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| 12-year-olds rolling sushi |
I’ve always liked to roll things: long loaves of stromboli, Bûche de Noël cakes, stuffed grape leaves. My high school boyfriend counted on me to roll his joints, but that seems like it was a million years ago.
There’s a zen type of pleasure in the act of layering ingredients then rolling them up and slicing to see cross-sections of color and texture. Somehow, in all my years of cooking, I had never rolled my own sushi—until last night.
Some friends wanted to mark the coming-to-an-end of seven years of our girls being in a French Immersion school together. It’s a magnet school in St. Paul, so girls and boys come from far and wide for the elementary years. They form a learning community that transcends neighborhood boundaries.
About half continue on in a middle school French program while others scatter back to their neighborhood schools or other places. The girls have been tight, and it’s hard to think they won’t see each other daily for much longer. There has been a lot of reminiscing.
But these moms wanted to have a chance to look forward as well—to let the girls hang out as we women gathered over glasses of sake and bottles of Japanese Sapporo beer to discuss where each girl will be next year.
My daughter will go to our suburban neighborhood middle school. Her entrance into the teen years is a great source of anxiety for me—probably because I still remember all the bad choices I made during those years (that above-mentioned boyfriend, for example). I jumped at the chance to huddle with the other moms over our bamboo rolling mats.
One host-mother, Dawn (otherwise known as Lily’s Mom) found the sushi chef. Cheiko, Dawn’s neighbor, isn’t actually a chef (she explained to our girls’ that for a long time in Japan women could not be, which our girls could hardly fathom). But she had what it took to teach 16 mother-daughter pairs: experience, ingredients, and patience.
The other host, Lisa (A.K.A., Elise’s Mom) supplied the party house with the kitchen large enough for this big group. She also offered alternatives for those girls who were not quite ready for sushi even though we were starting with California rolls and not raw fish.
Some girls ate the sushi as if they’d been eating it all their lives. Others ate pizza and played around, making walrus faces by hanging a chopstick from each nostril. They then retired to the basement to watch “Hairspray” while the women ended the evening gathered around the kitchen’s center island with green-tea ice cream and sorbets.
There are six weeks left before we mark the end of the school year with the new tradition of elementary school graduation. The girls have been shopping for their dresses for this rite of passage.
Ready or not, my girl’s teen years are coming. But as my friends assure me, she will do great. She’s confident and wise already beyond her years. And if she does run into a few bumps (or bad boys) in the road, she’ll get over them just like I did. She’s ready to roll.
There’s a zen type of pleasure in the act of layering ingredients then rolling them up and slicing to see cross-sections of color and texture. Somehow, in all my years of cooking, I had never rolled my own sushi—until last night.
Some friends wanted to mark the coming-to-an-end of seven years of our girls being in a French Immersion school together. It’s a magnet school in St. Paul, so girls and boys come from far and wide for the elementary years. They form a learning community that transcends neighborhood boundaries.
About half continue on in a middle school French program while others scatter back to their neighborhood schools or other places. The girls have been tight, and it’s hard to think they won’t see each other daily for much longer. There has been a lot of reminiscing.
But these moms wanted to have a chance to look forward as well—to let the girls hang out as we women gathered over glasses of sake and bottles of Japanese Sapporo beer to discuss where each girl will be next year.
My daughter will go to our suburban neighborhood middle school. Her entrance into the teen years is a great source of anxiety for me—probably because I still remember all the bad choices I made during those years (that above-mentioned boyfriend, for example). I jumped at the chance to huddle with the other moms over our bamboo rolling mats.
One host-mother, Dawn (otherwise known as Lily’s Mom) found the sushi chef. Cheiko, Dawn’s neighbor, isn’t actually a chef (she explained to our girls’ that for a long time in Japan women could not be, which our girls could hardly fathom). But she had what it took to teach 16 mother-daughter pairs: experience, ingredients, and patience.
The other host, Lisa (A.K.A., Elise’s Mom) supplied the party house with the kitchen large enough for this big group. She also offered alternatives for those girls who were not quite ready for sushi even though we were starting with California rolls and not raw fish.
Some girls ate the sushi as if they’d been eating it all their lives. Others ate pizza and played around, making walrus faces by hanging a chopstick from each nostril. They then retired to the basement to watch “Hairspray” while the women ended the evening gathered around the kitchen’s center island with green-tea ice cream and sorbets.
There are six weeks left before we mark the end of the school year with the new tradition of elementary school graduation. The girls have been shopping for their dresses for this rite of passage.
Ready or not, my girl’s teen years are coming. But as my friends assure me, she will do great. She’s confident and wise already beyond her years. And if she does run into a few bumps (or bad boys) in the road, she’ll get over them just like I did. She’s ready to roll.
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