Micah's Read of the Week, Vol. 55
Covid's lingering toll, Ernie Johnson, Micah Recommends, Mark McGrath's self-awareness, Recipe Corner, and much more.
Hello, and welcome to Micah’s Read of the Week.
This is a newsletter filled with things Micah Wiener finds interesting.
Check out the introduction post here and the entire archive of previous newsletters here.
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Covid killed her husband. Now it’s taking the only home her kids have ever known.
This is a heartbreaking story. A very, very heartbreaking story. It’s also brilliantly written and full of soul-crushing photos. Warning: it’s impossible to read this without crying.
Lisa Grim braced herself as she turned the key to her family’s new apartment.
It had taken more than a month to find a landlord willing to accept her — a newly widowed 33-year-old raising two kids, barely making $20,000 a year. None of the other 20 apartments had returned her calls and emails. This unit, which she had rented sight unseen, was the only one that approved her application.
“I’m not expecting anything fancy. As long as it’s clean and doesn’t smell,” she said as she opened the door on the first day of July, trailed by her 10-year-old son, Ralphie. She’d left her 4-year-old, Walker, crying that morning at the new day care he hated.
Nine months had passed since her husband Alan, 37, died of covid-19 in a rural Missouri ICU once again filling with coronavirus patients. Nine months since Lisa realized that without Alan’s salary, they could no longer afford their mortgage, forcing her to put the family’s house on the market and move to this apartment an hour away from everything her boys had known.
“Oh yay, it doesn’t stink,” Lisa declared as she walked into the living room. “It’s not bad, not horrible at all.”
Ralphie trudged in behind her and frowned. “It’s smaller than our old house,” he said.
He’d cried and yelled at her when she told him that they had to sell their modest, three-bedroom ranch home.
“It’s the only house I’ve ever lived in,” Ralphie argued. “It’s the house Daddy lived in.”
Alan’s death had not only devastated their family emotionally, it had broken them financially. Even as they grieved, the Grims — like tens of thousands of other families shattered by the pandemic — were now facing a cascade of secondary losses: income, home,school friends, long-held plans for the future.
Later that afternoon, with Ralphie at a friend’s house, Lisa sat alone on the floor of the empty apartment, opened a bulging green folder and spread their bills from the past year onto the carpet. There were car payments, cremation fees, credit card balances. There was the $1,000 in legal fees she paid when the mortgage company refused to give her the deed because Alan died on Oct. 1, 2020, without a will.
There were dozens of notices from the hospitals that treated Alan: $2,749.26 for the ER doctor that admitted him, $2,425.75 for the cardiologist, $7,747.07 for his stay at Cox Medical Center in Branson before being transferred to a larger facility, $228.09 for the final X-ray on his chest.
Words were highlighted in red: “Past due.” “Final notice.”
As she knelt on the floor and flipped through the papers, Lisa began quietly sobbing.
In his old bedroom, Ralphie was leaping from one corner to another, explaining with each spot his feet landed where everything used to be.
“This is where my bed was.”
“This is where my train set was.”
“This is where the dresser was.”
Alan eventually worked his way up to a $40,000-a-year job at an alarm company and planned to launch his own business installing fire alarms. Lisa wanted to go back to school to become a therapist.
They would save up and buy a better home. Move beyond Branson and its low-paying, tourism-dependent jobs, to a city with better prospects for their boys.
Instead, 10 years later, here Lisa was, walking through the house, taking apart that future piece by piece.
The car was silent on the long drive to the therapist’s office.
In the back seat, Ralphie fiddled with his phone. Beside him, Walker played a game on his tablet.
From the driver’s seat, Lisa glanced at her 10-year-old son in the rearview mirror and struggled for the right words to say.
They were arguing a lot these days. Ralphie contradicted her constantly. The more she tried to help, the more he seemed to resent her.
She understood his anger. She was angry, too. At the people who refused to get vaccinated, who talked constantly about the virus as a hoax even as the delta variant surged. Her own mother had said to her after Alan’s death that the pandemic was being exaggerated by the media.
Her drive to work every week took her past the big hospital — CoxHealth Medical Center — where Alan spent his last days. There was no vaccine available then. Nurses had held a phone to Alan’s ears so Lisa could whisper her last words to him before they put him on a ventilator.
“We’re going to be okay. We’re going to be okay,” she had told him. She didn’t want him to die worrying about her and their kids. Months later, she still didn’t know if that was a promise she could keep.
She’d gotten vaccinated, and she’d found a new therapist for them to see. But Ralphie made it clear he hated the weekly sessions.
“I don’t want to be better,” he told her after their last visit. Did it feel wrong, she’d asked him, to be okay without his father? The 10-year-old had refused to say.
At first after Alan died, Lisa returned to the bed they’d shared. She found herself always on his side, curled up in the indentation his body had left behind. It was comforting at first, until one day she couldn’t stand it anymore and had the mattress hauled away.
She bought a new one with a pure white bedspread that Alan would have hated. But it didn’t help as much as she hoped.
Today’s Reminder that Ernie Johnson is the greatest
Need a palate cleanser after that last story? Here’s the GOAT, Ernie Johnson.
Checking in on Hard Knocks with the Dallas Cowboys
The first episode was pretty uneventful. But this was truly repulsive.
New Yorker Cartoon of the Week
I will forever feel this.
Micah Recommends
I loved the new PBS “American Masters” documentary “Buddy Guy: The Blues Chase the Blues Away.”
The new documentary is about living legend George “Buddy” Guy, a blues master who transcended his early years as a sharecropper in Lettsworth, Louisiana to become one of the most influential guitarists of all time. A Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inductee and eight-time GRAMMY winner, Guy is a pioneer of Chicago’s fabled West Side sound and a living link to the city’s halcyon days of electric blues.
It features intimate, original interviews with Guy and archival and never-before-seen performances, including footage of the blues legend on stage with the likes of President Obama and The Rolling Stones. Interweaving archival interviews with Muddy Waters, Lightnin’ Hopkins and Willie Dixon with original interviews with musicians Guy influenced, including John Mayer, Carlos Santana, Gary Clark, Jr., Kingfish and more, the film traces Guy’s rich career and lasting impact as one of the final surviving connections to an historic era in the country’s musical evolution.
Turns out, Buddy Guy is basically the Forrest Gump of the blues. From PBS:
After moving from Louisiana in the 1950s, Guy quickly rose to prominence as the go-to guitarist for Waters and Howlin’ Wolf amidst the iconic Chicago blues scene, directly inspiring The Rolling Stones, Jimmy Page, Jimi Hendrix, Eric Clapton, Stevie Ray Vaughan and many more. Yet solo commercial success consistently eluded Guy until a late-career breakthrough in the 1990s. A tale of decades-long perseverance, Guy’s journey reflects both the Black experience in America in the 20th century and the history of the blues.
The doc is available to stream here free, and it’ll probably be replayed on PBS. Please, check it out. I recommend it.
Mark McGrath Crowns Himself “the Last Douche”
Shouts to Mark McGrath for the self-awareness.
Mark McGrath thinks he's the last of a dying breed he's affectionately dubbed “douches from the 90s.”
The former Sugar Ray frontman told Page Six that while he embraces the rock star persona he cultivated during that decade, he's no longer the same guy who could be found perpetually sporting frosted tips, a goatee, and no top. “It’s certainly a part of me, [but] do I see myself that way? No way,” he said. And while McGrath admits that he had plenty of “unfortunate haircuts” and “bad moves” in his day, he's still extremely proud of the music his band released and that he was able to participate in this era “we can really define.” He continued, “At the end of the day, we wrote four amazing songs that we still get to tour the world on today, not because of my hair, not because I took my shirt off, but because of those four amazing songs. So I’m very proud of the songs we wrote for sure.”
But despite Sugar Ray's sonic contributions, the singer says that he understands why he's been typecast as this particular type of guy. “I’m kind of stuck in this, like, vacuum of being the last douche, if you will,” he joked. “And there’s been no douches to replace me, so I’m the go-to guy for that very thing.”
Recipe Corner
Chili-Lime Pork and Mango Skewers With Avocado Mash
You know the deal. We’re grilling this week.
2 teaspoons chili powder
1/2 teaspoon ground cumin
1/4 teaspoon granulated garlic (or garlic powder)
1/2 teaspoon kosher salt
1/8 teaspoon ground cayenne pepper
1 1/4 pounds pork loin, cut into 1-inch chunks
Flesh of 2 ripe mangoes, cut into 1-inch chunks
1 medium red onion, cut into 1-inch pieces
Canola or grapeseed oil, for the pan
2 avocados
2 tablespoons fresh lime juice (from 1 lime)
Fresh cilantro leaves, for garnish
Combine the chili powder, cumin, garlic powder, 1/4 teaspoon of the salt and the cayenne pepper in a medium bowl. Add the pork and toss to coat evenly.
Thread the pieces of pork, mango and onion slices onto the skewers, alternating them until each skewer has 3 or 4 pieces of each. (You may need to thread a few slices of onion to equal the width of pork and mango pieces.)
Brush a grill or double-burner grill pan with oil and preheat it over medium-high heat. Grill the skewers for 10 to 12 minutes, or until the pork is cooked to medium (145 degrees) and grill marks have formed, turning the skewers several times. Transfer the skewers to a plate and allow the meat to rest for 5 minutes.
Meanwhile, halve the avocados, then peel and pit them. Place the flesh in a medium bowl and add 1 tablespoon of the lime juice and the remaining 1/4 teaspoon of salt. Mash the avocado with a fork until it's mostly smooth but some chunks remain.
Spread a quarter of the avocado mash onto each plate. Arrange two skewers on top of each, then drizzle each plate with some of the remaining lime juice.
Garnish with cilantro leaves and serve right away.
Tomatoes with Herbs and Almond Vinaigrette
And we’re serving refreshing, cool side dishes all day.
1/2 cup almonds, coarsely chopped and sifted
1/4 cup plus 2 tablespoons extra-virgin olive oil
1 garlic clove, finely grated
1/4 cup red wine vinegar
2 tablespoons fresh lime juice
1 teaspoon sugar
Kosher salt
Pepper
2 pounds mixed heirloom tomatoes, some sliced, some halved
1/3 cup very thinly sliced red onion, soaked in ice water for 10 minutes
+1/2 small jalapeño, minced
1/4 cup torn mint leaves
1/4 cup torn Thai basil leaves
In a medium skillet, cook the almonds in the oil over moderately low heat, stirring occasionally, until well browned, about 7 minutes. Strain the oil through a fine sieve into a heatproof bowl; reserve the almonds for the salad. Immediately whisk the garlic into the warm oil and let cool slightly, then whisk in the vinegar, lime juice and sugar. Season the dressing with salt and pepper. Spread the tomatoes on a large baking sheet. Season with salt and let stand for 5 minutes. Drain the onions; pat dry. Scatter half of the almonds on a platter and top them with the tomatoes. Drizzle with the dressing and top with the onion, jalapeño, mint, basil and the remaining almonds. Serve.
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