March Madness
Greenwood, Goodland BBQ, Mary Chapin Carpenter, Caitlin Clark, Grifter's Grill
Welcome to my weekly newsletter. I hope you enjoy the picks and pics.
Fave Five 22: March Madness. Tree Tale (Greenwood), Quintessential Q (Goodland BBQ, Award Amasser (Mary Chapin Carpenter), Buzzer Beater (Caitlin Clark), and a Grifter’s Grill.
Today is the start of a month that our family loves. Tracy, Kathy, and Sommer were all born on March 10, and I was born on March 26. I like to say that we are all lucky to have been born in our favorite month. That is because we love basketball, and March features conference tournaments, Selection Sunday, tournament brackets, the First Four in Dayton, and the NCAA Tournament for both men’s and women's basketball.
Our family has been to many regionals and Final Fours together. Tracy and Roger played basketball at Northville High School in Michigan, Roger played at Kalamazoo College, and Roger is a basketball coach at Mater Dei School in Bethesda and at Gonzaga College High School in Washington, DC. Roger runs an annual tournament bracket competition called Garfield and Friends in which he provides frequent updates that are incisive, funny, and always well-written.
There have been quite a few buzzer beaters of late. On Saturday Michigan State blew what appeared to be an insurmountable late lead when Iowa hit a 3 to force overtime, ending in a crushing loss. On Sunday Hunter Dickinson made one, leading to an overtime win over Wisconsin and keeping their tournament hopes alive. The Spartans bounced back with a nice road win over Nebraska last night, so I am keeping my fingers crossed for both teams’ tournament spots. Bring on the madness!
Book Best Bet
Greenwood: A Novel by Michael Christie
I liked reading the novel The Overstory and the memoir Lab Girl, both of which featured trees, so when I received a recommendation to read another arboreal book, I bought this one. It has 500 pages, but the short chapters kept pulling me along and it was a pleasure to read. Although trees are an important part of the story, the products of trees — wood, paper, and buildings — are equally prominent. At its core, it is about families and the tree-like bonds they form, through birth and other circumstances.
Greenwood moves back in time and then forward, and I had to return to earlier chapters to see where characters were first mentioned briefly who later figured more prominently. It’s an entertaining and thoughtful book.
From Amazon: A magnificent generational saga that charts a family’s rise and fall, its secrets and inherited crimes, from one of Canada’s most acclaimed novelists.
Structured like the rings of a tree, this remarkable novel moves from a futuristic world in which only one forest remains to the start of the twentieth century, where two young boys survive a train crash, setting them on a path that will forever change their lives and the lives of those around them.
It’s 2038 and Jacinda (Jake) Greenwood is a storyteller and a liar, an overqualified tour guide babysitting ultra-rich vacationers in one of the world’s last remaining forests. It’s 2008 and Liam Greenwood is a carpenter, sprawled on his back after a workplace fall, calling out from the concrete floor of an empty mansion. It’s 1974 and Willow Greenwood is out of jail, free after being locked up for one of her endless series of environmental protests: attempts at atonement for the sins of her father’s once vast and violent timber empire. It’s 1934 and Everett Greenwood is alone, as usual, in his maple-syrup camp squat, when he hears the cries of an abandoned infant and gets tangled up in the web of a crime, secrets, and betrayal that will cling to his family for decades.
And throughout, there are trees: a steady, silent pulse thrumming beneath Christie’s effortless sentences, working as a guiding metaphor for withering, weathering, and survival. A shining, intricate clockwork of a novel, Greenwood is a rain-soaked and sun-dappled story of the bonds and breaking points of money and love, wood, and blood—and the hopeful, impossible task of growing toward the light.
A rugged, riveting novel. This superb family saga will satisfy fans of Richard Powers’s The Overstory. — Publishers Weekly
There are plenty of visionary moments laced into [Christie’s] shape-shifting narrative. Greenwood penetrates to the core of things. — The New York Times Book Review
Restaurant Recommendation
Goodland BBQ 5725 Hollister Ave, Goleta, CA 93117.
Today is the one-year anniversary of Goodland BBQ. We spent last winter in Goleta, a short walk from Hollister Avenue, the main street through Old Town Goleta. Soon after we arrived, I saw a sign in a former Italian restaurant announcing the impending opening of a new place. As a barbecue lover, I was excited, but I had to wait for over two months before I could try it. When it first opened, there were lines out the door, and there were a few typical startup problems. A year later, they have their act together.
Last year our friends Barbara and David Osher introduced us to their long-time friends Barbara and Ben Eisley, who had moved to Santa Barbara to be close to their daughter and her family. We found out that Barbara and Ben also like barbecue, so the four of us drove to Goleta last night for dinner.
I had the three-meat combo: Tri-Tip (6 oz), Brisket (4 oz), Pulled Pork (4 oz), chili beans, sweet potato fries, and garlic bread:
My wife Barb had the one-meat combo: Brisket (6 oz), chili beans, cole slaw, mac & cheese, and garlic bread:
Ben had 1/4 Chicken Thigh & Drumstick:
Barbara Eisley had the Pulled Chicken Sandwich:
All of the meats and both the mild and spicy BBQ sauces were delicious. The cole slaw, sweet potato fries, and mac & cheese were the best sides. This Q here is the real deal.
From the restaurant: Our chef is a 5th-generation Santa Barbara native who was basically raised in the kitchen. His early start in the family business at El Paseo and Somerset restaurants in the late 70s and 80s continued at various other restaurants in the city after the family closed up and retired.
Later moving south to start his own business in the photo and film industry, Chef Tony Bones has developed his own style and love for barbecue. And now 20 years later he decided to partner up with longtime friend, Tom Ramirez, to bring everything he has learned back home. He now shares some of his favorites with everyone in his hometown at Goodland BBQ.
Our brisket is hand trimmed and seasoned with our special blend of salt and spice and slow smoked 12-13 hours with hickory and oak.
Goodland chicken is rubbed with a citrus and herb blend that pays homage to the orchards that once stood here. It’s slow smoked with hickory and apple wood finished off with a quick sear.
Tri-tip: what more can we say—it’s an 805 thing. Seasoned with our beef blend, reverse seared after an oak smoke bath, cooked medium rare, and sliced thin against the grain.
Our smoked pulled pork is seasoned with our special pork seasoning and cooked 5-10 hours with hickory and applewood.
Marvelous Musician
Mary turned 65 on February 21. I first learned of her from Garnet Rogers (who covered “Goodbye Again” and “This Shirt”) when he recommended her from the stage at The Ark in Ann Arbor. When I saw that she would be appearing at The Ark in 1989, I asked my friend Rob Baidas to go with me. I was blown away by her performance: her songs, her singing, and the guitar playing of the late John Jennings. When someone in the audience requested “Opening Act,” Mary seemed surprised, but she obliged. When she performed this song at the 1990 CMA Awards, she was a sensation.
I have also seen her perform five other times:
July 9, 2010 at Frederik Meijer Gardens & Sculpture Park in Grand Rapids, Michigan
May 21, 2013 with Shawn Colvin at Power Center for the Performing Arts in Ann Arbor
April 29, 2015 at The Ark
June 9, 2017 Four Voices with Joan Baez and Indigo Girls at Meadow Brook Amphitheatre in Rochester Hills, Michigan
October 15, 2019 with Shawn Colvin at The Michigan Theater in Ann Arbor
In a chat with a group of friends I met on Cayamo cruises, we each chose a Mount Rushmore of favorite female singer-songwriters. My choices were Patty Griffin, Nanci Griffith, Kim Richey, and Mary Chapin Carpenter. My playlist of Mary’s music has over 200 songs, and it could have many more — her songwriting and performances are that great. Listening to her latest live album, One Night Lonely, is deeply affecting.
From Wikipedia: Mary Chapin Carpenter (born February 21, 1958 in Princeton, New Jersey) is an American singer-songwriter. Carpenter spent several years singing in Washington, D.C. clubs before signing in the late 1980s with Columbia Records, who marketed her as a country singer.
Carpenter has won five Grammy Awards out of eighteen nominations, including four consecutive wins in the category of Best Female Country Vocal Performance between 1992 and 1995. Her musical style takes influence from contemporary country and folk, with many of her songs including feminist themes. While largely composed of songs she wrote herself or with longtime producer John Jennings, her discography includes covers of Gene Vincent, Lucinda Williams, and Dire Straits among others. On October 7, 2012, Carpenter was inducted into the Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame.
Grammy Awards
1992 Best Country Vocal Performance, Female – “Down at the Twist and Shout”
1993 Best Country Vocal Performance, Female – “I Feel Lucky”
1994 Best Country Vocal Performance, Female – “Passionate Kisses”
1995 Best Country Album – “Stones in the Road”
1995 Best Country Vocal Performance, Female – “Shut Up and Kiss Me”
Country Music Association
1992 Female Vocalist of the Year
1993 Female Vocalist of the Year
Academy of Country Music
1990 Top New Female Vocalist
1992 Top Female Vocalist
Emmy Awards
2012 Regional Emmy Award for narration of the documentary No Going Back: Women and the War
This Shirt
Opening Act
My Playlist
Sports Star
Our grandson Noah was born just over a year ago. His due date was in March, which would have made him another member of our family’s March Madness club, but he arrived early on February 26, 2022. On Sunday we were celebrating his first birthday at Tracy’s and Matt’s house in Santa Barbara. I turned on the Indiana-Iowa women’s basketball game to watch the finish of a close game.
When the Hoosiers took the lead late, I was called into the other room for the opening of Noah’s presents. I could hear the game in but not see it on the TV. When Matt yelled out that Iowa had won on a buzzer beater, I suspected that Caitlin Clark made the winning shot. I was correct. She is a most impressive player, and she wears number 22 — the same number that Tracy wore when she played. Caitlin’s birthday is January 22, so that may be why she wears that number.
From Wikipedia: Caitlin Clark (born January 22, 2002 in Des Moines, Iowa) is an American college basketball player for the Iowa Hawkeyes of the Big Ten Conference. She plays the point guard position.
At Dowling Catholic High School in West Des Moines, Iowa, Clark was among the top recruits in her class and named a McDonald's All-American. In her first season at Iowa, she led the NCAA Division I in scoring, shared national freshman of the year honors and was an All-American. As a sophomore, Clark was a unanimous first-team All-American and became the first women's player to lead the Division I in points and assists in a single season. She has won the Dawn Staley Award two times and the Nancy Lieberman Award one time as the top Division I player at her position.
Clark has won three gold medals representing the United States at the youth international level. She was named Most Valuable Player of the 2021 FIBA Under-19 Women's Basketball World Cup.
Caitlin Clark said she knew her game-winning buzzer beater 'was money' as soon as it left her hands
With 1.5 seconds remaining on the clock and her Iowa Hawkeyes trailing the second-ranked Indiana Hoosiers by two, everybody at Carver–Hawkeye Arena — all 13,000 fans in attendance, both teams' coaches, and the 10 players on the court — knew exactly who would be the target for the inbounds pass. But even with the advanced knowledge that the ball would wind up in Clark's hands, nothing could stop the National Player of the Year contender from finding the basket.
Curling around the top of the arc, Clark left her defender behind thanks to a brilliant screen and caught the ball a few feet behind the three-point line. Then, just before the buzzer sounded, she heaved an off-balance shot that dropped through the net, lifting Iowa past the No. 2 team in the country in dazzling fashion.
Picture Pun
After being grilled for an hour, the suspect admitted that this, too, was hot.
