The Neighborhood of God

Supermarket Rotisserie Chicken Redux

2011-01-04T20:29:00.002-05:00

When we go grocery shopping, we try to remember to eat first. If we forget, or if it’s not convenient, then we’ll be hungry by the time we get to the checkout line. And this means we’ll end up noshing on the rotisserie chicken we bought for our dinner well before we arrive home. Oh, heck, we’ll open the darn thing while Ned is still pulling out of the parking space and eat hunks. Good thing Ned keeps paper towels in the car.

Inevitably couples form familiar eating routines. For example, if we have a can of mixed nuts on hand, I’ll get all the varieties which don’t appeal to my husband. As I pick out the brazil nuts or the pecans, I’ll tell him I never met a nut I didn’t like…which is why I married him. His retort is never PG 13, so let’s draw the curtain over his inevitable guy-type response, the one where he always sounds like his brother or Dave Barry imitating Ice T.

THE FIRST ACT

With that baked chicken, we know our parts quite well by now. He prefers breast meat and thighs. Yeah, yeah…never mind. I like the oysters found on the back, but in the car it’s simpler to pull off a drumstick for myself and strips of white meat for Ned. Later, when we’ve gotten home and put the groceries away, dinner is some kind of salad and further pieces of that poor bird we ravaged in the car.

Since there are only two of us, that leaves a fair amount of meat to contemplate. Sometimes, say when my fatigue is the main thing on the menu, I simply toss the container into the refrigerator, promising myself I’ll think about it tomorrow. Then I crawl into bed to recover from my big adventure at the grocery store while Ned heads upstairs to catch up on the hundred emails that came in while we were gone.

THE SECOND ACT

When these chickens became a regular feature in our lives, I was sometimes at a loss as to what to do with the remainders. When I stop to consider why we buy them at all, I realize it’s because of my energy-killing fibromyalgia. In the case of food shopping, if I’m to be included in the trip - or, gasp! actually drive myself to the grocery store - I have to figure out some work-around which still allows us to eat that evening, once we’ve acquired next week’s victuals and stored them away..

Eating “out” is too expensive. Besides, the wait between ordering and eating is too tiring. Another besides: we don’t eat starches anymore. Locating cheap restaurant protein sans starches or sugary sauces is problematic out here in the woods. Thus our acquaintance - nay, our firm friendship - with rotisserie chickens these last few years.

You know how people say a friend is someone who knows your faults and likes you anyway? Well, that aphorism describes well my relationship with the chicken carcass the morning after. Usually I’ll ignore it for a day or two, but then Steps Must Be Taken.

The First Step is to extract all the remaining white meat for chicken salad. I wrap it snugly in a slightly damp piece of old linen towel (just the way they would’ve done in the old days for starched dress shirts that needed to “set” before ironing). Then it’s covered with waxed paper - or something a bit porous. Sometimes just leaving the package in a plastic bag open to the air is sufficient. Meat doesn’t keep as well if it’s deprived of oxygen. Just as you would do, it deteriorates more quickly.

With the breast meat set aside and decided upon, now we have all the rest of it to deal with. Usually All The Rest is a broken-looking thing. The wings, maybe a drumstick or a thigh plus the anonymous bits and pieces clinging to the back, especially those pocket oysters - my favorite part of any whole chicken. Stack ‘em up and there’s quite a bit of meat. Sometimes it’s enough for another meal but more often you’re left kind of a drumstick short of reality. This is when other leftovers come in handy. A few frozen shrimp, perhaps a hunk of ham or some smoked sausage?

Here’s where I’m going: more-or-less gumbo. In order to arrive, though, I have to rummage around to find the brown roux. If I’m out of roux, never mind. I’ll just make a poha pilaf with pecans and whatever and add the chopped bits of chicken. A good lunch for two.

On the other hand, if I do have roux, then gumbo it is!

Gumbo III - Almost-But Not-Quite The Real Deal

Meats: rotisserie chicken parts; peeled, raw shrimp if you have them, leftover smoked sausage or ham.

Veggies: sliced onion, chopped green pepper and celery, chopped or canned tomatoes.

Flavorings, etc: Chicken broth, Cajun spices, celery seed.

Essence of gumbo: a minimum of two tablespoons brown roux. Real Cajuns would use a half cup or more, but that’s way too much starch for us. It’s bad enough that the stuff is made with wheat, never mind using it in depth-charge amounts. I’ve tried making brown roux with rice flour. What can I say? Think of rice bread instead of a crusty sourdough roll. It’s like that…one of those better-than-nothing substitutions, but just barely so. By the way, if you don’t have time to make your own from bacon drippings, I hear tell you can buy roux now.

[The Christmas before she died, Shelagh made a jar of brown roux for me as my present. I laughed when she declared ruefully, "that stuff sure does smoke up the place. How do you stand it?". And then when she died so suddenly, I couldn’t bear to use it at all up…eventually I did, but as I spooned out the last little bit, the train carrying me away from her increased its speed...]

PREPARATION:

If there is any fat on the chicken, I render that to sauté the onions, green peppers and celery. Otherwise use bacon drippings or butter, maybe 3 tablespoons or so.

You can let the onion brown a bit if you want, but don’t let them darken enough to get bitter. While they’re cooking add whatever herbs you’re going to use. Store-boughten Cajun seasoning is fine; rendering it with the veggies kind of refreshes the flavors. Celery seed is good with all the meats/fish in this gumbo.

Oops, back up here: when the onions and celery are limp, that’s the time to put in the okra. You can leave them whole or slice them, but if whole, leave the cap on so the okra will stay intact. Cook and stir until the okra, onions and green pepper are a bit brown.

If you’re using fresh diced tomatoes (about three), put them in now and stir the dice around a bit, scraping up the brown bits on the bottom of the pan. Otherwise, pour in the chicken broth and do it then instead. Then add the canned tomatoes and let it all simmer, covered, for about fifteen minutes.

A gumbo with fresh chicken would be done in a different order, but this is leftovers, so the meats are going to go in last. It’s a more introverted kind of gumbo, but nonetheless a good thing to do with parts of a rotisserie carcass.

Cut up the sausage or ham and add that to the simmering vegetables. Stir in the roux and mix it well through the pot. Let it simmer for a few minutes with the cover on.

Now add the chicken carcass, back, skin and all. If there’s any jelled broth in the bottom of the container, scrape that out into the pot. Don’t bother breaking up the pieces since you’ll be removing them in a few minutes. Push the chicken well down into the simmer; cover the pot tightly again. Make sure the heat is real low at this point and leave it barely simmering for about fifteen minutes. If the broth has reduced, add water, more chicken broth, or - even better - a jar of clam juice (you can find it in the soup section).

When the time is up, use tongs or a slotted spoon to remove the chicken parts and skin. Put them into a bowl. Have the shrimp ready to add. If the shrimp is cold enough to take the gumbo off its simmer, turn up a bit. When the simmer begins again, immediately turn off the gumbo and cover it. Don’t take it off the heat. Here, you want to cook the shrimp until they’re barely pink and still firm. Overcooking, even if it’s just a minute or two, will make their texture unpleasant.

When the chicken is cool enough to handle, pull off all the pieces and shreds of chicken you can find. Discard the skin and the bones. Any large pieces of meat should be cut into bite sizes.

Return the chicken to the pot and let it sit until you’re ready to eat. Traditionally this is served over rice, but we often eat it as is to avoid the starch. Sometimes, though, I’ll steam a small amount of poha to go in the bottom of each bowl. It’s a not-quite rice for a not-quite gumbo.

Even dumbed down like this, Gumbo III is mighty fine on a cold evening.

Oh, dear. The recipes are starting to stack up. This one started out to be about Curried Chicken Salad, but I bogged down on the middle pieces.

But even before that, I said I’d tell you how the vension ribs turned out. Of the latter, I’m still contemplating how it could have been improved…I’ll write on that first. And the curried chicken salad is worth ~~reading about~~ eating, so I’ll get to it right soon.

I spent a long time today - too long - looking at meat grinders on Amazon. I’d really love to just grind up that venison haunch. More on haunch at a future date also.

Chow mein, y’all!

Veal Stew in the Microwave, Interrupted

2011-01-02T22:54:00.004-05:00

The way this dish turned out, it took about 15 minutes prep time and 20 minutes cooking time. You may be faster than I am, but a half hour ought to do even for a slow poke.

Most people add sour cream just before serving over noodles. I omitted the cream from my finished dish for the reasons below. And we don't eat noodles anymore. Saves further accumulations of "wheat belly" around our waistlines.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
So I bought these chunks of veal because they were on sale. "On sale" as in they were way cheaper than hamburger. I bought them even as my rational self nudged them away.

“You’re never going to cook those. You’re going to let them die of freezer burn. You know how tough that meat is.” Telling Rationality to shut up, I walked over to the produce section…lemons are a dollar each??

Oy vey! Well, lemon or green pepper, which will it be?

Lemon! I can freeze the skins for zest afterwards. Kiss the green pepper goodbye.

Lemon goes well with veal. So do lots of things, besides paprika. Capers, sherry, root veggies, sweet peppers…

INGREDIENTS
Veal is versatile as long as the tough parts are never cooked at more than a simmer. Osso bucco is to die for, the very best of the tough veal dishes. But you’d have to sell an organ to be able to afford them anymore. So this is just one variation on a theme:

A pound or so of stewing veal. More, if you want.
Flour for dredging meat (I use rice flour. Wheat tastes better but it’s not for me)
Salt and pepper for flour (go easy on the salt)
Half a yellow onion, sliced
A couple of carrots, chunked up
A splash of sherry
Some chicken broth - maybe a cup?
Mushrooms, if you have them, cut up
Butter
Garlic, a few cloves
Lemon juice - use half the lemon
Herbs (a bay leaf? Some thyme? Basically anything that suits chicken suits veal)
Capers (you could toss in some finely chopped calamata olives if you don’t have capers on hand. You're looking to add some umami 'depth' here)
Peas, a half cup or so.

PREPARATION
Cut the veal into the size chunks you like. Dredge with flour and let sit on cutting board while you heat the butter (or you could use lard or olive oil).

Melt butter on medium until it bubbles. Put in half the meat, shaking off extra flour, and brown. Remove to the ceramic pot you’ll be using in the microwave and repeat with the rest of the meat.

Add a little more butter or oil and turn burner to medium low. Add the onion slices, chunked up carrots, and the garlic cloves. You don’t want the onions to burn, you’re just trying to render them to bring out the flavor. Putting the carrots in gives them a kind of pan roasted flavor, too, and improves the dish. Tossing in the garlic cloves allows you to roast those without any effort.

Stir all this around every few minutes.

When the onions look translucent and golden (maybe ~ ten minutes?), take out the garlic. Add sherry, herbs, capers, and lemon. Turn up the heat briefly to boil off the alcohol. Add chicken broth. How much? Enough to cover the meat. A cup or so should do. Add lemon juice at this point, and squeeze out the softened cloves into the pot (if they're not quite soft, just chop them). Stir up the browned bits of flour from the bottom of the pan.

I remembered some dried shitake mushrooms so I put a handful in the pressure cooker for about 4 minutes and then chopped them and strained the broth. Added both to the saute pan...though you could say that maybe shitakes have too strong a flavor for veal with lemon and capers. I wouldn’t argue with you.

When this is bubbling, pour into the microwaveable pot over the meat and cover tightly.

Cook on HIGH in the microwave for about 2 minutes or so (remember veal is cranky; it doesn’t like high heat for long). Then turn it down to MEDIUM LOW (for my ‘wave, that’s 40%) and cook for ten minutes or so.

These times are all approximate. Your goal is to braise the meat till it’s tender. It helps to know what your microwave thinks “simmer” means.

After ten minutes, take out the dish and stir. See if the meat is tender yet. Mine wasn’t. Poke at the carrots. Still a bit too ‘crisp’ for stew.

I spied a past-due-date vine tomato sitting on the counter. Why not? Just one wouldn’t hurt. So I quartered it and put in the pot before covering and cooking again on forty percent for another ten minutes. During the last two minutes I added a handful of peas.

I haven’t checked it yet, except to see that the meat was done and very tender adn the broth had reduced. Exactly the way you want tough veal to end up.

As it turns out, however, the veal stew is destined for tomorrow. While the dish was cooking, a neighbor came to the door with a present: a plastic bag containing hunks of venison and some ribs.

After debating this sudden abundance of meat, the veal stew, now finished, was put away for tomorrow. Instead, we will have baked vension ribs with the leftover Hoppin’ John from yesterday.

I’m glad I had that extra lemon half handy for the ribs' sauce. So now they're baking at 300 degrees. The boned haunch is in a covered dutch oven out in the cold shed (it’s going to be 25 F tonight. That meat is nice and safe out there).

Next time, a recipe for barbecued venison ribs. Hey, when life hands you venison on a rainy January evening, go for it.

NOTE: Most of my recipes serve four people, even though there are only two of us left now. But Ned "works" at home (and boy! does he ever work). He stays busy so if there is no "jump in the mouth" leftovers for heat 'n' eat, he'll make do with cheese. Or peanut butter. Thus, I usually cook extras.

By the way, "osso bucco" means "bones in the mouth" -- or colloquially, "bones jump in my mouth" (at least that's what my Italian neighbor claimed it meant). Which osso bucco certainly does want to do. Or rather, that's what your mouth wants it to do.

Hoppin'John for a Happy New Year

2011-01-01T16:37:00.004-05:00

Southerners eat black-eyed peas a lot. They also eat smoked pork frequently, and rice.

Growing up in the South, I got everything but the rice. My mother was from Ireland; rice and spaghetti (whoever heard of "pasta" back then?) weren't on the menu. If I, as the house cook, put them on, I had to also haul out the bag of potatoes for my Irish uncles. So mostly, we didn't eat rice.

Other than that, Mother loved soul food. Greens and fatback? Yum. Black-eyed peas? Sure, as long as you cooked some potatoes. Back then, black-eyed peas were mostly canned and not very appetizing. Sometimes Mother's friends would give us fresh ones -- they were like another food entirely from the canned variety.

We ate pork more frequently in its fresh variety than the smoked versions. Except for bacon, when we could afford it. However, American bacon was/is pathetic. Mostly we didn't bother except to make drippings.

So enough background already. Here's the deal on Hoppin' John: If you eat it on New Year's Day, you'll have a prosperous year. Beans are for prosperity, the rice for fertility, and the greens for color and good health.

Here's our New Year's Day Hoppin' John recipe in its current metamorphosis....

First thing to remember is to prepare this a day or two ahead. Much better than fresh out of the pot, though if you don't get to it ahead of time, it's still mighty fine right out of the pot.

Shopping List

Get you some ham hocks. Three minimum, but more is better. Hocks are best because they have those gelatinous tendons which will make the broth taste wonderful. Not much meat on 'em so you may want to add ham later for extra protein if you like your meals with plenty of meat.

Stop by the produce department and get a pound or two of greens: collards, turnip, mustard, etc. Or if price is no object, get the packages of washed and prepared cooking greens in the bagged salad area. Not spinach, though. It's too delicate.

While you're there, grab a bunch of fresh parsley. If you can't get fresh, just skip it. Try to find flat leaf parsley. I never did understand the point of the curly kind. Not as flavorful nor as deeply green. I'll bet it has a lot less Vitamin K, too. However, sometimes you have to settle for what you can get.

Get a yellow onion if you don't have any on hand. In this case, if you have dried onion flakes at home, they'll do fine instead.

In the frozen food section, get two bags of black-eyed peas. Don't buy the fresh ones. They put some kind of preservative on them that tastes yucky. If you have to use fresh, I'll tell you how to handle them when we get to the cooking part.

PREPARATION

1. Start with the HAM HOCKS since they take the longest.

Rinse them well under running water and then put in a pot big enough to fit them. Cover with cold water and bring to a boil. Let boil for a minute or two and then dump into a colander and rinse well. Put them back into their cooking pot with more fresh water to cover.

When the hocks come to a boil, reduce to a friendly simmer and add the following (all are approximate amounts since I don't actually measure anything. Besides, it depends on how many hocks you have in the pot. Let's pretend you have three and you can increase these amounts if it's more):

1 teaspoon coriander seeds (crushed or ground are okay)
1 teaspoon celery seeds (same goes for them)
a bay leaf or two
a big, fat clove of garlic, cut in half
1/4 teaspoon (or so) red pepper flakes
1/2 medium yellow onion, or sprinkle dried onion flakes over the pot real vigorously until it looks like the equivalent.
2 Tablespoons cider vinegar

Let that cook, covered, on simmer for a few hours. The liquid will reduce quite a bit. For the first hour, replenish it but then let it begin to reduce but keep it soupy. Be sure to turn the hocks so all parts of them get their time in the simmering bath.

2. Sometime while the hocks are cooking, rinse the PARSLEY and pull off the stems (I save the stems in the freezer for a bouquet garni for soup later on, but if you're not a frugal cook, don't bother). Grab the leaves in bunches and use scissors to chop them into a bowl. Coarse chop is okay. Set aside.

3. Cook enough RICE to suit yourself. I usually add bacon drippings for flavoring, but that's just my Southern background. This can be done the day before and reheated easily enough. I prefer a pilaf kind of rice, so I cook the rice on medium low for several minutes in the hot oil or bacon drippings, stirring all the while with a fork. You've sirred enough when the rice grains have become transparent. Add boiling water or broth, put on the lid, and cook on low for 15 minutes. Turn off heat and let it sit for five minutes. Microwaved rice is good, too: I use a glass pyrex bowl with a salad plate to cover. It seems to take longer to cook this way so add 1/3 cup of extra water and punch in 18 minutes on high. Again, let it sit covered for a few minutes.

4. How do the hocks look? Are they beginning to fall apart? That means the water is taking up their flavor and you're ready to add the black-eyed peas. If the water is low, add more, along with the peas*. You want it soupy because the peas will absorb the liquid. Black-eyed peas take a while to become soft, especially when being cooked with smoked meat, which usually has added salt. So allow for extra time; they will soften eventually. Stir the peas around well, making sure they're covered by liquid. Put the lid back on but keep checking on the liquid.

*if you had to buy fresh peas, rinse well and then put into boiling water. Boil for two minutes and then rinse under cold running water for a minute or so. Set aside till hocks are cooked. This will get rid of whatever preservative they've put on the darn things.

5. Once the peas are in, it's time for the GREENS. My preference is young collards, Brazilian style. Wash the collards and pile the leaves into stacks. Water will cling to them, which is all the liquid you need. Coarsely shred the stacks of leaves and set aside.

Cut two or three fat cloves of garlic (can't ever have too much garlic for this dish so use more if you want) into thin slices. Heat on medium (or a bit lower) a pan big enough to hold the leaves, adding a scant 1/4 cup of olive oil to the warm pan. After it is hot enough to fry the garlic without burning it, add the slices and stir until they're golden. Pick out with a wooden spoon as they turn gold -- some will go faster than others. Put them on a plate, but don't drain the oil from them. When they've all been removed, add the shredded collard greens. The collards will spit and sizzle. Sprinkle with salt (stay on medium heat) and keep stirring them down until they are limp and cooked enough for your tastes (this is why you need young collards for this dish. The big old leaves don't ever soften). This takes less than five minutes, depending on how much greens you have. Remove from heat, sprinkle with more salt if necessary. When ready to serve, put the cooked garlic slices back in and distribute. They will soften a bit but retain their flavor. This dish can be eaten hot or at room temperature. It keeps well and can be reheated, but if cooking for later, save the garlic separately until you're ready to serve.

Okay, check the black-eyed peas. Are they soft? Is there still a thick liquid in the bottom? (if not, add water!) They're done! Turn off the pot and add the parsley you'd chopped before. Cover the pot for a minute or two so the parsley can wilt in the liquor.

SERVING HOPPIN' JOHN

As I said, these can all be done the day before. And they taste better if they can set overnight. But when the time comes to actually eat this good luck dish, here you go:

Some people stir the rice in with the beans and hocks; others serve them separately. It just depends on what particular Hoppin' John school you went to.

Some take the trouble to pull out the hocks, glean what meat they can from the bones and throw away the bones and skin.

Some save the skin to fry up later.

Many people, especially South Carolinians, would consider the amount of red pepper flakes an anemic addition not worth bothering about. They go straight to the hot sauce.

If you're serving buffet style, just set out separate bowls and let people decide how they want to arrange the three ingredients. Me, I stack 'em, with rice on the bottom and greens on the top.

If you have a dog, share the wealth with those bones, particularly the larger ones. I don't know how safe the smaller, knuckle-type bones would be but the big ones look okay. Of course, if you do have a dog, you don't need my advice...

A note about Comments: I closed them. Can't do a universal block, but I'll be doing each post if I remember. My fatigue levels are such that monitoring comments would be impossible.

Ah, The Meyer Lemon

2010-02-02T15:15:00.004-05:00

A friend of ours, a man of many talents and interests, bought a house in the country. A lovely house it is, too. Among many other improvments he made to his house was a most impressive solarium.

One of his many talents and interests is gardening, indoors and out. Well, not just gardening, but plant life in general. A walk in the woods with him is always an adventure since he can identify most of what it is we’re walking on, or walking past, or what lies up ahead.

Our friend has all sorts of plants I’ve never heard of . Or if I have heard of them, I know only the ‘vulgar’ variety. For example, there is syringa vulgaris, the common lilac which dots the landscape of my yard here and there. As anyone who grows them in a humid climate knows, by August the leaves are usually whited over by powdery mildew. The books claim this is due to poor air circulation, but given the various locales in which I’ve seen it, the more likely explanation is that come August your lilac is going to be infected. Period.

However, our friend found a variety that is not prone to mildew so he planted that instead.

There are many varieties of many plants in his solarium. It would take hours to examine them all. However, among his treasures are some lemon trees. Meyer lemon trees to be exact, and they are definitely a cook’s delight.

Our friend gave us one to try. What can I say? A Meyer lemon is to store-boughten lemons as homegrown tomatoes are to the commercial kinds.

For one thing, the rind is usable as zest without bothering to scrape the pith off first. The rind is soft and pliable, making it easy to chop. The pulp is noticeably juicy but not acidic. I think there were a few seeds, but not many.

In sum, that was the best lemon I ever had. I can only imagine the flavor it imparts to lemon curd or lemon pound cake.

For those of you with enough sunlight, the dwarf varieties could be grown inside with a southern exposure and some moisture. Here are some ideas from the grower my friend used to purchase his trees.

And here is an article from The L.A. Times, suggesting one hundred uses for the Meyer Lemon. They don’t say so, but the first thing you do is rub it gently between your hands to release the fragrance…

Lastly, a succinct list of Meyer lemon facts, the first of which is that the Meyer Lemon is not really a true lemon at all:

The Meyer Lemon is not actually a real lemon but a cross between a lemon, a type of orange and a mandarin. While it retains most of the characteristics of a lemon, it has a bit less acidity, less bitterness, more sweetness and thinner skin. The skin of the Meyer Lemon lacks the typical zest of a real lemon. It has gained favor because it bears a heavy crop and it is a relatively hardy plant.

Ignore the part about the zest. I used every molecule of that lemon I got and the zestiness of the skin was just fine. In fact, it's an advantage because you don't have to scrape the pith, which in itself has lots of bioflavanoids.

Black Cats and the Fear Gene

2010-01-28T22:25:00.002-05:00

Our black cat, not at all like this one, was a stray who wandered into a church lunch one Sunday afternoon and has been at our house ever since. That must have been seven or eight years ago since the future Baron was the one who carried her in the car while I drove home.

Lulu has always been a scaredy cat. Company comes and she’s under the bed. To her way of thinking (and I use that word loosely), men are less trustworthy than women. She makes an exception for the fB, but then most cats do. They seem to be able to read the big sign he wears: PUSHOVER FOR CATS.

A few years ago, in an effort to calm her terror, I began experimenting with low doses of clonazepam. At first it was a half milligram a night. We could see a difference in her demeanor; definitely less jumpy but not exactly laid back. So I upped her dose to one mg. with her supper. That has made for quieter times at 3:00 a.m. when she’s decided I’ve abandoned her because she can’t find her way back to her cushion. Now just calling her permits her to aim in the direction of the sound and soon she’s settled down and snoring again. Yes, she does snore.

Of course those distress signals don’t resemble at all the guttural, half-purrs she makes when some mouse wanders across her path in, say, the closet. There is much scrabbling, strange squeaks and squeals. Then the lights go on, the Baron is forced to find the creature in whatever state of extremis he happens to be and heave him out the front door. Lulu doesn’t seem to mind the loss; she was only going to get up on the bed and present him as a gift anyway.

A few years ago I was talking to the substitute vet at our clinic about our scaredy cat. She explained to me that Lulu had inherited a fear gene on her Y chromosome. Only the daddies pass this trait along; it affects some more severely than others, depending on the level of genetic involvement.

This vet thought my clonazepam treatment plan was a great idea and even suggested raising the dosage. I wouldn’t mind doing that, but vet meds are too expensive.

When he heard about it, the main vet was skeptical of the whole thing. Or at least he was up until Lulu’s last office visit. I hadn’t dosed her beforehand (forgot to). When the fB brought her into the treatment room and opened the door of the carrier, the doc was treated to a vision of bare, naked Lulu. Evidently it wasn’t a pleasant encounter. On the directions sent home with her he’d written: “whatever it was you said you’d put her on, increase it. Please.”

Nothing like a fearful experience to make one a believer, hmm?

The Death of Walt Whitman's Dreams for America

2010-01-04T15:06:00.003-05:00

Poem Hunter is a site that offers to send a daily (more or less) poetic selection to your email address. They don’t spam and they don’t appear to distribute your address to all and sundry. While many of the selections don’t appeal to me (save me from "Trees"), some are just right. They remind me to go back and look at a poet I’ve not read in a while.

In this case, Walt Whitman.

Way back when we first met, the Baron used to recite or read sections of "Leaves of Grass" to me. Until that point, I hadn’t cared much for Whitman. He was too…sprawling, perhaps, too loud and boisterous. Things changed; over the years I’ve come to appreciate his special voice.

The Poem Hunter is a grab bag of good and bad selections. Today's choice, A Song, brings you up short. You realize that Whitman's expansive hope for America was in vain. “Comrade” has been so contaminated by events that lay in the future beyond Whitman's brief span, that we, the inheritors of his work, cannot use the word anymore without irony. Amazing to contemplate the evil done in the name of comradeship in the 20th century.

I hope, I pray that the 21st century will be less bloody, that fewer people will die at the hands of those wielding yet another sword in the name of yet another Utopia.

That hope may be in vain. Already I hear otherwise normal, kind people talking about the need for “population control” in this country but they don’t talk about the methods to be employed in this endeavor. They don’t say it out loud because it means abortion on one end of life and euthanasia on the other. Do they think that these ideas will have no effect on them or on the ones they love? Do they think the many deaths already accomplished have made our nation a better place?

The best revolution would be the realization that all of us are connected at some level. Our individual selves are necessary, but they aren’t sufficient for living in the fullness of reality.

The old Catholic idea has been lost, the one which proposes the idea there is no private morality, we are always either building up or destroying by our behavior or our thoughts, public or private. None of us want to consider being so closely monitored. It interferes in the extreme with our idea of individual liberty. But what if the larger reality revealed individuals connected to one another by various webs of belonging (as Teilhard de Chardin believed)?

That view, of connections to one another, could have begun in the ancient Jewish belief of blessings and cursings. The translators of Christ’s words may have been a bit leery of the idea of cursing someone. “Blessed are the meek” was fine. But cursing the un-meek? Did they change the words so that we read now the easier-to-digest “woe unto him”? As in, perhaps, “woe unto him who hurts the least of these, the children…” . Sounds safe enough until you realize this may be an example of the Jewish belief in cursing someone, in proclaiming your hope in his receiving his just desserts for a particular behavior. Pedophilia, anyone?

We are modern now. We don’t believe in blessing people, and we certainly don’t discuss cursing them. Jung probably wrote about this somewhere, or perhaps the Italian Freudian, Roberto Assagioli, who wrote about the concept of the will. This lack of belief is the price we are willing to pay for our faith in science and our belief in its priests who reduce life to those things which can be expressed as provable hypotheses. We live inside this religion; thus we may not consider the webs of connections that might exist between and among us all. This notion cannot be proved, therefore it not to be considered, contemplated or discussed, much less researched! Heaven forefend!

But back to Whitman’s America. What a robust, finely drawn contemplation! What a blessing he made:

A Song

Come, I will make the continent indissoluble;
I will make the most splendid race the sun ever yet shone upon;
I will make divine magnetic lands,
With the love of comrades,
With the life-long love of comrades.

I will plant companionship thick as trees along all the rivers of
America, and along the shores of the great lakes, and all over
the prairies;
I will make inseparable cities, with their arms about each other’s
necks;
By the love of comrades,

By the manly love of comrades.
For you these, from me, O Democracy, to serve you, ma femme!
For you! for you, I am trilling these songs,
In the love of comrades,
In the high-towering love of comrades.

Those towers crumbled long ago, beaten down by the hammers and sickles of utopians. Though their stated aims use different terms now, the name of the game is the same: Destruction of all who are not exactly like us.

As for Whitman’s “inseparable cities”, if we really cared, we would treat the destruction of Detroit by greed and corruption (look at the photos on that site) as we attempted to treat the destruction of New Orleans by Hurricane Katrina. Detroit did not, does not, deserve the terrible pestilence of greed visited upon it any more than New Orleans "deserved" the wrath of Katrina. The latter is different only in that it was an unavoidable act of nature(unless you stop to ask why New Orleans continues to exist where it does).

Detroit is becoming known as The Feral City due to generations of soul-rotted "leaders" that bled her dry and left her corpse to rot, her people to scrabble for their bread.

The corrupters moved on, safe from the stench of their works. I do wonder sometimes if they are safe from the curses of those they left behind.

Is this the price we pay for killing our not-yet children and our old people? Is there a web of connections we cannot see, stuck as we are inside the limits of our faith in Scientism?

If that is not the case, then tell me, oh American, where did our love go?

Resolutions, Twitter and Cacciatore

2010-01-01T16:24:00.006-05:00

From Rasmussen:

It's 2010, and 39% of Americans say they plan to make a New Year's resolution.

According to the latest Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey, 54% will pass on a first-of-the-year resolution this time out, but seven percent (7%) haven't made up their minds yet.

Among those who are making resolutions, 93% say they are at least somewhat likely to keep it. Fifty-three percent (53%) insist they are very likely to do so.
Although women are slightly more likely to make resolutions, men claim to be more likely to keep them.

Men don't lack self-confidence, but I do wonder how closely reality aligns with their claims. The Baron doesn't make New Year's resolutions...that I know of. On the other hand, I never met anyone who can calmly point out all his own faults, uh, I mean character traits, without being defensive about them. He laughingly told me opnce that a friend of his had been appalled to see a picture of the Baron in which he was wearing two different kinds of plaids. Unlike the Future Baron, clohting is neither an interest nor a skill. Thus, he still has me check his ties to make sure they pass muster before he enters the Hive of Scum and Villany for a meeting or conference.

New Year's resolution: my technophobe self and I have decided to acquire Twitter skills. It will be a good way to check on blogs that fall through the cracks. No need to do anything as outré as actually remembering them anymore; now I just add favorites to my list and check in occasionally to see who is blogging about what. Easy peasy...though I can see the tweets becoming long pages in no time. Still..better than what I'm not doing now with one foot nailed to the floor. I guess I'll just have to figure out how to delete the old history.

The future Baron is coming home for the evening. Time to scrounge up a few things and teach him to make chicken cacciatore. He's becoming tired of his limited menu maybe? It's fun to teach old tricks to young dogs. It's especially nice to have a young person around who is motivated to learn to cook cheaply.

Of course he will be bringing some red wine I never heard of; then he and the Baron will whinge about the fact that I will steal a small glass to use in the tomato sauce...along with capers, lemon, green peppers, pesto, and mushrooms. Oh, and my secret ingredient.

One time an Italian woman showed me how to "dress" pasta. It's simple, but truly wonderful. Drain the pasta but not too well. Rub butter on the surfaces of the hot pasta pot before putting the pasta back into it. Toss the hot pasta with the juice of at least one lemon and one tablespoon or more of sweet butter. Then, using a coarse setting on the pepper mill, grind lots and lots of pepper, tossing the pasta at intervals.

You can serve the pasta plain or with whatever sauce you've prepared. If plain, use some parmesan and a bit more butter on individual servings.

The fB also making the trip home so he can learn to iron handkerchiefs correctly. For some reason, he's taken a liking to linen handkerchiefs. This may have started during his bout with pneumonia and swine flu. Paper kleenex weren't up to the job, plus they leave lint on everthing.

Fortunately, I had a stash of his father's and grandfather's handkerchief collection in the ironing bag (a place I normally avoid). In addition, I found an attractive wooden box in his father's top bureau drawer that fits the handkerchiefs perfectly. All in all, a nice Christmas present, especially since I found a tiny ironing board he can store in his closet and use on the kitchen table or his bureau.

It's a lot of work to be a bon vivant when you're poor and you don't have a valet. His great-grandfather had one but those days are long gone in our family. Sure wouldn't mind a ladies' maid meself. Perferably one who was patient and liked to read aloud and didn't mind my truly awful strew. I'd have to call her Saint Something-or-Other for all of those virtues.

Lacrimae Rerum...

2009-12-31T23:07:00.005-05:00

Within, where there is light, the omelets
have been made
using every cast iron pan
From every cupboard in the universe.

In a warm kitchen, hunger is an old, hopeful dog.
The grey at the windows, the white of eggshells
Strewn everywhere, shattered and glistening.
The feet gliding from stove to sink and back,
And then…
The sudden absence of his bowl. These are ample evidence.

He knows. There will be a depth of dinner, enough
Even for him. You’d see – should you peer through
The frost flowers on the window –
The silent dancing, the dropping shells, the chemistry of liquid egg
Poured into hot pans...

So stylized, so committed to memory by now
Are the economics of necessity,
That they call this choreography, or cooking.
But really, she is simply doing her best
Not to step on any of the shells.

The egg shells are everywhere.

If he hadn’t seen this so often,
He would think it was spring –
That these shattered half ovals
Were recently vacated cocoons,
That the birds or butterflies or moths
Had scattered in flights overhead
Fragments of color and light,
Fancying someplace surely warmer.

Yes, he sees. Their shells are everywhere.

She has plunked the dog’s dish on the floor.
Blind with age, half-deaf, he smells
the heavy atmosphere of food.
By now his senses are few but certain.
With an old man’s stiff grace
He is moved by the remnants of appetite,
Pulled toward the bowl in blind obedience
To Hunger, he shuffles past the fragmented edges
And never steps on even one small, broken carapace.
He eats with a puppy’s assurance that there will
Always be Dinner-and-After, a long sleep by the fire.

She has become uncertain and silent. The chaotic kitchen alarms her visitors.Soon they will come to take the old woman to The Home where she can be cared for.

The dog will be given to her nephew since he always loved that old mutt the best.

The woman will live for several weeks in The Home before dying one night in her sleep. Three days after her death, the dog will leave in the same way, dying quietly in the middle of the night whilie lying on the floor at the foot of the newphew's bed.

The nephew mourns them both all through that unusally long, deadly winter. Everyone on the Upper Peninsula, used to the harshness, are still moved to remark on the bitter cold and the refusal of Spring to show her face.

The nephew understands, though he never attempts to explain...he says to me in an email, "I don't think they'd understand if I tried to say anything".

I reply, "sometimes no explanation will do. In cases of extreme sorrow, we simply have to live through them if we can".

In his final message he says, "I finally got that Labrador puppy I told you about. He is playful but easy to train. And speaking of pups, I will be a father in June. We are giving our child her name in the hope that she may grow up to be the woman Louisa was. But by then, I too..."

The Twelve Chocolate Months of Christmas

2009-12-26T16:58:00.003-05:00

The Baron and I have had a most interesting Christmas so far (still 10 days to go until the 12th day, which is the feast of the Epiphany, January 6th). Besides the hope change and audacity of putting up a 3 foot, pre-lighted fake tree from the hardware store, we never quite got around to buying one another any presents.

Our lassitude took a while to figure out. We weren't feeling gloomy, just massively indifferent to the idea of decking the halls. As usual, it was the Baron who figured out the underlying reasons, all of which stem from the month-long (or more) bout of illness beginning with the future Baron's swine flu and pneumonia and moving on to our own bad colds before ending with my final flourish with maybe-pneumonia. The ten days on prednisone did not help the chances of Christmas around here. I do hate the side-effects of that drug, even as I remain very grateful that it exists. It has pulled me out of more than one dark well of inflammation.

The foundation of our un-Christmas was a mixture of gratitude that our son is alive and post-illness fatigue. Even the stalwart, tenacious Baron simply didn't care about getting a tree or decorating it. He was determined to attempt to get to the Christmas Eve liturgy at our church, but beyond that and listening to Handel he was content to soldier on sans tinsel. I did talk him into buying eggnog and rum, though.

This is the first year I'm not weighed down with the bleak sorrow of Christmases Past. My daughter's death no longer reduces me to melancholy when celebration times come around. Yeah, I still miss her. A lot. But I don't miss the crises she created all the time. Those grew increasingly worse over the years. Even she said one time, kind of wistfully, "do you think an exorcism would help?" It might have; we'll never know.

The fB stayed at his house for the holiday, which is actually pretty lonely with all his roommates gone home for the holidays. But he wanted to sing at the Christmas services at his church. He was so excited that the choir was doing parts of Handel he even called the Baron and sang some of it a cappella. A good friend of his, a girl in the dance club he belongs to, invited him to their family dinner so he ended up having a good time on Christmas Day.

Which reminded me that he has a repertoire of songs -- covers of music he likes, nothing original -- and a serviceable twelve string guitar. He might be able to make some money singing in restaurants, bars, coffee houses, etc. His voice is stronger and surer now from all his choir singing. At first he was reluctant to consider the idea, given that he wouldn't be doing anything original. I reminded him that he wasn't setting out to be a virtuoso but simply attempting to make a bit of money by entertaining people. So he's agreed to think about it. He knows the practice and the gigs would serve to structure some of his time as he job hunts.

For him, my presents -- some of which I'd already done months ago -- include a really cool duster (he needs to keep the dust level in his room down due to asthma), some fine linen handkerchiefs that were his dad's and his grandfather's. I whitened them (no bleach) and they await the iron. I actually like ironing linens when my fibromyalgia permits. I'm also giving him Steve Sailer's book on Barack Obama's obsession with race.

I got Sailer's book for free from Ron Smith at WBAL and proceeded to avoid it for a few months. My mistake: this is one of the best books out there on our current president. It shines a light on what I have been calling Obama's Hamlet-like personality. Sailer is an excellent writer and his examination of Obama's book about himself is one literary fellow admiring and dissecting the literary efforts of another. Long after Obama's presidency is history, Sailer's book-length review will remain an important work. No paranoia about Obama, no put-downs, no casting aspersions. He did such a fine job that I keep picking up the book to re-read parts of it.

I'll also be giving the fB some mocha mix. I used to make it for him when he was in college. Back then, along with the recipe for making a cup was a BIG reminder to return the vanilla bean when he had used all the mix. Since then I have found something called "vanilla powder" so I can substitute that for the bean, with no need any longer to wait for the flavor of the bean to permeate the mix.

The fB and I agree that buying gifts for his dad is problematic. The Baron has everything he wants (except a job, but that one is beyond us). So we're always reduced to getting him coffee, dark chocolate, or maybe some comfortable socks. Boring. He could use some 'around-the-house' sweat pants but those are boring, too. As gifts, I mean. I do plan to replace some of his older, rattier sweats with a few newer ones from Good Will, but he has to drive me into town. Can't make it on my own very often, though since being put on hydromorphone (bless you, Doctor H!), I am able to get out more.

I finally came up with an ideal gift for my not-needy spouse. He loves chocolate, at least the dark, bittersweet kind. At church dinners if there are no chocolate desserts (perish the thought!) he goes without. On the other hand, if there are, say, three chocolate options he has a bit of each.

Thus my idea for a Christmas present: one chocolate dessert a month for 2010. I'm working on a list, though it will no doubt change with time. For the moment, here's what I've got:

January: Queen of Sheba torte (not sure on the name, but it's in "The Joy of Cooking")

February: Fannie Farmer's Chocolate Icebox Cake

March: chocolate cheesecake. This is The B's birthday month and he's mighty fond of this dessert. It will also be big enough to share if anyone shows up. His birthday is the same date as my daughter's. For years he complained about having to go to town to share his birthday. Then, after she died, he didn't want any celebrations at all...we ignored that. Now it's come back to normal, but without her it has definitely become a quieter day.

April: chocolate pudding cake. Fannie Farmer again. That was the cookbook of my early efforts in the kitchen.

May: I found a recipe the author claims is the "definitive" chocolate sauce. I'll make some chocolate biscotti to go with it since it will make more than the amount of ice cream he can eat before his stomach starts to disagree with the idea. The B's not fond of biscotti but having this sauce for dipping may change his mind a little. Also, the sauce would be good to dip strawberries into and he dearly loves those. May is strawberry season around here.

June: chocolate cream pie. I'll need to find a good recipe for the crust, though.

July: chocolate cookies with espresso filling. He's not a cookie fan but these will be an exception to his rule, I'm sure. Anything that combines espresso coffee and dark chocolate is pretty much okay by him.

August: Boston cream pie. I'll make it with a chocolate cake, chocolate filling and an espresso glaze. Warning: he'll probably stick his fork in you if you attempt to eat any.

September: Paris cakes? Maybe. I need something different so perhaps these will fill the bill. This one's iffy.

October: Huntington chocolate cake. A one bowl cake. I'm tempted to substitute chocolate bread pudding with brandy sauce, but we'll see when the time comes.

November: whacky cake. Maybe for Thanksgiving?? The fB loves this one, too. It goes without saying that they both prefer it frosted so I'll just break up one of the B's Lindt bars and melt it over the top while the cake is still quite warm. Then the melts will spread very easily.

December: maybe chocolate cheesecake again. It's one I could just make every month and it would be fine with him.

I have no idea how this present will turn out in reality. I'll give him his list but he knows I'm like the weather -- subject to change and unpredictability. So if something better occurs to me in any given month, I'll do that instead. The only given is that it will be chocolate and it won't have any nuts. He's not fond of nuts particularly, while I love them. Thus a chocolate dessert with no nuts will be easy for me to pass without temptation rearing its warty head. That's important since wheat and sugar are not my friends.

Except for cake flour, I'm fairly sure I have all the ingredients already on hand.

All I need is a big wall calendar for 2010 to write in these chocolate monsters on their proper dates. I figure mid-month is safe so I'll give myself leeway by having each one on the second week of each month. Thus seven days to plan it, prepare it and present it.

My calendar preference is one of those big Catholic or Anglican wall calendars with all the feast days and saints' days inscribe. One of the remnants of living in the orphanage is my love of the Liturgical Year. It is my compass. But that's a subject for another post.

Now that I'm living on dope, I'll be able to post more often. Not only is the pain now within tolerable limits, but I have more energy. It's still not dependable, but at least there are moments now when the ever-lasting oppression lifts.

Vitamin Soup

2009-10-18T17:47:00.002-04:00

The Baron returned from visiting his family carrying a wicked cold he’d picked up along the way. The worst part of his sickness was a bad cough. Partly post-nasal drip and partly chest congestion. When he coughs it sounds awful!

He’s not one to take medication so he’s been toughing it out. In sympathy, I fixed him some Vitamin Soup. This is a good one for sick people.

The nice thing about this soup is that you can start from scratch or you can take advantage of left-overs. Like all good soups, it’s quite adaptable.

I’ve long since abandoned measurements in general cooking. When you’ve been on the job a long time, the idea of measuring gets in the way. Thus, any measurements you find here, you’ll know I’m just making stuff up.

Vitamin Soup

INGREDIENTS

Bacon, several slices
Cabbage, about 1/4 of a head, more or less.
Carrot, one
Potato, one medium
Water or chicken broth
Onion, one medium
Parsley, a good handful. Leaves only, chopped.
Red pepper flakes
Salt
Cream (optional)

DIRECTIONS

Fry bacon slowly until crisp.
While bacon is cooking, shred cabbage and carrot into a saucepan.
Barely cover with water or broth and bring to a boil.
While waiting for the vegetables to heat, grate the potato separately into cold water (grated potatoes turn brown so easily. If you put a pinch of vitamin C powder into the water you’re using to grate the potato, this won’t happen).
Drain potato shreds into a colander and rinse before adding to the cabbage and carrot saucepan.
Once the vegetables are boiling, add salt and red pepper flakes to taste. Reduce heat to simmer and cover saucepan.

When bacon is crisp, remove from pan and set aside.
Chop or shred an onion into the bacon fat. Cook slowly until the onion is translucent and beginning to turn golden. Don’t let it brown.
Scrape the cooked onion and rendered bacon fat into to the vegetables in saucepan.
Put cover back on and simmer the whole thing for another 20 minutes or so, until the potato shreds are very tender.

Add cream to taste and reduce the liquid a bit until it is the consistency you like.
Serve with freshly chopped parsley and crumbled bacon in each bowl.

This probably serves four people for a soup course, or two people for a meal.

As with most any soup, it’s even better the next day.

CONSIDERATIONS AND SUBSTITUTIONS:

broccoli can be substituted for cabbage. In fact, most any cruciferous vegetable will do.
if you don’t believe in bacon, use shredded chicken. Leftover chicken is fine. But add some celery seed and/or sage for flavor.
Use butter to cook the onion if you’re not using bacon. Actually, ghee is even better since it doesn’t burn. Making your own ghee is easy and much less expensive than buying it.
left-over mashed potatoes make a good substitute for shredded potatoes. If you riced the potatoes after cooking, then they won’t have any glutinous lumps. If you haven’t had “riced” mashed potatoes, you don’t know what you’re missing!
The flavor of the slowly rendered onions is wonderful. But if you don’t have the time or inclination, to sauté them, just add dried onion to taste. It’ll do in a pinch.

Be well!

Jewelweed Really Is

2009-08-25T23:41:00.002-04:00

The Baron and I were out doing errands today. Since the weather was lovely, warm but not really August-in-Virginia warm, we stopped at various places of remembrance. I call them that because they are either scenes he painted when he was a landscape artist, or they were spots we knew where second-bloom honeysuckle could be found for the taking. Some of them were simply old haunts that time is changing.

The second bloom is lighter than the first, and not nearly so fragrant. I picked some anyway. On the other hand, Autumn clematis is running riot over everything, smelling up the place. That is, blooming everywhere except where I planted it. Since it grows wild almost anywhere you look, I’ll be darned if I’ll actually buy a pot of the stuff. Instead, this time I’ll dig it up and pot it myself. Once the roots are over the shock, I can transplant it more successfully. Live and learn: plants, like children, do not like to be jerked around. Autumn clematis is one of those flowers you don't want too close to the house. Close enough to get the wafts of perfume, but not so close that the bees and such are chasing you.

Joe Pyeweed is in full flower. You can smell the vanilla in some of the varieties, especially the tall ones. False boneset is out but the tickseed sunflower has hardly begun and I don’t see any Ironweed. Maybe it’s late in this year of strange weather.

We saw jewelweed everywhere. It’s in full bloom now. I’ve been meaning to gather some for poison ivy treatment, but somehow each season gets by before I notice the blooms are gone. Then I'm stuck trying to identify the plant without its characteristic flower. It's a lovely small blossom but the plant itself is non-descript and tends to blend into the other foliage when not flowering.

This year I'm on it! I am going out bright and early tomorrow. Or maybe in the cool of the late afternoon is more realistic. I’ll bring home enough to make a concoction to have on hand when people run into poison ivy. It really does work like a charm.

Here’s my favorite method:

Get a bunch of the stuff, maybe four or five plants. Wash them, chop them up, flowers and all, until you have a moist mush. A blender would do fine.

Simmer that with a bit of distilled water. When it looks like the liquid is down by half, let it cool. Strain this through whatever you have handy – some cloth that you won’t mind having stained brownish green – and pour the liquid into a dark glass container.

Refrigerate this (a few days is okay) until you have time to clean out an ice cube tray. Then freeze the liquid in cubes. Don’t leave them in the tray as they’ll desiccate, or evaporate, or whatever it is that self-defrosting freezers do to liquid over time. I’d put them in a plastic freezer bag, well-sealed and especially well-marked. I’ve learned the hard way about tossing unmarked bags into a freezer and assuring yourself that you’ll remember what those cubes are. You won't.

If you have an ice cube tray with tiny compartments, that would be the best for freezing smaller cubes. Lacking one of those, just use a regular tray.

The ice cube can be applied to a poison ivy rash at any stage. Used at least twice a day, it will resolve the rash with far fewer blisters. It’s also effective on athlete’s feet.

Jewelweed is a member of the impatiens family. This makes me doubt that it would dry well, but what the heck. I’ll hang some upside down and see what happens. It probably won’t be pretty. More like a wet mess after a day or two.

Can’t hurt to try, right?

Weather is So Very Local

2009-06-28T18:15:00.004-04:00

The Baron is always wistfully hoping to see a tornado...preferably not here in the garden, but say, following one of those in the Midwest, the ones that turn the sky green and suck up all the air, plus anything else in their way. In fact, he likes them so much he watches that tornado channel whenever he's in the proximity of a TV and has any control over the remote.

So imagine his chagrin on finding out at church today that the clamor and banging that gave us six tenths of an inch of rain the other night was at the same time busy dumping six inches on a nearby area. The place is about three or four miles away, as the crow flies. In addition to the deluge, they also had a TORNADO!

So near and yet so far. That's the problem (if one is hunting them) with tornadoes in the southeatern part of the United States. They often come at night. In addition, if they occur in the Piedmont areas, they don't get far before bumping into an obstructive land mass, say a hill, or a mountain. I don't think "Tornado Alley" in the Midwest has any hills to speak of, thus they can go further and do more damage.

There is a higher mortality in the Southeast, though. For one thing, tornadoes don't have a "season" here; they can occur any time of year. For another, they are frequently at night so there's no way to send out the kinds of warnings that they do in the Midwest. And due to the milder weather here, there are more trailer parks to demolish. Trailers, or mobile homes, are essentially tin held together with staples. There is insulation between the outside tin and the inside fiberboard walls, but they're fragile things. That's why poor people like them: cheap housing.

Many counties, wealthier than we are, don't permit new trailers. They don't meet the building codes and rich folks don't like them cluttering up their pretty scenery. With Obama's new energy attack no doubt they'll eventually be outlawed, even those that were grandfathered in to the updated building codes. In other words, poor people will have fewer places to live, but everything will be pretty...and energy efficient. No more dangerous kerosene stoves. The Salvation Army better start some kind of building program or they're going to be turning away lots of folks.

This rain gauge is just like the one our car mechanic has. That's where the Baron got the idea for one of our own. He put it up so that I can see it from my desk. Not only is that an improvement over the glass and plastic ones we've had before, but I don't have to get up from my desk to see the water level. I believe this is a year 'round model, so we'll be able to count the inches of snow when the time comes.

Meanwhile, with all this great rain, it has been interesting watching the inches climb this June. We've probably had close to 4 inches this month, if not more. The only downside is that the slugs, snails, and pill bugs like the damp and have been increasing in whatever they have to do to make more of themselves. It doesn't bear thinking about, but meanwhile, these parents and their increase have taken to munching on my plants.

Tomorrow I am going to get some Sluggo and spread it around the susceptible spots. Sluggo is just iron phosphate in pellet form. Won't hurt the plants (though they already get a lot of iron from our orange clay soil), but it will send the offending creatures elsewhere.

By the way, the bush in the back of the picture is a lilac. In looking at the photo, I just noticed the mildew. Shoot, and I thought the bush had escaped this year. The black strap hanging to the left of the gauge is a left-over from when we had our roof replaced. After more than a year, our roofer hasn't finished, though he did clamp on rubber sheeting after the leaks appeared.

Don't get me wrong, this man was a very good roofer. He's been in business since 1953. But ours turned out to be a roof too far and he's not been back to fix it properly. Plus he and his Mexican workers banged nails through the eaves. It looks like we may be headed to court...bummer.

Wormy Palace

2009-06-27T14:17:00.003-04:00

I hate just tossing out our vegetable parings, but I don’t want to make just a compost pile that would further attract the attention of noxious deer, who are getting hungrier and less afraid. Besides, I can't toss around large piles, nor can I afford an enclosed store-boughten one so I had to think of something else.

For the first time this year, those deer ate the daylilies. Well, actually, they eat them every year, but this season they came back over and over again. Out of a hundred or so usual blooms, we have one. Their appetites may prove beneficial if it thins out a bed that I’ve wanted to dig up and separate for years. On the other hand, if all the plants die back for lack of growth, I’ll have move in bulbs from other stands. It's an herb bed, so strictly speaking daylilies don't belong there. But since the shoots, bulbs, and flowers are edible, they pass.

Obviously it’s way past time for pepper spray and blood meal. Should have done those in February, but in February I was running on one and a half cylinders. You do what you can and let the devil sort the rest.

By the way, our county is now offering a bounty on coyotes. Wish they’d do the same for deer. The latter are mighty skinny, some of them, and suicidal. They like to run into the path of oncoming cars. Yeah, I know: they’re so “cute”. I never thought much of Bambi myself and I sure can't afford the car repair bills. One unfortunate social worker in an adjoining county had a mortal encounter with a deer while driving to work. Were I a close member of her family, or if any of my family met such a fate, I'd be known as "Dymphna the Deer Slayer" for sure. Princeton New Jersey hired their own official deer slayer some time back. None of the progressives with gardens or landscaping or cars objected to this added expense.

Here is my solution for recycling house garbage… no, there wasn’t any meat involved in the process. I want to build up the soil, not attract rats.

I eat a lot of yogurt, organic when I can get it. I’m not much of a believer in the organic thing, but when it comes to animal fats, I’d rather do without all the extra added ingredients that cows are fed. Unfortunately, I can’t get away from their soy feed unless I find 100% grass-fed cows. Women who’ve survived breast cancer aren’t supposed to have soy, but it’s in everything. So the extent possible, I avoid those everythings and make my own stuff. But that's a subject for another post.

Meanwhile, I was throwing out the yogurt containers, all the while thinking “there must be a use for these”. Hey, anyone who collects dryer lint for other uses tends to think like that. It just means that if I weren't disabled, I'd be working somewhere.

Well, I found a use for them…at least some of them. I am making mini-compost bins. This low tech project requires a screwdriver or an awl and some scissors. A paper punch works for the parts that can be reached with that, and the pattern provided by the paper punch holes gives you a guide on how large to make the other holes on parts of the carton that can't be reached by the punch.

When you punch holes in the plastic yogurt carton, make sure to do the lid and the bottom, too. The holes have to be big enough and smooth enough to let earthworms get in, but not so big as to encourage voles. I use the scissors to trim the excess plastic from around the holes so as not to damage the worms as they move in and out.

To this “bucketette” you add ground up vegetable and fruit peelings and egg shells (they go through the blender effortlessly and you have a much smaller mass than you started with). This compost mass is layered between newspapers, as though you were building a strata…which you are, only for worms. Start with newspaper and alternate that with ground garbage. End with a covering of newspaper.

Now dig a hole in a part of your garden which has poor soil. In our clay soil, it’s not hard to find such spots. Make sure the hole is deep enough and wide enough to hold your yogurt carton easily. Make the hole a bit deeper than the carton so you can cover the whole thing with soil.

Wait, though. You haven’t invited your guests. Go to the part of your garden that has good soil and dig up some earthworms, along with some of the soil they’re crawling through. Pack this earthworm-laden soil around the yogurt carton, which will be shortly leaking its goodies out into the dirt. Cover up with some of the poor soil. Put a rock on top, one too heavy for a raccoon to lift. The rock also marks your spot so you can return on occasion to check its progress.

Meanwhile, you can be making new yogurt-compost containers and stacking them inside one another so they don’t take up much room. Put them in a convenient place, perhaps where you keep your plastic storage containers?

A caveat: I can’t lift a rock/boulder that would prevent a bear from getting to the goodies. If evidence of their presence appears, I’ll have to figure out what discourages those critters. I don’t need more animal company, thankyouverymuch.

Since it hurts my hands to do more than one container at a time, I make them as I need them. Meanwhile, I can store the accumulating veggie garbage in one of the un-holey containers, waiting till I have enough for another buckette of worm strata.

I like this idea of mine. Now I no longer look longingly at compost containers that cost a small fortune. This solution is much better for just two people’s accumulations, and I’ll bet the worms are happy.

For some reason, it popped into my head that what I’m making are little veggie coffins…

the worms crawl in, the worms crawl out,
The worms play pinochle on your snout…

Only in this case, they catch up on the local news while they eat. We will have well-informed invertebrates, rather like the current manifestation of the Republican Party.

Next I’ll figure out how to use coffee cans to make vole-proof tulip bulb containers. Those suckas ate 25 Cambridge yellow tulips and I haven’t planted tulips anywhere but in porch containers since.

Turning the Key, the Door Creaks Open...

2009-06-24T19:29:00.002-04:00

It's been more than a year since I've been home.

I promised myself that when the fund-raising was over at Gates, I'd come back to the old Neighborhood.

Staying away wasn't a choice. The spirit was willing, but the flesh rebelled, big time. In fact, it is doing so even as I type. The difference now is a lowering of my fatigue level via Provigil. It works on whatever part of my brain responsible for sending messages like this:

"you.are.tired.go.to.sleep.now.just.for.a.little.while"
That is my brain not on drugs. My brain on Provigil sends quick snappy twitters. Things like, "hey, go put some manure on those tomato plants. Now!"

I like my second brain better. Too bad Provigil is three hundred dollars a month. One might as well have a coke habit. Indulging in modafinil (the generic name, though it isn't available in America as a generic) isn't possible. Cephalon has the patent and they ain't budging. Too bad, because my insurance covers only generics. Being diagnosed with hypopnea,the junior version of sleep apnea, means (theoretically) that I qualify for modafinil. But Cephalon has a death grip on that patent so no go.

Fortunately, my doctor gave me some free samples; I hoard them and use only half a dose. I now have ten days of functioning left. After that, back to a snoozy reality. I am definitely saving some Provigil for the 4th of July Tea Party. Can't miss that one!

I have gone back to the sleep patterns of my youth, a pattern that all of my children inherited, unfortunately: I'm a night owl. My best time is about 10:00 p.m. onwards. I would much rather be a lark, like the Baron, up with the dawn and enjoying the sunrise. Ah well, you go with what you get.

One of my night owl offspring sent me this comic strip. Does he know me or what?

I'll be back, y'all...there's lots of stuff piled up, but Duty Calls. A post on Gates, then I can roam the Neighborhood, annoying Those-Next-Door -- all nine choirs of 'em.

Heh.

Remembrance Day for Shelagh, 2008

2008-05-08T23:56:00.002-04:00

Today is the fifth anniversary of my daughter’s death. Up until now, it has been a hard, gruelingly sorrowful day for me. But not this year.

The relationship between us has changed ever since I dreamed of her about 10 days ago. She looked amazingly well – serene, calm, and joyful. There was a kind of glow to her and to the younger woman who was with her.

In this dream, I was having some kind of get together and lots of people were moving about. It was reminiscent of family parties we had when Shelagh and her brothers were children: lots of kids running in and around the adults, chasing one another while the grown-ups tried to carry on adult conversations over the noise.

As I was making my way through the crowd, I came upon Shelagh. Suddenly she was just there, obviously with another woman who was shorter and younger than she was. They were both dressed in either white or pastel dresses, loose and comfortable. They both also seemed to have an inner light, a dimmed radiance surrounding the two of them as they faced me.

The sight of her was startling. “Shelagh, you can’t be here. You’re dead, remember?” She laughed, put her arm around me and assured me that all was well. “Oh, Mom, you’ll be okay. And I’m fine now.”

At that point the dream ended. The Baron had come in the front door, returning from church, and the rattle of the doorknob wakened me. The dream itself was so vivid that I was disoriented for a few minutes after I came back to the surface.

Since then, things have been the same, but different. I don’t grieve any more. Instead, I remember all the things I loved about my daughter and how fortunate I was to have been her mother – as rocky as that road was sometimes.

She has taught me to forego judgment; it’s very freeing. And knowing she’s all right brings its own unutterable peace.

Is the dream “real”? It depends on what one considers reality. I think of it as a gift, and I don’t inquire as to the source.

A fellow-blogger remembered what today was and sent me a long, comforting note. At the end of it, he said:

BTW my own view of the afterlife is that souls have work to do just as they did on Earth. They become a welcoming committee for new souls and also are guardian angels for those of
us who are left behind. I have a story from [his son]’s closest high school friend that definitely says they act as guardian angels.

Shelagh would have liked that idea. She’d have opted to be Ahnold’s guardian angel. Well, whoever gets her had better have a sense of humor. She enjoyed teasing people. After listening to the Baron and me sing while doing dishes, she remarked drily, “love isn’t blind, it’s deaf.”

She was right, but we’re still singing…no doubt, she’s singing too, wherever she is.

Salmon Cakes à la Cheap and Sneaky

2008-05-01T22:17:00.000-04:00

I like fresh salmon, but I question the wisdom of eating much of it since the fish - like chickens, beef, etc. - are fed soy. In addition, a lot of farmed salmon has color added to the feed so they’ll look pinker.

Having had cancer, soy is on the verboten list. And the darn stuff is in nearly everything: low carb “breads”, salad dressings, cereals, etc. Even the sardines I’m supposed to eat often are packed in soybean oil.

So I’ve gone back to making salmon cakes from wild-caught canned salmon. The kind from Alaska, not China.

I used to make these years ago with cod in New England, back before you could easily get fresh salmon there. Recently I had some leftovers (unusual) and a friend liked them enough to ask for the recipe. Recently I got another request from someone on a diet.

Here they are - this serves three people if one of them is a young man with a big appetite. Otherwise, a family of two adults and two kids would find this sufficient. For more people, just double the recipe.

Open the can (duh) and drain the broth into a separate bowl.

From here you have two ways to mash the salmon: put it through the blender or mix it with your hands. There are soft bones in the fish which have been pressure-cooked so that they will crumble between your fingers and finicky people will not know about this extra addition of calcium. The blender is easier and more thorough, however. Less messy, too.

Dump into a mixing bowl and add a Tablespoon or so of dried onion. Mix well to distribute. Set aside.

Now how to make the filler? Regular carb meals would permit some mashed potatoes, or finely crushed saltines, like you were making crab cakes. Medium carbs would allow for some mashed white beans, but if you want to make it low carb, use a large zucchini, grated and wrung out in a towel. Then sauté the zuke until it really lets go of the liquid (a little salt helps) and throw that into a colander. Squeeze out the liquid again.

Add the zucchini or the potatoes or crackers to the mixing bowl with the salmon.

On top of that put in about 1 Tablespoon of mayonnaise and one or two eggs. Some people prefer to avoid yolks, but they give you the same omega oils you’re getting from the fish (well, similar, anyway), so go whole hog. Or use two egg whites and give the yolks to the dog or cat.

On top of that put a large pinch of crab boil mix. It gives a good “seafood” flavor. If you don’t want to use that, then use dill. Fresh is best, though dried is tolerable.

Mix the whole thing with your hands until it is an even mooshy mess. If it seems too liquidy add a bit of cracker crumbs or flour or even oat bran. Anything which absorbs the liquid.

If too dry, use a bit of the salmon broth.

Use a cutting board of a piece of waxed paper on which to arrange the shaped salmon cakes. I sprinkle them with high protein flour on the top side and then let them sit in the fridge for a while. They seem to hold together better that way. But you don’t have to: you can simply heat some olive oil - enough to cover the bottom of the pan - and place some of the cakes, flour-side down (they won’t all fit in) - carefully into the pan once the oil is heated. Use medium heat, not high.

Turn oven on lowest setting and get out an ovenproof platter. Mine is 170 degrees so it won’t burn the paper towels on the platter.

Cover frying partially and cook until the bottoms are crisp. Takes only a few minutes, and you can flatten the cakes a bit when you check them.

Before turning over, sprinkle a bit of flour/salt or bread crumbs on the uncooked side. Press it in a bit before turning. Again, cook them for a few minutes partially covered…if you put the cover all the way on, I think it makes them steam a bit.

When bottoms are browned on both sides, put on platter and place in oven to keep warm while you finish the others. Depending on the size of the pan and the size of the salmon cakes, this will be one or two more batches.

These things absorb oil, so don’t put too much into the pan. Just enough to make them crisp. Add extra oil for each batch and let it heat before putting in the salmon cakes. If you don’t heat it sufficiently, they really will absorb the oil.

Again, remove and place on platter in oven.

Low carbing, serve with coleslaw and another vegetable, perhaps asparagus or green beans. If you need to gain weight, have some corn on the cob instead.

My family likes seafood sauce, so I use low carb ketchup, a squirt of lemon, a pinch of celery seed and a bracing amount of horseradish. The commercial kinds are way too sweet for our tastes.

Gloomier, Leaky Monday

2008-04-28T15:30:00.002-04:00

The rain continues to pour as though we’d suddenly been moved, house and all, to Oregon. Today is colder which pleases me…slows down the spring flowering process, making the dogwoods bloom last longer. The woods are filled with flecks of white.

And because the precipitation is soft and incessant this rain doesn’t run off; it moves through the clay all the way down to the ground water, --i.e., all the way down to the well. In all our years here, the well has never gone dry – except for the time I left it on the roots of some new trees while I went into the house for “a moment”, which turned into forgetting to go back to the hose until…. Voila, the kitchen faucet was dry the next morning. I was darn lucky I didn’t burn out the pump in the well house. And you don’t want to be on the receiving end of a lecture by the Baron. Guys worry about the infrastructure more than women do. We just want it to “look nice.”

The only problem with the rain is our new tin roof. There is a persistent leak now, which runs from the corner of the ceiling in the kitchen over my desk and fills the cabinet above it before thoroughly soaking anything lying on the desk. It is a recalcitrant hole that refuses to be fixed.

The roofer, who has been putting on metal roofs since the 1950’s, has come out twice. Last time, he was “positive” it was taken care of. Grrr…I am giving him the bill for the carpenter who will have to fix all the damage once the roof is really repaired. Meanwhile, pieces of the ceiling kerplunk into the bowl below; I can’t see the damage because a corner cabinet is installed on that wall…I try not to think about what it’s doing to the insulation in the crawl space.

I really like this man – can’t believe a guy in his 70’s can scoot up a ladder like he does and then move so nimbly on that steeply angled, smooth metal. Besides, I want to maintain cordial relations if we can. He takes great pride in his work and our cottage now represents one of his significant failures. I am determined that we not end up solving our problem the American way: in court.

Because of his age, Mr. W. has a genuine “Southside Virginia” accent. I enjoyed listening to it, and he sure does enjoy talking – he has the old Southern habit of settin' and talkin' for a spell. But I think that part is ending; he hates coming back, trying vainly to find the @#$%^&# darn hole. What a bummer…sure is a pretty roof.

I wish we had our old one back, though. It wasn’t “pretty” but it was solid and must have been at least fifty years old, with patches here and there. It may have even been older. What it did NOT do, which this one does in the least little old wind, is rattle. You’d swear there were trashcans rolling off the roof on the south side of the house (where the fig trees are). You know the way live theater makes those sound effects for thunder by rattling thin tin sheets? Well, that’s the noise we will have to live with when the wind gets up. I keep reminding myself that it could be worse. We could live in Corpus Christi and be forced to listen to the darn thing 24 hours a day…the wind in CC in unrelenting.

It’s most fortunate that I’m a procrastinator because I hadn’t gotten around to having the gutters installed. The first time I called Mr. W about this mess, he immediately did a gotcha: “I bet y’all had them gutters put on, didncha?” For once, my tendency to put things off worked in our favor. Besides this darn leak is nowhere near the edge of this noisemaking nuisance.

Time to go empty the plinkety-plink bowls…

Rainy Sunday Ruminations

2008-04-27T10:08:00.004-04:00

I came over here to clean out the cobwebs and set up shop for a while. Things at Gates are bizzy, bizzy. I like the quiet here. A few birds chirping, even in the rain – cardinals nesting in the forsythia, too. Forgot to clean the blue birdhouses. However, I'll bet the wrens are in the storage shed already, nesting on the garden tools so you have to move one ever so carefully. They used to like the eaves above the figs until the cat took to sitting in the window staring at them. That would make me nervous if *I* had feathers. Lulu has never left me anything feathered, though any number of moles and voles has met their end at her paws. I actually don't mind the moles so much: they tunnel through, eating their fill of Japanese beetle grubs. The darn voles, on the other hand, eat bulbs: lilies, liatris, poppies, tulips, etc. I've learned to soak them in hot pepper sauce for a day before planting. Lasts long enough for them to make it through the winter and then I have to get more assertive. For some reason, they don't like daylilies or daffodils or jonquils.

Since I haven’t been back “home” in months, I took a look around the Neighborhood. Peeked over God’s wall and noticed He’s let the grass get a little long. Everything is lush and green, though, just as He claims to have intended. Maybe I’ll go over later and "borrow" a cup of coffee. I’ll have to wear my wellies to get thru His grass, but it’s a good excuse to let Him know I’m baaack!

Usually these announcements make Him roll His eyes, but the coffee He serves is exquisite (Italian, maybe?), so it's worth a little rolling-your-eyes-toward-heaven patience. Come to think of it, Who could He be rolling His eyes to in the first place??

This season has been a bit strange. Cold nights froze most people’s tomato plants, but the darn figs are setting fruit earlier than I’ve ever seen them. This is a problem for a tardy pruner. You’re supposed to keep the “bushes” at about ten feet, but if I do that now, I’ll lose some fruit. Maybe I can work around it.

To give you an idea, I don’t usually see fruit until late June, usually when I’ve just decided that they will not be bear that year. The extension agent swears they only bear every four years or so, but these guys put out every single summer. When he told me that was impossible in our 7b climate zone, I just shrugged and agreed. Who am I to argue with the Authority on such matters? But come September I’ll be making preserves. And not falling off the ladder.

The dogwoods are blooming, but the Forest Pansy redbud wasn’t very flowerful. Perhaps it was due to the bad drought late last summer. I can see the buds on the mountain laurel all through the woods. What a wonderful plant. The lilacs are blooming away since we cut back some mimosas. Now they get more sun.

Darn deer have eaten everything in sight. Even the boxwood, for heaven’s sake. The azaleas under the pine are nubs. I kissed the parsley goodbye, too. I’m glad they leave the chives alone, and the daffodils and rosemary. Be grateful for small blessings, shall we? I will resolutely ignore the microscopic green leftovers where 25 Oxford yellow tulips should have bloomed. Should have…except for the raging appetites of those supposedly “cute” little deer, which grow bolder by the day. They multiply like Catholics…I mean Muslims. Mexicans?

Whatever. It’s obvious Catholics are no longer breeding according to plan…hmm. So much for sticking to the rhythm method.

Q: Do you know what they call people who use the rhythm method for birth control?
A: Parents.

And deer are not cute, except when they’re roasting on a spit. We need to put those critters on something besides the rhythm method. It isn’t working for them, either. There are now six deer for every person in our state...I mean dominion. Commonwealth. Or, as they say around here, "by the grace of God, Virginia."

Heh-- Send the Kids Over

2007-12-04T20:29:00.000-05:00

I got this little doo-dad here.

Hmmm...does that mean I'll have to elevate the vocabulary a bit?

Or maybe they just count semi-colons.

Hat tip: Are We Lumberjacks?

I've Never Posted a Forward Before, But...

2007-11-27T20:56:00.001-05:00

This one so startled me by bringing back my childhood, that I leave it here for other Florida Crackers for their amusement:

You know you're a Floridian if....

..You never use an umbrella because you know the rain will be over in five minutes.
..Socks are only for bowling.
..A good parking place has nothing to do with distance from the store, but everything to do with shade.
..Your winter coat is made of denim.
..You can tell the difference between fire ant bites and mosquito bites.
..You're younger than thirty but some of your friends are over 65.
..Anything under 70 is chilly.
..You pass on the right and honk at the elderly, but pull over for a funeral.
..You could swim before you could read.
..You have to drive north to get to The South.
..Every other house in your neighborhood had blue roofs in 2004-2005.
..You know that anything under a Category 3 just isn't worth waking up for.
..You dread lovebug season.
..You are on a first name basis with the Hurricane list. They aren't Hurricane Charley, Hurricane Frances...but Charley , Frances , Ivan and Jeanne.
..You know why flamingos are pink.
..You think a six-foot alligator is actually pretty average.
..You were twelve before you ever saw snow, or you still haven't.
..'Down South' means Key West
..'Panhandling' means going to Pensacola
..You think no-one over 70 should be allowed to drive.
..Flip-flops are everyday wear.
..Shoes are for business meetings and church.
..No, wait, flip flops are good for church too, unless it's Easter or Christmas.
..Sweet tea can be served at any meal.
..An alligator once walked through your neighborhood.
..You smirk when a game show's 'Grand Prize' is a trip or cruise to Florida .
..You measure distance in minutes.
..You have a drawer full of bathing suits, and one sweatshirt.
..You get annoyed at the tourists who feed seagulls.
..All the local festivals are named after a fruit.
..A mountain is any hill 100 feet above sea level.
..You think everyone from a bigger city has a northern accent.
..You know the four seasons really are: almost summer, summer, not summer but really hot, and February.
..It's not soda, cola, or pop. it's coke, regardless of brand or flavor, 'What kinda coke you want?'
..Anything under 95 is just warm.
..You understand the futility of exterminating cockroaches.
..You can pronounce Okeechobee, Kissimmee , Ichnatucknee and Withlacoochee
..You understand why it's better to have a friend with a boat, than have a boat yourself.
..Bumper stickers on the pickup in front of you include: various fish, NRA, Nascar, Go Gators, and a confederate flag.
..You were 5 before you realized they made houses without pools.
..You were 25 when you first met someone who couldn't swim.
..You get angry when people say 'Florida isn't really part of the SOUTH.'
..You've worn shorts and used the A/C on Christmas.
..You know what the 'stingray shuffle' is, and why it's important!
..You recognize Miami-Dade as ' Northern Cuba '....
and

..You forward this

So, Don't Like, Hurt My Feelings or Anything....

2007-11-26T23:55:00.000-05:00

I just found a great signature line:

Like Elizabeth Edwards, I now have the absolute moral authority of being a cancer survivor--and a mother! So don’t, like, hurt my feelings or anything, or you’re like, you know, mean and stuff.

One of those things I wish I’d thought of…except I keep tripping on my Superwoman cape and banging my head. It makes me forgetful…

…unfortunately, though, even with these self-inflicted memory deficits some things are seared, just seared into my brain.

Like John Kerry speeches.

And his special little hat.

And the time he knocked down the Secret Service agent when he was skiing.

They say “blood will tell” and John’s certainly does. I think it’s yellow. But maybe that’s just my jaundiced view.

No matter who the Dems run this time around, it won’t be as interesting as JFK II.

Ummm…unless Hillary runs. Fits and foments and rages, oh my.

Counting

2007-09-13T10:28:00.001-04:00

It’s been over a month now. Six weeks, perhaps. My last entry was the day before my surgery for a torn rotator cuff. Actually, it was completely ripped. I now have six little nails holding at least part of it in place.

Now it has healed enough that the pain is only humming under its breath. Horrible tune, but it’s nice that it’s become background noise rather than tubas blaring in my face all the time.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
I hate the jihadists for ruining September for me. It’s probably my favorite month. A bit cooler, the figs are ripening…and left over from my childhood the echoes of new school shoes on a freshly waxed linoleum floor as I walk into class. September is for beginning again, not mass murder. Stupid jidiots.

The painters and carpenter come everyday to fix things and make them pretty. The front and back doors have finally been painted. They are removing some rotted siding and replacing it with new, machine-smooth planks. The original part of the house has the handmade planks – kind of rough and uneven. Mostly they never seem to wear out, even though they’re probably seventy years old by now and we live in a humid climate.

They painted the music room. Or what used to be the music room. After The Boy left for college we loaned the piano to his older brother so the kids could start piano lessons. And, of course, the guitars are gone, and the music books. A professional organizer told me that when you’re still calling a room by its former function, that’s a sign you need to start reshuffling you life.

Amongst the detritus I found a big poster board that used to sit atop the piano. Printed on it, in a huge font was the word “COUNT!” This was supposed the piano to remind Our Boy to mentally count to himself while practicing. Don’t know that it ever worked completely…

When they painted the room, the mural that was behind the piano was obliterated. I took a picture of it before they kilzed it with several coats followed by a pretty yellow paint called “Petal.” (Where do they come up with these paint names???) The Baron and The Boy drew that mural more than fifteen years ago, but it was time…sic transit gloria is a hard, hard experience for some in this house.

When it’s all done, the music room will be the DVD room since we’re going to buy a big monitor for watching movies. Then new visitors won’t look around curiously and ask “so where’s your TV?”

Oh heck. The time has come for self-inflicted pain with my home practice moves to keep my shoulder joint mobile. Come to think of it, I have to count my way through twenty repetitions of varying levels of pain. The worst is using my left hand to raise my right arm as far up as it will go.

Rave On!

2007-08-01T15:17:00.000-04:00

From Glumbert.

Muslim Rave Party Sensation

No, I don’t know what it means. It would be just as funny in other situations - say John Edwards. No make that Howard Dean. And Rumsfeld could do a fine job, too.

This is not a Cat Blog. However...

2007-07-26T21:19:00.000-04:00

The New England Journal of Medicine got the MSM’s attention recently.

Dr. David M. Dosa, a geriatrician in Rhode Island, reports on a resident at the Steere House Nursing and Rehabilitation Center in Providence. This is not a human resident, nor is he elderly.

Oscar is a cat whose sanctuary is the physician’s charting room. He sleeps there between making his rounds of the patients, assessing their current state of health. Evidently, it’s not that Oscar particularly likes dementia -

In the distance, a resident approaches. It is Mrs. P., who has been living on the dementia unit’s third floor for 3 years now. She has long forgotten her family, even though they visit her almost daily. Moderately disheveled after eating her lunch, half of which she now wears on her shirt, Mrs. P. is taking one of her many aimless strolls to nowhere. She glides toward Oscar, pushing her walker and muttering to herself with complete disregard for her surroundings. Perturbed, Oscar watches her carefully and, as she walks by, lets out a gentle hiss, a rattlesnake-like warning that says “leave me alone.” She passes him without a glance and continues down the hallway. Oscar is relieved…

Instead, he seems to have a particular affinity for the dying, and he stays with them in their final hours.

For the average American, fearful and avoidant of death, Oscar’s calling must seem ghoulish. To me, it seems a blessing to staff and families alike:

Making his way back up the hallway, Oscar arrives at Room 313. The door is open, and he proceeds inside. Mrs. K. is resting peacefully in her bed, her breathing steady but shallow. She is surrounded by photographs of her grandchildren and one from her wedding day. Despite these keepsakes, she is alone. Oscar jumps onto her bed and again sniffs the air. He pauses to consider the situation, and then turns around twice before curling up beside Mrs. K.

One hour passes. Oscar waits. A nurse walks into the room to check on her patient. She pauses to note Oscar’s presence. Concerned, she hurriedly leaves the room and returns to her desk. She grabs Mrs. K.’s chart off the medical-records rack and begins to make phone calls.

Within a half hour the family starts to arrive. Chairs are brought into the room, where the relatives begin their vigil. The priest is called to deliver last rites. And still, Oscar has not budged, instead purring and gently nuzzling Mrs. K. A young grandson asks his mother, “What is the cat doing here?” The mother, fighting back tears, tells him, “He is here to help Grandma get to heaven.” Thirty minutes later, Mrs. K. takes her last earthly breath. With this, Oscar sits up, looks around, then departs the room so quietly that the grieving family barely notices.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
We have a skinny little cat, Lulu. The first time I saw her, she’d wandered into our church hall while we were having lunch. It must’ve been summer then since the door was open. And in short order, the future Baron had picked her up…game over. I told him on the way home that we couldn’t afford another cat, having two in residence already -- yadda, yadda, mother lecture.

She was cute. So despite my announcement that we were taking her to the ASPCA that very week, somehow I never quite got around to making the trip to town. Instead, I took her to the local vet for shots and neutering.

The two other cats, George and Moe, had very different reactions to her. George, a rare male calico the fB had picked from a litter his friend’s cat had, displayed a heretofore unknown animosity to her. The vet called him “an abuser.” He was terrible to her so I kept them separated.

Moe the Mellow Fellow, however, got on with both cats and he and Lulu had a run through the house every night at 10 p.m. You could set your watch by their exercise time.

We live a good ways from the road, but evidently George had a large hunting territory. One day he was hit by a passing car as he dove out of a ditch after some furry, tasty thing. The Baron found him when he went to get the mail.

Some time later Moe disappeared. We called and looked everywhere, but no Moe. He was overweight, though I can’t say he ate much. We used to feed him a special diet and keep other food out of his way. The Baron concluded he must have been attacked by a fox or dog…Moe never did move very fast.

Several days after we’d resigned ourselves to his fate, the fB came home on a break from college. He wasn’t willing to accept Moe’s fate so he went into the woods, calling and calling Moe’s name. Eventually he heard an answering meow: thirty feet down an old hand-dug well that had been covered over years ago, was Moe. The cover had partially rotted and he’d fallen through.

We called a friend, a fireman, and he came over to assess the situation. He in turn called some Rescue Squad friends who came over with a harness, ropes, and a light. Unfortunately, before they could do much, they were called out on a car accident. When they returned, it had been decided that the Baron was slim enough to get down the well in the harness, put Moe in a basket, and have him winched up. I’m not sure I could’ve gone down thirty feet in a dark, narrow old well…for one of my kids I would, but that’s different.

They both eventually emerged from the hole and Moe seemed unaffected. However, I think those days without water were hard on his kidneys because he began to have more problems with crystals in his urine…he had surgery (which I will not describe) and it helped. But I knew he wouldn't live to a ripe old age in his condition.

As fortune would have it, some months later he went missing again. This time, the Baron found him, limp and lifeless. His neck had been broken - probably by a passing hound. I don't think that is a painful way to die, but it must have been scary for those last few moments.

Thus was Moe laid to rest with all the other cats who have passed their lives with us in the last twenty five years. Some of them gentle, some of them neurotic, some of them seeming permanently blissed out…like Moe, who enjoyed watching the water ripples in his bowl.

After we got Lulu, I became ill: first chronic fatigue and then cancer. It was then that Lulu began keeping me company. When I felt sick, there she was, waiting to curl up against me. At the time the Baron was gone a lot on work assignments so she was good company. Neurotic, but good company.

In order to calm her fearfulness -exacerbated by George’s bullying - I put her on klonopin, a benzodiazepine which serves to calm her hyper vigilance. It has helped a lot, improving her appetite, though she doesn't gain much weight, despite putting her on kitten food. And she does seem to suffer from an attachment disorder…I am the object of her attachment. The vet told me her underlying fearfulness is genetic; inherited from the father. Female cats cannot pass on that reclusive, retreating, almost feral gene. Only the dad…

Lulu has some of Oscar’s qualities. She’d be a good nursing home cat. However, I plan to have her hang around while I recover from the rotator cuff repair scheduled for my shoulder next week. Today, I read on my chart that it's a massive rotator cuff injury. I’d suspected as much, but it’s hard to see it in writing. All from tripping over a darn rock in the yard.

With Lulu and a good nerve block, I plan to have a not-too-painful recovery. However, I’ll bet the rehab exercises are going to be something from Dante. Ugh. They haul you out to begin them the day following surgery. Double ugh. My family doctor claims I'm a stoic but I don't feel stoic at all. Maybe I'll yell all the way through this coming hell and surprise everyone.

The surgeon says I’ll be good to go by November. How cheery -- three months. Just in time to cook Thanksgiving Dinner. So maybe we’ll go out to eat and I’ll have two things to be thankful for: my newly agile, pain-free right arm, and nothing to clean up after the feast.

"This Is What I Was Born to Do

2007-07-17T09:27:00.000-04:00

The future Baron has finally acquired his much hoped-for vineyard job. It’s over the mountain and through the woods to a spot near a ski resort.

He is the dog’s body - does a little of everything, including sweeping up frequently. He gives wine-tastings and yesterday did his first tour of the winery, for which he got a tip. Very pleased, he was.

He’s also done some bottling of wines and will be taught to open and close for the owners this week.

There are lots of tourists on the weekends, so that’s mainly when he works, plus the odd weekday when there are catch-up chores to do.

Is he happy? Here is what he says on his blog about the Fourth of July:

Since they needed all hands on deck, they asked me if I could come in and fill in wherever there were gaps in personnel.

So I did, and I was immediately thrown into the maelstrom. I ran tastings almost nonstop from ten o’clock until about five or six, when the crowd began to taper off. There were two live bands, a man named Paul who was marketing pasta sauces with his own self-styled “pasta tastings” next to the tasting room, and an unending flow of wine from our shelves to the picnic tables outside.

During that time, there were no pauses to stop and think or to consider what I was doing—namely, living the dream. The dream of finding a place in this world where a man can think, “This is what I was born to do.” The dream of finding a place to stand alone. The dream of imagining yourself being in the same place when you’ve grown old—and being completely happy with that idea.

With so many choices available, it can be difficult to know what it is you’re called to do. He is fortunate to have listened and to have followed. A year to work before he plunges back into the academic world again…but this time, a focused attention to the domain of enology (oenology if you’re British): the study of wine.

Meanwhile he draws diagrams of his own vineyard-to-be. Every day his dream expands and changes.

A Graceful Move

2007-07-13T21:41:00.000-04:00

This is cool.

Several generations ago they did this to our church, too. Of course, they had to leave the graveyard behind.

Hope they don't move ours again, after I'm gone, as I have every intention of being planted next to Momma, with room enough for the Baron.

I want people to wave in my general direction on the way into church, and kids to play hide-and-seek behind my gravestone. It should be wide enough to allow at least one child to crouch behind it, and high enough to hide a few Easter eggs in the Spring grass.

Hat tip:

David Thompson via Norm Geras

Feelings and Faces

2007-06-29T00:21:00.000-04:00

Donald Nathanson, M.D. has written much on the ideas of Sylvan Tomkins -- the latter’s work being a bit abstruse for most of us to digest easily.

Tomkins believed that there were nine - and only nine - universal emotional affects. These affects, i.e., feeling experiences, were innately tied to the nerves in the face. Thus a baby could not help but show it if he were in the midst of experiencing one of these affects.

Here are the nine:

Interest —> Excitement
Enjoyment—> Joy
Surprise —> Startle
Fear —> Terror
Distress—> Anguish
Anger —> Rage
Dissmell —> Disgust
Shame —> Humiliation

One important thing to notice is that each is on a spectrum. We spot something novel and become interested. As we move toward it and investigate further, we may become excited about our find. You see this phenomenon in small children all the time; the whole world is new and exciting.

In an optimal environment, the expression of interest, followed by excitement at learning something new actually increases the complexity of the neural network in children. In other words, it increases their intelligence. On the other hand, where curiosity is suppressed, boredom and depression often set in and the developing brain is also stifled. The eyes of such children often seem to be flat or empty.

Tomkins proposed that these nine affects were the sum total…we might experience variations on their themes as we matured, and we might learn (we’d better learn!) to mask our expressions in polite society, but we would continue to experience these affects throughout our lives.

Each affect has its own unique facial expression and body language. In shame, for instance, the neck droops and the eyes turn away from whatever caused the feeling state of shame. Intensifying, the state can move on to humiliation and cause the child to withdraw - physically if he can, or emotionally if he cannot. Everyone develops coping skills to deal with shame, though these skills are limited. Nathanson diagrammed them out in a compass of shame.
[Scroll halfway down the page to see the diagram]

Nathanson illustrates his book with pictures of babies in the midst of these feeling states. The “disgust” face is amusing to see — and moving, too. It makes you realize how absolutely similar we human beings are when we start out.

All of this is a preface to explain why this picture fascinates me. Here is a “baby face” that has disintegrated into pure rage. John McCain has an anger problem, hmm? Or at least it appears he has difficulty modulating this affect under duress.

I’d like to get eight more politician’s pictures illustrating the remaining affects. If I can, I’ll try to find images from both sides of the aisle. No need to pick on either group since - despite what some say - we’re all human. Somehow, though, I don’t think anything I find will be as absolutely perfect an example as this one is.

Maybe it's his chubby-cheeked baby face that makes this example so fascinating?

lolcats

2007-06-26T01:35:00.000-04:00

Have you seen them?

There are several running jokes in this huge collection of animal pictures (mostly of cats interacting in their environment while the omniscient human narrator provides the dialogue).

Wikipedia has an entry for lolcats — and another image — explaining both their provenance and the idiosyncratic pidgin language often employed in the captions.

A lolcat is an image macro featuring a photograph of a cat with a humorous and idiosyncratic caption. The name “lolcat” is a compound of lol and cat. lolcats are also referred to as cat macros.

lolcats are created for the purpose of sharing with others on imageboards and other internet forums, especially on Saturdays (“Caturdays”). lolcats are similar to other animal-based image macros such as the O RLY? owl, but the cuteness of cats “enhances” the appeal and increasing prominence of the Internet meme. lolcat is an example of anthropomorphisation.

lolcat images usually consist of a photo of a cat with a large caption characteristically formatted in a sans serif font such as Impact or Arial Black. The image is, on occasion, digitally edited for effect. The caption generally acts as a speech balloon encompassing a comment from the cat, or as a description of the depicted scene. The caption is intentionally written with deviations from standard English spelling and syntax, featuring “strangely-conjugated verbs, but [a tendency] to converge to a new set of rules in spelling and grammar.” These altered rules of English have been referred to as a type of pidgin or baby talk. The text parodies the grammar-poor patois stereotypically attributed to internet slang.

[The footnotes in the original have been omitted. Click on link to follow them]

It also has a link further down the page to information on snowclones, an evolution in speech formation that I will leave to you to peruse. Let us just say that the more things change, the more they change.

You can only surmise how things will evolve after you’re gone; what was our language will be very different in a hundred years, and it would ring strange and discordant to our ancient ears if we were able to return. Fortunately, we can’t.

Meanwhile, George Bernhard Shaw is rolling over in his grave…but then he needs the exercise anyway.

Next will be ROTHLHAO dog pictures. Except dogs are not as flexible as cats. All they can do is sad and glad. Hard to get a huffy looking dog, or an imperious one. They are buffoons. Amusing, but without the possibilities for depth that the lolcats possess. Perhaps it’s merely a matter of spinal differences.

Enjoy lolcats. See how many you can scroll through before you quit.

Once you see those “I can haz cheezburger” on “Caturdays” your time doesn’t belong to you anymore. Not to mention the diagrams for the monorail cat which keep popping up.

It’s definitely a different world.

Commentary on the Weather

2007-06-25T12:51:00.000-04:00

The following is an OT comment left on LGF last week. For some reason, his musings made me muse on the fact that we all sit with our sandwiches at lunchtime – outside, in the good weather – and think about the same things.

Somehow that is comforting,

Lunch Time Weather Musings

On this, the second sunniest day of the year, the Gulf of Mexico is nearly cloud free.

The Gulf is warming nicely.

And, a good part of the Gulf has warm water at least 25 meters deep, with some areas having warm water to 75 meters and more.

This is like the growing season for hurricanes, like the orange tree in my backyard. The oranges are still green, and no bigger than limes, but they are getting better and better.

The weak low off Florida won’t develop as long as strong Westerlies aloft blow the thunderstorms away from the LLCS.

No forecast to develop, but this interesting feature should move into the Gulf of Mexico and enhance the rainfall late Monday through Wednesday from coastal Texas to extreme Western Florida.

I think its cool how the weather in Texas this time of year can sometimes come from Africa and cross the entire Atlantic and Caribbean to get here.

No wonder people invoked the weather gods. They are mighty and inscrutable indeed.

Midsummer's Eve and St. John's Wort

2007-06-24T13:18:00.000-04:00

The Baron’s friend, Phanarath, sent us a recording and the lyrics for Vi Elsker Vort Land (We Love Our Country), a Midsummer’s Eve song the Danes sing every year at the celebration of the summer solstice.

For many years we used to have a two-day party here on the weekend nearest the solstice. Were we still celebrating, it would have been winding up today with trips to the river for a swim and then lunch, before everyone folded their tents and headed back to the city.

The best part of the celebration was Saturday evening. Everyone brought food, there was often live music, and then immediately after dark — around 9:00 or so — our friends would put on a spectacular fireworks display, lasting a half hour or so.

Yesterday was sadly quiet; we don’t have a Midsummer’s Eve party anymore. Over the years things change, and the gradual deterioration of my health made it harder to do every year. Besides that, after my daughter’s death, celebrations became harder. The picture of her that I sometimes display was taken at one of those long ago parties.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
I notice that the Danish midsummer song mentions “sankte Hans” (St. John), whose feast day is June 24th. Here is the English translation of one verse:

We love our country
and with sword in hand
outside enemy’s will know us, as ready
but against unpeacefull spirits
over fields, under the beach
We will light the fire on the graves of our fathers
every town has its witch and every Parish has its trolls
we will keep them from our lives with fires of joy.
we want peace in this land
sankte Hans, sankte Hans!
it can be won, when the hearts never gets doubtfully cold.
we want peace in this land
sankte Hans, sankte Hans!
it can be won, when the hearts never gets doubtfully cold.

I didn’t know the Danes celebrated ‘sankte Hans’ particularly. They probably don’t anymore; no doubt it’s an anachronism, just as is naming hypericum perforatum St. John’s Wort.

Phanarath’s song reminded me that I’d let St. John’s wort die out in the garden. The plant is not long-lived, but it’s attractive and sturdy. I put it in among the flowers in my daughter-in-law’s perennial bed a few years ago. Her house is on a busy corner; lots of people walk by with their dogs and the former owners put up a small, attractive rail fence — probably to keep pedestrians from cutting that corner. The St. John’s wort looks pretty right there.

The Germans call it “Johanniskraut” — “kraut” means herb, says the Baron. In Germany, tinctures and powders of hypericum perforatum outsell the more modern treatments for depression. Evidently the Germans have established that it helps mild to moderate depression. A lot of people think herbal medicine is “safer” than the synthetics that Big Pharma concocts. However, taking this herb can cause photosensitivity just like the pharmaceutical anti-depressants do. If you use it, be sure to stay out of the sun during the most intense part of the day.

Once I have a car again (mine died the other day — but that’s another story), I’ll get more St. John’s wort and re-plant it in the herb garden where it used to flourish; it’s bright yellow prostrate flowers went well with the tall white Echinacea and the daylilies. Yes, I know the latter aren’t herbs, they were just there at the end of the bed when I started it. Besides, the flowers and the spring shoots are good in stir-fry dishes. I know because Wally Ballou showed us how to cook them. And daylilies abound here — they grow wild everywhere, just like the dogwoods and redbud. So even if they don’t cure anything, they’re pretty in addition to being edible and not prone to diseases or dramas. That’s as good an excuse as any not to have to dig them up and move them.

Thanks to Phanarath for the song — what a joyous way to celebrate the solstice. Whoever said that singing is “praying twice” was right.

Happy feast of Saint John to all.

When I Fall in Love

2007-06-23T08:31:00.000-04:00

You Tube has disabled the embed for Nat King Cole’s video, and the sound doesn’t meet today’s standards, but this is worth watching. It’s hard to imagine him this young, but not this talented.

Before I was married, this was my secret song to whomever it was that I would someday meet. Now on the far side of that bridge, I know that the lyrics were true.

Fausta caught this picture while on vacation in Kill Devil Hills. She said the groom had a chest full of medals, eight rows perhaps. So biology alone could explain the bride’s exultation; she's got a winner there.

May they grow old together, full of grace and years.

* * * * * * * * * * * *

When I fall in love
It will be forever.
For I’ll never fall in love
In a restless world like this is
Love is ended before it’s begun
And too many moonlight kisses
Seem to cool in the warmth of the sun.

When I give my heart
It will be completely.
Or I’ll never give my heart.
And the moment I can feel that you feel that way too
Is when I'll fall in love with you.

[Of course, the first time I heard this song, I was in a convertible on a starry night in July, in Pensacola. The second lieutant who was driving had other plans than “falling in love forever” so I ended up walking home.

It didn’t ruin the song for me, though.]

Busted Flat in Baton Rouge

2007-05-31T17:53:00.000-04:00

I have a good post or two I'd like to put up at Gates, but unfortunately my mind has gone on strike. There's one on the fate of Christian converts in Germany, and another of the U.S. Fifth Fleet exercises in the Straits of Hormuz.

God, I love pictures of ships moving in convoy. Must be a left-over from my childhood days of watching them come in at Mayport...which is in Florida and I don't know if it's a carrier basin anymore. Back then it was palmetto scrub and ships. Destroyers, destroyer escorts, and those hunking big carriers. Delightful for a child who loved orderly mayhem.

I'd also like to do some gardening but it's too hot. Florida has come to Virginia, only without the thundery afternoons that made everything lush. How can this be June when it feels like August? I been cheated. I have some rose bushes the children left at Shelagh's grave for Mother's Day but I can't find the courage to plant them.

And the future Baron's belongings accompanied him home from college. They sprawl in heaps here and there, proving that bodies at rest tend to gather cobwebs. I doubt they will move unless my inertia is somehow overcome...fortunately I have barred the door so it won't be necessary to shove boxes off the couch were someone to show up.

Yesterday, in a small, controlled fit of desperation I went to see this MD who is also a homeopath. I hope his remedy cures me of Shelagh's death but somehow I doubt it. On my way home, I noticed a headline that said Casey's mother -- I have honestly forgotten the woman's name already* -- is retiring from her anti-war duties. Poor wretch. Now the whole façade will come tumbling down. I'll invite her to join me in my dark hole here. We can argue politics and throw clods of dirt at one another.

Beats crying all by yourself, I should think.

*Cindy Sheehan, that's her name...Welcome to the pit, my dear. Have a mud pie?

Happy Birthday to Me!

2007-05-26T13:06:00.000-04:00

It is my birthday. Coy youth is gone – gratefully, most days—and I’ve taken to flirting with eternity, which as you know is so much vaster...and yet takes up no room at all.

But who can get out of the grip that time has around our hearts? It’s there like a pickpocket, till the last breath is gone.

So I wrote my own birthday song…sing along everybody:

EVERY LITTLE MOMENT COUNTS

Every little moment counts,
They’re all adding and subtracting,
Piling on conventional wisdom
But taking away, taking away
With each breath you’re breathing
Stealing a leaf from your measured days

It’s all we have, this time right here
It’s all we have, there’s no way to save it
Time slips through your hands
There goes one less remaining

Don’t divide what’s left but
Begin with reclaiming:
Reclaim the sky,
Sunshine and twilight
Reclaim the past
Every lonely midnight.
Reclaim the joy, the smiles you’ve been given
Reclaim it all, know you’re forgiven…

‘Cause time’s all you have
So give it away, spend like a sailor
Spread it around, it’s not about failure
Let everyone play
Give it all away…

‘Cause every little moment counts
Every last single one
Spend them all on love
Till you’re finally done…

Every little moment
Every little moment
Every little moment…counts

Once Upon a Holy Week

2007-04-06T17:54:00.000-04:00

A poem from many years ago, when I was both crazier and more creative than I am now.

There is a theory, not without its merits, that anyone with a compulsion to write is a bit barmy. I'll buy that...well, I'll buy it if it doesn't cost too much. However, I suspect I may have already paid, maybe even more than once.

Holy Week

The best laid weeks sometimes get up
And walk away, unsatisfied.

Tuesday, I left therapy dizzy and disoriented
And fell into a hole of my own devising.
In theological circles, the abyss.
In Freudian dogma, Momma’s nether parts.
Either way, it’s dark in here.
The walls weep.

Wednesday, I passed a sigmoidoscopy
With flying colors—mostly brown.
Lying on the table, the procedure seemed familiar…
Ah, yes — therapy. Mostly accomplished behind my back,
By therapist and supervisor, in camera.
Each sigmundoscopy confirms their diagnosis
The asshole, she is interminable,
Prognosis guarded. Or, as my psychiatrist says,
“It’s not for shit.”
I concur.

On Thursday the stonecarvers arrived
At the churchyard with Momma’s headstone.
The Celtic knots her only son-in-law had designed
Were right there on its face,
Proclaiming her three names and those two vital dates
All in their proper places.
I promised her I’d witness the laying of the stone
But when I got there, at the appointment hour,
The stone was in place, the carvers gone.
It seemed as if it had always been there,
Fitting in with the other graves, and the nearby
Flowering bluets. I sat by the grave, tired from
My long journey here, idly tracing the engraving
With my tears. She left us at three AM to die alone
And now I’d missed the laying of her monument.
It is a role I am born to play.
In my defense, I reminded her
My doctor claimed to know the core of me
Was whole—“You must be responsible
For some of that,” I comforted.
In reply the wind blew hard and sudden,
Smacking down my belated vase of daffodils.
Clouds shrouded the sun.
Oh, Momma.

On Friday I crucified myself;
Doing the last hand alone was difficult
But with faith all things are possible.
The sky was cloudless. No crowds gathered.
I climbed off and dragged my crucifix
Home. I put it with the Christmas tree stand
In Momma’s closet, where the cat hides.
Maybe next year will be different.
A better crowd of standers-by, perhaps.
Or more dramatic weather.

Fortunately, even past bad poetry and self-pity, there is always Easter.

The Punctual Rape of Every Blesséd Day

2007-03-22T10:25:00.000-04:00

Writing about Cathy Seipp’s death yesterday on Gates of Vienna has led me to a long meditation on my childhood.

What sparked the ruminations was the clear memory of singing Gregorian chant during the many Requiem Masses we were called out of class to chant during the liturgy. I can’t remember how many of us there were…though since our choir director,Sister Marie Therese, is still alive and more active than I am, I will find out. Back then, it felt as though our numbers filled the choir loft.

Not being very good at it, I was ususally relegated to the alto section. Not much tune in the alto section, but we made up in strength for what we lacked in quality. And I liked the ver plain chant of the alto part. It was soothing.

Which led me to thinking about my less-than-optimum childhood and to wondering why I am not more dysfunctional than I am. What factors “saved” me?

This may sound strange, but I have often wondered if group singing had a great deal to do with soothing the savage breast of so many displaced children. We sang all the time: at church, during recreation time, on bus rides to while away the boredom. I know the old songs from the childhoods of the nuns, the songs of the Big Girls (anyone over ten was a “Big Girl” and was of much higher status than we were). These higher beings rolled their hair in curlers, wore bras, and they sang the latest songs - Nat King Cole comes to mind. They were also in charge of cooking and did a terrible job at it. Perhaps I grew up to become a good cook partly in retaliation for all the mornings of burned oatmeal.

Obviously singing is not enough to get you through [“Hah,” say my Observing Self. Just hum a few lines of “Whistle a Happy Tune”]. The linchpin holding everything together was our unvarying schedule. All these years later, I can still recall how the hours of our days were structured, winter and summer. We lived a cloistered life, punctuated not only by song, but more importantly by prayer. Prayers for getting up, prayers for lying down. Prayers before and after meals. The Angelus at noon. The rosary in the nuns’ chapel after dinner. Prayer was the skeleton on which the flesh of our days hung.

When I grew up and read The Eight Ages of Man, I remember the author saying that what saves childhood for many of us is an over-arching sense of meaning. A few months ago I read his daughter’s story of her father’s life. He invented himself, carved out his own meaning. He never even knew his real last name, so when he moved to this country, he named himself Erik Erikson. And - in an attempt to preserve an identity that was closed to him by his mother’s silence re his beginnings — Erikson resisted his Jewish step-father’s fervent desire for him to adopt Judaism. However, I think the rituals and observances of the religion he refused saved him, too. Erikson’s productivity was unflagging.

And his new identity? An attempt to get past the boundary his mother erected, to find his first Self.

My productivity is more porous than his. I never know, on waking up, if I will be scattered and lack all initiative, or if whatever remains of the inner Mafia of my childhood will permit me to move through the day in relative calm, experiencing the initiative that - in more integrated souls - allows one to stay vertical and busy. I read once that happiness means being busy about eighty or ninety percent of the time. That sounds about right to me. In fact, I lust after the energy required to maintain such a virtuous schedule…and on the days that I do, life is glorious.

Richard Wilbur captured it perfectly in this, my favorite of his poems:

Love Calls Us to the Things of the World

The eyes open to a cry of pulleys,
And spirited from sleep, the astounded soul
Hangs for a moment bodiless and simple
As false dawn.

Outside the open window
The morning air is all awash with angels.

Some are in bed-sheets, some are in blouses,
Some are in smocks: but truly there they are.
Now they are rising together in calm swells
Of halcyon feeling, filling whatever they wear
With the deep joy of their impersonal breathing;

Now they are flying in place, conveying
The terrible speed of their omnipresence, moving
And staying like white water; and now of a sudden
They swoon down into so rapt a quiet
That nobody seems to be there.
The soul shrinks

From all that it is about to remember,
From the punctual rape of every blesséd day,
And cries,

“Oh, let there be nothing on earth but laundry,
Nothing but rosy hands in the rising steam
And clear dances done in the sight of heaven.”

Yet, as the sun acknowledges
With a warm look the world’s hunks and colors,
The soul descends once more in bitter love
To accept the waking body, saying now
In a changed voice as the man yawns and rises,

“Bring them down from their ruddy gallows;
Let there be clean linen for the backs of thieves;
Let lovers go fresh and sweet to be undone,
And the heaviest nuns walk in a pure floating
Of dark habits,
keeping their difficult balance.’

Aside from his ode to laundry - obviously he didn’t wash it or hang it out, nor does he suffer from the "rosy hands" that did so...still, since it billows there outside his window on wakening: he knows, oh he knows:

The soul shrinks
From all that it is about to remember,
From the punctual rape of every blesséd day…

The soul's "bitter love," indeed.

The painting, “Washday” is from a small collection of works by Val Doonican

Saint Patrick's Day Shadows

2007-03-17T17:22:00.000-04:00

This is an up-and-down day for me. Already had two teary spells and the day is still young. Well, youngish…the sun is still making its way across the sky.

St. Patrick’s Day…funny how, as you get older, holidays begin to assume more shaded, bittersweet overtones. Growing up with a Dublin mother and lots of Irish nuns fresh over from the Old Place, I loved St. Paddy’s Day. We always went to Mass. Mother sniffed derisively at the green beer and drunkness of American celebrations. In *her* youth, the pubs in Dublin were closed on March 17th. In Savannah, we went to the wonderful St. Patrick’s Day parade. In South Boston, I watched the festivities for several years with my former in-laws. It’s hazy now: I remember the formal parlors in the three decker homes, and the amazing amounts of beer and politicians. It was a noisy, happy place, though we always went back home to the suburbs before nightfall.

Here in the blue hills of Viriginia, March 17th is the day to plant potatoes and peas. I didn’t prepare the vegetable bed yesterday because of the lashing rain, and now it’s windy and cold. Methinks I’ll commit a venial sin and wait till the spring solstice. Besides, I have to move a raspberry cane I planted in that plot “temporarily” last September.

There isn’t any Irish sentiment where we live. Just as well. It’s become a sad holiday now. My Irish mother is gone, my lovely colleen, Shelagh, is gone, and — worst of all - a friend of the future Baron, a boy with the most wonderful Irish name - killed himself at school on this date several years ago. The fB and I dug up his grandmother’s crucifix and a tall candle to burn in their memory today.

Meanwhile, I offer you a Celtic blessing I found some years ago. I framed it then, and now I use it for this St. Patrick’s Day:

May God’s tenderness shine through you,
to warm all who are hurt and lonely.
May the blessing of gentleness be with you.

May the God of Peace be with you,
stilling the heart that hammers
with fear and doubt and confusion.
And may your peace cover
those who are troubled or anxious.

May the God of Mercy be with you, forgiving you.
May your readiness to forgive calm the fears
and deepen the trust of those who have hurt you.

May the God of strength be with you,
holding you in strong-fingered hands.
May you be a sacrament of strength
to those whose hands you hold.

May the God of Gentleness be with you,
caressing you with sunlight and rain and wind.

Amen.

March Chores

2007-03-12T00:12:00.000-04:00

We began Spring pruning today. I had the Baron cut several large trunks from the fig – opening it up to the light, and moving the mass away from the house. It gets so overgrown in the summer that no light gets into that south corner. As a result, some of the siding at the bottom is rotted. Tomorrow I will take the clippers and neaten up the job.

The butterfly bushes were also cut – not judiciously but right down to the ground. I learned the hard way not to let them get out of hand. Otherwise nothing can grow near them. Or would want to. I like to keep them deadheaded during bloom time. It really extends their season well into Fall. But that is workable in a flower bed only if you cut them back severely in March (around here).

Our flowering cherry put out lots of ugly spouts so those went. Along with branches that too deeply shade the flower bed below it. I never expected it to grown so tall or so deeply branched. Its mate – both of them being bought at the end of a season some years ago for five dollars each-- is planted in the herb bed; it is so much smaller than the one by the house that they no longer resemble each other.

I meant to gather the branches and leave them to bloom inside but forgot them before dark. I hope I can salvage them tomorrow.

I gingerly climbed the stepladder (ever since I fell off that ladder and shredded the meniscus on my left knee, the Baron gets nervous when I venture near it) and began pruning the old apple tree, removing suckers and branches that crossed through the middle. Its mate died off finally last year – so dead that even the remaining flat stump is a little spongy and rotten. Meanwhile the live one will take a bit of work since I didn’t prune it last year. The light was fading by the time I’d cleared the western side of the tree. I don’t know how much longer it has, either. I think I will replace them both with Arkansas Blacks. That is one fine apple. Or maybe Albemarle Pippins. Now wouldn’t that be a treat?

I was wicked with the viburnum. I know you’re not supposed to prune them until after they flower, but I don’t like the shape of this one and I keep trying to work it into something more attractive. Maybe I just don’t like viburnums.

We prepped my “hot box” for seedlings. This little green house is a rectangular wooden frame whose bottom is a piece of foam core insulation cut to fit and nailed on. A storm window fits perfectly onto this rig. The window can be moved a bit as the temperature requires. For very cold nights – of which there will be many between now and May 1st, I have encased an old blanket in plastic – the plastic being rainproof – and it will lie across the window, insulating the box. The whole thing is on the well house roof, which makes it easy to maintain.

Today I cleaned out the winter trash – oak leaves and acorns galore, plus over-wintered little azaleas I need to stick somewhere. Then I put in some prime potting soil. This bag of soil lay on the ground next to the well house all through the winter. When we opened it, I noticed lots of worms already active. They probably liked the ground lobster particles and seaweed.

Last year, I planted many of my annual seeds directly into the soil in the box. This year, I am going to fill the plastic six-celled planters with potting mixture instead and line the box with them. However, with love-in-a-mist, I’ll try a direct seeding into the ground. They don’t seem to move well and I’d like to get a patch established somewhere once and for all.

The nice thing about this homemade green house is that all summer I can bed plants I’m trying to root or move things to a holding place until I can decide where to put them. Wish I’d had one of these years ago.

The daffodils and spring crocus are blooming. Even a couple of hyacinths. The pansies are putting out flowers, but haven’t spread much yet. I see some holes where a few died off during the winter. Will have to fill those soon – I love the antique colors, though some years I’ve done blues and white. And last year I did that strange orange variety. It sure did light up the place. Most of the tulips survived the voles – that trick with Bon Ami in the hole must have worked. It will be weeks before they bloom, though, and then the hostas will come along to cover their straggly ending.

Some unnamed bulb, which must have traveled in with a nursery plant, is springing up everywhere, green and lush. In May, it has a pretty, though not particularly distinctive white flower. This mystery guest, who has been around for about three years now, is more invasive than wild onion. I wait for moist soil and yank up mounds of them and put them in the trash. You have to yank slowly and twist a bit or all you get is greenery. They would be nice naturalized somewhere in a large wildflower plot, but they’re tiresome guests in small beds and large lawns.

I love March – all new beginnings. It has difficult parts, too, because March is Shelagh’s birthday. I never think “March was Shelagh’s birthday. Even though this will be the fourth anniversary of her death, I am still inclined to think of her in the present tense. Shelagh and the Baron shared the same birth date…no matter what I do his birthday now has a permanent shadow.

Are You Spelling Impaired?

2007-03-07T12:44:00.000-05:00

Here’s Robert Heckendorn’s List of Hard to Spell Words.

It is good resource for those who find spelling confusing and a chore. For people like my daughter, who, when faced with uncertainty about spelling, had her own rule: “when in doubt, add an ‘e’ somewhere.”

On the other hand, it is a place of sheer wonderment for those to whom spelling comes naturally. For the latter, they can only ponder (or gape at) the inventive phonetic solutions that poor spellers have come up with to address their deficit.

The author’s list is long, but obviously incomplete. Here is his statement of methodology: [edited for clarity and spelling errors - D]

Here is my list of over 1000 hard to spell words.

Here are some important points about this list:

Sometimes a word is entered as a misspelling of a particular meaning such as “dam”.

These spellings are for American English and not British English or any other language. I may occasionally treat a British spelling as a misspelling of American English. This is not meant as an insult to the English any more that my saying that driving on the left side of the road is wrong in the US. You will get arrested for it here. I drive on the left when I am in England and on the right in the U.S. I adapt to local custom.

The same word may be misspelled more than one way. People have different ways to misspelling and I try to include a variety.

I accept new entries and corrections.

The words come in pairs: the first word is the misspelling, the second word is the correct spelling.

Here is a list of just the correct spellings (which is not always up to date).

Here is a list of just the incorrect spellings (which is also not always up to date).

Have fun!

And here is a brief look at his compilation, though I urge you to scroll through the list at your leisure:

Presbaterian Presbyterian
Tootonic Teutonic
Tusday Tuesday
Wendsday Wednesday
abanden abandon
abizmal abysmal
abriviate abbreviate
abscound abscond
absorbant absorbent
absorbtion absorption
abstanence abstinence
abundenceabundance
abundent abundant
acatemy academy
acceptence acceptance
acceptible acceptable
acceptibly acceptably

And here are two personal favorites, though you will notice they don’t carry the Shelagh rule of adding an ‘e’ somewhere when in doubt. On the other hand, maybe these would-be spellers were never in doubt at all:

angshus anxious
farmasudical pharmaceutical

The website has an Idaho.edu address in its URL, but it no longer leads back to the author. Too bad, I’d like to see what he teaches besides the obvious “Remedial English for the Poorly Educated Freshmen.”

It’s definitely a wasteland out there.

Gus van Horn’s Fact Checker

2007-03-04T13:45:00.000-05:00

I’m a little loose with facts myself. I figure if I get even an adjective wrong, someone will show up to set me straight. So I see fact-gathering as a game of pick-up sticks. I try to nudge them out of a story, but sometimes the whole thing collapses.

~~Mr.~~ (that's Doctor van Horn to you, bub), however, has an impeccable source for facts: his cat, Jerome. This is evidently a moniker the cat chose for himself, no doubt in honor of St. Jerome, who was Pope Damasus I’s secretary. (though I haven’t actually asked - that would be fact-checking and this blog is for wool-gathering and jumping to conclusions).

~~Mr.~~ Doctor van Horn explains:

I’ve intended to write about one of my best friends for quite awhile, but have mentioned him only a couple of times so far and only in passing at that. We have been close collaborators for over a decade. He has stuck with me through thick and thin. I am, of course, talking about my cat, Jerome.

Jerome is, of course, his nom de plume, and I just learned of it today. He is a cat of many eccentricities and surprises, not the least of which is his pen name. In fact, almost everything about this fine beast is eccentric in some way, and his uniqueness will pervade my whole account. He is at once the most unusual and, by far, the best pet I’ve ever had.

In the post, ~~Mr.~~ Doctor vH describes their acquisition of Jerome, and his probable ancestry:

… we checked out a few books on cat breeds and determined that he is probably at least part Turkish Van. Because he has been such a great pet and is getting on in years, my wife and I are talking to breeders to get a better idea of whether he really is a Turkish Van. Especially after seeing an entire row of Turkish Vans at a cat show awhile back and recently describing him to a professional breeder, I am fairly sure that he is a Turkish Van. We certainly don’t expect another one to have the same personality, but the next cat my wife and I get will be a Turkish Van. Jerome’s temperament was probably shaped by his being rescued, but he also seems typical of his breed.

My word! Jerome is still with them and they’re already planning on his replacement. I do hope he doesn’t discover this in his fact-checking. Vans are smart and if he reads that part, things may not go so well…the trauma might cause him to be unable to ever check another fact again.

And one important disagreement I have with ~~Mr.~~ Doctor van Horn’s ideas re his cat’s gentle, friendly nature: he describes Jerome’s precarious existence before being rescued and to this he ascribes his benignity. It is my experience that cats - or any mammals - who are neglected or mistreated while young do not go on to acquire gentle, grateful natures as a result. In fact, the opposite is true. There is a window for acquiring a social nature and it closes very early. Cats and kids can compensate, but they’ll never regain lost ground.

Nope, in this case it’s genetic - he’s got a Van.

As it is also genetic in the case of my neurotic cat, Lulu. What a mess. My vet says that in cats a fearful nature is passed on through the paternal genes. Her daddy must’ve been a feral beast, indeed, for she jumps at the slightest movement.

We got snookered when she wandered in through the open door of the church and I let the future Baron take her home while I made noises about having to give her to SPCA. After all, we already had two cats as it was. Of course, we never quite made that trip.

And as fortune would have it, eventually Lulu turned out to be my “chemo cat.” While otherwise quite leery of everyone (especially after the dominant cat started making her life hell, while I was in chemotherapy and would curl in a fetal position in bed, indescribably cold and tired, Lulu would jump up and curl in the curve where my knees bend. She was a nice warm lump, content to lie there for hours. Ever since, on occasions when I haven’t felt well, I feel her lying next to me.

Ever since I put her on clonazepam it has made all the difference. Ms. Congeniality? Not exactly. But she will come when called now instead of hiding under the bed, and sometimes, of her own volition, she will jump up where you’re sitting and peer into your eyes. Black cats seem to like eye contact.

She has developed a rotten habit: yowling in the middle of the night as though she has lost track of where we are. She does this routine right next to the bed, so if I call her to climb up, she does…and then settles down to sleep. However, just as often I exile her to the kitchen. Damn cat.

Of course if you’re sitting in front of the laptop, she thinks her perch ought to be the keyboard. So I have to remove her and then wipe the keys of any trace of her germy derriere.

Now this creature is our only cat. George, the male calico, was hit by a car while hunting. Moe, the fB’s beloved cat, who once fell down an old well and was stuck there for five days before the fB came home from college and found him, had his neck broken by a dog…we think. Moe couldn’t move very fast, so he was an easy target.

Only Lulu remains. And it is far, far too late to send her to the SPCA. Besides, her sleek black coat is beginning to be flecked with white…

I tol ya that the blogosphere is an automatic fact-checker. Turns out that Mr. van Horn ain't no mister at all. He's Doctor van Horn.

Proves my point about fact-checkers, hmmm?

What Do Women Want? I’m So Glad You Asked, Dr. Freud

2007-02-12T18:30:00.000-05:00

Protein Wisdom linked to a study in the UK on what women find attractive in men. It’s not a rigorous accounting by any means, but it certainly shows the intuitive mating selection process for women.

High-flying men are not as attractive to women looking for love as those with an average job, scientists say.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the University of Central Lancashire research found the 186 female students asked preferred good-looking men.

But within that group, those without top careers were deemed most suitable, the Personality and Individual Differences journal reported.

The team said women seemed to feel high-flyers would not be good fathers.

[…]

“We suggest that females see physically attractive, high status males as being more likely to pursue a mating strategy rather than a parenting strategy.”

There is more information at the site, with looks being weighed against men’s professions.

When I first saw this at post at Protein Wisdom and read the comments, I noticed there were only men on the thread. So I had to put my two cents in. And as I thought about it, I remembered the many groups I’d facilitated with battered women as they struggled to figure out how they’d ended up being in a nightmare relationship. Was there a way to gauge which men were safe and if there was some way to tell ahead of time, what was it? So often they’d say sadly, “but he was so nice…

Over the course of several years, with the input of hundreds - if not thousands - of women, we came up with some basic guidelines. I was surprised, as I commented on PW’s post, that I remembered most of the criteria for “safe” men. But then, we did work on this subject for several years, and it was a pressing one for each member of the group. Obviously, I internalized their ideas.

What follows is not necessarily in order of importance. In fact, I don’t recall that we ever ordered the criteria that way. It seemed more important to simply understand the details that went into making a safe choice where men were concerned.

It’s important to remember that this is after-the-fact reasoning. Each woman was bringing to the conversation what she needed and what had been sorely missing in her relationship with the man she’d trusted, the man who ended up beating her.

“Scientific” it’s not. But heart-felt is definitely the foundation of this list. Such sadness and loss went into describing a safe man - but also great hope.

The study that Protein Wisdom linked to discussed whether wealthy men would be considered most attractive. That was one issue we talked about since some of the women came from upper class backgrounds. And physical attractiveness was another. Some physically abusive men are quite handsome…

Here’s my comment at Protein Wisdom, with some editing for this post:

When I used to do crisis counseling with battered women the idea of a “safe” man was a recurrent theme, hashed over again and again as women struggled to figure out why they hadn’t seen it coming...

Handsome isn’t necessarily safe — very often, having gotten by on his looks since he was two, Handsome may tend toward narcissism. tend — obviously they’re not all like that, except for those in Hollywood. Narcissism flourishes there.

Very wealthy men are of two categories: inherited and earned. The former do tend to make strategic alliances, though some of these partnerships are disastrous. See Ethel Kennedy’s family tree.

The latter, with their earned wealth, have a different sense of entitlement. Usually they’re looking for drop-dead beautiful as a further proof of their success. Again, just a tendency, not an absolute. There is a high rate of divorce in this category due to the driven nature of many high earners. Just ask any bitter ex-wife of some doctor. She ended up raising the children by herself only to have him trade her in after thirty years for a newer model. Strangely, the new one often looks like the old one, just twenty or thirty years younger.

Anyway, that said, here’s the “safe” list my battered women evolved over the years:

1. He gets on well with his family, particularly his mother or sisters. Family members don’t do dramas or cut off relationships —e.g., his momma gets on with her own family and her in-laws (as best she can).

2. He works steadily at a job he really likes. Never leaves one job without having lined up another. Isn’t a work-a-holic.

3. He has an avocation that really engages him — fishing, reading, motorcycles...whatever. But not so absorbing he’s never home or unavailable for extended periods.

4. He has some interest in the larger world and gives some of his time to a community group or someone in need. Like maybe he mows the yard for the old people next door.

5. His moods are reliable. Not happy-sappy, just predictable— e.g., you know for certain how he feels and what he will say and how loud he’ll say it if — again — you borrow his tools and don’t put them back. A corollary: the person he is in public is the same person he is at home. No Jekylls/Hydes need apply.

6. His times and routines are predictable. He’s never three days late for dinner.

7. He has a sense of humor and thinks you’re funny, too. You share secret jokes.

8. He’s sensible about money and reasonable. You don’t have to account for every penny, nor do you have to worry he’ll buy a $500.00 whats-is instead of paying the rent or the mortgage or the children’s dental bills.

9. He enjoys children to some extent, especially his own. He sees them as people.

10. He’s trustworthy. Keeps his word.

It’s been a few years, so that’s the list as I remember it —though maybe there were twelve qualities, not ten. I think one was “no substance abuse of any kind” since that was a frequent problem, and physical abuse is often accompanied by substance abuse. However, battering a woman when you’re stone cold sober is far more frightening an indicator that you’re a dangerous person. Those are the women I preferred to send out of town to another shelter.

And I believe they decided that a “loner” was a danger signal since it meant you couldn’t have friends, either. It also meant he didn’t have good people skills, another warning signal.

By the way, this phenomenon really does cut across socio-economic lines — and political ones, too. Though politics didn’t enter the equation much if the abuse was severe. No room to think about who’s running for office when you’re busy running from someone who swears they love you.

That was then. I wonder what it’s like now for Muslim women here in the US. That problem never came up on my innocent pre-9/11 horizon.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
James Higham has another survey here, this one from Canada. He’d like to know if you agree.

Mondays, Manure, and Getting Rid of Unwanted Guests

2007-01-15T10:23:00.000-05:00

I have always liked Mondays, even when life was too hard to contemplate getting up in the morning. Perhaps this is an incurable optimism, some limbic system quirk that kicks in no matter what, to tell me “hey, new beginnings. A chance to start over.”

At heart, I’m one of those people looking for the horse because I found the manure pile. Not that I want the bother of caring for a horse, mind you, but wow!... all that manure, man. What a goldmine for my garden. On the other hand, a few years ago, a friend let me come and take all the aged manure from her piles of llama and horse effluvia. It was like found money…until the following year, when I realized that I had also carried home a great colony of Japanese beetle grubs. To thoroughly mix my metaphors, what a Trojan horse that pile of doo doo turned out to be.

And drat, the skunk population seems to be down because there are no dug up spots in the yard - an indication they’ve been feasting from the underground. Fortunately, we have moles…yes, fortunately: they love Japanese beetle grubs. And unlike voles, they don’t eat bulbs. I don’t mind putting up with their mole runs; our yard is big enough to share with such helpers.

Supposedly Bon Ami cleansing powder, sprinkled into the tulip bulb hole, will prevent the voles from wanting to chomp. I tried it this year; we’ll see. So far, though, they’ve eliminated liatris, poppies, lilies, and tulips. ThankyouGod, they don’t like hostas or anything in the daffodil and iris families.

I haven’t given up yet. I’m still working on ways to foil them. But I buy cheap bulbs while I work on my master plan. I am considering getting large Sam’s Club-sized hot pepper sauce and cayenne and thoroughly mixing that in with the bulb soil. I wonder if that would deter them?

Meanwhile, it’s Monday and my paperwhite Narcissus has just started blooming in a north window. And the shamrock I brought back from the dead is taking over the pot and putting out lots of airy-fairy blossoms.

Now if I could just figure out a way to get that wax plant to bloom. Five years and some of the vines are six feet long. Lovely leaves, but NO blooms. Maybe I should talk to it more, show it pictures of other, nice obedient wax plants that put forth floriferously. Or maybe threats…I looked online but all I saw were stories about other people's wonderfully prolific wax plants. I took the cutting from a large, ever blooming plant that was at least fifty years old. But this one, its offspring doesn't seem to respond to anything, not even flowering plant food. Grows like crazy, though.

Meanwhile, there are definitely worse days than Monday.

Are There Any Adults Who LIKED High School?

2007-01-14T10:58:00.000-05:00

Over at Gates of Vienna we seem to have stumbled upon a vein of school material - the stuff that makes the Baron rant because it’s obvious the corrupted practices of pc education are leaving our kids in the lurch – not to mention President Bush’s mindless support of the “No Boondoggle Left Behind” program. This odiferous piece of legislative garbage doesn’t provide any money for vocational schools, by the way, so some kids are indeed left behind. Vo-Tech will just have to make do. Build their own desks, maybe.

Continuing in school mode, later today I’m going to do a post over there on Victor David Hanson’s views of the corrupted university. Not that I’d planned to, but it’s a pet peeve and since he wrote an essay last week on how truly awful “universities” are, I’m going to give it seat and voice at Gates. I found it last night on his PJM site.

For four years we have been paying exorbitant tuition fees/loans to a state school for the future Baron. It’s almost over, and I can’t wait till he can be free of that place. He’s going to work for a year and then go to graduate school for oenology. In other words, he hopes to be a vintner. There are far fewer ways they can pc that one up. I’m so relieved he’s not even considering a doctorate in chemistry. There are two hundred vineyards in Virginia alone, but Chem PhD’s do not find employers lining up after they finish that rigorous, long, and expensive haul up the mountain. Several friends with doctorates in Chemistry have urged him not to go there. He listened.

Meanwhile, the Baron and I are helping a teenager who has run up against the wall at high school. He’s miserable and feels scapegoated. We’re going to run interference for him but his experience reminded me of my high school years…definitely misery time, and a relief when they were done.

I’ve been asking people for years if they liked high school. So far, everyone has said no. Everyone but the Baron, that is - and for him it was because his high school years were spent in the north of England and the curriculum was so rigorous that he got to skip his freshman year when he came back to the US. Besides, England (back then) was condescendingly fond of Yanks, and the cultural infrastructure there was still in place. His geeky self was quite acceptable and he had lots of friends. The school didn’t have cliques, really. As far as I can tell, people grouped off according to their interests, but that was about it. And the kids had a place to go and dance and hang out…sounds idyllic.

He would’ve been dead meat back here in the US, just like so many of us were…

As far as American schools go, there doesn’t seem to be anyone exempt. Private or public, high school is misery time.

If any soul should read this, and had a different experience, please let me know. If you liked high school, why so, and why do you think it was different for you? For example, I’ll bet people who married their high school sweetheart (and stayed married) do not shudder when asked about those years. And maybe the top scorer on the basketball team has fond memories of glory...actually I can vouch for the latter: I read recently that he donated the money to have a new field house built at our old school, and named in his honor. So, definitely, Roger would say 'aye.'

What was high school like for you?

January Is a Bully Named Moe

2007-01-12T17:54:00.000-05:00

January snarls his arrival.
having kicked Christmas behind him,
he insinuates himself into the gaps
between the old windows; he rattles them
for good measure and sifts the cold into
every crevice of the room.

His glowering armies move in ponderous
formations across the horizon. They have lurked
here for days, threatening to descend, to erase
even the memory of every blue sky
June ever birthed. But I will not let go.

January is a bully.

I have learned not to fight back.
Under the quilted covers are hidden
flower catalogues bursting with bloom:
hydrangea macrophylla, two kinds of scilla,
an erect and proper Echinacea, baptized “Fragrant Angel.”

January is a bully named Moe.

with luck I will outlast him, my lunch money
secret and safe in my shoe.
Eventually – when he’s finally gone –
I can battle February with one hand tied behind
my back – clutching a fistful of Lathyrus seeds.

February is short and ugly and stupid with snow.
I can handle him.

It’s Not Easy Being Green

2007-01-11T21:54:00.000-05:00

Did you know that parts of America have populations of wild parrots and parakeets? I didn’t either (even though I have an amateur ornithologist in the house who has been studying birds since he was very small. The future Baron is chock-a-block full of interesting trivia about his feathered friends, their nesting habits, when they mate, how many eggs they produce, and when the fledglings mature. After all, what else is there to do when you live in the country sans TV -- or siblings to torture?).

And then I stumbled upon this website.

It says that of all the birds who have escaped captivity in the US, parrots and parakeets are the most numerous. There are many species of them, and many stories as to how they got here. This is one possibility for those which inhabit Brooklyn…yes, Brooklyn:

More than 60,000 wild parrots of this type (Myopsitta Monachus) were shipped from South America to the U.S.A. during the 1960s and early 1970s. Why so many? Well, the Argentineans had just spent 10 years trying to wipe these parrots out. In fact, a government-sponsored program managed to kill more than 400,000 of them in the late 1950s and early 1960s. But in the mid 1960’s, someone had a bright idea: instead of killing them, why not ship them to the U.S.A. and make a few extra dollars? And thus did the great influx begin.

The website is concerned with the fates of various colonies nationwide, but devotes most attention to the parrot tribes in Brooklyn. Somehow, parrots and Brooklyn seem suited to one another. Yet how did they manage to set up shop so far from their natural habitat?

There is much mystery surrounding the appearance of these remarkable birds in Brooklyn, but it can safely be said that they did not fly up here from Argentina on their own.

1967: The Great Escape

The theory has the greatest credence is that a shipment of birds destined for sale at New York area pet shops was accidentally released at Kennedy Airport in the late 1960’s (1967 or 1968). This incident was referred to as early as 1971 in an article by ornithologist John Bull.

Much confusion remains about what actually happened at the airport. At least one source in Brooklyn has informed me that many shipments coming into the airport were opened by unauthorized people during the 1960’s: Martin Scorsese’s classic film, Goodfellas, based on the memoir of Nicholas Pileggi, depicts the common practice of “crews” opening crates in order to pilfer their contents. My informant speculates that a large crate bearing an indecipherable Argentinean waybill may have been opened in this fashion. But instead of finding bottles of fine Argentinean wine, the crate opener was surprised when an unruly crowd of fully-flighted Quaker Parrots burst into the air, circled the airport, screaming, and disappeared over the horizon.

[The part about crews pilfering crates rings true for me. One of my immigrant uncles, in his first job in the US, worked at the local airport. He was always coming home with odd lots of things like, say, a dozen pots of vinca major in assorted colors.]

Evidently, the birds quickly acclimated and began turning up in the environs of New York, beginning with Brooklyn College. Central Park was another possibility for the parrots, except that the city workers chased them off, believing they would drive out other kinds of birds. Right. Great thinking there: “let’s drive out the parrots. They might cause a disruption in the pigeon population.”

The website has lots of information about the birds’ treatment by nice and not-so-nice utility companies’ policies, proving what we all know: some organizations are real bird brains.

If you’re in the area in early February, you can be part of the Parrot Safari:

Attention all Urban Parrot fans: the next Wild Brooklyn Parrot Safari will happen on Saturday, February 3rd, 2007, at 12 Noon. All interested wild parrot fans should meet at Brooklyn College’s Hillel Gate, which is at the intersection of Hillel Place and Campus Road.

Due to popular demand, our monthly tour will run an optional “second section.” After getting our share of the raucous antics of the Brooklyn College Parrots, at approximately 2:00 PM, our group will walk to the Q Train stop at Avenue I, and journey to Green-Wood Cemetery, where we will observe the late-afternoon antics of the parrots residing there.

The website has wonderful pictures, some YouTube videos, and fascinating information on the parrots’ nests - as one person put it, they’re more like condos.

What a serendipitous thing to find in New York, especially in the winter: wonderfully colorful, exotic parrots! Going on that safari is cheaper than a get-away trip to Florida, too.

If you can’t make the trip, consider buying their parrot calendar, here. As the author says at Café Press:

The Brooklyn parrots have all of the great qualities we associate with the American character: they’re industrious, loyal to each other, they’re amazing little engineers, they coexist well with other native birds, and they just won’t give up, even when the deck is stacked against them.

Now those are immigrants after my own heart.

Decade

2006-12-14T00:12:00.000-05:00

Ten is the default number.
Ten is the wall I bump up against,
And time once again re-sets itself.

When my children are out of sight,
They are all ten years old –
As am I, where there are no mirrors.

I got married ten years ago.
In fact, both marriages
Are but a decade old.

My internal infernal clock
Never goes to noon or midnight.
It stops before there can be endings.

Ten is the wall beyond which recollection
May not go. Memories lie in heaps, none
Lackluster or dim, they are merely at the wall
of ten.

When I turned ten, I came home for good
From St. Mary’s. When I was ten my frozen life
Began to melt on the hearth at home.

I began laying the bricks then,
Erecting the wall, setting the clock,
Tuning the time to a minor key.

********

Every child I love is ten, even the dead
One – ageless now and safely beyond
All my spinning calculations.

Everyone I know has the capacity
For being ten. If they climb the mimosa
And grin back at you that’s a sure sign.

It is easy being ten.

Reflections on Flowers

2006-10-10T22:25:00.000-04:00

The long dry season this summer seemed to go on forever. Watching the grass wither until it crunched under my feet finally made me surrender the garden to its fate.

And then came the rains. Not the hurricanes, which usually bring us some autumn moisture, but long warmish days with lashes of rain nonetheless. Small creeks flooded and the James River ran over its banks as it made its way down from the mountains. A friend’s house, near the flood plain, had water up to her front door.

Through much of it, our roof leaked. Finally, it was patched until such time as we can have it replaced. Gratefully, now when the skies glower, I can enjoy once more the feeling of being safe in a dry house while listening to the plonking sound of rain on a tin roof.

The bonus of all this rain is the flourishing of the garden flowers. Zinnias, blue salvia, dahlias, and snapdragons. Their evanescence is part of the attraction.

Soon it will be time to put in the bulbs and pansies. And perhaps set a few pots of mums on the porch steps. The asters and floppy pink chrysanthemums are blooming and will take their turn in the house with some of the “Autumn Joy” sedum. I have learned to pick those before they are fully blooming. Otherwise, they don’t last long enough to go through the trouble of arranging them.

Perspective

2006-09-08T22:57:00.000-04:00

What a week! The roof is leaking in two places. Being a tin roof, it is practically indestructible. But also, being a tin roof, when it goes, it goes, and it’s not easy to find someone to fix it anymore. Fortunately, we’ve located a geezer (is seventy-four considered a geezer age?) who has been fixing tin roofs for fifty years. And he runs up that ladder to the roof faster than a teenager. Amazing to watch.

Seems as how they’ve changed the material in tin roofing. No more lead paint to protect the galvanization so thus they need more attention. Who knew? Anyway, that roof must be more than forty years old by now, so it served well.

In addition, if the geezer can’t do it, there’s a guy named Junie Bug who also fixes tin roofs. In these situations, it’s good to have a back-up or three.

That wouldn’t be so bad, but the car died the other day. In fact, it died at a funeral. The minister had to jump start me so I could chug down to Roger’s to have it seen to. Unfortunately, Roger isn’t open on Wednesdays so it had to wait being seen to until he returned. Turns out the battery was dead beyond repair, just like the roof. Also the brakes and the shock absorbers need some seeing to. However, Roger put in a new battery and said the other problems could wait till the next oil change.

And during all this, workmen were tearing out all the old flexi-pipe from our heating system. It had become infected with mold early on, and was getting worse each summer. Of course, no one – including the contractor who had it installed -- told us to vapor seal the crawl space to prevent damage to the pipe. It wasn’t until last year, while I was researching heat pumps and such that I found out about the need to seal the crawl space and install a humidifier. Which was done…for about three thousand dollars. At the time it seemed like a lot of money, but in comparison to a tin roof…it’s a mere trifle.

When the workmen finished installing everything, including these nifty air filters in the intake vents, they turned on the outside unit…and it tripped the breaker inside. Guess what that means if it happens more than once a month (and it happened three weeks ago)? It means a whole new outside unit, that’s what it means. They’re coming on Tuesday to show us what’s available and to break the news gently on how much it’s going to cost.

I think I will go lie down and listen to the rain plink in the bowl from the ceiling. If you unfocus your ears, it sounds rather musical.

To keep things in perspective, I remind myself that I went to a funeral this week and I wasn’t the guest of honor. That’s a comfort considering that Samuel is long past worrying about his roof…or his car…or his crawl space.

Rest in peace, Samuel.

September Fruit

2006-09-02T23:25:00.000-04:00

September is the beginning of my New Year. Almost like magic, the weather turns to wine. No doubt this is a left-over feeling from school days, when I looked forward to new books and had good intentions of keeping my notebook neat this year. Never happened, though. Not till I got to college.

September (or sometimes August, depending on how things look) is when we gather the domestic pears and wrap them in tissue, leaving them in the dark to ripen. The trick is remembering to check them every day or two. Our tree, now more than 30 years old, is not a very prepossessing figure, and it lost its mate across the yard some years ago. It has endured cicadas, fire blight, and the just-plain-wrong architecture of pear trees, which are not meant to carry the heavy loads they bear. Kind of reminds me of those skinny, hipless young women. How will they ever make it through a pregnancy and delivery?

One year, Wally Ballou’s father made pear wine at his farm. It was delicious; fermented essence of pear and the most delicate color.

The wild pears are another matter. They won't be ready till October, and they ripen on the tree, making their own winey taste if you let them get golden enough.

I’ve been gathering figs, too —fighting the hornets for my share. This time last year, I fell off a ladder because of the hornets and it’s taken a full year for my knee to recover. Today I did my first normal (almost) knee bend. And I put on a long sleeved shirt, a hat and gloves, sprayed my clothes with insect repellent and went mano a mano with those hornets. Since the big figs on the south side of the house are all going into the pot for preserves, I simply shook the tree and down came the ripe ones. A few of them splatted, but I washed them off and put those in with the others.

The tiny figs which grow under the mimosa are always superior to the regular Brown Turkey — though they are in fact the same variety, since I took some rootings from there for the ones on the southern part of the house. The small ones ripen first and are very sweet, almost like raisins. Or at least they were until the heavy rains came from the leftovers of the last hurricane.

Now I see why grape growers pray for dry weather that last week before harvest. The remaining ripe figs (the day after the rains passed) under the mimosa have lost all their flavor. I don’t know where the sugar went, but it’s gone. I was fortunate to pick a basket of them to sell to one of the organic food stores in town…before the rains came. The remainders, which look just the same as the wonderful ones from last week, have absolutely no taste. You wouldn’t put one into your mouth on purpose.

George Washington grew brown turkey figs. In order to winter them over, the gardeners would cut them back, bend down the remaining branches and bury them in dirt, covered with mulch and straw. But that was Mount Vernon. Here in the warmer areas of Virginia, you can ignore them — except to prune and feed them in the Fall. Which I will do in the next two weeks. The long dry period caused many of the branches to lose their leaves, so they almost have an October appearance — spindly with “yellow leaves, or few, or none” hanging despondently as the hornets argue about who gets which fig. Today I watched two of them either duking it out or mating. Do hornets mate? At any rate, they were belly to belly and talking with their hands. Maybe Italian hornets…?

The irony is that the rain, except for the figs (and the grape growers) was most welcome. The yard was so parched even the zinnias were crispy. And it had become too much work to try to keep all the flowerbeds watered; I was sure they were done for the summer. But now, with three inches of rain, even the roses are perking up. And the garlic chives are blooming in their stately way. The dahlias are a bit wrecked, however, and the butterfly bushes haven’t been deadheaded in weeks. I like to watch the butterflies go by the kitchen window, headed for the Buddleia (named for the Reverend Adam Buddle and once called buddlebush), so I suppose I’ll get out there and whack off the dead blooms and feed the darn things. They ought to be good for one more go.

Come to think of it, buddleia and ficus have one thing in common: untidiness. They respond well to serious whacking.

Just like some people I know.

Traveling Light --by the Baron

2006-08-31T10:16:00.000-04:00

Since he has no alternate blog to neglect, as I do with The Neighborhood of God, the Baron asked if he might guest post here in the midst of chaos. I readily agreed...and then when I saw his essay, I realized it fits right in with chaos and the inexorability of entropy.

Enjoy his memoir...

With the day almost over, the rain has finally stopped and the sky is clearing. There’s a mist rising off the street, and I hear a steady drip-drip from the big maples next to the curb. It’s still August, but a few early yellow leaves have fallen and are lying in the gutter.

I’m walking up North Street, only it’s not North Street any more, it’s Brilyn Place. The house numbers are different, too, so the old address, the one our parents worked so hard to get us to memorize, is no longer of any use. But it’s still stuck in my head like a mantra: 711 North Street, Falls Church, Virginia. No zip; that was before zip codes.

Our house is on my right as I pass the intersection with Gordon Avenue, which still has its old familiar name. The trees are big now, but not as big as they should be — those maples, back when they were only a decade old, seemed so huge when we climbed them, when we sat in the lower branches and watched the helicopter seeds spiral down around us. Fifty years have added to the maples’ stature, but they and the houses still seem too small.

Up ahead Brilyn Place ends at the pebbly acoustic wall that shields the neighborhood from the interstate. When we lived here the big highway was just a gleam in the developer’s eye, but we all knew it was coming. It was going to knock down the houses at the end of the street, and lop the corner off Teddy’s parents’ lot. “It’ll take out Teddy’s trash burner,” said Steve.

There’s a dead end where the turn onto Hallwood Avenue used to be, and the sound of the heavy traffic on I-66 rumbles beyond the barrier. The old postwar brick houses along here are a little bit seedy now — the neighborhood never went upscale, as might have been expected had it been further from the interstate.

In the late summer of 1956 I was out on these streets and in the back yards all along here with the other boys of the neighborhood. There weren’t any boys my age, so I tagged along with my brother and his friends. Dave was three and a half years older than I, and he and the others tolerated me as long as I behaved myself.

There were five or six in the group — Dave, Teddy, Ricky, Robert, Steve, and maybe some others whose names are lost now. Steve was the oldest — a year older than Dave — and he was the leader, a ten-year-old with an assurance that seemed godlike to a child my age. When the boys formed a club, he outlined the rules. When teams had to be chosen, he performed the eeny-meeny-miny-moe. His hobbies became the gang’s hobbies. In later years, just before we moved, his parents sent him off to Fork Union to military school, and he came home for the holidays in a uniform. He was more than human.

Steve was the one who gave me my inexplicable nickname, “Dee”. When my brother used it, I didn’t like it, and I would call him “Day-Day” in return, for which he held equal hatred. But when Steve called me “Dee” I didn’t mind; it had a sort of affectionate tone to it. Or so it seemed.

I held Steve in awe, more so even than my own brother. Whatever interested him interested me. It was through Steve that I became fascinated with reptiles, and learned to catch snakes at a tender age. He taught me how to find box turtles by listening for their rustle as they crawled through the undergrowth, and how to track baby snapping turtles along the smelly edges of Four Mile Run.

Steve was an expert on military weaponry and the Civil War. He knew all about airplanes. He and Dave could identify all the makes and models of the cars that drove by, right down to the size of their engines and their horsepower.

And it was through Steve that Dave and I became interested in astronomy. We asked our parents for books on Mars and the Moon, and Dave got a three-inch reflecting telescope for Christmas so that we could watch the comet.

One night late in August 1956 the gang was lying in the front yard of our house, looking up at the sky. We were far enough from the streetlights so that some of the stars showed through, and Steve would point to the brighter ones and identify them.

It was just before Labor Day weekend, and the next week school would begin. I would be entering kindergarten, and my whole world was about to change. But for now it was just like it always had been, with the warm dark and the damp grass and the sound of the crickets in the bushes and the cicadas in the trees.

Steve had brought along a high-powered flashlight, and when he switched it on, gnats and moths were highlighted in the moving beam. He used it as a pointer, flicking it upwards as he identified Jupiter or Sirius. The boys took turns using the light, and eventually Steve passed it over to me.

I pointed it upwards, towards a faint star directly overhead.

“Dee, that star is probably fifty light-years away,” Steve told me. “You know what that means? It means that the beam of light will take fifty years to get there.”

I thought about it. “So, in fifty years, someone up there on a planet around that star will see my light shining on them?”

Steve chuckled. “Well, maybe. There won’t be much left of it by the time it gets there. But you never know — some alien up there might look up and see a little flicker of light.”

Not long after that we had to go in to bed. But I kept thinking about that beam of light, now moving up and away from the earth, traveling through space at an incredible speed. Fifty years! It might as well have been forever…

Time went by. I went off to kindergarten. Winter and summer came a couple of more times before we moved to Maryland. The federal government eventually built Interstate 66 through our old neighborhood, and then a lot of other things happened.

But I didn’t forget.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
I’ve turned around now, and the wall and the noisy interstate are behind me. I’m walking back down North Street — I mean Brilyn Place — and the lights are coming on in the houses on either side.

There’s our old house on the left, with a light in the front window. I resist the urge to walk up the sidewalk and knock on the door to ask if I can just take a quick peek inside.

And there’s the front yard, with the trees so big and overhanging now that no boys could see the sky through them. And with all the light pollution from Tysons Corner there may not be all that many stars visible, even if anyone could see through the trees.

The cold front is moving in, and a fresh breeze has lifted the mist off the street. Standing in the middle of North Street, I look straight up at the newly-cleared and darkened sky. Yes, there it is: a very faint star.

When I squint my eyes I can just picture a little cluster of young bug-eyed aliens gathered in front of their strange dwelling, looking upwards as a faint flicker of light shows in their own night sky. They’re turning a bright flashlight upwards in the same direction…

No need to stick around. I know when to come back.
— August 30th, 2006

Roanoke College Students Build a House

2006-08-28T09:33:00.000-04:00

Roanoke is a small and beloved city in southwestern Virginia. Natives pronounce that “Roe-noke” with the accent on “Roe”. There is no ‘a’ in Roanoke, despite its spelling.

Roanoke College (in nearby Salem) is nicely named, having the modesty to refuse to join the fad of grabbing the “University” appellation back when everyone else was doing it. Most universities in this country are really colleges and should have remained so. But then higher education is a big business now, so of course inflated terms are to be expected. If parents have to shell out twenty thousand dollars for junior’s education, it had better be at a “university”, no?

One of the nice things about Roanoke College is its tradition of “Service Day” Projects. All students participate in community service — an idea that ought to be adopted by other schools…for example, the University of Virginia sure could use some mandatory service time for its incoming freshmen. Perhaps that would cut down on the alcohol syndrome in Charlottesville. Or maybe not. Another fraternity chapter was closed there recently.

This year, the returning students are putting together a house for Habitat for Humanity. In five days the house will be built on campus and then moved eventually to the nearby town of Salem.

What a way to start the academic year! Imagine a school which practices the old idea of education: mens sana in corpore sano.

Hat tip: PJ Media

Mastering Disaster

2006-08-28T00:24:00.000-04:00

No matter what the calendar says, summer ends on different days for different families.

For me, it is when the Boy returns to school, taking with him his quotes from Pogo, or Monty Python, or the Marx Brothers, or moving lines from songs I’ve never heard of.

The house grows still, even though he’s not that noisy. The tickety of laptop keys is not all that raucous. The turning of pages in a James Lileks book isn’t boisterous.

But the sounds of Another in one’s space are more than sound and more than simply taking space. It involves making room for Another for a while, and then letting him go…so the space fills with silence even as I picture his trajectory and he rides away in a car jammed to the roof with his possessions.

Or, rather, most of his possessions. This seems to be a season of loss for him: his wallet (or rather, the wallet of his grandfather, which he has used since carrying a wallet became necessary), the portfolio of all his beloved CDs collected over the years of his adolescence, his computer – whose hard drive could not be retrieved and with it went his photos, back-ups of his music…and that part of our identity which comes to rest within the matrices of a machine that we use every blesséd day for years. That particular laptop followed him from dorm room to dorm room for three years and now it is gone, its contents irretrievable.

I reminded him of the following poem and he remembered it from a class he’d taken last year:

One Art

The art of losing isn’t hard to master;
so many things seem filled with the intent
to be lost that their loss is no disaster.

Lose something every day. Accept the fluster
of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.
The art of losing isn’t hard to master.

Then practice losing farther, losing faster:
places, and names, and where it was you meant
to travel. None of these will bring disaster.

I lost my mother’s watch. And look! my last, or
next-to-last, of three loved houses went.
The art of losing isn’t hard to master.

I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster,
some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.
I miss them, but it wasn’t a disaster.

---Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture
I love) I shan’t have lied. It’s evident
the art of losing’s not too hard to master
though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.

Women Are Bag Ladies at Heart

2006-08-23T10:17:00.000-04:00

A report in The Washington Times reveals that most women are emotionally insecure when it comes to finances:

They may have money in their purses and a decent salary, but many women fear they’ll lose their income and end up a bag lady, forgotten and destitute.

A “startling” 90 percent of women say they feel financially insecure, according to a survey of almost 1,925 women released yesterday by Allianz, a Minnesota-based life insurance company.

Almost half are troubled by a “tremendous fear of becoming a bag lady” — 46 percent of women overall, and 48 percent of those with an annual income of more than $100,000. An additional 57 percent are sorry they had not learned more about money matters in school.

[…]

Women… are twice as likely as men — 18 percent to 9 percent — to set aside a secret stash of money, the study found. Roughly the same number counseled their daughters to do the same.

Why is this surprising? Despite the p.c. dogma about independent women, there is evidence for a hard-wired dependency program in women…something about child-bearing and its concomitant vulnerability, perhaps?

Which is not to say such feelings cannot be overcome and mastered, just as men have to stretch themselves to attain a steady-state monogamy.

Yes, the things we do for love.

The strongest, most practical women I knew always did this, some openly, some secretly, depending on the nature of their environment and their own character. One woman told me that her Jewish mother trained her to believe that each woman must have her own “knippel” (if that is the correct spelling). She said it was a Yiddish expression for a woman’s secret stash. Another woman, of French Canadian extraction told me the story of her grandmother’s deathbed scene, in which she called her children together, opened up some battered shoeboxes, and proceeded to give them each thousands of dollars. Her stash, hoarded secretly over the years and then distributed personally as she prepared to leave the things of this world. Much more instructive and memorable than a will.

In this generation of serial monogamy, observant women notice the propensity of successful men to acquire younger and younger trophy wives. They know from experience that beauty fades and that beyond "a certain age," women become invisible. The clerk at the counter calls them "dear" or "honey." It's simply one more rite of passage.

So if one is going to be deserted in a grasping attempt at some last-ditch avoidance of mortality on the part of her life-long mate, she'd better make plans for a single bed and a safe-deposit box. This is especially true now that women are "independent." Thank you, Gloria Steinem, for no-fault poverty.

What's so startling about women's fear of living at the Salvation Army? The grown children move across the continent, the husband moves to the bed of a woman their daughter's age. And if an ageing wife hasn't made provisions for this almost commonplace fate, then what? Bitter penury, that's what.

Indomitable women don’t shop till they drop. They stash.

Tent Caterpillars from Hell

2006-08-08T10:33:00.000-04:00

Dear Cosmos,

I promise I will never, ever, cross-my-heart-and-hope-to-die, complain about tent caterpillars again. Never.

These creepy horrors are eating exactly what on a bicycle??

I had a small wild cherry tree cut down last year because it had been de-leafed by our much milder version of this icky thing. But still, the cocoons get onto everything outside. I cannot imagine what this “March of the Larvae” causes.

Early next Spring I plan to put duct tape around the trunks of the apple trees to see if that will stop the little buggers, but God knows what these people can do. Obviously the municipality in Sweden, where these photos were taken, isn’t too concerned about the situation. Maybe it’s politically incorrect to harm them.

Go here to see more — notice how white the trunks of the trees are, and how they somehow missed a few leaves on one tree.

As Shelagh used to say while making a face, "ickky pooo..."

Hat tip: Wally Ballou

Changes

2006-08-06T17:46:00.000-04:00

The Baron’s Boy is home from his summer session of Chemistry at college. Only two weeks and then he returns for his last year of undergraduate work.

In some ways, this period evokes the time leading up to his first venture off to college. I don’t know why. Maybe it’s because he’s in love and I can see a change in him that I can’t quite articulate. So it brings back memories of the younger boy, the one who is gone…or at least irrevocably changed.

He still talks a lot. We were fortunate parents – never had one of those sulky kids who hung out in their bedroom, coming out only for meals. But being an only child (his half-siblings being a generation older) left him with only us to talk to, so we were a captive audience. Thus it was that we enlisted him in the nefarious role of inveterate reader. It helped that there was no TV and we lived (live) in the middle of nowhere.

But now he has wider fields to roam, fields full of people. He loves his job as a sales clerk in a tourist town; lots of chances to schmooze. And his music fraternity offers some scope for this ability, as do his dorm mates and classes.

Not much instant messaging, though. Seems like when love takes over, there’s not much room for chatting with your old friends. Sitting across the table from one another eating sushi is time-consuming. It’s a full time job for awhile, discovering that you both like cats and don’t like television and that you were born under the same sign.

This week, a grandchild celebrates his first year among us. A lovely, calm baby, just walking and saying everyone’s names. It’s also the month for Big D’s birthday and it will be K’s 21st.

My how time flies! (what? You expected me to say something original?) It seems to violate some natural law when children continue to grow when you’re not even looking. They ought to stay the same age so that when you’re able to pay attention to them again, there will be no shocking changes. On the other hand, that would mean most of my friends would be much younger than I, and my children would all be about ten years of age. Actually, the latter is true: to me, a person is most truly himself at age ten. He continues on, gaining height and a whole lotta angst in the ensuing years, but you know what? His last years are focused on returning to the child he was when he was ten years old.

Some people make it, and charming souls they are.

Father's Day 2006

2006-06-19T13:38:00.000-04:00

I love Father’s Day. I didn’t have a dad to speak of growing up, and my first attempt at supplying one for my children didn’t work so well (though the children are loyal to the ideal of him, as children are -- no matter how grown). The second try was serendipitous and truly fortunate for someone like me whose life has been more fated than it has been filled with destiny.

But I digress… back to Father’s Day, 2006.

Yesterday Big D arrived with two of my grandsons. I invited him to come and celebrate his own vocation as a father – both the effort he has put into it and the joys he has experienced in teaching his children to fish, to hunt, to get about in the world.

He’s too soft sometimes, this tough man who had to fend for himself too young. He was close to his mother, but he learned to be a man by himself. His first paying job, at the age of thirteen, was breaking horses. I have never seen a man better with animals than he is.

So we sat under the shade of the hickory tree and ate steak and potato salad and sauerkraut and smoked sausages. I hauled a bowl of trifle out for our dessert. The boys loved the gooey mush; even Big D ate a bit, though he’s not much on sweets.

I have much to atone for to Big D. When my daughter decided he was The One, I wasn’t happy about it. Big D, being shy, wasn’t much help in bridging the gap, either. They had some stormy times before they eventually parted many years later, but by then I had come to appreciate this quiet, capable man. And here, three years after my child’s death, he and I share her memories, the good and the bad. They are all we have left now.

So for Father’s Day we talked about her love of food. The potato salad, I told the boys, was their mother’s favorite. She often ate it for breakfast. It is a recipe from her paternal great-grandfather, who was a wonderful cook. His daughter, my former mother-in-law, passed it on to me (me own mither, being Irish, didn’t believe in potato salad in theory. Boiled “in their jackets” or mashed, or pan-fried, yes. But even baked potatoes were borderline).

Potato salad, like spaghetti sauce, is one of those idiosyncratic dishes. Everyone prefers their mother’s version. In my case, I preferred my mother-in-law’s and will share it here, slightly modified for laziness:

Rose’s Potato Salad:

Enough potatoes to serve the purpose (in our case, six people, most of them men or growing boys, meant 10 potatoes)
Chopped celery, including some of the leaves
Chopped onion, sparingly
Mayonnaise
Oil
Vinegar (malt is best)
Sugar
Salt and pepper

Peel the potatoes or not, depending on your preference. If unpeeled, scrub well. Cube them and drop into cold water. Rinse, cover with cold water again and bring to a boil. At this point, salt them to taste (unsalted water boils faster), lower the heat and cover. [HINT: if you lightly grease the top half-inch of the saucepan, the pot won’t boil over].

When the potatoes are cooked to your taste (about twenty minutes for us), drain in a colander and shake. Return the potatoes to the pan and immediately toss in onions and celery. The heat from the potatoes will soften them a bit.

Then pour about 3 or 4 Tablespoons of oil over the vegetables. Sprinkle 2 Tablespoons of vinegar on that, and lastly, about a teaspoon of sugar. Mix well and taste. If too sour, a bit more sugar. If too sweet, a bit more vinegar. Mix again and set aside.

When potatoes are cooling, but still warm, add mayo to taste. Adding it while they're warm allows the flavor to develop more fully. Add ground pepper at this point.

Cover and refrigerate until ready to use.

This is even better made the day before. Especially if you hide it from those who would eat it for breakfast.

After dinner, the boys gave us a small fireworks show. It was fun to watch the colors against the black sky and the outline of the trees as the rockets ascended and burst into trails and sparks of color.

Afterwards, the Baron had his own pyrotechnics, in the form of wiping out a yellow jacket nest he’d found earlier in the day while mowing. Actually, they found him when he came too near the nest and they came out in military formation to sting his leg. This group is no longer extant, but I’m sure there will be others. After all, it’s only June.

This is the second year in a row that the yellow jackets have come so early. And when I think of that, I realize I haven’t seen many skunks in awhile. Or smelled them, rather. A spring ritual used to be the odor of skunk on the roads as they performed their migration ritual in March. I don’t recall being assaulted with eau de skunk this past spring…and we sure do have the yellow jacket nests to prove it. Perhaps we’ll have to import some wild boars to do the job.

Which reminds me of the time a neighbor’s pigs got loose and tore up the sod in our yard, leaving a mess behind. I was annoyed until I discovered they ate Japanese beetle grubs and yellow jackets. Now I wish they’d come to visit more often.

We are all so enmeshed, we humans and animals and insects. Which reminds me: time to set out the Japanese beetle traps…

Starbucks' Patron Saint?

2006-05-18T13:54:00.000-04:00

Today is cold, considering it is past mid-May. Good for me, since I took the chance to put in some more grass seed, which prefers it cool. I’ve been watering it — or rather, the straw which covers it — hoping for little green miracles. What is it about us that is drawn to green swards? Maybe our genetic origins on the savannahs somewhere. I’ll have to ask Wally Ballou. He knows everything worth knowing (mostly) but doesn’t tell you unless you ask.

We had the most lovely violet season this year. Many people consider them weeds, but the Baron loves them. I must admit I like their very green, heart-shaped leaves even if they are invasive. They’re easy enough to rip up, and compard to the darn mimosa seeds, at least they never grow into trees with tap roots that go the center of the earth.

The false indigo is blooming fitfully, as it did last year. It’s been in that spot a long time, perhaps I ought to divide it or feed it whatever it is legumes like. It, too, is a pretty blue.

The dahlias that the Boy gave me for Mother’s Day last year came back! They’re not supposed to do that, but there they are. Of course the figs aren’t supposed to fruit every year this far north, but they do that, too.

Today is the farmer’s market in town. I am going to see if anyone has cranesbill to add to my patch and will buy some red geraniums to plant by the red bench. Last year, Elizabeth’s mother gave me a huge pot of Dragon’s wing (I think) begonias. They were beautiful all year. And now, her mom is recovering from by-pass surgery and not doing well. If you’re the praying type, picture a dignified and beautiful elderly Greek woman who is need of your assistance. If you’re not the praying type, just give her a passing thought occasionally — as I would for your friends if I knew them.

And just for the record, on this day in 2003, John Paul II beatified the inventor of cappucino. That in itself is reason enough for beatification by my standards, but JP had other motives:

Marco d'Aviano, known as a fiery orator, persuaded European Christian monarchs to lift the Ottoman siege in Vienna in 1683. A biography records that during the fighting, d'Aviano brandished a crucifix at the Turks, shouting, "Behold the cross of the Lord: Flee, enemy bands!"

Well known in the 17th century as a preacher of penance and a miracle worker, d'Aviano is thus something of a patron saint for European Christians alarmed over Muslim immigration and fundamentalism in Islamic states. Many Europeans believe that the Twin Towers attacks in the United States took place on Sept. 11 because it was the eve of the anniversary of the battle in Vienna on Sept. 12.

Cappucino. Yum. Gates of Vienna? Mais, oui!

Given Pope Benedict’s pessimism about Europe surviving with any Christian identity, perhaps he will move the beatification process forward for d’Aviano. Let’s get Starbucks behind it.

She's Baaaaack!

2006-05-17T18:22:00.000-04:00

This is a neglected blog. If it were a kid, they would’ve called in the authorities by now…

There are a myriad of reasons I’ve avoided posting here. For one thing, I always seem to be behind over at the other place so how could I make room for personal essays? For another, my health isn’t the best and my ADD seems to intensify with age. Both conditions interfere with my energy and focus.

But the big reason is more personal than that: some months ago an evil person cut and pasted a family story I had written here, kind of one of those untold family tales that you can relate in an anonymous setting, but you’d never discuss it with the people involved. This malicious lurker printed out the story and then went to the trouble of giving it to the person I wrote about. It hurt her feelings very much, even though it wasn’t harmful...just a backroom tale I used to hear people laugh about. I hadn’t thought about the story in a long time, but when it came to mind while writing that particular post, I mentioned it.

I should have known there were mean-spirited lurkers on my blog. Most blogs have trolls of some level of evil or other. It just never occurred to me that anyone would use my words to hurt another person. That’s a desperate, grasping kind of evil when you stop to think about it. A karmic error on their part, one that can’t be erased. Think of Lady Macbeth.

So I’ve avoided The Neighborhood for awhile, walking around the long way without realizing why. Then, the other day it occurred to me why I didn't come here much. It also occurred to me that we can't let others' evil rule our lives; and, for me, ruin what had been an entertaining endeavor.

So here goes. Take your best shot, Evil One. See what you can dig up. Your malice is all you’ve got left…and the great thing I have in my favor?

I’m not you.

I Thought You Ought to Know

2006-05-05T11:59:00.000-04:00

A friend sent this latest bulletin on bird flu in the U.S.:
Be sure to stock up on water and canned beans and a sufficient supply of Jim Beam to see you through whatever is coming.

April Is Not the Cruelest Month at All

2006-04-02T11:38:00.000-04:00

March is finally, gratefully over.

As I said in a recent email to the Baroness Alexandra, the months of March, May and December have disappeared into the black hole created by my child’s death. March was the month of her birth, May was the month of her death, and, of course, December was Christmas. She loved Christmas so; I used to give her Santa Claus figurines every year.

I expressed my hope to the Baroness that eventually I would get those times back, but she seemed to think it might not happen. She could be right. A high school classmate whose son died twenty years ago, suddenly and by suicide, still flees to Europe every Christmas…I just go blank and hunker under the pillow.

So welcome here, dear April, you are not “the cruelest month” -- not by a long shot, I don’t care what T. S. Eliot says. Not only do you bring Daylight Savings Time and the beginning of long sun-lit evenings, you also have in tow many family birthdays. I love to celebrate birthdays!

This month the Baron’s Boy turns twenty one. I’m sure we’ll be on hand for his first legal order of a pre-prandial drink at dinner. At least his first one in this country. On his visit to England a few years ago, he got great pleasure out of ordering the local beers in Yorkshire. Somehow our age limit of twenty one in the U.S. doesn’t stop the ferocious alcohol consumption by kids in high school or college. A student at the University of Virginia wrote Gates of Vienna recently to tell us of the sad death of a fraternity boy visiting from Princeton who died of alcohol poisoning. No one knew how much he’d had, so they let him “sleep it off.”

Oh, dear. I seem to be back to the unexpected death of children once more…was it Anne Tyler who said in one of her novels that when you have a child, your heart, from then on, resides outside your body? Sounds about right.

Never mind. The grief is sure to circle 'round again soon enough. For now, it’s on to April and the garden and la vie.

Cheesecake for the Pancreatically Challenged

2006-03-02T19:54:00.000-05:00

Sometimes I get tired of having to tiptoe around my pancreas, trying to keep it asleep and not squirting much insulin. As long as I stick to a type one diabetes form of eating, I feel mostly okay. All right, I feel less pain and mental fog than if I eat like the normals out there.

Here’s a recipe for cheesecake. It’s small since most of us with wacked-out pancreases live with the normoes. It has the advantage of cooking quickly this way, so I use my toaster oven. It has a convection setting.

Ingredients for crust (if you must have one)

About a 1/3 cup of shredded fresh (or frozen) coconut.
A couple of tablespoons of butter
Whatever artificial sweetner you use ( I send off to Canada for sucaryl since it has no aftertaste)

Using a smallish pie plate (8 inches or so) — or even an oven proof pasta bowl, put the ingredients in bottom and place in oven until the butter melts. Pat the mixture onto the bottom of the pie plate and broil for a few minutes. Stand with it or you’ll have burned coconut. Remove from oven and set aside.

Turn convection toaster oven to 325.

Ingredients for the filling

2 packages of cream cheese, room temp
2 eggs, large, also room temp

(you can microwave the cream cheese in a bowl to speed things up and put the eggs in a bowl of hot water for a few minutes. The pie crust needs to cool a bit anyway.)

Use a wire whip to cream the cheese well. Don’t whip a lot of air into it, just make it very smooth. Add eggs one at a time and stir until very well blended.

Flavorings: I use vanillin (there’s a trace of sugar in real vanilla) and a little bit of powdered lemon flavored drink mix.

If you use the unsweetened, you’ll have to sweeten to taste. If you use the pre-sweetened, go easy since it could overwhelm the cheese — that stuff is strong. You can add a bit of shredded lemon peel, too. Maybe a quarter teaspoon.

Put a metal half cup measuring cup filled with hot water in bottom of toaster oven. It will keep the cream cheese moister than would otherwise be the case. If you forget — it’s still quite edible.

Pour cream cheese mixture into pie plate, smooth the top, and put in oven. Mine takes about twenty minutes to cook. Yours may vary. I cook it until it swells (rather unevenly) and begins to crack. It shouldn’t crack, but sometimes it does.

Remove immediately and leave to cool. When it’s cool, or barely warm, put in freezer for a few minutes if you plan to have a slice soon. Otherwise, cover and place in refrigerator.

This is good with strawberries sliced and tossed with a little artificial sugar. Or a squirt of sugar free whipped cream.

Eat your heart out, because your pancreas will sleep right through it.

Ash Wednesday, 2006. Lectionary Year II

2006-03-01T12:14:00.000-05:00

Today, for millions of Christians world-wide, the season of Lent begins. Yesterday was Mardi Gras (Fat Tuesday) because it was the eve of Ash Wednesday, the day which marked the beginning of Lent. Back when the old and more rigorous rules still held, one fasted and abstained during the Lenten period. The limited fasting meant that you had one full meal a day and two smaller (meatless) ones, which were not to equal your usual full meal. Abstention involved refraining from eating meat. Every year, about halfway through Lent my mother would grumble, “if I eat one more egg, I’ll turn into a chicken.” Lent does get old. Since it comes on the ebb of Winter, it can also seem much, much longer than it really is.

Fat Tuesday is followed by Ash Wednesday. “Thou art dust” is the gentle reminder that life is brief…Ashes have been part of religious ceremonies for untold millennia. The ashes used in Christian churches are made from the palm fronds left over from the previous year’s Palm Sunday commemoration of Jesus’ arrival in Jerusalem to begin His final week on earth.

The observance of Lent, lasting the forty days from Ash Wednesday to noon on Holy Saturday, the penultimate day of this part of the liturgical season. Easter, the following day, is the beginning of a new season, and the shedding of Lenten sorrow. It is joyful not only because of what occurs again, but for its opposition to the gloom and sad suspense of the Passion Week which preceded it.

Lent is but a small part of the full liturgical year. Like the rest of the calendar, it is devoted to sacred time, to that part of the human soul that is timeless and yet, while here, anchored to time and to the recurring observation/celebration of Christ’s life on earth. Carefully observed, it becomes part of the warp and woof of one’s own tapestry of life.

As a child in a Catholic orphanage, my days were imbued with an almost medieval sense of time. Looking back, I can see now the overarching meaning that the Liturgical Year provided in the lives of little girls without the buffer of parents against the slings and arrows of childhood. It gave us a higher, deeper, and wider sense of the sacredness of the quotidian: those feast days and the changing rubrics of color and music and prayer belonged to the ages. By understanding that, and being given the meaning behind the flow of each year, we remained rooted to a sense of belonging to something far greater than ourselves.

When people make fun of the Muslims for their daily routine of prayer, they miss the point of that kind of belonging. Yes, you can live in the modern world and pray five times a day. In Saint Mary’s we certainly prayed more often than that.

Here it is Ash Wednesday and I haven’t decided what to do for Lent. This season, for me, is the most intensely directed. Easter and Pentecost are the lodestones of Christian faith. Celebrating Christmas could disappear tomorrow and it wouldn’t mean much. But from here to Pentecost are the crucial moments. From the 40th day before Easter right through to the Day of Pentecost lies the fulcrum upon which the rest depends.

Before I go to church to have the ashes placed on my forehead and am reminded by this of my mortality, I’ll decide what it I’m supposed to do. Discernment is not my strong suit, and I have been distracted by our friend’s death in these last days leading up to today. I have an idea what my Lenten practice will be, but until I feel more sure, I’ll let it be.

For reading this week, I’ll be returning to A Search for God in Time and Memory by John Dunne. Mine is the 1967 edition and shows its age. Remember when paperbacks were $1.95?

You can still get the 1977 edition here, at Notre Dame Press. It’s $15.00, but you get about ten pages more for your money. No doubt a new introduction with Father Dunne’s thoughts about what changed for him in those ten years.

May you experience the depth of Lent's adventure into the unknown.

They Grow Up, Don't They?

2006-02-15T23:03:00.000-05:00

One day you come across something that makes you realize your child is not just your child anymore; he or she is a thinking -- and thoughtful -- questioner, a person on his own quest to make sense of things.

Each increment of growth is a surprise; even as you imagine your child into the next phase, when he arrives, seemingly spontaneously, you stand in awe; you let go a little more.

The following essay is a recent post from the Baron's Boy's blog, stuck in between analyses of "Firefly" adventures and random thoughts on the vagaries of women:

Today in my Middle Eastern Archaeology class the professor talked about the origins of agriculture from two points of view: the natural forces hypothesis and the cultural change hypothesis. Put simply, these two notions cover the fundamental question of what man is: a creature of action or reaction? A creature who shapes his life or is shaped by it? The natural forces theory holds that man is controlled by his surroundings, a puppet jerked around by the strings of climactic change and environmental factors that are beyond him to predict or explain. On the other hand, the cultural change theory tends to look more at the synthetic aspects of man's existence, and how man-made things--agriculture, industry, and so forth--shape him, just as they were shaped by him.

I'm not sure if this is an already-posited theory, but it seems to me that man is no less a product of the environment than the environment is a product of man. For lack of a better word, I'm going to call this the Inflection Point Hypothesis. Imagine this: a lowland river valley in a fairly temperate zone, with mountains sloping up from both banks of the river. The fishing is good, and the land is suitable for subsistance crops of various sorts. The people of this valley survive mainly on rudimentary agriculture: wheat, barley, maybe rice if it's wet enough. Perhaps there's limited domestication of pigs, dogs, and goats. However, the flood plain is fairly wide during the colder, rainier seasons, and there's already been significant erosion of the villages around the river, to the extent that the people are moving farther and farther up the slopes of the valley. Now, here's the eponymous "inflection point": the people can either attempt to dam the river and alter its course and flooding pattern, or they move away from the valley floor, into the mountains. If they dam the river successfully, they've set the stage for continued settlement in the valley, which I believe would significantly affect the course of history in that area. If there's continued settlement, there is the possibility of an enlarged cultural sphere, perhaps even the foundation for a civilization. A continued settlement will build walls, establish trade routes, and serve as a nexus point for travel, warfare, and other forms of human interaction. However, if they move into the mountains and beyond, the people will come into contact with other groups. Maybe they will assimilate these groups, or be swallowed up by them; maybe they will fight and conquer, or be conquered. The point is: in either damming the river or moving away, they have already set into motion things both within and beyond their control. There is no one governing factor above all others in the course of these events. There are actions under our control, and there are things that follow from human actions that shape both what we do and how we do it.

There seems to be one critical mistake with both the cultural change and the natural forces hypothesis. They both give the impression of accounting for fluidity in human action, but stay rooted in the static mindset that seems to accompany ancient historical study. There is nothing static about human interaction with the environment. Every action brings new change, and every new change brings newer action. We cannot shape our world without it shaping us...and it cannot shape us without being itself shaped. Heisenberg, I think, would not disagree.

I couldn't have said it better myself. In fact, I wish I had said it.

Saint Valentine's Day

2006-02-14T01:43:00.000-05:00

During the latter part of the third century A.D., Claudius was Emperor of Rome — Claudius II, that is. In what has to be one of the dumbest edicts ever devised, Claudius decided to outlaw marriage, thinking it would be more efficient to raise troops if he didn’t have to tear them away from their families.

On paper, this decree must have looked good to Claudius, and it’s doubtful anyone was willing to tell him how sand-poundingly stupid his idea really was. After all, what happens when you outlaw normal human behavior? Of course: normal human beings sneak around the corner and do it anyway.

Thus, young couples started showing up at the Bishop’s house — this was in Interamna, now Terni, Italy— asking to be married. The news quickly spread and Valentinus was called before Claudius to explain himself. At the time, Christians were not considered persona grata, so Claudius wanted to deal: if Valentinus would renounce his faith and his bishopric and stop this marriage business he could escape unharmed. Needless to say, Valentinus wasn’t having any.

Claudius ordered the Bishop to be martyred in three stages. I will spare you the details. While awaiting execution, it is said that he fell in love with his jailer’s daughter and that his love cured her blindness.

There are at least two martyrs named Valentinus, so parts of the legend probably have some fact. One of them is buried on the road to Rome, and one of the smaller gates leading into the city was called for many centuries St. Valentine’s Gate. It has some other name now.

Eventually — about 200 hundred years later, a brief period in ecclesial time — Valentinus was canonized. He was made the patron saint of lovers, of epileptics (he perhaps suffered this disorder), and a regular grab bag of other ailments or past times. He is, for example, the patron saint of beekeepers — no doubt because of pressure from the beekeeper’s lobby.

Saint Valentine is not only the patron of lovers, originally he was appealed to as the savior of troubled love. The old people swore he could save marriages. Hmmm...

Maybe when it ceased being Saint Valentine’s Day and just became candy and flowers…maybe then, the divorce rate began to rise?

Save marriage — put Saint Valentine back on the calendar!

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
And for my beloved Baron, a quote from C. S. Lewis, that man most surprised by love:

Affection is responsible for nine-tenths of whatever solid and durable happiness there is in our lives.

The Baron would probably say that the other tenth of our durable happiness comes from sharing a good meal.

Happy Saint Valentine's Day, dear BB.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * *.So...waiting in my mailbox this morning was a card from the Baron.Why, of course I can!

Is That A Fact?

2006-02-13T20:19:00.000-05:00

A panel of linguists met to decide which new word best describes 2005. The word is truthiness.

This neologism was chosen by The American Dialect Society, winning out over other contenders that were some version of the terms which have been affixed to the posterior of Hurricane Katrina, henceforth known as “Katrinagate.” Obviously, when the sufix “-gate” is pasted onto a word, it means someone is convening a congressional investigation and someone else is about to be chosen – eeny, meany, miney, moe — as the fall guy for that particular gate to hell.

One of the specialists in lexicology said that truthiness means “truthy, not facty.” According to this group:

"The national argument right now is, one, who's got the truth and, two, who's got the facts," he said. "Until we can manage to get the two of them back together again, we're not going to make much progress."

Sounds like Dan Rather Redux to me...these guys must be sharing the outter darkness with ol’ Dan, swearing that the National Guard memo was truthy as all get out, even if it didn’t have any facts to back it up.

Creepy. This must be a bunch of academics, gathered together to hoist a few and write it off as a departmental expense. If this is the case, we know which point of view – “truthy” vs. “facty” – they subsribe to.

Makes you wonder: do they consider the laws of gravity to be true or to be factual?

And what do they have to say about how many angels can dance on the head of a lexicologist?

Needless to say this group convened in Albuquerque, not Minneapolis. It is February, after all.

And that's the truth.

"Ain't It Awful Saturdays": Chapter 23 or so

2006-01-21T14:22:00.000-05:00

Some blogs specialize in their area of authority — me, I just spout opinions. To paraphrase one of Thomas Merton’s poems, yes, thank you, I have an opinion for everything/Even though the nights are never dangerous. Heavens, I have opinions to burn. A blog I particularly like — and recommend, even if you have no children in school — is The Education Wonks.

I first met TEW when I joined The Watcher of Weasels Council last year. Their posts were usually short, succinct, and full of information I never saw anywhere else. Of course they don’t usually deal in jihadist issues, so I had no call to link to them on Gates, except when they won. But sometimes, win or lose, I’d comment anyway on a particularly hopeful or a shamefully egregious report the EW brought to our attention.

For example, back in June they did a brief expose of the shenanigans of the Las Vegas school administration. Those people work in splendor of a Las Vegas castle:

The fourth floor of the Clark County School District's new $14.5 million administrative building has features any executive would desire.

It has large offices, a dining room, [six] tiled showers, upscale furniture and decorations, and even remote-controlled curtains in one lounge area.

Superintendent Carlos Garcia allowed the news media to look inside the building for the first time Tuesday, and even he admitted the fourth floor of the four-story building was a potential public relations problem. But Garcia said it's an anomaly and that the purchase is justified.

"The fourth floor [with five showers] is a little bit controversial. It was designed for executive suites. I wish we didn't have the fourth floor, but it's here," Garcia said in the foyer of the 66,645-square-foot-building on Sahara Avenue between Edmond Street and Decatur Boulevard.

Of course, they took care of the children and teachers first, didn’t they? Those kids probably go to schools with marble halls and golden water fountains, right?

Dream on.

…many of Las Vegas's children attend classes in what some refer to as "portable" classrooms, and what others call "trailers."

Even though portables were designed for temporary use, in reality, they often become permanent fixtures at school sites around the country. At many campuses, (including the one where I teach) they have been in use for 20 years or more. Maintenance is often minimal, and many slowly deteriorate over the years. Most portables are small, and a visit to your local school will readily confirm that overcrowding is a serious problem.

Educrats like Garcia and countless others would do well to remember that they work for the parents, students, and taxpayers of their respective communities.

Garcia and his minions are ensconced in the lap of luxury while many of the community's children continue to be relegated (some might say condemned) to portable classrooms.

I think that a better administrative model would be for the administrators to work in portables, and for the students and teachers to be in the permanent buildings.

I’ve complained about ourschool system here, but never again. Our administrators are fiscally responsible and the children are well-housed in our schools. Not too long ago, the high school underwent major renovations and looks quite grand. The administration building is a modest affair across the street from the high school.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

But that’s not the only offense I’ve seen at Education Wonks. The one this past week took me by surprise. Do you know why you never hear the Martin Luther King speech all the way through — just a sentence here and there?

In "The Need to Share the Dream," the Wonks have a link to the WaPo story on the silence of Dr King on MLK Day — or any other day, for that matter:

All of King's speeches and papers are owned by his family, which has gone to court several times since the 1990s to protect its copyright; King obtained rights to his most famous speech a month after he gave it. Now, those who want to hear or use the speech in its entirety must buy a copy sanctioned by the King family, which receives the proceeds.

Some are of the opinion that the family was not left with much money and thus use this speech as a way to raise funds. I don’t find that angle credible at all, at least not now. Dr. King’s children are grown and one supposes they are making a living on their own. Meanwhile, the children most in need of hearing his speech are the least likely to do so:

Critics of the King family's decision not to put the speech in the public domain say the poorest children are the most deprived.

"The more elite the institution, the easier it is to pay the mandatory fee," said David J. Garrow, author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning book Bearing the Cross: Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and now a history professor at Cambridge University.

"So, to use a King phrase, 'the least of these,' I'll say that the least of these among schools and students are those who cannot afford the least access to his teachings," he said.

The decision to charge for a tape of this speech may have been a good one way back when. To continue to do so is just plain tacky. Sounds like they want it both ways: to have Dr. King in the American pantheon and to be paid for their efforts to place him there.

Beyond his human foibles, Dr. King had vision and he seized the opportunity to move things forward. Charging for his speech is just plain wrong.

The Education Wonks are one of the most interesting blogs around. Full of education and culture issues. Some of the features are heart-warming and positive, but for “Ain’t It Awful” Saturdays, they have enough material for years.

The Organizing Lady Comes to Visit

2006-01-20T21:33:00.000-05:00

Our house is a disaster.

For a long time, I couldn’t figure it out. The more I tried, the worse it got. So I grew a shell, like a turtle, and pulled myself inside. It made walking by the same magazine on the floor for a week — no longer having the motivation to bend and pick it up — something I could do with ease. It got so I didn’t even see things anymore. Clutter was where we lived.

Who knows how many “tried-and-true” (or “tired-and-false”) housecleaning books I read. Everything from House and Gardens to Feng Shui. Nothing worked for very long.

Someone introduced to the Flylady and while I agreed with her philosophy, I couldn’t put it into practice. Except for keeping the sink clean — I did manage that one. And getting up every morning to dress, do my hair and put on make-up before I started anything else. Usually, I dressed, put on my make-up, etc., and then went back to bed. Hey, you do what you can, right?

And then one day, a few months ago, while perusing Amazon, I ran across a book on cleaning. Sorry, I ran across yet another book on cleaning. I have a small library of them, as though if I collect enough books on the subject, it will all come together. Fat chance. They simply totter on the shelves, or fall sideways and lie there gathering dust.

But this book seemed different. I was skeptical and decided I’d look at it and return it if it were just another routine about routines. It wasn’t. It’s a book about how we get stuck with things and how it gets beyond us. Life happens, things change, and we find it hard to change with it.

So there’s the pile of Shelagh’s stuff…that’s one obstacle. And there’s the “Music Room” which is no longer a repository for music since the Boy went off to school and the piano went to the next generation for lessons, and the guitars went with the Boy. A sad and lonely hymn book remained behind until…it became the room to put things “for awhile until I figure out what to do with them.”

Thus, a clue to your problem is labeling rooms by names that no longer function. It’s a junk room, not a music room. It needs to be a media center, and Wally Ballou has even gotten the sound equipment to go with the wide screen I have yet to get because first I have to move all the junk out (WHERE???), pull up and replace the rug, paint the walls, and then make it a Media Room.

So after reading the book, I looked on line for a person who was trained in this meta-organizing. Sure enough, in Li’l’ Kumquat, there were four. I picked the one who seemed to have been doing it the longest, and she came today.

Peggy, the Baron and I talked for two or three hours and she walked around and looked at things and asked questions and discussed styles of organization and how we use space, etc. It was exciting and exhausting.

But now we have taken our first step. And I have three steps to do before I decide what to do next. The first one is to remove every single book from my bedroom that there is not room for. A good beginning. When that is finished (put them in boxes until the shelves are built), I get to reward myself with flowers…

A wonderful, hopeful beginning…I laugh and wince when I remember that I used to do this for a living myself. Cleaning people’s closets, I mean. And now you barely open mine. The Baron used to say that I didn’t just clean, I went on search-and-destroy missions…but that was then. Now?

Now I watch the glisten of January's afternoon sun as it shines through a particularly large and intricate spider web in the corner of the “Music” Room.

Ah, how the mighty have fallen. Ah, how the mighty are struggling to arise.

Hey! Look me over!
Hey, lend an ear,
Fresh out of clover
and mortgaged up to here…
But don't pass the plate folks,
Don't pass the buck,
I figure whenever you're down and out,
the only way is up!

And as soon as I can find the book in the midst of all my clutter, I'll let you know the title.

Jambalaya, Crawfish Pie, File Gumbo....

2006-01-19T20:30:00.000-05:00

When I was first learning to cook, I had a friend whose family came from Ville Platte. It was from them I learned to love Cajun food, which is about as far from Irish cooking as you can get and not leave the galaxy.

One feature of Cajun that is true of many country dishes is that it tends to be cooked in one pot and it features local food. So for Cajuns, that means fish, pork, fowl, and lots of vegetables. Rice, of course, since Louisiana has all those rice paddies.

Warning: most Cajun recipes begin with “first you make a roux.” This means brown roux, which in reality is pretty near the color of chocolate. I’ve heard tell you can buy ready-made roux, but I never have. It’s just not something I think of when I go to the grocery store.

Here’s how to make roux. It takes about forty five minutes altogether (having a book to read while you stand/sit on a stool stirring the pan will alleviate the tedium some. Or you could think good thoughts).

First thing, you need a cast iron frying pan. Nothing else can distribute the heat the way it does. Second thing you need is some fat. I use (heaven forefend!) lard or clarified butter. Bacon grease was often used in traditional brown roux. Even oil works, but you can’t darken it as much and I think the flavor is shallow.

CAJUN BROWN ROUX

1 cup lard
1 cup flour
1 cast iron pan

Heat pan on medium to low and add fat. Let it melt completely and then stir in the flour. Stir the mixture constantly (I use a wire whip since it seems to keep things moving more efficiently).

The lower setting takes longer for the roux to brown, but it avoids making black spots, which turns the roux bitter and inedible.

The roux will darken slowly, and then darken some more, and then a little darker. The first time you’ll be a bit nervous, thinking you’re going to leave it on too long. You probably won’t because it’s so damn tedious.

Just before you think it’s dark enough --as it's moving past a caramel color--take the pan off the burner and continue stirring for a few minutes longer. That cast iron really holds heat and if you just let the mixture sit, you’ll get burned bits, so keep stirring for awhile.

When the pan is cool, scrape the roux into a jar. It will keep for ages in the refrigerator.

That’s the hard part. Now comes the rest of the story, which is my recipe for gumbo. Lots of ingredients, but easy to prepare. This probably serves ten or twelve people, depending on size of diner and size of appetite. It freezes well and it tastes better if you make it a day ahead.

DYMPHNA’S GUMBO (filé powder expunged)

Red and green peppers, sliced or diced
Several onions, same way
Chopped celery, a cup or more
Enough oil or spray to sauté them on low for awhile in a big pot. Let the vegetables brown lightly, but not much. And do it slowly on low.

While they’re cooking, use the cast iron pan you made the roux in to sauté:

1 pound sausages, cut into pieces,
1 chicken, or 4 chicken breasts
1 pound ham, uncooked, cut in chunks.
Brown the meat lightly and leave aside.

To the large pot of veggies, add

8 diced tomatoes or two large cans of diced tomatoes
2 cups chicken broth
2 or 3 tablespoons brown roux (real Cajuns use half a cup, but you don’t need that much)
some thyme — be generous
celery seed, if you have it
Creole seasoning (make your own or buy it. The commercial kind has salt, so be careful)
1 jar clam juice

Let that cook slowly for about ten minutes and then add the meats from the frying pan. Cook until the meats are done, about half an hour to forty five minutes.

Now add either fresh or frozen okra — about a pound or so. It’s not crucial. In fact, some people don’t like it so they leave it out. If you do that, we’ll have to talk about filé powder.

Let the okra cook for about ten minutes. By the way, if you use whole okra, then people who don't like it can pick it out. Then add

1 lb shelled, raw shrimp. Size doesn’t matter, but stir and watch carefully that you don’t overcook the shrimp. They don’t take to it and get all mushy.

That’s it, except for cooked rice. Some people put the rice in the pot when the vegetables are cooking. Some put cooked rice in the bottom of the bowl (pasta bowls are good) and put the gumbo on that. Those who don’t eat starches can skip the rice.

NOTE: filé powder is made from dried sassafras leaves. There are some ersatz-science claims that sassafras leaves are carcinogenic but it’s one of those things where you’d have to eat more than you’ll ever put in a gumbo. The thing is, you can only use it when the gumbo is hot, sprinkled on separate servings. If you boil it, ugghhh — you have ropes instead of thickening. Okra’s better.

And, of course, here's the accompanying music:

Jambalaya, Crawfish Pie, File Gumbo....
Goodbye Joe, he gotta go, me oh my oh
He gotta go pole the pirogue down the bayou.
His Yvonne sweetest one me oh my oh
Son of a gun we'll have big fun on the bayou.

Thibadeaux Fountaineaux the place is buzzin'
Kin folk come to see Yvonne by the dozen
Dressed in style they go hogwild me oh my oh
Son of a gun we'll have big fun on the bayou.

Jambalaya crawfish pie file gumbo
For tonight I'm gonna see ma cher-o me oh
Pick guitar fill fruit jar and be gay-o
Son of a gun we'll have big fun on the bayou.

Settle down far from home get him a pirogue
And he'll catch all the fish on the bayou
Swap his mon to buy Yvonne what she need-o
Son of a gun we'll have big fun on the bayou.

Repeat. Or, as they say down there, "allez encore..."

January 18th, always

2006-01-18T23:55:00.000-05:00

In my experience, on January 18th it’s usually raining. Everything is grey and damp and seems eternally so.

This year is an exception. Today we have sun and a few clouds whipping by in the high wind. A large branch came down in the driveway, forcing me to get out of the car and drag it into the woods. I noticed a smallish, dead pine had broken off, but the tree fell vertically coming to rest against the stump.

It was one I had marked to be cut down during the last driveway cleanup, but Herbert said, “Naw, that one ain’t comin’ down any time soon.” So there was the small, momentary triumph of being right…of course three others are similarly marked and they are all quite upright and hanging on so I’ve only gotten one out of four. On the other hand, it’s a long way till we’re past March so my batting average could improve.

January 18th is the anniversary of the first time I experienced death. Yeah, I’d already had many separations from my family, but no one I’d ever known or cared about had up and died on me.

That is, until Father Doyle did. He died of a heart attack in his sleep during the night. The nuns told us that morning at Mass — explaining that the altar was draped in black in his memory. My first reaction was a sense of unreality. My second reaction was to cry. And cry, and cry, and cry. Maybe “incessant wailing” is a closer description. For once, admonishments by the nuns to “behave” or “be quiet” or “settle down” had absolutely no effect. I was past caring what they could do. What was the worst thing that could happen now? Could they forbid any more visits to the rectory with Father Doyle? No more birthday cards? No more waldorf salad in the kitchen of the rectory, sitting with the housekeeper?

I adored Father Doyle. He was tall, balding and bespectacled. Quiet, but with a twinkle in his eye. He used to count my freckles, though never past a hundred. The nuns were not happy he’d singled me out for “attention.” Just another thing to make me think I was special. Of course, they could object about his spoiling me, and did, but in that hierarchy he could ignore their objections with impunity. And did.

It was probably because my mother was from Dublin that Father Doyle singled me out for affection. It wasn’t often, and only when he saw us in the playground that he’d come and spend a few moments just being nice to me. I think it was because I was Irish and he was homesick for Dublin. I was as close as he was ever going to get to home.

Like any kid, I had an intuitive understanding of the politics of the situation. Father Doyle could be nice to me and the nuns couldn’t stop him. Other than that, I didn’t think about it much, except that he made me feel accepted, acceptable. Worthy, even. The other girls didn’t mind — we shared what we got, and Lord knows it wasn’t much. If anyone harbored bad feelings, they never said so. I guarantee you they would have if that had been the case. But kids don’t think like that. Grown-ups do stuff and that’s just how it is.

And, no, this isn’t one of those pedophile stories — no scandal here. Father Doyle was just a lonely middle-aged priest sent to our parish to “dry out” from his alcoholism. Later I learned that he’d succeeded and had he lived would have gone back to running his own parish. But that knowledge came when I was older and gone from St. Mary's. When he was alive, and when I knew him, I was just a little Irish girl who reminded him of home and he was someone who made me feel special. Two lonely souls who happened across one another. See? Sometimes the fates smiled, however briefly.

I can remember the funeral clearly. I remember not wanting to leave the casket. I remember being pulled away. I remember the following days and weeks quite clearly — or as clearly as one can remember a shadow world.

Did I recover? Of course. I’m telling you the story, am I not? Did I forget? Never.

I am here to honor Father Doyle every January 18th. He was forty-seven years old when he left me. Gabriel Marcel says that love means “for me, you shall never die.”

And so it does. Requiescat in pace, dear man. I'm glad I knew you, and even gladder that you knew me.

Tuesday's Book: "Too Scared To Cry"

2006-01-17T23:47:00.000-05:00

This book is out in paperback now with a 1992 copyright. The first time I laid eyes on it, my daughter was holding it in her hand. We were in my kitchen.

Shelagh thrust the book at me and said, "here, take this for me. I just found it at the dump, but I don't think I can read it yet." So I shoved it in the bookcase, made her a cup of coffee and we talked about ordinary things, including what a wonderful dump her town had, with places where people could drop off useable things for others to pick over.

The original book had a kind of grey cover as I recall. It certainly didn't have the garish picture they're using now. At least, that's how I remember it: hardbound with hard words on the cover. The title made me shiver. As it would anyone who's ever been told -- or heard another told to --"shut up that crying or I'll give you something to cry about." There may be a more banally evil expression than that, but I can't think of it. When you are simply too terrified for tears, you're in basic survival mode. Tears only come with a safe haven. And then it seems they'll never stop. I remember reading a book once about a man who decided he would cry until there were no tears left. He cried for months...don't know if it ever healed him or not.

Dr. Terr is a child psychiatrist in California. Hers is not a book for scholars or researchers. She's trying to explain a phenomenon to the rest of us, in flesh and blood terms we can grasp. She doesn't talk down to you, and she doesn't gloss over the emotionally difficult parts, but she does show you how fragile children are.

Part of the book is a longitudinal study of sorts about the children in Chowchilla, California who were kidnapped off their bus one afternoon in the 1970’s and buried for twenty four hours in an abandoned rock quarry. Shortly after their rescue, Dr. Terr began a series of interviews with them and followed them into adolescence. They didn't do well. It was here I learned that children of terror cease to have a future, even if you give it back to them. You know those kids Bill Cosby talks about who make bad decisions? They're part of that club, too. Children left alone too long, neglected too much, ignored too often. People think abuse is the worst, but it's not. Abuse is connection. Neglect is abandonment and disconnection. It can kill.

One part of the book that Stephen King fans may enjoy is her attempt to analyze what childhood trauma he must have endured to keep repeating the same themes in his books and films. You'll be surprised at what she manages to uncover.

If you have some idea of the high incidence of abuse and neglect in families today, this book will interest you.

It is my contention that the roots of global terrorism lie partially in the family system of fundamentalist Islamic cultures. Our fundamentalist Christians, bound as they are with brimstone and bigotry, are similar except for one important fact: they don't want to kill all the infidel non-Christians and so far none of them are exhibiting any signs of donning bomb belts and setting out for godless New York City. There can be no moral equations there.

Lenore Terr writes well and makes important connections you wouldn't see otherwise, including the cognitive losses that terror produces, and why people like horror movies (I loathe them).

I finally read Too Scared to Cry but Shelagh never did. She wanted to, but she never felt safe enough. After she died, I gave it away.

Monday's Word(s): Soulless Susurration

2006-01-16T23:01:00.000-05:00

I have this thing about The New York Times -- part of my 'thing' is that I never, ever link to it. If the Old Grey Doxy were the only outlet carrying the story of Judgment Day, I'd talk about something else.

Anyway, we don't usually do links in this neighborhood. It's not that kind of place, unless perhaps it's Tuesday and books are being bandied about. Otherwise, it's not the done thing here in Chaos, next door to H-m..

But recently -- and this has a connection, as you'll see -- Neo neocon had a post on Moby Dick. The first of two, as it turns out. The premise of this initial post is obsession:

...So, what does the whale symbolize, anyway? I've called it a "protean" symbol, meaning "readily taking on various shapes, forms, or meanings." So one thing we can agree on is that the text offers a lot of room for us to see any number of things in it. Evil, for starters. Or unbridled nature, with Ahab representing the hubris of fighting the way the world is set up, thinking he can subdue the chaos.

Hmm, I've been there...been there, done that, and will no doubt return to the scene of the crime many more times before I snuffle off.

Neo offers several obsessions, or "Moby Dicks" for our consideration:

Whatever your preferred Moby Dick metaphor, it can be extended to some present day situations. Here are my current offerings:

(1) To Hitler, the Jews were Moby Dick.

(2) To the Arab world, the Israelis are Moby Dick.

(3) To quite a few Europe on the left, "Zionists" (read: "Jews") are still Moby Dick.

(4) To those suffering from Bush Derangement Syndrome, Bush is Moby Dick.

(5) To many who detest Bush, Iraq is Bush's Moby Dick.

Most obviously, when I am Ahab, the Old Grey Whore is Moby Dick: elusive, cunning, always out there somewhere. And I want to harpoon her and drag her carcass back to shore.

Turns out I'm not the only one harboring this animus. Gerard Van der Leun has his own disquietude about her. Here is his meditation on the subject:

The Soulless Susurration of the Times' Editorials

After many years of reading the editorials of the New York Times with interest and attention, both my interest and attention began to drop below absolute zero after several months of sour grapes following the 2000 elections. Soon after that my interest and attention in the paper itself went even lower until, after nearly three decades as a daily reader of the Times, I decided that the money spent on the paper could be put to better use buying lap dances for indigent friends. At least they'd get a little pleasure from the money.

Since early in 2002 I've not spent a penny on the paper, but I do read it online from time to time just to assure myself that its death spiral continues unabated.

The rest of his essay is here and it's every bit as entertaining as this opening riff.

Mr. Van der Leun is one of those people who have led "interesting lives." That he can also bring forth "soulless susurration" from the depths allows me to surrender my envy of his myriad experiences in the face of astoundingly great alliteration.

Now I am free simply to admire his scope. And rejoice in discovering a kindred soul who would do better things with his money than spend it on that Hussy.

Sunday's Gratitude Got Mugged

2006-01-15T21:50:00.000-05:00

In the Neighborhood of God, Chaos can be a pest -- always in and out, asking for a cup of sugar or leaving the yard strewn with leaves I just raked. Some neighbors are simply obnoxious.

So it was Sunday and I was driving home, pondering my gratitude post, since Sundays are for gratitude. I already had the picture ready -- one the Baron had taken. And I was going to talk about being grateful for friends because we'd gone to our friends' house the night before to have dinner (yum, gumbo) and watch "Serenity."

These were my thoughts as I came to the driveway. But I stopped in the road because blocking the entrance was a dark sedan. There were big doings at the Baptist church just down the road and I thought perhaps this person was just overflow parking. But then I noticed he was motioning me to go around him. I motioned to him to move out onto the road so I could drive in without having to go on the verge (and possibly into the ditch), but he wasn't budging, except to move over three inches to my left.

So I squeezed in and before I could ask why he was there, this man informed me that I was on his property and he was closing the driveway to our use...??!!

We live in the country -- as my three readers know. Here in the woods, commonly shared driveways are...well, common. As in frequently found and not unusual. Our driveway property is mostly owned by a family who doesn't live there, but along comes Mr. Brown, down from the big city, with big plans for "his" share of the property. Which, given there are a dozen children and their offspring, can't be much. However, he says, he has a "vision" about what he's going to do with these woods and my driving on the road past them is definitely not part of his vision.

To put it mildly, I got upset. Intellectually, I knew he was wrong, but this grandiose flabber jab had me convinced we'd have to find another way into that third of a mile to our house. I told him he was cruel. He told me maybe we could make some kind of deal...in other words, that big city so-and-so was going to charge me rent for the privilege of using the driveway! And, by the way, I'd better move my mailbox because it belonged down by the church not near his property...

...The Baron was waiting to use my car to drive the Boy back to school when I came in crying. When I told him what'd happened he did the guy thing: got out the deed which showed that we had express use of the driveway, and called the sheriff (in that order). Then he drove down and parked behind the sedan, still sitting on the driveway. He showed Mr. Big the deed, but Mr. Big was on "Transmit Only" so the Baron just waited for the law. Fortunately, they showed up in two colors: the black officer talked to the crazy man, and the white officer told the Baron to call our attorney at home and make plans to have a letter delivered in lawyerese explaining to our visionary why he couldn't extort money for the use of a common driveway.

So now we have the expense of having an attorney explain to someone who cannot hear his neighbors that he can't deprive us of access to a commonly shared driveway. And is he gonna be mad! Turns out his grandma used to do this periodically to the old lady who lived in our house previously and the old lady didn't know the law so she would be frantic because she had to walk through the woods to get out until she could get back in Grandma's good graces and be permitted to use the driveway again. Mr. Big thought he'd come "home" (he left here in 1970) and repeat Grandma's evil ways.

Guess he thought we were hicks.

Now in case you think this is about race, it's not. Mr. Big is black, and we are white. Mr. Big's black grandmother used to pull this trick on the owner of our house, who was also black. It was not about race, you see, it was about being mean. Grandson wanted to carry on that fine family tradition.

Funny thing is, his Grandma made the black woman who owned our house so bitter that when it came time to sell, she wouldn't sell to any black folks. I didn't find that out until twenty years later, but I couldn't figure out why she'd do such a thing, be so trifling with her own people.

Now I know why. Too bad Miz Johnson's not still alive. I'd go visit her and talk about how the mills of God grind slowly, but grind they do. And they're gonna grind that mean man into an expensive lawsuit if he keeps up with his Grandma's mean ways. Oh, pardon me, her "vision."

Yeah. So Happy Martin Luther King Day, y'all.

Cast Adrift By Judge Cashman

2006-01-14T14:17:00.000-05:00

The Anchoress calls him a judge Steven Spielberg could love:

In his “prayer for peace” Steven Spielberg’s film Munich reportedly draws a moral equivalence between Palestinian terrorists and Israel’s response…and he cautions that “fighting back” doesn’t work - it only leads to more violence.

The Associated Press claims that this story was “whipped into a frenzy via Internet blogs” — a snarky aside, showing the growing fear the MSM harbors about the ability of distributive information to change outcomes.

Michelle Malkin weighed in on the reason for last week’s fury:

There was outrage Wednesday when a Vermont judge handed out a 60-day jail sentence to a man who raped a little girl many, many times over a four-year span starting when she was seven.

Prosecutors argued that confessed child-rapist Mark Hulett, 34, of Williston deserved at least eight years behind bars for repeatedly raping a littler girl countless times starting when she was seven.

But Judge Edward Cashman disagreed explaining that he no longer believes that punishment works.

“The one message I want to get through is that anger doesn’t solve anything. It just corrodes your soul,” said Judge Edward Cashman speaking to a packed Burlington courtroom. Most of the on-lookers were related to a young girl who was repeatedly raped by Mark Hulett who was in court to be sentenced.

Before we analyze what this judge did, it is important to know who he is. According to that same editorialized story by the Associated Press, Judge Cashman is a Catholic conservative and a former Vietnam veteran. He is known as a tough judge and has handed down some harsh sentences.

On the other hand, he also been a volunteer for many years at a halfway house for prisoners who have been released and are attempting to start over.

He has won his state legislature’s confidence over the years and the Governor speaks highly of him.

So why were neither of these aspects of his persona — the tough judge, the fellow who understands the need for community — why were they not in operation in this case of the pedophile who was given sixty days for his four years’ of sexual abuse of a child?

Ignorance. That’s all it was. Judge Cashman has bought into the conventional wisdom that such men are “sick” and need treatment, not jail time. The judge is merely a man of his time, our time, a moment in history when perpetrators of crimes are seen as needing our help and not our censure.

Judge Cashman has probably never worked as a volunteer with the victims of crime, especially the child victims of sexual abuse. Had he done so, he would have put this man away for as long as possible. He would have put him on the same basis as John W. Hinckley, who is still in St. Elizabeth’s despite efforts to have him released. But then Hinckley didn’t rape a little girl over and over again. The permanent damage to a child simply doesn’t tip the scales of Justice when compared to an attempt on President Reagan’s life — even though it is more heinous and probably even less curable than Hinckley’s obsessions, Jody Foster notwithstanding. These two men chose different victims but their criminal obsessions are the same.

The Judge ought least to have read some of the studies which have been done on child victims of sexual assault. It changes the trajectory of a child's life; it is never gotten over; and the damage does not go away with time. What they’re beginning to understand is that trauma to children, but especially sexual trauma, actually changes the brain. The amygdala of such children is smaller than those of children who have not been victimized.

In a very long website article, Bruce Perry, M.D, notes that “states become traits” — i.e., the animal fear and loathing that arises during abuse becomes a permanent way of being in the world:

… Similar altered brainstem catecholamine and neuroendocrine functioning was suggested by a pilot study in sexual abused girls. Following abuse girls exhibited greater total catecholamine synthesis as measured by the sum of the urinary concentration of epinephrine, norepinephrine and dopamine when compared with matched controls… In our laboratory, altered platelet alpha-2 adrenergic receptor number and cardiovascular functioning was demonstrated in children exposed to traumatic violence, suggesting chronic and abnormal activation of the sympathetic nervous system . In our clinic populations, evidence of brain-mediated alterations of cardiovascular functioning have been demonstrated in various ways… In both the acute and chronic post-traumatic period, resting heart rate is different from comparison populations. In other studies, clonidine, an alpha2 adrenergic receptor partial agonist has been demonstrated to be an effective pharmacotherapeutic agent… further suggesting altered LC functioning in children exposed to violence.

And what does this translate to in every day life? These girls (and boys) live in a persistent fear state and their cognitive, social and emotional functioning are ruled by fear. Try to imagine life lived in that state, try to understand what it does to your ability to think, to make responsible decisions, or even to maintain yourself in present time.

Severely abused children do not plan for the future. The future has been wiped as a potential space. Thus, they often function well below what would have been their potential. Underneath it all is the shame and humiliation which drive a desire for surcease from the emotional blankness or pain. Suicide rates are higher, but more importantly, such children feel they do not deserve a future so they don’t make plans for one. They simply drift.

That’s what sexual abuse of the order of magnitude this child suffered at the hands of Judge Cashman’s prisoner has left in its wake: she is now a child set adrift on an empty sea.

Will she ever “recover”? No.

Will she ever find a way to live with her suffering? Perhaps. It depends on what kind of help she gets and for how long. It depends on the environment which takes her in. It partly depends on how resilient she was before this happened…

And there, but for the grace of God, go you.

Meanwhile, this piece of human garbage, Mark Hulett, will be given the opportunity to do this again and again, setting more little girls adrift on a sea of pain and self-loathing.

What is wrong with us?

Living In a Neighborhood Where Chaos Mucks With My Schedules

2006-01-13T22:45:00.000-05:00

Well, I “try”… which means E for Effort.

For Neighborhood of God, I adopted James Lileks' idea of having a schedule of subjects for each day of the week. Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to transplant his anal retentive tendencies along with this great idea, so I carom off the hours and the days, bruising body parts along my erratic path and dropping the days’ categories all over the place.

Here’s the putative schedule:

Monday: Etymology. I’d prefer this to be words I come across while reading or in conversation but it doesn’t always work out that way. I suppose if I read William Buckley more often I wouldn’t have a problem.

Tuesday: Books. It started out as Science because I was reading The Agile Gene at the time, but what I know about science you could put in thimble and have enough room left for Bill Clinton’s integrity.

So now it’s whatever I’m reading or have read recently. This can run the gamut from fiction to philosophy, depending on my mood. And sometimes on what the Baron brings home from the library or the Boy brings home from college. Sometimes he borrows wonderful things from Wally Ballou, who has contributed greatly to the Boy’s education. Once he was reading a “borry” from WB — either Thurber or Benchley?— and came across a mention of Billy Rose’s trial. The day before I’d been telling the Boy about the fact that my grandfather had been Billy Rose’s attorney. Don’t know if that goes under family (Friday) or books (Tuesday). And then there are family books, including some good ones, even.

Wednesday: The Garden. Or Matters Rural. This can be anything from Hazel’s wedding —which if I haven’t written about, I will — to the zen of raking, raking, raking to Missouri. Or plant diseases and pests, like the horrid Japanese beetle.

Thursday: Food, Glorious Food. I’ve been cooking dinner since I was ten. Doing the grocery shopping since I was twelve. There is little about food I don’t know but I won’t burden you with it. Perhaps though, I will tell about the time Mother brought home a string of dead quail and tried to put them in the trash. I rescued them and learned quickly how to clean them, strip the feathers, and singe the remaining pin feathers from the skin. Best fowl I’ve ever had. The story of how Mother came to have a string of dead quail in her possession will have to wait.

Friday: Family and Friends. This, too, will be a mishmash. Our family agrees we’re pretty much a mishmash. When I married the Baron, Mother commented that it would be good to widen the genetic pool beyond our Celtic walls. No kidding. Maybe I will write about my cousin, Buster, who lost the mayor’s race in Tallahassee by 37 votes. Or maybe Mark Humphrys, a cousin I met because I found my grandmother’s wedding picture on his site. He lives in Dublin and teaches IT. An Irishman who’s a libertarian. A fierce libertarian…are there any other kinds?

Saturday: Ain’t It Awful. This one is fluid, since I don’t seem to have managed a Saturday post as yet. Usually Saturday is hanging out with the Baron and dribbling the day away. We’re lazy bums except when we’re too busy to be so. Anyway, this category is tentative, as is Wednesday. I think I could quickly run out of things that annoy me, but perhaps not. When Norm Geras interviewed me I sure did rattle them off.

Sunday: The Latitudes of Gratitude…the antidote to Saturday…As in “there is a wideness in God’s mercy.” Wish I could get the Baron’s boy to learn to play that hymn. Of course I could just buy a CD, but I’d rather hear the music drifting down the stairs when he’s home. Carrot? Stick? Guilt? Hmm…

Anyway, since Shelagh died, gratitude comes hard. My spirit starts to expand and I find myself wanting to tell her about it and then I remember…she’s not here. A lot of parents tell me that somehow they manage to find a sign from their dead child. Sometimes I think of that…but nothing has appeared so far…though there was a small incident with her granddaughter, Kiki, the other week.

The people who lived in the house where my daughter died have moved from there because they see her drifting up the stairs as though she’s just come out of the bath, a towel wrapped around her hair. I wish she’d move here.

Well, there I went from gratitude to grief in two small steps. That seems to keep happening. Perhaps it is a process to be gotten through and eventually one arrives at a more spacious place. Writing poetry helps sometimes. A psychiatrist friend, a writer in NYC, says poems are “pellets of time.” He’s right…they provide enough aesthetic distance to allow me to move on a bit.

Lileks was right. It’s a good idea to have a schedule. Now if I could just get him to help me organize my papers. Wonder if he works by the hour?

It may look as though I wrote this so my reader(s) might know what to expect on any given day. Truth to tell, I wrote it because I keep losing the damn list. Now it exists here in the ether where it can only get lost if the web gremlins or the blogger bugs interfere with my karma.

Fortunately, my webmaster is duly diligent about backing things up.

Tomorrow: the dreadful Judge Cashman. I have things to say about that soft-headed man, but not entirely what you think. It may even be a nuanced characater assault instead of merely a rant.

Yorkshire Pudding, The Day After

2006-01-12T12:28:00.000-05:00

We had a standing rib roast recently — two of them, actually, since my family can’t seem to co-ordinate Christmas dinner. One was on Christmas and one was two days past Epiphany, which is officially beyond the Twelve Days of Christmas, but any excuse for rib roast is fine with me.

Rib roast calls for Yorkshire pudding. The Baron, having spent his high school years in Yorkshire, loves pud. As do those who were fortunate enough to taste the ones his mother made. My Irish mother made Yorkshire pudding on occasion. She was a spectacularly bad cook, but the YP was in her blood so she made a decent one when we could afford the roast to go with it.

This last time, as we were cleaning up from dinner, the Baron happened to mention a dish he’d had in Yorkshire when he went back to visit a few years ago. He described it as a small, individual pudding which was topped with beef stew.

“Say no more,” I told him. “That’s what we’ll do with the rest of the rib roast.” My recipes for both follow:

Beef Stew (made from left-over cooked rib roast)

Preheat oven to 400 or so.

Put enough carrots for whomever you’re feeding into a roasting pan lined with tinfoil.
Add a few chopped up onions,
a leek if you have it (white only),
some unpeeled garlic cloves,
celery hunks, perhaps.

Spray with oil, sprinkle lightly with flour, and put in oven. Stir occasionally as they roast. Spray a little more oil if they look dry. If you like parsnips, turnips, etc., you can use those, too.

At the same time place ½ cup or so of flour into another pan and put in oven. Stir this occasionally until it browns a bit (you’ll use this to make gravy).

Scrub enough potatoes (I used three) to go with the rest of the ingredients.
Bring to a boil enough water to cover the potatoes, add salt and then cube the potatoes into the water.
Turn down to medium when it returns to the boil. Cover and simmer for ten minutes (if you want to avoid having the potatoes boil over when your back is turned, put a little oil or butter around the rim of the saucepan — about an inch into the pan— before you start. If you forget, do it with a pastry brush while they’re cooking)
Cook for about 10 minutes and drain in colander. Set aside.

Now cube the beef. Scrape whatever juices remain on the plate and ribs and set aside with the cubed meat.

If you’ve saved the roasting pan with its fat and juices, now is the time to haul it out of the fridge where it was taking up too much room anyway.

Crack up the solid fat and discard, being careful to scrape off any congealed juices clinging to it. Use what remains ( two tablespoons or so of fat — just eyeball it) to make the gravy for the stew.
Heat roasting pan on low and add enough of the browned flour to make a thin gravy.
If you have left-over red wine, now’s the time to add it, before you pour in water or beef broth. Or both.
Use a whisk to smooth out the gravy. Put in a few dashes of Lea and Perrins. Set aside.

Heat a large stew pan over medium heat for a few minutes before putting in a bit of spray or some rendered beef fat on the bottom and sides of the pan.
Add the cubed beef and cook very briefly, perhaps five minutes, stirring a few times.

Pour the gravy over the meat.
Remove the roasted veggies from the oven and add to stew pot, mixing well.
At this point, use pepper grinder generously over stew.
Add a tablespoon of tomato paste
and one of pistou, if you have it (this is easily made by blender, using only basil, nuts, oil, and garlic. Don’t add cheese. Freeze it in small hunks and bag it when frozen).
If you don’t have pistou, use a small bit of anchovy paste and a basil leaf. Cover stew and turn fairly low so it’s just simmering.

Spread the cubed, parboiled potatoes in the just-vacated veggie pan. Spray lightly with oil, sprinkle with salt and crushed pepper and put in oven. Stir them around every few minutes so they brown slightly, very slightly. Roast about ten minutes.

For the puddings:

Using heavy 8 inch cake pans, line the outside with foil (this just provides an extra layer to keep the bottoms from overheating).
Put in a square of the solid rendered beef fat from the roasting pan (about a tablespoon) into the cake pans. Set aside.

Measure out a cup of flour (use metal cups, not the graduated glass kind for liquids).
Warm two eggs under running water.
Heat a cup of milk (use the glass pyrex cup for this) in microwave just until it reaches room temperature.
Beat eggs well (use a whisk briefly) and add milk.
Sift the flour/salt into the milk/egg mixture and whisk briefly to distribute. Don’t beat it much, leave a lump or two. Set aside.

At the finish line...

Remove potatoes from oven. Turn oven up to 450.

Put potatoes into stew.
At this point, add a cup of frozen peas also, and chopped fresh parsley if you have it.
Stir, taste for salt, and cover again.

Put cake pans into oven to preheat. Leave them in for 3 minutes or so.
Stir the pudding mixture,
remove the pans, swirl the melted fat around the pan
and quickly pour in the batter.
Return to oven and don’t open the door. Here is where an oven light helps because you can watch their progress. Lacking that, figure on 20 - 22 minutes for them to rise and cook through.

Remove pans, open puddings up (use a fork or sharp knife) and spoon in a generous serving of stew.

Place pans on dinner plates and serve. People can use their napkin to hold the pan initially but it will cool enough to touch quite quickly.

That looks like a lot of work but it's not if you do it in steps. Roast the veggies one day and make gravy at the same time. Blend them and refrigerate. Then the next day you can make the pudding and finish the stew with the meat.

Besides, you're likely to have stew for yet another meal. If you serve the potatoes separately you can freeze it. Potatoes don't freeze well, but turnips do.

Shoot. I Thought It Was Tuesday.

2006-01-11T23:40:00.000-05:00

But it’s not. Wednesday is here already, which means I missed doing my weekly book review. Wednesday is the garden, the country, and matters rural. That covers a lot of territory, considering it’s about forty miles to the nearest latte — in Lil’ Kumquat*, that blue, blue town near us. It has the nearest Barnes and Noble, too, but since we have a somewhat shaky internet connection and email, Amazon is better…can’t go into Barnes and Noble in my pajamas. On the other hand, Amazon doesn’t serve coffee. And on the third hand, while browsing Amazon I won’t be meeting any red-faced liberals demanding to know why I’m browsing through David Horowitz and “polarizing the country.” That was a fun moment. Have you ever noticed that liberals seem to have an atrophied sense of fun?

In the winter around here — here being Eden, our estate — the garden tasks amount to raking. Lots and lots of raking. Fortunately, since it’s also my winter exercise, I don’t mind raking a large area only to find it covered with leaves a few days later. There is a wonderful Zen experience to be had with raking for its own sake. Rake, step, rake, step, rake, step. And then down goes the tarp. Rake, step — repeat several hundred times and then haul the tarp to the woods and dump it wherever it feels right.

At the moment I am using the spot where sits an old, dilapidated picnic table. Hexagonal, I think. Anyway, it tilts south and I’ve been busy covering it with leaves. It’s not treated wood so it responds to my treatment by gradually growing holier.

As I am also doing, by applying a modest dose of raking every day. It is good — a good — to do something useful which you will simply have to repeat eternally until you die and someone comes behind you to pick up the rake and continue the task.

But who knows? Maybe the next person will come along and knock down the house and build a bigger one. A few years ago, I got one of my recurring yens for a dining room. I asked a contractor friend to come over and see if he could somehow manage to attach a room to our house so I could have a separate place to eat dinner, away from the kitchen. He had built an addition here once before, when my mother, disabled with Parkinson’s, came to live with us. After walking around, and pondering, and walking around and discussing, he thought it might be a good idea to knock down the house and start over.

Thanks a lot. That desecration will be someone else’s task, not mine. This house was built room by room as previous owners had the money. No one family could do much since they were all so poor — obviously none of them could build square either. Gradually, electricity was added. Then water. Then the kitchen was expanded. That wife must have been so happy to have a sink, not to mention a bath tub.

I love that kitchen sink. You can’t find enamel ones with two sinks and two drain boards anymore. It fits in its little nook so well. When we had the kitchen cabinets put in (before there were just rough shelves) I tried to save the sink by having it resurfaced. But that was a failure. The “enamel” just peeled away. So now I’ll have to find another sink. Darn it….

…soon a professional organizer is coming to help me rename the rooms and reshuffle my life. It’s a sign you need a pro when you’re still calling it the “music room” three years after the pianos and the guitars have gone elsewhere. Leave a room to its own devices and it fills up with “storage”…also a sign you need professional help. My organizer says every time you hit an obstacle, things get more chaotic. Well, I guess so! She is coming with cardboard boxes and lots of energy and we are going to be busy at Goodwill. In fact, it’ll be Goodwill hunting, since that’s what I’ll be doing — hunting for things to give away so there will be room to think.

Meanwhile, I can always rake. Step, rake, step rake. Lay out tarp. Step, rake, step, rake. Pull tarp to picnic bench and dump. Lay out tarp…step, rake. Quit when it stops being fun.

*You know how they call New York City "The Big Apple"? A friend of mine from Westchester said one day that she had to drive into the city for horse feed. When I looked at her blankly she laughed and told me she forgot she wasn't in New York anymore. That's when we came up with the name of our town: "Lil' Kumquat" is sweet on the outside, sour and seedy in the middle.

Ask Emily Dickinson

2006-01-09T15:38:00.000-05:00

On The Conglomerate, there was a brief, desultory discussion of why fewer women than men blog. Having said previously that having a blog is rather like herding a child, I’d be inclined to agree with whomever said, “why would women (who have had children) want to blog, anyway. It’d be a case of been-there-ain’t-going-back.

But no one brought up my similarity between blog and child. They talked about socialization, about men being more inclined to think whatever issues from their own mouth is inherently more interesting, etc.

One commenter did say something a bit off the beaten horse:

…I think we have to agree on what "success" is for a blog. For a commercial enterprise to be successful, it has to bring in more money than it costs to keep the doors open. But most blogs are not a commercial enterprise. So, you seem to be saying that you would not consider your blog a success if no one linked to you and no one read to you, but I'm not sure that your definition forecloses others. Nothing would force someone to close a blog just because no one read it. Although to you, running such a blog would be pointless, I'm not sure others agree. Many college students, high school students, etc. have blogs that about 3 people read, for example.

Yeah. Who cares if people read it? The process of writing is the point. Just ask Emily Dickinson.

Maybe having two blogs — one to develop and one to neglect — makes this a non-issue for me. So what if more men blog than women? Who on God’s green earth cares??? Aside from some ghettoized feminist who seeks parity in everything — one of those people responsible for the awful effects of Title IX on men’s intramural college sports — who gives a fig leaf?

It's not fair. Yawn....

Monday's Word: Tachyphylaxis

2006-01-09T13:33:00.000-05:00

This is not going to be of much interest to those who don't have to use psychotropic drugs, and those who do are unfortunately all-too-familiar with the phenomenon.

Basically, tachyphylaxis is the process by which your brain gets enough of a particular helping hand and proceeds to roll over and play dead. Wikipedia describes it thusly:

Tachyphylaxis is the diminution of a pharmacological response during the continued or repeated administration of an activating substance. Tachyphylaxis or receptor desensitization appears counterintuitive because the addition of more of an activating ligand lessens the elicited response.

See also desensitization or physiological tolerance.

I don't get the "counterintuitive" part. The whole thing makes perfect sense to me. Eat chocolate every day and one's taste buds are not nearly so sensitive to the experience. Yeah, it still tastes good, but the familiarity numbs the novelty.

So anyway, taking psychotropic meds is a hit-and-miss affair (or a hit-and-mess situation, depending on your reaction to the drug).

SSRIs and SSNIs trigger migraines for me, so they're out.
tricyclics -- mainly amitryptiline -- are helpful, at least for awhile.
benzodiazepines -- are here to stay. Thank God for small mercies.
light box in winter -- let those lumens hit your retina.

And then, there's exercise. Moderate exercise. Enough to make you breathe hard for a bit but nothing extreme.

Tachyphylaxis --thank you, Shrinkwrapped, for the correct term -- is what my psychopharmacologist calls "trying to hit a moving target." Neuroscience is in its infancy right now. May my great-great grandchildren, who will no doubt inherit all these Celtic quirks in their neurotransmitters -- get to meet the adolescent version of psychotropic drug development.

Meanwhile, we take what we can get...with gratitude when they last for awhile and a Gallic shrug before we move on to something else.

A Good Enough Mother

2006-01-01T17:53:00.000-05:00

The tsunami in December, 2005 caused many deaths, many upheavals, untold sorrow. Because the organisms of Earth are adaptable, we began once more to put pieces back together, to fashion new pieces for the missing ones -- the ones who vanished in the wave and would never return.

In the midst of the chaos, death, and subsequent corruption that followed one of the world’s horrible tragedies, a few redeeming stories emerged. For me, last year, it was a love story. A genuine willingness to make the best of things and to connect with another in a way that brought satisfaction to both.

The story never fails to move those who read it. Last February, I happened upon the article in an Asian newspaper and marveled at the ability to transcend loss and separation. The child’s resilience was truly awe-inspiring. So much so, that I made a Valentine card out of the picture and the few details I could gather then.

The outside of the card read: “A Love Story” and was accompanied by the picture of mother and child. The inside of the card simply related the news story:

A baby hippo rescued after floods in Kenya last week has befriended a 100-year-old tortoise in Kenya.

The one-year-old hippo calf christened Owen was found alone and dehydrated by wildlife rangers near the Indian Ocean.

He was placed in an enclosure at a wildlife sanctuary in the coastal city of Mombasa and befriended a male tortoise of a similar colour. According to a park official, "they sleep together, eat together and have become inseparable."

The hippo follows the tortoise around and licks his face.

The tortoise is named Mzee, which is Swahili for old man.

Owen did more than merely “befriend” Mzee. He adopted Mzee as his mother. The tortoise was less than delighted with the idea of motherhood at his state in life — confirmed bachelorhood — but Owen, that resilient baby hippopotamus, persisted in his attentions to Mzee.

First, however, Owen himself had some adjustments to make, some grieving to do. Here’s what the caretaker says in early January:

We have had Owen for five days now and just when I thought he was recovering something even more worrying happened. Today I noticed that he has started walking around in circles. Sabine told me that these are the symptoms of a very serious disease and we called Dr. Kashmiri to come and check him out. Dr. Kahsmiri arrived in the late morning, Owen was still doing his circles. According to the vet however, this is not a disease but perhaps an indication that Owen is still traumatized and feeling lost and alone. I wish we could do more to quickly settle Owen down.

The next day, Owen began his adjustment:

Today I noticed that Mzee began is beginning to show some interest in Owen, and Owen has stopped his turning just as suddenly as he started it. Everyday I put the food out in the same place and Mzee knows and appreciates it. Today I noticed that he does not seem to mind Owen following him. In the heat of the day Owen was sleeping beside him, some part of his body always touches Mzee, just like a human child reaching out for some security.

Owen has started following Mzee to the pond to swim, and then back out again to the food, and the most extraordinary thing happened today. I noticed Owen copying Mzee in eating dairy cubes (concentrated food that we give the other hippos) and drinking water. I wonder if my eyes are deceiving me, but Owen seemed to be copying Mzee.

By mid-January, Owen had regained his healthy pink color and was growing. The caretakers were worrying about the future of this strange mother and child:

Everyone is interested in Owen and Mzee. My friends want to know how long this relationship can last. I often wonder about this myself. Owen will outgrow Mzee before long and I think he would be much better off with another hippo. Sabine and I are preparing a new much better long term place for Owen which will be large enough for him and Cleo. We will not be able to move them for some time, and since Cleo is an adult, we don't know how quickly she will respond to Owen. We have never done this before so it will be a big learning experience for us. I don't even know how we will move Cleo - she must be several tons in weight!

In March, Owen was becoming more independent, though still attached to Mom Mzee.

Owen still spends time with Mzee, but they are not as in-separable as they were in the beginning. He seeks the proximity of Mzee specially when he feels threatened or disturbed.

But when they do stay together, Owen’s attachment to Mzee still seems strong. Owen still seems to take Mzee as a fellow hippo, a friend and protector – at times nudging him to accompany him to the water, or just lying next and snuggling up to him. We have observed Owen licking Mzee’s face and neck, what Mzee seemed to enjoy a lot, as he then stretched his neck as if to encourage more (like the giant tortoises do when you scratch their neck – they stand up and stretch their neck.

By April, the two have an established relationship, one in which communication manages to take place, even across the chasm of species-difference:

Sometimes I think that Owen and Mzee are communicating, they often look as if they are deep in conversation. When they move Mzee sometimes waits for Owen to get up before he moves on. Owen always looks for Mzee before he goes exploring. At one point Owen looked as if he was helping Mzee to climb over a fallen log by nudging the back of his shell when he seemed stuck with all four legs off the ground! When Mzee goes on walks he marches and Owen keeps up with no effort at all. I noticed just how much Owen has grown, he is almost the size of Mzee now.

The bond between them is stronger than ever. Owen can sometimes be seen licking Mzee’s wrinkled face and neck as the old tortoise stretches his neck out, or nudging Mzee's shell with his fat foot when he wants to go for a walk. He still sleeps with his head nestled comfortably on Mzee's enormous scaly arm. Mzee reciprocates and has been filmed putting his head trustingly into Owens mouth during a yawn.

When they fell asleep Mzee looked as if he was watching over Owen and only put his head down after Owen had closed his eyes.

Behind the scenes, in October, the Caretakers are trying to figure out how to move Owen into a habitat with Cleo, another lone hippo who lives in a separate enclosure. They hope that Mzee will be tolerated by Cleo, though they seem to think that Mzee is the one who must sacrifice. If Cleo doesn’t like Mzee, then Momma has to go:

Owen has recently gained a lot of confidence and courage. Unlike in the past when he would run into hiding behind Mzee or water, he is now behaving boldly. Hippos yawn to display their irritation or excitement. Owen occasionally yawns at visitors and today he actually threatened to charge at me! This sort of boldness shows that he seems to be quite at home now.

Although he is courageous towards people, he is not when it comes to Mzee. Everything he does and everywhere he goes depends on what pleases Mzee. Mzee is also quite bossy. When Mzee is on land eating and Owen decides to go into water, Mzee would follow him there and push him trying to get him out of the water. Owen can be stubborn and doesn’t just oblige that easily. So it takes Mzee a lot of nudging before he finally succeeds in making Owen do what he wants.

By December, the Caretakers have figured out the boxes they must use to move Owen over to Cleo’s enclosure. Owen has developed a new habit, and they aren’t sure what it means:

Although Owen and Mzee still spend most of their time together, Owen is becoming more aggressive with Mzee. Owen has taken to biting and shoving Mzee whenever he is hungry and wants to eat but Mzee is not moving. The food is spread round their enclosure as much as possible so that Owen and Mzee are always close to food somewhere. However it has not deterred Owen from biting Mzee. Could it be that he is teething and it is uncomfortable for him?

Fortunately, I don’t think a young, teething hippo can damage a tortoise’s shell right now. But this is an ongoing relationship so who knows what the future holds? Last year, who could have predicted this relationship at all? Owen, miraculously rescued when his mother and the rest of their herd were swept away, must have looked at Mzee and, heart thumping, said to himself “’twill do, ’twill serve.”

The world is full of mystery and magic, and the greatest magic of all is mysterious love.

There's a downloadable free pdf. story here. The Caretaker's Diary is a month-by-month account of this love story.

Tuesday Already? Have I Got a Book For You

2005-12-27T22:42:00.000-05:00

All of y'all probably already knew this but since I just found it in the catacombs over at Geopolitical Review, I'm going to share...just in case anyone missed it.

The thing to remember about this is the date of the news report: June, 2004. A year and a half ago. After 9/11 of course, but before all those "youths" became arsonists and set France's ~~pants~~ cars on fire.

Back then, in 2004, Brigitte Bardot had to fork over $6,000.00 for being bad in print. How bad? Welll...she wrote a book (Un cri dans le silence) and in the book she said this:

I am against the Islamisation of France! This obligatory allegiance, this forced submission disgusts me.... Our ancestors, the elderly, our grandfathers, our fathers have for centuries given their lives to push out successive invaders."

What do you think they'd do to her now? Makes me wonder -- would they still be singing this chorus?

...the Paris court found that Ms. Bardot provoked racial hatred by expressing “right-wing and xenophobic views.” One of the more interesting aspects of the wire report was the following:

In its verdict, the court ruled that Bardot had deliberately tried to draw a link between Islam and terrorism by mentioning the September 11, 2001 attacks on the United States in a chapter on a Muslim holiday celebrated in France and elsewhere.

But Geopolitical Review nails it from the beginning of the post:

One of the many downsides to socialism is that freedom of speech and thought is inevitably restricted, usually under the guise of either protecting minority rights or shielding citizens from “controversial” viewpoints. This occurs because the natural progression of socialism is to shift responsibility form the individual to the state.

All of this came before Oriana Fallaci and her ordeal.

Bardot's book doesn't appear to be available in English. Too bad. I hear that she did a real sharp right turn in her maturity, long before 9/11 converted Ms. Fallaci. Would that the generations of Hollywood airheads that followed in Bardot's footsteps had bothered to listen to what she had to say. Wouldn't it be interesting if, say, Madonna grew up and her brain returned. She could be on the road for the Republicans. Though I don't think the Republicans would find it all that amusing.

Come to think of it, with Bardot and Fallaci, that's two women being fined for speaking out in their own supposedly free countries. I can't think of any men that this has happened to. And Theo van Gogh's death at the hands of a barbarian doesn't fit this category.

Are any Western men getting fined or silenced by the authorities for speaking out?

Just asking.

Oleo What??

2005-12-26T23:37:00.000-05:00

All you aeronautical types will sneer, but ever since I found the term as a child, I have been fascinated by an airplane part called the oleo strut.

What poetry! How could one fit it into a poem without laughing out loud? Perhaps Billy Collins could do it, since his work is meant to make you laugh out loud...or, at the very least, smile broadly.

According to Random House Dictionary, here's what it is:

oleo strut: a hydraulic device used as a shock absorber in the landing gear of aircraft, consisting of an oil-filled cylinder fitted with a hollow, perforated piston into which oil is slowly forced when a compressive force is applied to the landing gear, as in a landing.

In other words, it makes your re-contact with terra firma less jolting.

But has there ever been a more joyful name for a shock absorber? If we were all born with oelo struts that could absorb the shocks, the slings and arrows of fate, why we'd be...almost immortal. And if not immortal, at least a hell of a lot kinder to one another than we are now.

Anyone who arrived with a built in oleo strut would come out laughing, delighted to be here. With an oleo strut the fall from grace to howling birth would be fun. We could dance through life doing the oleo strut with perfect rhythm, always landing on both feet.

Imagine that.

Christmas Day, 2005 A.D.

2005-12-25T23:54:00.000-05:00

Having been dragged kicking and screaming to this event, I find myself relieved that it's over.

And I apologize to and thank all of those who put up with my bah-humbug attitude. That I was not done away with during this jolly season is a tribute to the better angels of all those who had to deal with me. You know who you are and I promise I'll get unguents, ointments and soothing balms for all of you. But for the moment I need to lie here in wonder that we made it.

Thanks for the Christmas tree that I could not bear to get or put up. Isn't it handy to live in the woods so you could just walk a few hundred yards and cut one down? Thanks for the ornaments since I seem to have misplaced mine. Thanks for the presents I certainly didn't deserve.

Thanks for the carols at the Christmas Eve service. Thanks for the priest who showed up to preside (even if I do suspect she's a liberal. That was a lovely homily). Thanks for the congregation which showed up to share cookies and cider. Thanks for the very ancient father of the priest. His name is Noel and he served in the South Pacific.

Thanks for showing up for dinner and sharing the Yorkshire pudding. Thanks for just hanging out. It gave new dimensions to just being there.

Who knows what next year will bring? Will there be a next year? If there is, at least I have a long time to prepare for it....and all of you have a year to recover.

I would promise to be normal next year, but I think I promised that last year so let's just go with the flow, huh, guys?

Oh, yeah...and thank you, Lord, that all you sent was lots of rain without the least speck of ice.

Saturday is Pet Peeves

2005-12-24T17:20:00.000-05:00

Everyone should have a few fingernails-across-the-blackboard shudders. Things they just can't stand.

By now, surely people are standing three deep to yell that they hate the Christmas that starts before Thanksgiving -- heck, the Christmas that now starts before Hallowe'en and leaves you 15 minutes space to find some Thanksgiving decorations for the table.

Come to think of it, there are actually Christmas stores devoted to nothing but harrowingly cute little figurines and reeking of some fake pine forest smell. Oh, my soul...hell for me will be eternal life in a Christmas tree store with little elves dressed like devils who make me look at garish trees with hideous ornaments and poke me with acrylic six pointed stars if I glance away for a moment.

Then there is the horrendous cacaphony of blaring "seasonal" music. Surely there ought to be a place where people who can shoot straight can line up and take a shot at the speaker of their choice. You might have to be certified or something, but think of the pleasure your "ready-aim-fire" execution of noxious noise would bring to the rest of us. Consider for a blessed moment the godly silence which would ensue. Ah, heaven. A mall with just the waving murmur of people, the sounds of children, the movement and sway of ordinary sound...except for the mall part, that is surely heaven?

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * *That is enough peevishness. It is, after all, Christmas Eve.

Tonight, the Baron's Boy will be playing the organ at church for carols before the Christmas Eve service. He's been doing it for years and now I see those years coming to an end. Soon there will be graduate school and other places. But for tonight, at least, we will have carols one more time. The Baron will light the candles in the windows of the church -- I do hope he hid them well last year.

Our church in the country doesn't do a midnight service. Everyone around here is asleep by ten o'clock except for the few desperate young parents trying to put bikes and trains together. So we have a service at 7:00, and briefly, cider and cookies before everyone scatters home.

Somehow it is good to worship at a church you know you will be buried from. It gives a continuity and perspective to the time, making a sacred space a temporal and fleeting moment...the church itself, the congregation, is old and dying out. We will have to go soon -- in the next year or two -- to town for services in a congregation headed by an authentic English vicar from the North of England.

But the graveyard here will remain. And eventually, my remains will return to this church, to be buried next to my mother, and I hope with the same Celtic designs on my headstone that the Baron did for her.

Imagine that: the two of us finally at rest and so far from home.

Christmas at Saint Mary's

2005-12-23T21:32:00.000-05:00

Yeah, Christmas at an orphanage sounds bad. But when you’re six years old, what do you know? It was Christmas, just like everybody else.

There are parts that stand out for me. One is the hymns we prepared all through Advent so we’d be ready for Christmas morning.(Years later, in middle school, the Gregorian choir was my introduction to midnight Mass. Besides getting to stay up till midnight to sing, there was the excitement of singing “Adeste Fideles to a packed house which emitted enough alcohol fumes to share a little cheer with us, way up in the choir loft). There were strong delineations between the hymns we sang and the Christmas carols we prepared for the school party. Somehow they didn’t mix back then.

Then there was the party at the Naval Air Station. Christmas for the Orphans, put on by the sailors. We all got a present from Santa Claus — he smelled like moth balls — and loads of food. The first year’s party was my introduction to black olives. I put a few in my mouth thinking they were grapes — I should have been suspicious since these “grapes” were next to the carrot sticks and celery on a plate, but back then grapes were my passion and I'd never seen an olive. The deeply salted taste surprise scarred my little gustatory psyche for years. I was twenty three and in an Italian restaurant before I ventured near another one.

That first year, I was young enough to sit on Santa's lap. When he asked what I wanted for Christmas, I told him -- duh -- I wanted to go home to my Mother. Big silence. Then he said "sure, sure, little girl," and passed on to the girl behind me. Since I'd been praying to go home ever since I'd heard about "ask and ye shall receive" I tried it like a key on anyone who gave me the opening -- no longer expecting an answer but impelled to ask anyway. At the party, though, with the band playing carols and all the food, I never ruminated long.

On the long ride back to the city on the Navy bus we sang Christmas carols and ate most of the little boxes of hard candy they’d handed out on the way out the door. To this day, “O Little Town of Bethlehem” makes me think of that dark trip on the warm bus, watching the stars first, and later the street lights as we neared the city again. It's a song I associate with sleepy sweet sadness.

We also had our own Christmas party at school. Everyone got up on stage and did their own solo. Mine was usually “Jolly Old Saint Nicholas,” because of my favorite line: “Neddy wants a pair of skates, he thinks dolls are folly.” “Folly” was so foreign, so antiquated: I loved the idea that someone could think of a way to use “folly” in a song. Now that I consider it, however, when “Good Golly, Miss Molly” came to be written, my favorite word would have fit in well. But it never crossed Little Richard’s lips. He was obviously thinking of other things in his song.

As Christmas drew nearer, we made loooong paper chains, red and green. The paste was white and came in large jars with brushes inside the lid. Later, after we’d hung them on the tree, we got to put up angel hair as the final touch. “Angel hair” is long gone as Christmas decoration. It was made of fiberglass, finely spun, and little pieces of it became attached to the spots of glue and inevitably created myriad splinters which worked their way into the skin on my arms. I called it “Christmas tree itch”; the agony took days to go away.

The nuns took us shopping the Saturday before Christmas. It’s hard to believe they herded sixty little girls down the street to the dime store near the Florida Theater, but perhaps they took us in groups. Of course, back then, weirdoes weren’t stalking the aisles of stores checking for loose kids, so maybe they did take us all in one fell swoop. We each got a dollar to spend and we deliberated long and carefully over our choices. It really was a dime store. Most years I got my mother my heart’s desire: a box of chocolate covered cherries, which left enough to buy a handkerchief for my brother. One year, though, I splurged and got two sherry glasses for mother and nothing for Mark. I still have one of those glasses, etched with grapes.

There was a nickel to spare from my purchase so I used it to buy some candy for my best friend, Sylvia Rivera. I loved her dark, curly hair. In fact, I deeply envied her dark, curly hair but kept this fault to myself as envy was not a sin I was willing to share in Confession. One day her father arrived from Cuba and took Sylvia out of St. Mary’s. I was totally surprised — so was everyone else — and thus ended one of the world’s great friendships and began my intense dislike of surprises. “She went home” was all we were told. I looked up Cuba in a geography book and found out they grew bananas there. That old devil, envy, popped up again. Not only did she have curly hair, she had a daddy and all the bananas she wanted.

Christmas morning was exciting — that was the big deal. After Mass (you couldn’t break your fast before Communion back then) we came into the dining room to find a stocking on each chair. There were no ordinary Christmas stockings, either. These were the nuns' own discarded black cotton stockings, too worn to darn anymore, but very long and capacious. Much better than a fancy stocking, which couldn’t have held half of the loot in one of those long black things. And instead of the usual burned oatmeal (the older girls really couldn’t cook worth a damn) we had toast and tea and eggs. It was all rather magical, digging up one delight after another out of those big black bulges and sipping tea like a grown up.

In the afternoon I was permitted to go home overnight with my mother. Our tree was tiny — otherwise it wouldn’t have fit in the living room — but the Nativity scene had a tiny yellow light behind the angel. It lit the manger indirectly, as though it was star shine. I was always impressed. Years later, when I had a family of my own, Mother gave me the Nativity set.

The Baron, not as pious as I, would arrange the sheep in compromising positions. I’ve never known a man who could have so much fun with so little material. Little plaster sheep??

Sister Mary Agnes was right about men.

Jolly Old Saint Nicholas, lean your ear this way…

Thursday's Food: Fig Cake for Christmas

2005-12-22T22:03:00.000-05:00

Not one more Christmas cookie. No squares, no bars, no circles, no little balls dipped in confectioner’s sugar, no Viennese crescents or spitzbuben, no meringues, nor Florentines, or Noels. Not even gingerbread men for grandchildren…

Bah. Humbug. After forty five years of Christmas cookies I am done. Someone else can take up the apron and the marble rolling pin…someone else can cheerfully cover herself in batter and chopped nuts and red and green sprinkles and try to figure out if she can substitute cake flour when she runs out of the regular stuff.

Instead this year, for revenge on that damn fig tree, the one which ate my Autumn and is chipping away at Winter, I am making fig cakes. One for me, and one for Jamie. For him, particularly, since I bought the figs with him in mind.

Here is an interesting recipe. After you look at the ingredients, I’ll tell you why it interests me.

Fig Honey Cake

6 large eggs
1 teaspoon baking soda
1 cup granulated sugar
1 teaspoon ground allspice
1 teaspoon ground cinnamon
1 cup honey
1/2 teaspoon ground cloves
2 tablespoons vegetable oil
1 cup finely chopped dried figs (in grinder or food processor)
3 1/2 cups unsifted all-purpose flour
1/2 cup finely chopped nuts
1 1/2 teaspoons baking powder

If you’ll notice the amount of honey and the amount of oil, you can tell this cake keeps well. In addition, you could substitute one half cup of very finely ground almonds for a half cup of the flour. It would be a bit heavier, but the nut flour would increase the flavor. I also like the density that nut flours give desserts — like tortes, for instance.

Here are the directions:

1.In a large bowl, mix eggs, sugar, honey and oil. Stir in flour, baking powder, baking soda and spices. Fold in figs and nuts.
2.Pour batter into 2 greased and floured loaf pans.
3.Bake in a preheated slow oven (300° F) for 1 hour or until firm to the touch in the center. Unmold and cool on racks. Cool thoroughly before cutting into slices.

So far, I agree with them on #3, but not much else. That nice slow baking is perfect for this kind of cake.

There are two ways you could go with those eggs. First, you could beat them thoroughly with a wire whip or an electric beater until they’re pale yellow. And then add the oil and honey and put aside.

Next, sift the flour, baking powder and soda, and the spices together. I’d add a bit of salt to this, too. Not much. Maybe a quarter teaspoon up to perhaps half. Salt deepens the taste of things and this sounds a little insipid without it. I'm also considering coriander or cardamom. Then I’d leave that bowl aside, too.

(The Romans used to make fig "cakes" by grinding dried figs into a paste, patting down the resulting mess onto a marble or wooden bowl and then press the outside with ground coriander. These cakes kept very well in a cool spot)

Okay, we have two bowls, wet and dry ingredients. Grind the figs (or you could have done that step first), chop the nuts, and then take a few tablespoons of the flour mixture and coat the nuts and figs. It will keep them distributed through the cakes while they're baking.

Finally, stir the flour mixture into the eggs and honey. Add the floured figs and nuts and fold in.

Divide the mixture evenly between two greased and floured loaf pans (or you could simply grease some parchment paper and fit it to the pans. I like the way it prevents the bottoms from browning too much). You get a more even texture if you take turns filling the pans -- a third in the first pan, a third of the batter in the second pan, another third in the first pan, and so on. It makes the fruit and nuts more evenly distributed, too.

That’s the way I’d do it. And I don't think I'd refrigerate this cake. It doesn't need it with the honey. Wrap in an old linen dish towel and store in a tin.

There’s another possible method, where you separate the eggs and beat the whites to soft peaks and then beat the yolks thoroughly before adding the oil and honey. But then that would involve folding things together properly so the first method is better. Also, if you were going to do that, you’d reduce the flour some while keeping the ground almonds…it just all depends on what you want the crumb to be.

UPS Sucks

2005-12-21T22:00:00.000-05:00

Christmas is in the air, in the blogosphere...and were I plugged into the rest of the world no doubt it would be on the radio and television. All those awful carols, sung to a finely wrought travesty. All those manic, fake smiles of people with too many things and not enough free time to use them all.

So far I've managed all my shopping online, except for one heavy present for The Boy that I schlepped home myself -- or rather, the Baron did -- as I couldn't imagine the postal lady lugging that thing to the door.

Let us praise the Post Office, which comes down our long driveway and toots to let us know they've arrived before coming to the porch with our packages. The postal lady clomps up the stairs in her boots, wearing an apron under her heavy sweater and a smile as she hands over the mail. She only comes down the drive if there are packages so these days I see her almost every day. And inevitably she'll tell me of the latest perfidy of the United Parcel Service.

Let us boo United Parcel Service, which ties our packages to trees, or leaves them abandoned on the side of the driveway and hopes we notice their presence. They (illegally) hang them off the mailbox on the road, or if the package is too big, they walk across the road and dump the thing on the porch of the white house.

Now these drivers are familiar with this territory. They know no one lives in the white house. It belongs to the descendants of the owners, all twelve of them — descendants, that is, not owners — so unless someone notices a package on the porch…well, too bad. They’ve ruined a few things that way.

Things have gotten so bad that we’re collecting the pictures to send to the district manager. UPS must think it’s a government agency. It sure acts like one. And the post office seems to have traded places.

Someday, you will hear the story of the blind postmistress in the tiny post office near the river, not too far from here. Why that place hasn’t closed is anyone’s guess. Probably because the post office box users would have to travel another twenty miles to get their mail.

Lincoln Springs Eternal

2005-12-20T16:48:00.000-05:00

Because I never get through a full week without slip-sliding into the Slough of Despond -- man that sucker has moveable boundaries; always sneaking up on me -- because of that I never have the pleasure of doing a whole week's schedule. For example, yesterday being Monday (which is word day) I'd planned to put up umbrageous.

I found this gem of a word in a book of O. Henry short stories that the Baron hefted home from the library. A very large book, the size of a modest version of the Oxford Dictionary if someone had used a very small font. So it's a book best read at the table unless you are a muscle-bound type. Arnold could no doubt hold the thing up in one palm and read comfortably.

Not I. I heft it with two hands onto the kitchen table and randomly open to a promising title. So far, so wonderful.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
But never mind that. I came here to talk about a new book, not the many shadings of umbrageous. Throwing aside the custom of discussing only about books one has read, I will put forth for your consideration one that I wish I had written. Only somebody beat me to it. And this somebody is a liberal through and through, proving the point that if we go back far enough in history, those on different sides of the current Civil War may find points of agreement.

Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln is one of those points. Sure, there are people on both sides who think Lincoln was the spawn of Satan, just as there are those of us who think he was so good that books like this new one by Doris Kearns Goodwin will continue to arrive for centuries to come, as new generations refract their own vision of the man.

In this case, the reviewer of Goodwin's book (Arthur Herman in National Review, December 31, 2005) sees the situation the same way I do, for he expresses ideas I've mulled over for a couple of years now, predating the re-election of George Bush in 2004.

Essentially, Bush is repeating Lincoln's experience. He is sneered at by the cognoscenti, just as Lincoln was. Both were/are considered "not equal to the hour." Both were reviled for being "third rate" and "illiterate partisans."

Has there ever been a cruder president than this cowboy we have in office now? Indeed, there has: Abraham Lincoln. But both men could induce loyalty in their divided staffs and could offer loyalty in turn. Both men operated on principle in their conduct of an unpopular war. And both men faced a rival party bent on surrender and appeasement.

I can't wait to read Goodwin's book. She probably won't like it that conservatives will take it as a foreshadowing of Bush's presidency. But if this obvious connection takes her by surprise, then she is intelligent without being wise. And if she knew we’d like it when she was writing it, then bully for her: an author flourishes best with a widespread audience.

Meanwhile, the parallels between Lincoln and Bush as politicians don’t cross over into their personal lives. Bush has none of Lincoln’s melancholia; he never lost a child and he married a woman with an even temperament. Those great gifts were withheld from Lincoln, but he transcended what the fates gave him, just as he has outlasted his assassin's bullet.

May Bush be as fortunate in the outcome of his war. And may he escape Lincoln’s end. People like John Wilkes Booth still hide in the footlights. Their words may have changed, but their hearts remain the same.

NOTE: This book is 994 pages long and the list price is $35.00. Amazon is offering it for $21.00 and teams it with David McCullough’s 1776 for $39.51. As of this writing, Kearns’ book is listed at # 5 in sales.

Lincoln springs eternal, does he not?

Friday's Fortunes

2005-12-16T17:24:00.000-05:00

When we moved to the country, we kept a vegetable garden for those first few summers. Neither of us knew much about vegetable gardening, though the Baron had a few elemental ideas from watching his father's efforts with his vegetable patch. I had none -- my idea of gardening was to cross pollinate day lilies and see what you got in a few years. It was a hobby I had as a kid, something I did instead of what I'd been sent out to do: mow the grass.

So between the two of us we had a thimbleful of understanding. Our huge ignorance soon bloomed into a disinclination to plant anything since people would inundate us with tomatoes and zucchini, etc. One good old boy swore that the okra I was growing was actually marijuana. Right, you are, Jimmy. And what are those big yellow blossoms on my plants then?

When we did have our garden, we were told to get old Mr. Carroll to come down to plow and harrow the area first. Virginia clay is rock hard where it hasn't been worked or amended, so it needs mechanical assistance to begin to resemble something more like soil and less like brick. Cracked brick, when it dried out.

In late March, we'd call over to his house and his missus would send him over when the soil was dry enough to work. Soon, you could hear the chug of his tractor coming up the driveway, and he'd swing into the front yard and begin his work. First he broke up the soil, going back and forth on the rows longways. Then he attached whatever piece he needed to smooth out the soil and leave it ready for planting. Had we not been so ignorant, we'd have thrown lime and manure into the rows before he made the last pass, but the Baron and I did not come to gardening naturally and back then we didn't know enough to ask.

Maybe old Mr. Carroll thought we had some citified way of doing things after he left. Or maybe he went home and told Mrs. Carroll about those tomfool people over near the colored church who didn't put nuthin' on that clay.

He never did take any money for his labors. All he wanted was a flask of whiskey, which the Baron always made sure to have on hand. When the plowing was done, the old man would stay in the seat of his tractor and reach down for the bottle the Baron held up to him. He'd take a swig, smack his gums, and sigh. Then he'd begin to tell us about life where we lived, about growing things, and about growing old -- the last of which he was doing at a rapid rate.

It's been more than twenty years now, but I still remember Mr. Carroll, and standing by the turned earth, and how it and the smell of diesel oil made that particular fragrance in the cool Spring air which meant "time to get out the radish and the lettuce seeds.

He's gone now. Died years ago. The thing I remember most now (besides the wry recognition of how little we knew about growing things in clay) was what Mr. Carroll said once, after the third swig or so. "Seems like," he sighed, "once you finally know everything it is you need to know to get by, you're too old to make any use of it..."

At the time, he seemed philosophical. Now I know what it was: Mr. Carroll was feeling the pinch of despair that comes with age. He was too old to acquire wisdom and he knew it. Or rather, whatever bit of wisdom was going to come his way already had, and life wasn't going to get any better than it was right at that moment. For old man Carroll, that knowledge wasn't enough to take him over the hump. At some point in the race, maturity begins to be overtaken by dementia and it's downhill from there...

So he sighed, screwed the top back on his bottle and shoved the bottle into the big front pocket on his bib overalls. Then he turned the tractor around in one smooth movement, waved to us behind him, and headed back down the driveway.

Now, of course, I realize that the whiskey was his way of getting past Mrs. Carroll. He could do a little plowing for the innocents from town for "free", and have a nice flask to warm his soul on the way home. Not a bad trade for either of us.

The last few years, I've been thinking about starting another vegetable garden. Only this time, it’s going to be a raised affair, one where I can sit and weed, one which never gets plowed or disturbed. One which attracts the earth worms. A place to throw eggshells and coffee grinds all winter.

Come to think of it, I've been wanting chickens, too, or guinea hens, but I don't know if I'm ready to deal with a rooster. How do you mellow out the mean ones? I guess learning to use a shotgun comes first, hmmm?

Well, that's for another year. For this one, I just want to be able to sit low again and weed the flowers around the house. With enough physical therapy, I'm going to have a left knee with attitude instead of this mess which seems to point out even more than it did before the ladder caught my foot between two rungs and torqued my knee to some whole new plane.

Or perhaps this an old Mr. Carroll moment: I know what I'd need to do the things I like, but I have enough wisdom to know those capacities are not coming back.

Snark Sighting for Thursday's Food Ruminations

2005-12-15T12:15:00.000-05:00

Robin Wright is a reporter from The Washington Post. Her job appears to entail the occasional flight aboard Air Force Two as she accompanies various Cabinet-level officials around the world. According to her, it’s a rigorous life. Not because they’re in any danger, but because she and her colleagues have to endure the food they are served.

*The wing-dings are so awful they almost caused a mutiny among the staff.
*The burritos made one person sick.
*The carnivores complain that they’re tired of always having meat.
*The flan is evidence that even desserts can be ruined.
*Vegetarians and people with food restrictions are not taken into account.

And so on, etc., ad nauseam.

I swan. What a bunch of spoiled brats. As children, they were probably all labeled “picky eaters” by their parents who threw up their hands in disgust over their offsprings’ limited and sullen eating habits. As adults, they are a big bunch of babies who need to grow up and face the fact that moving with the big boys means you either eat what they serve or you bring your own food.

No one with any brains gets aboard a plane planning to eat the jet food. There are too many nutritious subsitutes available at your local grocery store to have to settle for “a teeming bowl of pork and beans,” if such a dish is not to your liking. And if you’re a finicky eater, try the gourmet aisle for the yuppie, spoiled-brat version of MREs. Smoked salmon comes in small foil bags now, as do oysters, chicken, and vegetables. How about protein bars for the food-restricted? Ever heard of fruit? How about suffering in silence...oh, that's right. Against the code of "J" school.

Really, these whiners ought to be served MREs as part of their Air Force Two experience. Why not? If it’s good enough for soldiers on the ground, it’s certainly good enough for reporters in mid-air.

Really, lady, if this is what you have to complain about, you need to get a real life, because the one you're complaining about now is an embarrassment of riches.

Just get off the plane.

Wednesday Is For the Garden, All Covered In Ice

2005-12-14T12:17:00.000-05:00

"Bless me, Father, for I have sinned. It's been ten days since my last post."

"But it's not all my fault, Father...in fact, I think you ought to call God down here so we can have a little chat -- just the three of us -- before you dole out the penance. That would only be fair..."

"What do you mean it's not about 'fair'? It's always about fair. Just ask anyone with a grievance, or anyone under the age of eight, or any misunderstood victim of this or that...it ~~damn~~ darn sure is about "fair." And I have my list right here, thank you. Fairsies first, and then we'll get to my sins."

"First thing, right off: pain isn't fair. Nor are pain medications. Sure they kill the pain, but have you ever tried the side effects?"

"Ummm...no, I don't think I want to give up the pain medication just yet. So maybe we'll skip that one. But how about all that ice on the ground? I can't even step outside without the risk of undoing all the surgery on my knee...is that fair, I ask you?"

"Well, yes...the house is warm and cozy. The living room's a bit chilly, though...we never did insulate it that well. Ah, no. I don't have to sit in there. And you're right, that's what God made sweaters for. I was just saying..."

"Yes, it's true. The ice on the ground does a good job of killing off some of the more obnoxious insects we had last summer. You have a point there...oh, never mind about calling God into this. He'd be even worse than you. So we may as well deal with this ourselves..."

"Now about my sins...I hope you understand what a horrible childhood I had. We need to get that straight first..."

Ransom Captive Israel

2005-12-04T22:41:00.000-05:00

The first Sunday in December.

Oh Come, Oh Come, Emmanuel...

It echoes down the ages.

And ransom captive Israel...

Captive still, after all these millennia.

Israel is the paradigm for how all of us live:

Captive, bound on all sides by those who do not wish us well.

And yet, in Israel, life goes on.

Orange blossoms fill the air,

Babies are born,

Old people die, but not in captivity.

Young people and grandmothers are blown into the heavens.

Israel grieves.

Israel blooms.

Israel is in the desert but she is not the desert.

Israel is God's heart, beating in the rhythm of creation.

Of destruction.

Always, somewhere, Israel lives and breathes with the breath of He Who Is Who He Is.

And His breath warms We Who Are Who We Are

In this first Sunday of December

In this first Sunday of Advent.

In the beginning of the third Christmas without Shelagh.

No. Wait. That is another meditation.

Rejoice! Rejoice! Emmanuel
Shall come to you, O Israel...

SAD No More

2005-11-30T10:47:00.000-05:00

Anybody around here suffer from SAD besides me? I used to love the onset of Winter with all the holidays and the brisk weather. Over the years, though, that changed. Slowly and imperceptibly, I began to dread the dark, short days. The plans I made would become simply that — plans without any final resolution. Winter became hibernation; no doubt my family thought me related to the bears…shall we say I was a tad grouchy?

Here’s an explanation of the problem:

Seasonal Affective Disorder is a depression that afflicts people primarily during the winter months, and is often referred to as seasonal depression. Seasonal Affective Disorder was discovered in the early eighties by the National Institute of Health. The NIH estimates that over 36 million Americans suffer depressive symptoms brought on by the winter months. Seasonal Affective Disorder causes you to feel down, gloomy, and lose energy. You may have difficulty concentrating and feeling alert, withdraw socially and have carbohydrate cravings. Seasonal Affective Disorder sufferers also experience sleep problems.

Seasonal Affective Disorder vs. Winter Blues

Although often confused with the ‘winter blues,’ Seasonal Affective Disorder and Winter Blues are not the same. Seasonal Affective Disorder is manifested by symptoms of clinical depression, with impaired social interaction and cognitive ability. On the other hand, Winter Blues is milder than SAD and is typified by the lack of energy and feeling sad or down. If you have the winter blues, you can still function. If you have Seasonal Affective Disorder, normal daily functions are difficult to perform. Although Seasonal Affective Disorder and Winter Blues differ in the degree of severity, the treatment is the same for both conditions.

What causes Seasonal Affective Disorder?

Researchers agree that the lack of sunlight in the fall and winter causes the effects of seasonal depression. Without sunlight, the brain doesn't produce enough serotonin, which results in the symptoms of depression. The darker days also signal the brain to overproduce the hibernation hormone, melatonin. The symptoms diminish as the days get longer, although many Seasonal Affective Disorder sufferers note brief (1-2 week) periods of SAD-like symptoms in the summer.

This year I decided to change that. After a month of dilly-dallying, I sat down and ordered a sun box. One place has a circadian rhythm assessment. Hah. Mine is almost a flat line reading.

According to your test results, you have Circadian Amplitude Disorder (CAD). CAD means your body clock may be producing lower amounts of the night/day hormones during the day. This can cause Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD), insomnia and other depressive mood disorders. If you have CAD, you may not have problems waking up or going to sleep, but the quality of the wakefulness and/or sleep is diminished. This means you'll probably have less energy during the day.

Duh. The suggested treatment time was 30 minutes at 8:00 am but when I finally got the device, it recommended starting with 15 minutes if you’re fair-skinned. Which I am — given my Celtic genes, the sun has never been my friend.

This light is bright. Whoo wee! But no UV rays so I don’t have to worry about that part. 10,000 Lux, whatever that means beyond bright as the dickens. The point is to have enough light reaching the retina, so while I may read, I have to glance up occasionally to let those rays bounce off my eyes. Hey, any excuse to sit down and read…
I got my light box at Apollo, though I’m sure any of the other places would do as well. Just google “light box” and you’ll be inundated.

So far, so good. I’ve quit crying in my beer, for one thing. They tell you to “avoid caffeine” which I figure means you shouldn’t look at the coffee while you’re drinking it. One thing is for sure: no sunbox is going to cure lack-of-coffee.

This is supposed to take a week or so to really set in. I’ll have to check with the Baron to see if he can tell.

To be continued…

Monday's Word(s): What You May Utter

2005-11-28T11:34:00.000-05:00

Usually by this time I've stumbled across a new word or two to use for Monday's post. But this week no word appeared on the horizon, so I was going to fiddle with two words which have been going through my mind: imbroglio and brouhaha.

However, they will have to wait, as the word(s) just arrived on Gates of Vienna from Jason Pappas. Mr. Pappas says this about certain set phrases that are bandied about in the public square:

“FAR right” is, of course, a code phrase. Here’s a few more:

“Inclusion” (Keep in step and toe the party line!)
“Diversity” (only one way of thinking allowed)
“Affirmative action” (our kind of racism)
“Go it alone” (fight a war without France)
“Exceptionalist” (knows Western culture is better than a mud hut)
“Environmentally friendly” (a mud hut)
“Social justice” (antiquated phrase before animal rights and the environment but sounds good)

This is a fine list, but there must be many, many more and I'll bet some of your favorites are not included here, especially if you work in government or education (which have become more or less the same thing of late).

If you have special pet phrases (no slogans, please. "Bush lied, people died, brains fried" is rather old), please leave them in the comments.

My introduction to Words From the Left, designed by proto-Marxists, happened more than twenty years ago. It was then that I first saw the phrase "politically incorrect" on a button adorning Wally Ballou's shirt. It fascinated me. Since the occasion was a Hallowe'en party, I thought perhaps it was part of a costume. And, of course, he lived in the big city so he was up on such things. I, from the country, had no idea what his button meant. And even after he told me, I found the idea outlandish. Surely such a phenomenon couldn't last?

Unfortunately, W. B. was merely ahead of the times. But not by much.

Here, from Global Language Monitor are some of my favorites of their picks for 2005:

Thought Shower or Word Shower substituting for brainstorm so as not to offend those with brain disorders such as epilepsy.

Out of the Mainstream when used to describe the ideology of any political opponent: At one time slavery was in the mainstream, thinking the sun orbited the earth was in the mainstream, having your blood sucked out by leeches was in the mainstream. What's so great about being in the mainstream?

Deferred Success as a euphemism for the word fail. The Professional Association of Teachers in the UK considered a proposal to replace any notion of failure with deferred success in order to bolster students self-esteem.

I suppose the most egregious term is "militant" instead of "terrorist." But then the BBC hasn't been in the mainstream for a long, long time. Not my mainstream, anyway.

Have a go, mate...by the way, "mate" is now beyond the pale, too. Soon we will all be reduced to barking out the Indo-European roots of the words we were once allowed to say...oops. Indo-European is rather elitist, isn't it?