In American vernacular architecture, a witch windowis a window placed in the gable-end wall of a house and rotated approximately 1/8 of a turn (45 degrees) from the vertical, leaving it diagonal, with its long edge parallel to the roof slope.
Ada Laurie Bryant and Robert Mitchell Haire were married Saturday in Hockessin, Del. Robert L. Bryant, a Universal Life minister and a son of the bride, officiated at his home.
The bride, 97, is keeping her name. She graduated from Lesley College in Cambridge, Mass.
She is the daughter of the late Ada Lee Laurie and the late Richard Laurie, who lived in Hingham, Mass.
The groom, 86, a chemical engineer, retired as a manager of labor relations from E. I. du Pont de Nemours & Company in Wilmington, Del. He graduated from Vanderbilt University and received a master’s degree in history from the University of Delaware.
He is a son of the late Pearl Quinn Haire and the late Emmett E. Haire, who lived in Jacksonville, Fla.
The bride was a widow and the groom a widower.
The couple met in 2007, when Mr. Haire and his first wife, Jean, moved into Country House, a retirement community in Wilmington, Del. Mrs. Bryant had lived there since 2001 with her first husband, Leonard, who died shortly after they moved in. Mrs. Bryant and Mrs. Haire became close friends.
In January 2010, Mrs. Haire was given a diagnosis of Lou Gehrig’s disease, and died 15 months later. In August 2011, Mr. Haire asked Mrs. Bryant, an artist whose murals adorn some of the walls of Country House, to paint a portrait of his late wife, and Mrs. Bryant agreed. Mr. Haire was “blown away” by the finished work and asked Mrs. Bryant to help him choose the perfect frame at a local shop. Afterward, they had lunch at a tearoom, and both were surprised to discover that they had a lot to say to each other.
“There was some kind of feeling,” Mr. Haire recalled.
They began going on regular lunch dates and became very close, revealing to each other that both hated going to dinner alone at Country House. Even though they knew it meant they might be labeled a “couple” by the other residents (a “couple” being a widow and a widower who do things together), they started going together.
On Jan. 25, 2012, Mr. Haire, a hobbyist poet, slipped a sonnet vowing “friendship and affection” beneath Mrs. Bryant’s apartment door with a note that said “this represents how I feel in our relationship as a couple.” He was afraid to give it to her in person.
“I was desperately trying to strike a balance between too timid or bold. I didn’t want to mess things up,” he said about the courtship. “I can attest that it doesn’t get easier even in advanced age.”
He needn’t have worried. The next morning, he found a note outside his apartment door. Mrs. Bryant was delighted with the sonnet, and “she would heartily enter into that relationship.”
Jane Bryant Quinn, one of Mrs. Bryant’s daughters and the author, columnist and financial adviser, recalled speaking with her mother on the phone around this time.
“Her voice was kind of glowing,” she said. “She loved having someone to talk to again. Since my father died, she just didn’t have someone to talk to in the deepest sense.”
On Valentine’s Day, Mr. Haire presented Mrs. Bryant with a loose sapphire that he said he wanted to have mounted as an engagement ring. Mrs. Bryant refused the proposal, but a few days later said she would accept the stone as a friendship ring.
“I said, ‘I’d very much like you to accept it in whatever way you’d like,’ ” Mr. Haire said.
Their feelings continued to grow. Mr. Haire presented her with another sonnet in late March, and by April they had professed their love to each other.
The subject of marriage came up occasionally, but Mr. Haire never pressed the issue.
“I told her repeatedly that whatever care she needed, I’d already committed to,” Mr. Haire said. “She could rely on me no matter whether we married or not.”
Mrs. Bryant finally accepted his proposal on Aug. 6, and they will move into her apartment (“It’s slightly bigger,” he said) after the wedding.
She explained why she first turned him down. “There’s a great difference in our ages, as you can see,” she said. “I didn’t think it was the thing to do because I don’t have that many years ahead of me, but he said, ‘That’s all the more reason.’ I like him very much. I love him. So we’re going to be married.”
Pollia condensata, or the “Marble Berry” is a berry with no nutritional value found in the forrests of Africa. It was recently named the world’s shiniest living thing.
It might be useful to distinguish between pleasure and joy. But maybe everybody does this very easily, all the time, and only I am confused. A lot of people seem to feel that joy is only the most intense version of pleasure, arrived at by the same road—you simply have to go a little further down the track. That has not been my experience. And if you asked me if I wanted more joyful experiences in my life, I wouldn’t be at all sure I did, exactly because it proves such a difficult emotion to manage. It’s not at all obvious to me how we should make an accommodation between joy and the rest of our everyday lives.
Perhaps the first thing to say is that I experience at least a little pleasure every day. I wonder if this is more than the usual amount? It was the same even in childhood when most people are miserable. I don’t think this is because so many wonderful things happen to me but rather that the small things go a long way. I seem to get more than the ordinary satisfaction out of food, for example—any old food. An egg sandwich from one of these grimy food vans on Washington Square has the genuine power to turn my day around. Whatever is put in front of me, foodwise, will usually get a five-star review.
You’d think that people would like to cook for, or eat with, me—in fact I’m told it’s boring. Where there is no discernment there can be no awareness of expertise or gratitude for special effort. “Don’t say that was delicious,” my husband warns, “you say everything’s delicious.” “But it was delicious.” It drives him crazy. All day long I can look forward to a popsicle. The persistent anxiety that fills the rest of my life is calmed for as long as I have the flavor of something good in my mouth. And though it’s true that when the flavor is finished the anxiety returns, we do not have so many reliable sources of pleasure in this life as to turn our nose up at one that is so readily available, especially here in America. A pineapple popsicle. Even the great anxiety of writing can be stilled for the eight minutes it takes to eat a pineapple popsicle.
My other source of daily pleasure is—but I wish I had a better way of putting it—”other people’s faces.” A red-headed girl, with a marvelous large nose she probably hates, and green eyes and that sun-shy complexion composed more of freckles than skin. Or a heavyset grown man, smoking a cigarette in the rain, with a soggy mustache, above which, a surprise—the keen eyes, snub nose, and cherub mouth of his own eight-year-old self. Upon leaving the library at the end of the day I will walk a little more quickly to the apartment to tell my husband about an angular, cat-eyed teenager, in skinny jeans and stacked-heel boots, a perfectly ordinary gray sweatshirt, last night’s makeup, and a silky Pocahontas wig slightly askew over his own Afro. He was sashaying down the street, plaits flying, using the whole of Broadway as his personal catwalk. “Miss Thang, but off duty.” I add this for clarity, but my husband nods a little impatiently; there was no need for the addition. My husband is also a professional gawker.
The advice one finds in ladies’ magazines is usually to be feared, but there is something in that old chestnut: “shared interests.” It does help. I like to hear about the Chinese girl he saw in the hall, carrying a large medical textbook, so beautiful she looked like an illustration. Or the tall Kenyan in the elevator whose elongated physical elegance reduced every other nearby body to the shrunken, gnarly status of a troll. Usually I will not have seen these people—my husband works on the eighth floor of the library, I work on the fifth—but simply hearing them described can be almost as much a pleasure as encountering them myself. More pleasurable still is when we recreate the walks or gestures or voices of these strangers, or whole conversations—between two people in the queue for theATM, or two students on a bench near the fountain.
And then there are all the many things that the dog does and says, entirely anthropomorphized and usually offensive, which express the universe of things we ourselves cannot do or say, to each other or to other people. “You’re being the dog,” our child said recently, surprising us. She is almost three and all our private languages are losing their privacy and becoming known to her. Of course, we knew she would eventually become fully conscious, and that before this happened we would have to give up arguing, smoking, eating meat, using the Internet, talking about other people’s faces, and voicing the dog, but now the time has come, she is fully aware, and we find ourselves unable to change. “Stop being the dog,” she said, “it’s very silly,” and for the first time in eight years we looked at the dog and were ashamed.
Occasionally the child, too, is a pleasure, though mostly she is a joy, which means in fact she gives us not much pleasure at all, but rather that strange admixture of terror, pain, and delight that I have come to recognize as joy, and now must find some way to live with daily. This is a new problem. Until quite recently I had known joy only five times in my life, perhaps six, and each time tried to forget it soon after it happened, out of the fear that the memory of it would dement and destroy everything else.
Let’s call it six. Three of those times I was in love, but only once was the love viable, or likely to bring me any pleasure in the long run. Twice I was on drugs—of quite different kinds. Once I was in water, once on a train, once sitting on a high wall, once on a high hill, once in a nightclub, and once in a hospital bed. It is hard to arrive at generalities in the face of such a small and varied collection of data. The uncertain item is the nightclub, and because it was essentially a communal experience I feel I can open the question out to the floor. I am addressing this to my fellow Britons in particular. Fellow Britons! Those of you, that is, who were fortunate enough to take the first generation of the amphetamine ecstasy and yet experience none of the adverse, occasionally lethal reactions we now know others suffered—yes, for you people I have a question. Was that joy?
I am especially interested to hear from anyone who happened to be in the Fabric club, near the old Smithfield meat market, on a night sometime in the year 1999 (I’m sorry I can’t be more specific) when the DJ mixed “Can I Kick It?” and then “Smells Like Teen Spirit” into the deep house track he had been seeming to play exclusively for the previous four hours. I myself was wandering out of the cavernous unisex (!) toilets wishing I could find my friend Sarah, or if not her, my friend Warren, or if not him, anyone who would take pity on a girl who had taken and was about to come up on ecstasy who had lost everyone and everything, including her handbag. I stumbled back into the fray.
Most of the men were topless, and most of the women, like me, wore strange aprons, fashionable at the time, that covered just the front of one’s torso, and only remained decent by means of a few weak-looking strings tied in dainty bows behind. I pushed through this crowd of sweaty bare backs, despairing, wondering where in a super club one might bed down for the night (the stairs? the fire exit?). But everything I tried to look at quickly shattered and arranged itself in a series of patterned fragments, as if I were living in a kaleidoscope. Where was I trying to get to anyway? There was no longer any “bar” or “chill-out zone”—there was only dance floor. All was dance floor. Everybody danced. I stood still, oppressed on all sides by dancing, quite sure I was about to go out of my mind.
Then suddenly I could hear Q-Tip—blessed Q-Tip!—not a synthesizer, not a vocoder, but Q-Tip, with his human voice, rapping over a human beat. And the top of my skull opened to let human Q-Tip in, and a rail-thin man with enormous eyes reached across a sea of bodies for my hand. He kept asking me the same thing over and over: You feeling it? I was. My ridiculous heels were killing me, I was terrified I might die, yet I felt simultaneously overwhelmed with delight that “Can I Kick It?” should happen to be playing at this precise moment in the history of the world, and was now morphing into “Smells Like Teen Spirit.” I took the man’s hand. The top of my head flew away. We danced and danced. We gave ourselves up to joy.
Years later, while listening to a song called “Weak Become Heroes” by the British artist The Streets I found this experience almost perfectly recreated in rhyme, and realized that just as most American children alive in 1969 saw the moon landings, nearly every Briton between sixteen and thirty in the 1990s met some version of the skinny pill head I came across that night in Fabric. The name The Streets gives him is “European Bob.” I suspect he is an archetypal figure of my generation. The character “Super Hans” in the British TV comedy Peep Show is another example of the breed, though it might be more accurate to say Super Hans is European Bob in “old” age (forty). I don’t remember the name of my particular pill head, but will call him “Smiley.” He was one of these strangers you met exclusively on dance floors, or else on a beach in Ibiza. They tended to have inexplicable nicknames, no home or family you could ever identify, a limitless capacity for drug-taking, and a universal feeling of goodwill toward all men and women, no matter their color, creed, or state of inebriation.
Their most endearing quality was their generosity. For the length of one night Smiley would do anything at all for you. Find you a cab, walk miles through the early morning streets looking for food, hold your hair as you threw up, and listen to you complain at great length about your parents and friends—agreeing with all your grievances—though every soul involved in these disputes was completely unknown to him. Contrary to your initial suspicions Smiley did not want to sleep with you, rob you, or con you in any way. It was simply intensely important to him that you had a good time, tonight, with him. “How you feeling?” was Smiley’s perennial question. “You feeling it yet? I’m feeling it. You feeling it yet?” And that you should feel it seemed almost more important to him than thathe should.
Was that joy? Probably not. But it mimicked joy’s conditions pretty well. It included, in minor form, the great struggle that tends to precede joy, and the feeling—once one is “in” joy—that the experiencing subject has somehow “entered” the emotion, and disappeared. I “have” pleasure, it is a feeling I want to experience and own. A beach holiday is a pleasure. A new dress is a pleasure. But on that dance floor I was joy, or some small piece of joy, with all these other hundreds of people who were also a part of joy.
The Smileys, in their way, must have recognized the vital difference; it would explain their great concern with other people’s experience. For as long as that high lasted, they seemed to pass beyond their own egos. And it might really have been joy if the next morning didn’t always arrive. I don’t just mean the deathly headache, the blurred vision, and the stomach cramps. What really destroyed the possibility that this had been joy was the replaying in one’s mind of the actual events of the previous night, and the brutal recognition that every moment of sublimity—every conversation that had seemed to touch upon the meaning of life, every tune that had appeared a masterwork—had no substance whatsoever now, here, in the harsh light of the morning. The final indignity came when you dragged yourself finally from your bed and went into the living room. There, on your mother’s sofa—in the place of that jester spirit-animal savior person you thought you’d met last night—someone had left a crushingly boring skinny pill head, already smoking a joint, who wanted to borrow twenty quid for a cab.
It wasn’t all a waste of time though. At the neural level, such experiences gave you a clue about what joy not-under-the-influence would feel like. Helped you learn to recognize joy, when it arrived. I suppose a neuroscientist could explain in very clear terms why the moment after giving birth can feel ecstatic, or swimming in a Welsh mountain lake with somebody dear to you. Perhaps the same synapses that ecstasy falsely twanged are twanged authentically by fresh water, certain epidurals, and oxytocin. And if, while sitting on a high hill in the South of France, someone who has access to a phone comes dashing up the slope to inform you that two years of tension, tedious study, and academic anxiety have not been in vain—perhaps again these same synapses or whatever they are do their happy dance.
We certainly don’t need to be neuroscientists to know that wild romantic crushes—especially if they are fraught with danger—do something ecstatic to our brains, though like the pills that share the name, horror and disappointment are usually not far behind. When my wild crush came, we wandered around a museum for so long it closed without us noticing; stuck in the grounds we climbed a high wall and, finding it higher on its other side, considered our options: broken ankles or a long night sleeping on a stone lion. In the end a passerby helped us down, and things turned prosaic and, after a few months, fizzled out. What looked like love had just been teen spirit. But what a wonderful thing, to sit on a high wall, dizzy with joy, and think nothing of breaking your ankles.
Real love came much later. It lay at the end of a long and arduous road, and up to the very last moment I had been convinced it wouldn’t happen. I was so surprised by its arrival, so unprepared, that on the day it arrived I had already arranged for us to visit the Holocaust museum at Auschwitz. You were holding my feet on the train to the bus that would take us there. We were heading toward all that makes life intolerable, feeling the only thing that makes it worthwhile. That was joy. But it’s no good thinking about or discussing it. It has no place next to the furious argument about who cleaned the house or picked up the child. It is irrelevant when sitting peacefully, watching an old movie, or doing an impression of two old ladies in a shop, or as I eat a popsicle while you scowl at me, or when working on different floors of the library. It doesn’t fit with the everyday. The thing no one ever tells you about joy is that it has very little real pleasure in it. And yet if it hadn’t happened at all, at least once, how would we live?
A final thought: sometimes joy multiplies itself dangerously. Children are the infamous example. Isn’t it bad enough that the beloved, with whom you have experienced genuine joy, will eventually be lost to you? Why add to this nightmare the child, whose loss, if it ever happened, would mean nothing less than your total annihilation? It should be noted that an equally dangerous joy, for many people, is the dog or the cat, relationships with animals being in some sense intensified by guaranteed finitude. You hope to leave this world before your child. You are quite certain your dog will leave before you do. Joy is such a human madness.
The writer Julian Barnes, considering mourning, once said, “It hurts just as much as it is worth.” In fact, it was a friend of his who wrote the line in a letter of condolence, and Julian told it to my husband, who told it to me. For months afterward these words stuck with both of us, so clear and so brutal. It hurts just as much as it is worth. What an arrangement. Why would anyone accept such a crazy deal? Surely if we were sane and reasonable we would every time choose a pleasure over a joy, as animals themselves sensibly do. The end of a pleasure brings no great harm to anyone, after all, and can always be replaced with another of more or less equal worth.
How Mierle Laderman Ukeles turned maintenance into art
Gallerist NY
By Michael H. Miller 1/15/13
Last week, Mierle Laderman Ukeles, who is the first and, to date, only artist in residence in the history of the New York City Department of Sanitation (a title she has held since 1977), was speaking at the Brooklyn Museum’s daily staff roll call. She told the museum’s crew of maintenance workers—among them window washers, security guards and floor sweepers—that even though their work can seem boring and repetitive, what they do is “the first kind of culture.”
The Observer met with her at the museum later that day. “Here’s the museum with all this stuff,” she recalled telling the workers, “and then there’s what you do. You are culture, and your work is culture. And the endless hours that will never be done, that’s what enables us to be in an institution like this. Mopping up the garbage from yesterday. It’s safe. And the things in here are taken care of. That’s culture. What I’ve been trying to do all these years is take those things that have been behind the scenes, downstairs, things no one will talk about it, and pull them into the zone of things to look at. I’m not just saying, ‘Oh, you poor things, you’re having such a hard time, here’s a chance to let it all hang out.’ I’m saying these are important subjects.”
In the conceptual artworks she has been making for over four decades, Ms. Ukeles, who is 73, has kept her focus on people and how they live. In Brooklyn, she was preparing for a performance in which she would conduct a series of live interviews with a museum security guard, a window washer and a sanitation worker, as well as architects and city planners, asking each person a series of questions: How do you personally survive? What do you need to do to keep going? What happens to your dreams and to your freedom when you do the things you have to do to keep surviving? What keeps New York City alive? What does the city need to do to survive after Sandy?
Besides that last update, the questions are the same ones that were included on questionnaires that Ms. Ukeles handed out to visitors to her exhibitions in the ’70s. She formulated them after coining the term Maintenance Art in 1969. In her brief Manifesto for Maintenance Art, the backbone of her work for the last four decades that was written shortly after giving birth to her first child, she declared, “Everything I say is Art is Art.”
“When I had a baby, people suddenly got uninterested in me,” Ms. Ukeles told The Observer. “It was like I got put into this box of mothers with children, as if they automatically knew everything about me. This made me furious. And I became a maintenance worker. Because if I didn’t do certain tasks, the baby would die. I take care of the baby, the baby can thrive, if she’s lucky and healthy. I loved that baby, but nothing in my educated brain, nothing in my culture, prepared me for this. I got really pissed off. I thought, if I’m an artist, then I get to say anything is art. So I call ‘maintenance’ ‘art.’ If art wasn’t like that before, then it has to change. Why? Because I say so. Period.”
Her artworks at the time included spending five hours washing the sidewalk in front of New York’s A.I.R. Gallery (a champion of the era’s feminist art) and locking and unlocking the doors at the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford, Conn. In 1976, when New York City was on the verge of bankruptcy, she staged a performance called “I Make Maintenance Art One Hour Every Day” at what was then the Whitney Museum’s downtown location, on the second floor of a large office building on Water Street. She took Polaroids of the building’s 300 maintenance workers, keeping the building open after midnight so the night-shift workers could participate, and printed out labels that said “Maintenance Work” and “Maintenance Art.” She let the workers decide what to call the jobs they were doing.
The piece was reviewed by David Bourdon in the Village Voice, who suggested, tongue firmly in cheek, that the Sanitation Department could replace some of its decimated budget by saying its workers were performance artists and getting an N.E.A. grant. Ms. Ukeles decided to take this advice at face value, and sent a copy of the article to the department’s commissioner. She spent the following months touring the sanitation facilities and getting to know the people. There was talk at the time of closing the department and moving it into the private sector. Over half of its equipment was broken. It patched together garbage trucks from spare parts and employees did desk work on furniture found on the street.
“The cops would throw out their furniture and say, ‘Give it to Sanitation,’” Ms. Ukeles said. “It was crystal clear to me that all the things that pissed me off about how people didn’t see me when I was with my baby carriage, they were in the same boat. Nobody wanted to talk to them. They were blank. It was so ridiculous. You want your garbage to get off your sidewalk, then you have to pay attention to who these people are who are doing this. So I’m still there.”
Her first project as artist in residence was to go to each of the 59 sanitation districts, using a driver provided by the department, and shake hands with every worker, about 8,500 in all. This took about a year and a half. With each handshake, she offered her gratitude, saying, “Thank you for keeping New York City alive.” The Department of Sanitation has never paid her, but it does give her office space that she uses as her studio. Her office downtown is still technically “restricted” after Hurricane Sandy. It’s running on generators, and mold is a big concern. Most days, the only people in the building are security, a rewiring crew working in what everyone refers to as The Dungeon and, with a young assistant, Ms. Ukeles.
ASK MS. UKELES THE SAME questions she has asked of others in her work for so long, and she quickly grows uncomfortable. They’re not the easiest questions to answer. What does she need to do to keep going?
“Well,” she said, “my work has been focused on this for many, many years. It’s always been fraught, and a big pain in the ass. And boring. How do I deal with that? Like”—a pause—“so, what did you just ask me?”
What do you need to do to keep going?
“I need to”—another pause. “It’s a tender subject. I’m working very hard to build this thing at Fresh Kills,” the Staten Island landfill that’s in the process of becoming a park three times the size of Central Park. She won’t say much about her project there other than that it’s a permanent installation meant for public use. “I got this commission in 1989, and I still haven’t built the goddamn thing,” she continued. “What do I have to do to keep going? I have to not go crazy.”
After our interview, Ms. Ukeles talked with the window washer she would be speaking with on the day of the performance—Margaret Johnson, who lives on Staten Island, has straight black hair pulled back tight in a ponytail, speaks in a deep rasp and goes by the nickname Peggy. She has a friendly but tough, weathered face. She was told they’d have 15 minutes to speak.
“I don’t want any more time than that!” she told Ms. Ukeles. “I am shy. I’m a talker and all that, but when you put me on the spot? No. Blam-o.”
On the day of the performance, Ms. Johnson was washing the windows in the lobby while Ms. Ukeles was talking to other people. After a few hours, she stopped working and sat at a table with Ms. Ukeles in front of a small audience.
“What do you do to survive?”
“I am a three-year survivor of cancer,” Ms. Johnson said. “To me, being able to get up, have a job and not be bedridden, and to have the next day, is how I survive. I was bedridden for a whole year. My husband took off work, and I had stage-four cancer. We had no income. Every day I wondered if tomorrow would come. And it did. The most fearful thing in the world is not knowing if you’re going to be here tomorrow.”
Ms. Johnson was followed by Ed Shevlin, a beefy, goateed worker with the department of sanitation who lives in Far Rockaway. He is 11 years sober and, in his spare time, a Fulbright scholar of Gaelic. When Ms. Ukeles asked him how he survives and how the city will continue after Sandy, he launched into a horror story—witnessing the hurricane’s destruction of his neighborhood. He watched his car get carried into the Atlantic Ocean. He watched two massive sections of the Rockaway Beach boardwalk—“replete with benches, guardrails and light posts”—crush houses and cars as they moved through the neighborhood atop the storm surge. He saw a light post run straight through one of his friends’ houses “like a spear.” After the storm, he used a front-end loader to dig into the three-foot-high piles of sand that had taken over the area. Transporting all the debris with heavy machinery was “like trying to empty the ocean with a teaspoon.”
“When evening came,” he said, “I’d go down to the pool in front of my building, get a bucket of seawater and put it in my toilet tank. There was no running water. I’d bring a case of water home from work, heat half of it up in a big stockpot, stand in the bathtub and pour it over my head. I didn’t shower for three weeks. That was the kind of maintenance I was performing.”
“Let’s end with one thing,” Ms. Ukeles said. “You have this circular pin on your collar. Can you just say what that’s about?”
“This is Fáinne Airgid,” Mr. Shevlin said. “It’s a symbol that tells people I am an intermediate Irish speaker. This means I am open to speaking in Irish with anyone. It’s a continuation of the language. People tried to eradicate the Irish language. But it’s back. It will never be killed.”
Boil 2 big bunches of chopped beets and beet greens for one hour in two quarts of water with a little salt and a bay leaf, an one cup of sugar as for lemonade. When cooked, add enough lemon to balance the sugar, as for lemonade (4 or 5 lemons or more).
Icy chill; serve with hot boiled potatoes on side and a dollop of sour cream in the middle of red cold beet soup. On side also: spring salad (tomatoes, onions, lettuce, radishes, cucumbers).
Joyce Carol Oates’s Easter Anise Bread
1 dozen eggs 1 tablespoon sugar for every egg (¾ cup) 2 cakes yeast ½ cup oil 1 cup butter 1 teaspoon orange juice 1 teaspoon lemon juice 1 teaspoon anise seed 1 pinch salt 9 cups flour Warm milk, enough to dissolve yeast
Beat eggs; add juices, yeast, and milk an beat slightly. Mix flour, sugar, salt, and anise. Now add to liquid mixture and mix until well blended. Let rise in bowl until nearly double in size. Punch down. Let rise again. Shape into four loaves. Place in greased pans. Let rise and bake for 20-30 minutes at 350 degrees.
