mom came home from work.

Once I’d be back in school my two-a-day sandwiches shifted to 3:30 PM when I got home, and 9:30 or 10 at night, just before bed. Peanut butter brought me comfort, particularly after a rough day of being an adolescent with few friends in junior high. Because I didn’t look forward to school the following day, at least I could look forward to ending my night with my favorite food. Needless to say, I was wearing “husky” jeans by this point as the calories I was consuming were increasing my waistline.

As high school went on and I developed some good friends and a social life, the peanut butter meals were cut to one a day. At some point I also transitioned to pretzels as their accompaniment (the Doritos and “gourmet” crackers became a thing of the past.)

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I commuted back into the city for the first three years of my undergraduate college career at the University of Illinois in Chicago. After studying and watching TV or listening to music, I still had a daily peanut butter and jelly sandwich before bedtime. When I started going out drinking with my friends, I’d still manage to arrive home for a late-night peanut butter snack. I’ll never forget the time I arrived home about 5 AM after a night out with the gang. My stepfather Ray would usually get up early and watch TV. I waltzed into the house and immediately went for the peanut butter. I wasn’t going to miss me my before sleep obsession. Ray and I never talked during moments like this. I can only imagine what was going through his head. Of course, my whole family knew I loved the stuff and never asked any questions about it.

My last year in college I got an apartment with my friend Angie. We were poor college students so there wasn’t a lot of money for food. Still, peanut butter, jelly, and pretzels were a staple of my budget. I recall a night going out drinking with my friends Mike and Pat at the university’s Faculty Club. (We thought we were bigwigs on campus and managed to get access to all sorts of places because so many of the staff loved us.) That night I think we had drinks and the Swedish meatballs that came with happy hour. Without much more to eat but plenty to drink, the rest of the night became a blur. The next morning Angie said she found jelly on the walls of the bathroom. Apparently, it was necessary for me to have my nightly food staple before vomiting it all up.

As life went on, I became a bit more health conscious. This doesn’t mean I cut peanut butter out of my diet, but I switched to the more natural brands like Smucker’s which only had peanuts and salt but no added sugars. I also switched from grape jelly to raspberry preserves (without initially looking at the sugar content.) Later I discovered Smucker’s low sugar strawberry spread (no sugar wasn’t an option.) This is what I have today. (I’ve never had the “Elvis” version: bananas on a peanut butter sandwich.)

I don’t know when this obsession transitioned into a breakfast food. Cereal or oatmeal were usually my main course. I then started adding a piece of toast with some peanut butter and my strawberry spread. I’d also have orange juice to wash it all down. This lasted for many years, well into my career teaching college film courses.

As I started hitting mid-life and getting my blood sugar checked more regularly, it was clear that I had too much sugar in my diet and had to cut out the o.j. and substitute it for decaf. (Regular coffee made me too anxious.) I started regularly falling into the “pre-diabetic” range when I’d get my blood tests.

About a year or so ago my kindly doctor suggested I didn’t need to eat as much as I did for breakfast. Perhaps the cereal (which now became a low-carb version: Catalina Crunch’s chocolate and peanut butter flavored protein cereal) and peanut butter on toast could be separate meals. I tried doing the latter for lunch but didn’t find it as satisfying without my morning coffee. Eventually, my breakfast became PB&J, decaf, a banana, and sometimes a hard-boiled egg for more protein. That’s what I eat today, every morning.

You might be wondering what bread I eat. I gave up Wonder’s white bread early in my adult life and switched over to whole wheat. Then, some friends told me I should be eating bread without flour (both white or wheat) so I started eating flourless sprouted grain Ezekiel brand bread with sesame seeds (yes, I love most nuts and seeds.)

Questions you might be asking:

What about other nut butters? I haven’t really tried them. I’m that addicted to the peanuts! I do often eat almonds as a snack though.

Do I like peanut butter cookies? I think I’d like them more if they were filled with more actual peanut butter. Those Girl Scout cookies are all sugar and crunch with a hint of peanuts. The same is true with those “peanut butter-filled” orange cheese crackers.

How about Reese’s peanut butter cups? Yes, I’ve always liked them. How could you go wrong with chocolate and peanut butter?! Now that I try to watch my sugar intake, I’ve moved over to a brand called Skinny Dipped. They have a dark chocolate peanut butter cup that has only 2g of sugar. It’s quite satisfying.

Have I ever eaten anything other than jellies with peanut butter? Yes, back in the day Fluff was a thing. I tried it a few times but always returned to the fruit. I also tried Nutella, which I used as a substitute, while traveling in Europe once. Not bad.

Do I like Thai food? Yes! Especially Pad Thai with its nuts, eggs, and noodles! My mouth is watering right now thinking about it.

Have I ever tried Frangelico? Uh, yes, I have a bottle at home. For the uninitiated, Frangelico is a liquor that has a nutty flavor.

The final word: I clearly love peanut butter. If I had only one food left to eat, that would be it. When I was young, I remember watching the Tonight Show starring Johnny Carson. He mentioned a study that showed peanut butter might cause cancer. This, of course, shocked and disturbed me but it didn’t change anything. Now that I am turning 63, I think I’ve made it this far in decent health. If I live into my 100s I’ll know the secret was my daily dose of peanut butter.

Do you like peanut butter? If so, creamy or crunchy? Which brand?

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