Illustration by Radio 23Tip By Malia Wollanshack, or cabane à sucre: ceaseless mari-
onette music cluttered with the infernal
racket of spoons. Even my close friends
were confused. I was one of a handful of
Anglophone Jews at a big French Catholic
school. Why on Earth was I learning their
great- grandparents’ music? To them, this
was the stuff your dad subjected you to at
New Year’s, to scratch some once-a-year
ancestral itch.
During those years, there was a bar I
used to go to on St.- Laurent where the
servers never carded, where on Tuesday
nights it was hard to fi nd a seat because
the place was so full of fi ddlers. I became
one of them. I hardly ever talked to any-
one, except an older nurse with dyed- red
hair, who embodied pure joy more than
any other adult I’d ever met. She didn’t
play; she just sat close and listened,
swayed, chatted, had a pint.
You could tell she loved those tunes.
There were dorky common ones and
old jagged weird ones. The closer you
listened, the easier and more complicat-
ed they became. Each one held infi nite
infl ections and moods and variations.
‘‘Trad’’ music could be bombastic and
cheesy — but it could be anything else
too. People often talked about it as pat-
rimoine, or ‘‘heritage,’’ a solemn word,
conveying history but none of the wild
immediacy of those Tuesday nights.
Hearing an accordionist’s micro shifts in
rhythm was like watching the surface of
the ocean, the unexpected glint momen-
tarily at odds with the tide before merg-
ing again. With little more than six notes,
a fi ddler could vault herself into a state
akin to fl ight.
Foot percussion underpinned all that,
the constant that every sync opation
pulled against. It can seem deceptively
simple. The way I learned, you start with
the right foot, marking the beat with a
fl am, a heel-toe series that merges into a
single homemade kick-drum blast. Then
you add another tap on the off beat, with
the same foot but just the toe this time,
swinging your shoe so it becomes a
metronome. Once that feels like second
nature, you sneak in the left foot a second
before the pattern begins again. It took
me a year or two to get the groove — prac-
ticing under my desk at school or in our
front hall wearing my dad’s dress shoes.
Tock-tick-uh, tock-tick-uh, tock-tick-uh.
You can hear gravity in it, being
defi ed and succumbed to, again and
again. Much of the non fi ddle music I
love seems unconstrained by the laws of
physics — Hilary Hahn’s ethereal Bach,
Burna Boy’s inimitable voice, each of
them possessed by an otherworldly
ease. Québécois tunes fl oat, too, but dif-
ferently, their ascent inseparable from
the creaking of the fl oor. It’s the sound
of a particular body in a specifi c place
and time, inviting you into someone
else’s gait, to feel its idio syncrasies.
All music is about belonging: grasp-
ing at the familiar or pushing it away,
attending to what unsettles until it
sounds like home. My obsession with
these particular tunes probably has
something to do with that: an attach-
ment to a city where I’m always an
outsider but also utterly myself, wheremy molecules feel more comfortably
arranged. It’s an eerily pleasant state,
and wherever I am, I can summon a ver-
sion of it by moving my feet — a useful
trick for someone who always feels a
little out of place.
Now, as a journalist, sitting at my
cubicle under ceiling- tile constella-
tions, I often feel that same strange suck
and gurgle of time, crushingly fast one
second, interminable the next. I wish
I could lose track of time, submerge
myself in a draft and forget. Instead, I
turn my body into a clock — tock-tick-
uh, tock-tick-uh — marking each pass-
ing instant, subdividing it, inhabiting it,
feeling how it can collapse and expand,
how I can make the strangest, tightest
place suddenly capacious.How to Put Out a
Grease Fire‘‘Frying chicken is a common culprit,’’
says Bruce D. Bouch, a fi re- program
specialist at the U.S. Fire Administra-
tion. Cooking is the leading cause of
residential fi res, and burning grease is
particularly dangerous. When you see
oil smoking in a pan, it’s on the verge of
combustion. Animal fats like lard tend to
smoke around 370 degrees Fahrenheit,
while vegetable oils like saff lower oil
catch fi re upward of 450 degrees. Always
watch hot oil on the stovetop. ‘‘If you get
on the phone, start texting, answer the
door — that’s when fi res occur,’’ Bouch
says. ‘‘If you have to walk away, turn your
burner off .’’
If something on your stove catches
fi re, fi ght your fi rst instincts: The two
most common responses — throwingwater on it and picking up the pan — each
exacerbate the problem. Water will turn
to steam, causing the oil to jump and pop
out of the pan, Bouch says, sending ‘‘a
whole ball of fl ame with it.’’ Moving the
pan will also spread the fi re and will most
likely result in burns. Bouch spent much
of his early career as a deputy fi re mar-
shal in Maryland. He remembers a man
who burned his house down: Inspecting
the aftermath, Bouch could see the trail
of spilled, burning oil from the kitchen
through the house and out the door. The
man ended up with third- degree burns.
Slide a lid over a pan that erupts in
fl ames and turn off the burner. If you
don’t have a lid, use a cookie sheet.
‘‘Starve it of air,’’ Bouch says. Wait 10 to 15
minutes before lifting the lid, and open it
away from your face. If you can’t get a lid
over the fi re, or if the fi re has escaped the
pan, use an extinguisher. But don’t linger
in a burning kitchen. Get everybody out.
Close the doors behind you. Call the Fire
Department.
Bouch has spent much of his 30-year
career thinking about the hazards of
kitchen fi res. In one study of grease-fi re
burn patients admitted to the Univer-
sity of Washington burn center over a
10-year period, nearly 90 percent had
burns on their arms in combination with
their face, trunk or legs; 40 percent of
patients required skin grafts. Knowing
the risks has changed his cooking hab-
its. ‘‘I’m more of an air- fryer guy now,’’
Bouch says.Wherever I am,
I can summon
a version of that
state by moving
my feet —
a useful trick
for someone
who always
feels a little out
of place.Eric Boodman
is a reporter for STAT
and has written for e
Atlantic, Undark and
other publications.