An unhappy ending to an otherwise great day

 When one begins dragging 60 behind them and doesn’t need a magnifying glass to see 70 looming,  the options for funny birthday cards increase dramatically.

And leave it to my sweet sister to find one to honor my sweetie on his birthday earlier this week. 

 When we were kids growing up in Los Angeles, there was a local television program for children hosted by Sheriff John, and he did a “birthday cake” song...

which I found myself singing when the day arrived. We did not, however, have a birthday cake this year for him. We had Klondike bars instead. 

The aches and pains of growing older are not what makes the “golden years” very golden. Richard has an occasional minor problem in his back, which requires him to walk around hunched over a bit for a day until it works itself out. At this point it is still something we can still make jokes about, but it may not be so funny as time goes by.

Today would have been a very nearly perfect day. I have finally clawed my way out of the huge volume of work I was handed and feel like I can take a breath once again. I even had time to look at a blog or two. Yea!!!

We have been accumulating brush since last winter due to ice storms and throughout the spring and summer due to high winds. The pile began to breed and suddenly there were two piles, and both of them looked pregnant.

And as it often goes with us, they might have remained for quite a bit longer, perhaps even throughout the winter, except an armadillo picked one of them to crawl under and die, and the stench of rotting flesh has been wafting in the window I sit in front of for the past week – it takes the process quite a while longer in an armadillo because of the hard shell. So Richard decided to burn the piles today. Yea!!!

The last time brush piles were burned – in September of last year -- Nathaniel did the job

so it was a bit poignant for both of us when Richard went out to light it off.

And then just as the job was finished, a very bad thing happened. A turtle that had crawled under the brush pile for shelter did not get out in time and was killed.

How to explain how horrible Richard felt? Horrible. We both felt sick inside. I love turtles. 

 I probably have as many photographs of turtles (and judging by the red eyes, this is a boy turtle) on this computer as I do of lizards and flowers and…

At any rate, I am so grateful I am married to a kind man who does not take pleasure in killing things.

Strange food associations…

When Richard was young, his mother drank buttermilk. A lot of buttermilk. He couldn’t stand the way it looked. Eventually he might have come around to liking it, except somewhere along the way he took a big swallow of truly spoiled milk, and that did it. 

He has never tasted buttermilk. He also won’t eat cottage cheese. And he won’t even try my homemade yogurt, although why he turns his nose up at it is beyond me. It is smooth and does not have “chunks” of stuff in it.

One of the most memorable of a string of otherwise wonderful Thanksgiving meals throughout my childhood occurred one year at Grandpa and Grandma’s house. I am not sure how many of the cousins were there, but we had a fine time sticking black olives on our fingers and wiggling them around and then eating them off our fingers.

At some point, I suspect one of the adults became annoyed by this behavior and said something like

“Cut that out, if you keep eating all of those olives,

you will make yourself sick.”

And sure enough, not too long after eating the meal, I got violently sick and spent some time bent over the porcelain throne.

Up to then, I loved black olives, but it was quite a while before I started eating them again.

Our son was not a picky eater -- not in the least  -- and we usually did not have trouble getting him to eat. He was, however, very visually oriented, and there were a couple of foods he got “fixated” on because of the way they looked – not because of how they tasted – and he would not eat them any more.

We kept chickens for a long time and had fresh farm eggs several times a week. He loved eggs and gobbled them down.

One morning I set his plate of eggs in front of him and he took one look and started gagging. That was the last time he ate eggs (unless it was part of an ingredient in something else) until he was well into adulthood. He could give me no reason for what it was about the eggs that caused such a violent reaction.

Later, the same thing happened with long spaghetti. He quit eating it because it reminded him of worms.

He stopped eating elbow macaroni because… well, I am not sure why… something about the “bend” in the pasta, but he would eat “penne,” which is the fatter straight tube.

Now he really liked corkscrew pasta, because it reminded him of the auger that used to operate at the feed mill in town. He had started stockpiling pasta in preparation to move out, which I am now slowly eating my way through: six 1-pound packages of augers.

The other day I cooked some augers to make a small pasta salad for lunch—lentils and whatever vegetables I could scrounge with salsa on top…

And as I put the augers on the plate...

 I suddenly got my own association with something.

Along with the chickens, we raised Muscovy ducks for meat. The drakes are big and are very meaty.

(Our main drake was pure white. But I don't have a picture of him. This one is from Wikipedia)

We had lots of Muscovy ducks. They are the “rabbits” of duck-dom. They are prolific breeders, and the ducks raise large batches of ducklings.

I couldn’t help but notice that the augurs look very much like a certain organ that the male duck has that is vitally important for procreating.

I had a very clever title picked out for this post and when I mentioned it to Richard he said.  

You aren’t going to use that, are you? 

I sort of hemmed and hawed and he said...

Don’t

I have a new name for the augurs, which I will not share. My little pasta salad was very tasty. And we will be eating augurs tomorrow in macaroni and cheese.

Get'er done

There have been a few moments during this week where I have just wanted to shut the computer off…

walk out the door…

and never come back.

Not really.

But during this week occurred one of those periodic events that I call the “conjunction of the journals,” when all of the issue managers of the journals I copyedit have manuscripts that need to be worked on, and they need me to work on them.

Last Friday I received an e-mail from the woman who handles the dermatology journal: She has 21 manuscripts she needs done right way--by the 16th in fact--which would only be possible if I were a machine and not a flesh and blood person who needs to eat and sleep, get some exercise, watch a bit of television and have lunch with my friend at Subway, which I did on Thursday.

Who offers the suggestion that perhaps what I really do need to do is "walk away for 10 minutes..."

Yes.

That is something I could do. I could take the camera and see if I can get a picture of the toadlet that lives in our basement;

I could take a short walk with Richard...

down to Big Tony’s house (who lives at the "T" up ahead there in the picture).

On Monday, the woman who handles the transplant journal sent 6 files for me to work on, and then on the Wednesday, she sent 4 "rush items" that she needs back right away, and that I was to set aside the other 6 she sent me earlier in the week. I told her that I could not get them back to her "rush" because I had too much other work piled up and that she might want to send them to someone else.

No, she writes back. You are my favorite.

I am her favorite.

I thought I was done with the orthopedic journal for the month, and on Tuesday, here came 6 more.

Also on Tuesday the journal covering diabetes sent me a manuscript. These manuscripts are incredibly difficult. It is due back Monday.

I log-on to the Web site where I retrieve the manuscripts for the vascular surgery journal, and I see there are 14 of them waiting. Fortunately, the deadline for the last of them stretches into September.

As the week progressed, I was hoping that the only journal I had yet to get anything from – the thoracic surgery journal – would not send me anything. And he did not. Thank goodness.

Richard helps to keep me grounded. He gives me a hug and a pat on the back and says...

Do the best you can and ask for more time. They will give it to you.

Of course, he is right. Having a mental meltdown will not help. All  I can do is plug along, doing the best I can.

So I have plugged away:

• I will send the last of the rush manuscripts back on Monday. 
• I will have the manuscript for the diabetes journal ready on Monday. 
• I have finished 1 of the orthopedic manuscripts. 
• I have finished 2 of the vascular surgery manuscripts.
• I will have 14 of the dermatology manuscripts ready by the 16th and will ask for more time on the 16th.

I wonder what would happen if Richard were not here. I hope that if that time should come, that I will be retired; but then I think, because of the sort of job I have – which I really do love – I could continue to do this for a very, very long time…

As long as I don't become demented.

A chorus line of naked ladies…

Beginning at about 8 pm Sunday evening, we were without power for about 10 hours because of a strong thunderstorm that moved through the area with very powerful straight-line winds that broke a lot of trees. The dead tree alongside our driveway, which Richard has been eyeballing for some time and talking about “having someone come in and take it out before it falls and hits one of the cars,” did indeed come down. It fell behind the cars parked at the garage, at an angle, and did not hit anything.

Our TV-watching plans were set aside. We got in my car, which could still be backed up and turned around despite the dead tree, and took a tour of the neighborhood to see who did and did not have power. We didn’t get very far. There was a tree blocking the road just past Tony’s house -- he did not have power -- so Richard executed a perfect 5-point turn on the one-lane road to get us back headed the other direction.

We took a left at the “T” with gravel road right in front of Tony’s house and immediately saw that this road was also blocked by a tree. We could see that some people further down the road did have power.

We came back, and by the light of the Coleman lantern, I started reading him the John Grisham novel, “The Confession,” and after a couple of chapters, he decided he better fire up the generator to try to keep the refrigerator cool because the power probably was not going to come on right away.  He fired it up and saw that it needed gasoline so at about 10 pm we made a trip to the convenience store and ran the generator for another hour before we went to bed.

We got up to a quiet house Monday morning, and fired up the generator again. And at 7 AM, just about the time my laptop computer battery was running out of juice, the power surged back on. Hallelujah! And the day commenced.

The good thing about the storm is that it broke the heat wave and the drought for our area and we got some lovely rain over the next few days that we needed badly. Everything that was looking so sad and tired suddenly sprang to life again, and up popped the naked ladies.

Amaryllis or “surprise lilies” are a more polite name for them. We were bewildered during the first spring we were here to see the thick, lush vegetation at about the same time the daffodils and tulips came up, but no flowers.





And then, surprise!

Put a cork in it…

Many years ago, a friend’s husband made me a concrete birdbath that sits on the ground where I can see it from the kitchen window. It has a round hole in one end into which a cork will fit to keep the water in and to let the water out to clean it and to keep the mosquitoes from breeding.

Corks tend to deteriorate over time when they are left submerged, so occasionally I replace the cork with a new one. The type that come in the occasional bottle of sherry Richard buys work well.

The birdbath is extremely heavy and difficult to move, so permanently blocking the hole would mean tipping it on its side to drain water out, and that is not an option.

This birdbath is a popular gathering place for birds…

 And little warty toads….

The cat drinks out of it.

I have no idea who comes to visit it at night, but for sure the raccoons are interested in it.

Earlier in the spring, I got up in the morning and noted the water had been drained out, and I discovered the cork had been pulled out.

This happened a few more times, but it didn’t bother me too much because the water needs to be drained frequently. And then I decided to put a "sort of a brick" on the cork.

And then the cork disintegrated.

So I found a new cork in the junk drawer (how could one survive without junk drawer?), but it was slightly bigger than the hole in the birdbath and it took several tries throughout the day before I could get it wedged in there firmly enough to stop the water trickling out. After about the third trip out with my small pail of water, I finally resorted to whacking on it with a hammer. Round cork. Round hole. Should fit.

Satisfied, I replaced the sort-of-a brick on top of the cork, but the cork stuck up too much which left the brick at just enough of an angle that it did not thwart the raccoons. When I got up the next morning, the sort-of-a brick had been pushed off and the new cork pulled out, and the birdbath was empty.

As I stormed back into the house fuming at this clever, clever animal, I recalled that one of the writers of a blog I used to look at fairly frequently (and I am slowly, slowly, starting to be interested again in all the blogs these lovely people have written) has Lucy, which appears to be a pet raccoon or else a very tame wild one, and I wondered – how does one live with a raccoon? How would one go about keeping them OUT of stuff?

At any rate, after several false starts, I got the cork back in and doubled up on the “heavy things that are sort of like bricks” and so far that seems to have done the trick.




I have been thinking in the past few days how it is that the minutia of day-of-day life, the innumerable little problems that crop up that need to be solved, the small decisions that need to be made that help to keep me focused on the right here and now instead of what has happened.

Which manuscript will I work on next?

What shirt will I wear to the Y this morning?




The things that constantly demand my attention and help to keep me going – to keep me from floundering.
To keep me from thinking too much about the gaping hole that suddenly opened in the fabric of our life.

And then, inevitably, every once in a while, I find myself looking over my shoulder as I sit at my computer, feeling at any minute he is going to walk into the living room, and I’ll hear his voice “Hi Mom!” in that funny way he had of saying it.




I miss him so much.

And then the lyric of a song will float through my mind….

“And as I stumble through the darkness
I will call Your name by night…”

And then the moment passes and I ...'



until the next one…

Caught in the act…

A week or so before we left on our trip in early June, I planted the last of the tomato plants that Richard bought from the feed store. We did not get around to staking them or putting them in cages before we left, and when we came back it might not been too late to do it, but we were preoccupied with getting ourselves reorganized from the vacation, and when we woke up and saw what was happening, they were a tangled mess on the ground and it was too late to do anything about it.

Richard comes in and announces “I found the culprit who is munching on our tomatoes.” 

 

Yes indeed.

Who can resist a vine-ripened tomato (aside from someone who doesn’t like tomatoes)?

Not me. Not him (or her) either.

End of an era

The cicadas that live in the trees that surround the house begin very early in morning to stitch their sewing machine songs. These are not the smaller periodic cicadas that we had in the late spring, these are the big ones that are with us throughout the summer every year. Even if there were no traffic whizzing by 24/7, there is nothing quiet about country living in the summer. The cicadas go to sleep in the early evening, and then the katydids wake up and sing to each other throughout the night. I love the sound of the katydids. Puts me right to sleep

The Bandido Brothers show up fairly regularly here after dark. Each year there are a different group -- the Momma raccoon brings the latest batch of infants to the house to introduce them to all the goodies that might be had here. They scavenge the leftover bird seed at the bird feeder, they invariably tip over the large saucer of water I put out for the birds, and if I forget to bring the hummingbird feeder in, then they are all over that. They squabble and make noise and are just adorable. Until they grow up. They apparently did not come by last night, because this morning I see that the water is still there.

The heat continues. I suppose it is hotter in some areas than it is in others -- I think we get a bit of a break because our house is well shaded by trees and surrounded by tall trees and there is no asphalt or cement around the house to serve as a heat sink. It gets this hot in Los Angeles for sure, but there is no late afternoon marine layer coming off the ocean to moderate the heat. The "low" the other night was about 80 degrees. I find that even though we have lived here since 1981, Los Angeles is still home. I still think of myself as a "California girl".... urr... well, make that "geezer."

I sort of "engineered" it so that someone came on Wednesday and installed two window air conditioners, one in Richard's office and one in our bedroom  (my office is in the bedroom) so we will have "zone cooling".  He was annoyed with me because he "wasn't ready" to do what needs to be done so the A/Cs can be installed (had to move a bunch of stuff away from the window so the A/C could be put in), but one of the A/Cs has been sitting in its carton for at least a year and the other one even longer, and it was time. Installing a window A/C is not a major deal, but Richard can't lift anything very heavy because he has an umbilical hernia that he must be careful with.

So an era is coming to an end -- an era of suffering through the Midwestern summer with no relief except for box fans a few hours of cool air being drawn through the house in the early morning and early evening by the whole-house attic fan. The heat never seemed to bother us much -- or if it did we have forgotten how miserable we were -- but at least now we can be a bit more comfortable.

Not a slave to fashion...

Richard listens to the NPR radio program Car Talk every week, and by default I hear snatches of it as I meander within the sound of the radio in his office. I enjoy the program, the banter between the hosts and the people who call in with problems, the weekly puzzle, and the closing credits.

The credits begin with “colorfully nicknamed actual staffers, notably producer Doug the subway fugitive, not a slave to fashion bongo boy Berman…

I have not been a slave to fashion since we moved here in 1981. I try to be neat and clean and look presentable, but I have nothing currently fashionable hanging in my closet.

I was reflecting on fashion yesterday when I rose from the pew to make my way to the front of the church at the end of the service to play the closing song and happened to look down. If I had stuck to the white pumps with the 1-inch heels that I had briefly tried on and then discarded because my feet immediately started hurt (even though they are my size) I would not have found myself suddenly realizing that that I was wearing a different shoe on each foot. I wondered why I had not bothered to look down when I was putting them on or at any time before I left the house, when there still would have been time to change my shoes.


 

It was an easy mistake to make, actually, because they are, after all, very much alike, and I doubt that anybody noticed the difference, especially since I was wearing an ankle-length dress.

In some places footwear like this on a Sunday morning would not pass muster, so I am very thankful that I live in a place where I don’t have to torture my feet to fit in.

The writer of one of the blogs I read sort of went on a rant about why do we need “perfection.” And he makes some good points. Many very nice looking, and pleasantly average, and even strikingly beautiful women are filled with insecurity about how they look and thus gobs of money are spent on facial products and surgical procedures and clothes, and hair to so they can feel better about themselves, and sometimes in order to succeed in a world that values external beauty. 

He tends to want to blame our culture for this, but I think the root of it is basic human nature: I suspect that every culture on the planet has some sort of standard of beauty that the people must strive to achieve – from the tribal people in the Amazon River rainforest where they often have skewers in various parts of their faces, to the Inuit in the far north whose women were expected to tattoo their faces to appear beautiful.

I am just thankful that my career path did not take me in a direction where I had to “dress for success” and appear a certain way to advance my career.

Dressing for success today in our hot little house with no A/C meant slipping on silk boxers to wear as shorts (25-cents at the thrift store) and a sports bra that was in a bag of clothes I was given years ago by a woman whose house I cleaned. I just have to make sure no one arrives unexpectedly at the back door.

Feeding the donkey…

Several Saturdays ago, maybe the second Saturday after we got back from California, the phone rang in the afternoon, and I picked up.

“Hello?”

Immediately, I heard voice of my sister’s husband, rattling along in Italian at breakneck speed.

Of course I did not understanding a single thing he was saying, and likely never to do so, especially since the variety of Italian that his family speaks is a dialect that developed on one of the small islands off the coast of Italy where they all came from.

I began to laugh. It perked the day right up.

Yesterday, we took most of the day off and journeyed to Springfield to commemorate our 40th wedding anniversary. It ended up being sort of boring because it was so hot outside we did not go to any of the fun outdoor places we had thought about going to, and the theater that offers such a nice price break on the matinee on Tuesday was not showing anything we want to see.

We were able to find a few things we wanted in a couple of used-book stores, and we looked at the beautiful things at the Waverly House, a art gallery and gift shop, and then we had lunch at the Macaroni Grill.

We both had the opportunity to learn a little Italian. Richard came back from the men’s restroom and said it was playing a lesson in Italian that said, “When was the last time, Gina, that I told you I loved you.” We had a good laugh about that. What if the woman’s name was not Gina?

So, more out of curiosity than real need, I visited the women’s facility to see what I would be taught.This is what I was asked to repeat: “I have to go to the bank to get money so I can buy food to feed the donkey.”

We had an even bigger laugh. The day, which had the potential to slide into boredom, suddenly perked up a bit. Laughter will do that...

Nursery fare

The essay for July 9 in Simple Abundance

is titled “Nursery Fare for Children of All Ages”

She writes:

When you’re cranky and cry easily, when you are so tired that your eyes burn from keeping them open, when you need hugs and someone to pat the top of your head and whisper, “Shh… there, there…” and no one is around, you need nursery fare.

Nursery foods are the well-loved recipes from childhood that conjure up the happy, innocent moments when all was right with the world…”

She started me thinking about the foods that bring back such pleasant memories of childhood.

 My mother did not make dessert very often, but things that spring to mind are…

warm tapioca pudding…

warm rice sprinkled with sugar, a dollop of margarine (butter was a treat for only very rare occasions), and a bit of milk….

a few marshmallows on top of a graham cracker and put under the broiler (years before “S’mores” became popular)…

hot chocolate made with canned milk…

It surprises me not at all that my favorite thing to eat off the dessert bar at the mega buffet is bread pudding (not that we will be going there anytime soon given how much weight we have gained…)

And then I suddenly remembered some things I loved to eat when I went to stay overnight with Mungie, my mom's mother, who was twice widowed and lived with her son, Ellis, whose wife had died many years earlier.

I loved Mungie, but I tended to prefer hanging around with men when I was a little girl, and I especially liked hanging around with Uncle Ellis. He had a couple of hobbies – indoors he raised canaries, and in the back yard he raised and raced pigeons.

Every time I see the small flock of feral pigeons flying about near the bridge over the highway, where they roost on the ledges of the “I” beam girders, I think of him and remember going outside with him and helping him mess about with the pigeons. When I was a little older, he gave me some pigeons of my own and built a coop for them at my house, but a neighborhood boy that I went to school with stole them one summer when we went on vacation. It was not until we were at our 10th high school reunion that he confessed that he had been the one to take them.

Uncle Ellis made money by making brooms, and he kept me supplied with stick horses – I was going to be a cowgirl when I grew up. Really, I was.

I loved the smell of the broomcorn, and watching the machine that he used to stitch the broomcorn, and the other machine that wound the wire around the stick. And when I spent the night, they fixed me up a bed in the room with the big machines that made interesting shadows when the lights were off, surrounded by the smell of the broomcorn.

And part of the ritual of staying with them was the bedtime snack: pieces of white bread torn in chunks with milk poured over and eaten; or it might be graham crackers crumbled into milk and eaten.

I have already learned in the past 6 months that food does not help. Eating to assuage our grief has just made us gain a lot of weight. So, I think I had better just reminisce about the nursery fare of childhood… except if memory serves, I believe I do have some tapioca in the cupboard…

Excuse me for just a minute….