Memory Rollover

Every once in a while a certain song, or a picture, or a current event will illuminate a memory that is not forgotten, just not thought about very often. I got such a flashback when I was visiting with my dad.

In the summer of 1962, when I was shortly to become 13 years old, my father's sisters Vera (Uncle Bud) and Theresa (Uncle Bob) decided to take their children (Vera's, 3, Theresa's, 2) on a road trip from northern California to Seattle to see the World's Fair. Vera invited me to come because her oldest daughter Teri is a little more a year older then me (aaahh, what's a few months between cousins). We had a very good cousin relationship then and indeed, even now, she is one of the dearest people in my life, all these many years later.

I believe the airplane ticket for me to fly from Los Angeles to Sacramento, the nearest airport, was about $40 (which seemed a staggering amount back then). I had saved a bunch of money in my piggy bank, and so I was able to go.

I remember bits and pieces of that trip. I remember we visited a cheese factory and a brewery, and sand dunes on the Oregon coast. While we were camped outside of Seattle, we saw big slugs in the rainforest, and I fell into some stinging nettles, and yep, they really did sting. We went up on the Space Needle, I ate a Belgian waffle, which was an amazing treat, bought from a vendor at the World's Fair. I remember my Uncle Bud buying a malt at a restaurant in which he instructed the waitress to add cherry to it as well. I think it was a chocolate cherry malt. Or may be it was a "cherry soda." (help me Teri!) Regardless, no one in my family had ever done anything so bold. I also remember falling asleep in the back seat of Uncle Bud's new car, which cousin Richard (son of Bob and Theresa) says was a gorgeous Mercury station wagon, with gum in my mouth. It fell out of my mouth, and got all over the seat and he was furious with me.

I remember riding on a ferry through the islands off the coast of Washington and British Columbia, and getting a little seasick.

The song "Monster Mash" was popular that summer and we heard it over and over and over on the radio as we travelled -- at least Teri and I did, not sure about what they were listening to in Theresa's car.

But one of the things that I remember being the most fun was when the odometer in Aunt Theresa and Uncle Bob's car turned over from 99999 to 100,000. My cousin Richard, their oldest son and cousin I am becoming reacquainted with after a very long time, says it was a 1956 Mercury, and he remembers that event too. That's because the caravan stopped, and everybody in Aunt Vera's car who could cram into Aunt Theresa's car did so, and we crept down the highway laughing hysterically and all of us trying to see the exact moment when the odometer changed.

It was such fun.

Things were a bit quieter a few weeks ago in my dad's car as we were driving along on our way to eat lunch. Before we left the house, he said, "The odometer should turn to 100,000 today." And indeed it was about to. It conveniently began inching toward 100,000 while we were stopped...

And closer.....

And it then finally tipped over while we were in the midst of traffic on the busy thoroughfare....

.

This time  there weren't 6 giggling children and four adults crammed into a car. Just me and him.

A Journey of 1000 Miles

I am a member of Bookcrossings,  an organization that promotes recycling paperback books by leaving them in public places for other people to pick up and read.

A few weeks ago, my cousin in Washington, DC, sent me a Bookcrossings book that he had received, The Cat Who Had 60 Whiskers, by Lilian Jackson Braun, complete with the appropriate Bookcrossing stickers. I knew I was going to write about Bookcrossings and getting this book and liberating it, but I neglected to photograph the book, not thinking too clearly at the time.

I read it just before I left for California, and I knew I definitely did not want to keep it, so I decided to take it along with me and leave it at one of the airports. At that point, the book's journey had taken it at least 2300 miles; who knows where it had been before then.

Aside from giving books to the Thrift Store to sell, I have liberated books before -- the last time I traveled in July, I left a copy of the paperback, Dr Metzger's Dog, by Thomas Perry at the Orange County airport.

After I reached the gate at Los Angeles International for the return trip flight to Dallas Ft/Worth, I sat the book the "end table" next to where I was sitting (once again forgetting to take a picture of it) and then got up to put some water in my bottle. When I returned to the seat, a woman was reading the book.

The book came to me in the Midwest from the East, then travelled to the West Coast, and now I wonder where it will end up. Where was her home? I almost approached her to find out - in fact, I am not usually shy at all about talking to strangers, But for some reason I let inertia take over, and before I could talk myself into an interview with her...

she got up and walked away, the book peeking out of the top of her bag.

I didn't see her again. I don't know if she was on the flight to Dallas/Ft Worth, but I think I would remember that bright purple outfit.

So, book where are you? Back East again? North, South? I did not like the book very much, but even so, I wish it well on its journey.

Luggage That Moves Itself

Fantasy author Terry Pratchett has created a most amazing character - a wooden box called the Luggage - which appears several times in the Discworld novels that feature Rincewind the Wizard. The Luggage is alive, it has hundreds of little legs, it is slavishly dedicated to its owner, and it follows Rincewind wherever he goes, even to hell and back.

Modern travelers can buy luggage with wheels so that they can pull it behind or push it in front, but they don't have quite as much luck keeping their luggage with them. It can and does often go missing.

But the last two people to board the commuter jet at Dallas/Ft Worth on Wednesday for the trip to Springfield, who sat behind me at the very back of the plane, each had a carry-on that carried itself on. They caused quite a stir among the passengers as they came down the aisle and arranged the carry-ons under their seats. 

"They can't bring them on the plane!" one said. "Oh yes they can," said the flight attendant.

These carry-ons were two drug-sniffing dogs on their way home from the Dominican Republic with their handlers for more training.

One was a chocolate-colored Labrador Retriever, and this dog, Kito, a Golden Retriever mix..

They were excellent passengers, although the handler explained they had been given sedatives to help keep them calm. Even so, toward the end of the flight, I felt a tail hitting my foot.

The Wall Came Tumblin' Down...

According to a program I was watching the other night about chocolate, pirates once seized a ship headed for Spain expecting to find gold or silver in the hold. Instead they found what looked like dried rabbit droppings. They burned the cargo, not realizing that they were burning cocoa beans that were worth their weight in silver back in Spain.

Sometimes I wonder if a stranger coming into my house would recognize one of the most valuable things that I own, which is sitting in plain sight on one my bookshelves.

For Christmas in 1989 I received in the mail a small package from Germany. It came from Elli, a woman who started out as a customer of our mail order business, morphed into a translator of our materials into German, and in the process became a friend.

She sent some wonderful chocolate, a cassette tape of German Christmas carols, and in a small box nestled in cotton, a small piece of concrete painted orange on one side. I was somewhat puzzled by this painted concrete, until I read the note.

A piece of the Berlin Wall.

Today marks the 20th anniversary of the day the Berlin Wall ceased to be an official barrier between East and West Berlin, a prelude to the reunification a year later of the country that had been divided since the close of WW II.

The images of German citizens on the wall celebrating their freedom stick in the mind similar to the image of Nelson Mandela leaving prison in South Africa. They began attacking the wall, and eventually crews came to dismantle it. Not quite as neat and efficient a Joshua marching the Israelites around the walls of Jericho, but to me every bit as much a miracle.


For Elli this piece of concrete had deep symbolic meaning, because it was her country in which history was being made. I was deeply touched that she thought to send it to me.

Since 1989 it has sat on the bookshelf, propped up against my battered collection paperback books.

To the casual eye, just a bit of rubble that likely would quickly be thrown away; for me, a small symbol of freedom of immense value.


Sometimes people are confined by internal prisons of their own making, sometimes they are victimized by external prisons of concrete erected by others; and sometimes--just sometimes--those prisons are dismantled.

Twosie Balls

My folks id not feel comfortable using in front of their children the words other people used to talk about bodily functions involving the toilet. They did not say urinate or defecate, or pee or poop, and most definitely none of coarser or the even worse four-letter words.

Instead, we went "number one" - or "onsies" -- or "number two" - "twosies". And of course, in our minds, those words became the equivalent of the four-letter variety and our response was usually furtive giggling when anyone innocently said those words in another context, such as hopscotch.

Our folks have an old-fashioned metal food grinder that clamps to the counter, with a hopper in the top and an auger and discs with different sized holes. When I was a kid one of my favorite things to do was help dad grind cranberries, oranges, and apples for the Thanksgiving Day dinner relish. The cranberries made a wonderful popping sound.

Then he found a recipe for a very healthy confection consisting of dried dates, figs, prunes, and walnuts, mixed with a little orange juice and rolled into balls, and then the balls were rolled into powdered sugar. They looked a lot like... you know what... and we all called them twosie balls.

 
I hadn't thought about twosie balls for a long time until I happened across a similar sounding recipe on A Vision Splendid, another blog I enojy.

I made her recipe, except I fashioned it into balls rather than square slices. I agree with her assessment: very tasty indeed.

I'll fly away.... this morning

In a few minutes we will be leaving in the pre-dawn darkness for the trip to the airport in Springfield and I will be flying away to Los Angeles to celebrate the life of my mother, who symbolically flew away on Oct. 13. This time I will only have to negotiate the Dallas/Ft Worth airport.

I won't have internet access to the blog from my dad's house, but thanks to the magic of "scheduled posting," there will be a few installments here over the next week.


I'll be back!

I do strange things when trying to multitask

One of several things I have noticed about getting older is that I cannot so easily do more than one thing at a time without messing one or more of those things up somehow. I have recently been exchanging e-mails with these two women, Rhonda and Sue, who came to visit my father...

and had their photo taken standing in front of his truck.


That truck has quite a history. I began to learn to drive in it, learning how to operate a clutch and the gears, with my dad teaching me, but I think I made him a little crazy -- I know I made him a little crazy (and we were just in the parking lot of a big factory). Eventually my mother took over, bless her heart.

But the best memories are that when we were younger, in high school, these two were often among the group of kids my dad would invite to hop in the back of the truck on a Saturday for a trip to the beach.

Sue passed on to me a recipe for wonderful pumpkin soup that she says her boss gave her. I guess reading about soup on his blog is perhaps a bit tiresome, but just one more soup recipe for a while and I'll give it a rest. Promise.

Pumpkin Ginger Soup

2 lbs of pumpkin or other winter squash
2 tbsp of unsalted butter
2 cloves of garlic minced
6 inches of ginger peeled and minced (approximately 1/4 cup)
1 stalk of celery finely chopped
1 carrot finely chopper
1 yellow onion finely chopped
4 cups of chicken broth
Salt and pepper to taste

1. Melt butter in a soup pot and add the onion, garlic, ginger, celery and the carrot. Saute for about ten minutes or until the onion becomes translucent.
2. Skin the pumpkin (or squash) and cut into cubes about 1 inch square.
3. Add the cut pumpkin and chicken broth to the pot and bring to a boil.
4. Simmer until the pumpkin is soft.
5. Let the mixture cool and then put in a blender or food process to puree.
6. Re-heat to serve.

So, there I was at the kitchen counter dishing up my lunch and ladling pumpkin soup into my bowl -- and at the same time talking to the LOML who was sitting at the table eating his lunch -- and I reached in the pot, got a scoop of soup, turned to say something to him, and then dumped it into the dishwater that he had prepared to wash the dishes after lunch.

Cup of tea, anyone?

Yet another very rainy day in the Ozarks, and I return home from town after having run some errands, without an umbrella,  feeling rather damp. Time to get into something warm and settle down with a cup of tea.

Would you care to join me? Not too long ago, I went nuts in the salvage store and I can offer you many varieties of tea. What kinds?

I am not supposed to drink a lot of caffeine, so the The "California Orange" can contains caffeine-free orange pekoe, if just regular type tea is what you want... 

And this is not even all of them, which I am somewhat embarrassed to admit (I am in good company, the LOML once accumulated 42 tubes of toothpaste that he found on sale)..

And I have a lovely teapot.

I can offer a variety of cups to drink it from....

And some Honey-Lavender biscotti, which is perfect for dipping if you're a "dunker"...

which I found out about at the food  blog written by Sidewalk Shoes (and I even copied the way she took her photograph) who had a link to it. And she is right, it is about the best biscotti I have ever made. Biscotti is a wonderful form of cookie for eating with something hot and fluid, because it can be made without any added fat, which helps to keep the calorie count down.

So, shall we have a tea party?

Magic Under the Cedars

After what seems like days and days of rain (have we magically been transported back to Oregon? I think to myself) ...

enough rain that even the most cheerful people are beginning to complain just a little bit about it,

even though we are probably in a drought, and need every drop....

the clouds finally blow away and the beautiful blue sky of fall returns.

We take a walk through the field to see if our little pond is full (and it is!),

and there at our feet, springing up under the cedar trees,

are these amazing jewels of mushrooms, rivaling the most beautiful fall colors...

.

on the trees around the house...

I become a geezer?

Upon awaking this morning, I realized that I have turned another year older and I may now be a geezer. Possibly. The LOML says I won't officially be a geezer for another 5 years, and he may be right, but most of the commercial establishments in these here parts offer a discount to people my age. It is now cheaper for me to see a movie. Today (or tomorrow) I believe I will take our boy to see Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs, which is playing at a cinema in the next town down the road. He remembers me reading that story to him when he was a little kid.

I have not made up my mind about what I want for my birthday dinner. Either homemade macaroni and cheese, or meatloaf with mashed potatoes. I am also wrestling with what sort of dessert I will feed myself and the men to honor me on my special day. Either an apple pie with ice cream, or a chocolate cake layered with pudding, whipped topping, and Heath bar bits.

I know at least two of the presents that I will get--the CD Dreamboat Annie by Heart and a lavender-scented diffuser with a nice pottery bottle--because I picked them out myself. A package from my sister sits waiting to be opened, and there are some cards, too.

The first birthday I remember celebrating was when I was 3 years old. My mom and dad got me a child-sized fishing pole that came in a metal tube.

 This enabled me to go fishing with my father.

 
 I remember turning 16 and 21, but the rest of them are sort of a blur. I think I will no doubt remember turning 60 because of its association with our family's recent bereavement. But, I have made the decision that this will be happy day, and so it will.