My brother and
I were French graduate students in Paris when we met Sid for the first time.
Sid was trying to make a phone call from a café next to the Cité Universitaire
where we all lived. My brother helped him make the call - a nearly
impossible feat at the time for all of us - then brought him to our
favorite café next door to meet our friends and me. Sid became a regular
addition to “la bande” (our gang), happily speaking French all the time,
immersing himself in our local student culture, surrounded by us “natives”.
When the time came for anthropologists to descend on Paris for their
international meeting, held at the Musée de l’Homme that year, Sid asked my
brother and me to be guides for “his friends”, among whom were not only big
names of the field, but also a Yale student whom he had taken with him to Haiti
to do fieldwork there. Thanks to Sid, I met my future husband, as this student
was Vern Carroll. Vern even used the Creole he had learned in Haiti as the
basis for our first exchanges. Among the many many fond memories I have of the
four of us (Sid, Jackie, Vern and I) at Yale, Brooklyn, or Paris, one in
particular relates to food. I do not have any recipes, but I have a precious
object. As a very special wedding present, Sid gave us the old pressure
cooker which had belonged to his father. We have moved many times across
the world and gotten used to keeping only the essentials (boxes of books and
notes of course). The pressure cooker has always remained with us,
throughout the years, and I still have it today.
