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sformato for a younger generation
Tuesday, March 3 2026
Our niece Sadie would be coming to spend the night tonight, and since she's a young adult and family, her imminent arrival didn't result in much of a cleaning jihad. But we did have to make sure the guest bedroom suite in the basement wasn't too nasty. Even when nobody goes down there, entropy has a way of accumulating if only in the form of cobwebs and the corpses of the creatures who create them.
Meanwhile, the weather was back to being unpleasant. It snowed for much of the day, producing as much as an additional inch atop the several other persistent layers from earlier in the winter. By this afternoon, the snow had mostly turned to sleet. Fortunately Sadie was driving a late-model Subaru, the kind that beeps at you and shines yellow lights from the rearview mirror when someone is in your blindspot.
Sadie arrived a little after 4:00pm and snacked on a vegan cracker inspired by Cheese Nips and cookies while Gretchen dealt with some sort of tax documentation issue. Then we sat in front of the fire while Gretchen and Sadie discussed her first year at college, which is taking place at Temple University in Philadelphia. Most of what was discussed was the social dynamics, including some unpleasant people from high school who are also going to Temple. This reminded Gretchen of how her high school nemesis, Elizabeth H., followed her to Oberlin.
For dinner, the three of us went to La Florentina, with me driving us there in Sadie's car. We wanted to turn our niece on to the weirdly delicious dish we always get there: sformato with tahini sauce, something we now usually just refer to as "purple pie." When I ordered a glass of wine, Sadie matter-of-factly told us that one of the fun things she's discovered at college is alcohol. When Gretchen asked what kind she liked, she said simply "anything someone puts in front of me." Since she is less than 21 and has no fake ID, she can't be picky. She said she liked to get drunk by herself and just stare at the wall. This all seemed fairly normal, but it's not the kind of thing a member of a younger generation normally confesses to members of an older one.
Our waitress at La Florentina was wearing a black and white sweater in the style of an ugly Christmas sweater and it featured the word "CHEERS" without punctuation. She had a grimness to the relaxed expression on her face (the only expression I ever saw) that, combined with the sweater, was somewhat David Lynchian. She looked something like a Native American whose entire family had been wiped out by the white man in a massacre and she'd then been given a job at the saloon in hopes of cheering her up.
Back at our house, Gretchen and Sadie watched Love and Other Catastrophes on our teevee while I drank booze by myself in the laboratory.
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