Christmas in June

After our Christmas service, the beautiful poinsettias that were bought earlier in the month to decorate the church were handed out to the congregation. I brought mine home and sat it in the living room for week or so and then moved it to the “cold room” where most of my plants live during the winter – it is heated, but not very much.

And so it was that about midway into January, we were encouraged by the author of the gardening column in the local newspaper to not bother with the Christmas poinsettias we had been given or purchased during the holiday season because there was no point in keeping them around. Just go ahead and toss them in the trash, she said. They would eventually die, and in any event, would never again develop the red leaves that make them such an attractive decoration during the holiday season.

I did not throw mine away. It endured the benign neglect suffered by most of my house plants during the winter. Much to my surprise, it not only did not die, but most definitely survived the winter.  And thus it was that Spring arrived, the last danger of frost passed, and it joined the yearly migration out to the back porch along with the Boston fern, and the Christmas cactus, and the rest of them.

OK, yeah, some of the bigger red leaves don’t look all that great, but on the other hand, unless my eyes deceive me, are those new red leaves?

Ya just never know…

Remembering…

 I have always been fairly confident in my ability to remember things accurately. At least I was. And then Judy said I just had to read “the gorilla book.” 

 The book has startling things to say about us humans and the way our minds work. We can look right at something and not see it at all. We can remember something that never happened. It was a hard book to deal with, and I have talked about it with Richard probably more than he would like. Our brains play tricks on sometimes, and I no longer trust very much my memories of the past. Judy and I refer to these as “gorilla moments.” 

 

The book presents two very public people who had “gorilla moments” with their memories. One was Hilary Clinton, who got off a plane having been to Bosnia and talked about things that she experienced at the airport that video footage showed never happened. Another was President George W. Bush, who said he remembered seeing some of the events of 911 that he could not possibly have seen in real-time because he was reading a story to some children in an elementary school (this, of course, played right into the hands of conspiracy theorists). Neither person was telling a deliberate lie. Their brains had played tricks on them. They were having “gorilla moments.”

And I came right up against my very own “gorilla moment” a few days ago.

The tumor in our son’s brain was removed on June 7, 2010. On June 8 at noon they moved him from the neurology ICU to the ward. Late in the day on June 8, the radiologist came into the room and said “melanoma… spread from somewhere else….” I left the hospital in the early evening and drove home with those horrible words ringing in my head and heart. Knowing now what I know about the gorilla and the problem of "distracted driving," that I was able to make it home without killing myself or someone else is something of a miracle.

The next morning, June 9, Richard left and drove to the hospital and spent the day with our boy. While he was there, the neurosurgeon came to check on our son. Richard and the surgeon went out in the hall to talk so that our son could not hear them. He said to Richard:

This is a very aggressive cancer. We will throw everything we have at it, and we will lose.

And two years later, as I was thinking back on that week, I thought that the surgeon had told us that when he came to see us immediately after the operation was over. I was convinced of it, until Richard assured me that I definitely was wrong. He was by himself with the surgeon in the hall. I was not there.

A gorilla moment.

But then in that blessed way that He has, another memory scuttled in to give me something else to think about.

Parts of the wood scaffold that Richard built against the side of the house several years ago have started to drop off. And at about the same time 2 years ago that Richard was hearing that dreadful prophecy in the corridor of the hospital, I happened to walk by the fallen board and I saw this fellow basking in the sun. 

A fence lizard, who very patiently sat still for me while I went in the house and got the camera and fumbled with it trying to get it to turn on and focus and get close enough to take his picture.

Yes indeed. Seeing this little fence lizard sent me on another much more pleasant trip into the past… 

 

A memory I absolutely trust. Or most of it. I think. It was summer and our family was visiting my father’s sister, Betty, and her husband, John in Carmel Valley. He had to go tag fence lizards for a project he was working on as part of his job as the director of the Hastings Natural History Reservation run by UC Berkeley. I have no idea what the project was about. I am sure he told me, but I don’t remember. It may have been simply counting them to see if the population was healthy. In any event, he let me come with him.

He had slick technique for catching the lizards. He had a fishing pole with fine line and a noose tied at the end, and he would slip the invisible noose over the head of the unsuspecting lizard and jerk, and the lizard was his. I am not sure how he marked the lizards he had already caught and tagged, but I am almost sure he used nail polish (go away, gorilla).

If I were keeping score, I’d guess the gorilla is slightly ahead.

A very nearly perfect day…

I have found myself on more than one occasion being invited into a home that has every appearance of having just been photographed for a Better Homes and Gardens spread and being warned by the lady of the house “Oh don’t mind the house, it’s a mess.”

Which of course prompts me to look around to see what the mess is; and of course, there is no mess anywhere. The woman is obviously lying. These sorts of self-deprecating remarks that fly in the face of reality have puzzled me greatly. True, one doesn’t want to be thought of as a person who brags on herself or himself, but why say anything at all?

On the rare occasions when people show up at my house unexpectedly or, since January, when I have on purpose invited them for lunch, I never ever say “don’t mind the house, it’s a mess.” Even when I do a good job of cleaning the house, I do not want to encourage people to look around to see what ever the mess might be that they haven’t noticed already.

Late last week I sent an e-mail to my next lunch victim, asking if she was allergic to anything, and was there anything she particularly did not like. She mentioned “mole,” which happened to be somewhat similar to the Buckaroo beans recipe I was planning to make. I sent her the recipe, and she said, “go ahead.” So I did.

I fixed it on Sunday and it was horrible. I made several mistakes. The recipe called for “strong coffee.” And the coffee was too strong. The recipe called for a one-ounce square of unsweetened chocolate. I didn’t have any so I used 1 ounce of baking cocoa. Some versions of the recipe use powdered cocoa, but between the cocoa and the coffee, the sauce had a bitter taste to it, despite the brown sugar.

The main mistake was that I had way too few beans for the amount of sauce.

So after several samplings, hoping that the taste would improve, I decided it had not improved. Richard agreed.

So I decided Plan B would be some vegetarian chili I have that has barley in it. I started cooking the barley and in the meantime I washed all of the bitter mole sauce off the beans and added canned tomatoes and cooked it some more.

It tasted much better, but still not good enough for company. I packed it away in freezer containers and will eat it later. So, there sat the cooked barley

I happen to have a recipe for a barley-vegetable salad, so I put that together, and Richard found some frozen Szechuan carrot soup, which I thawed, and my guest bought beet greens she had cooked with butter, so we had a rather odd lunch, that I think turned out OK…

I was assured that the more I did this -- the house and the food -- the easier it would get. So I ask myself: Is having people over for lunch getting any easier? In some ways, yes. I feel more relaxed now as we sit at the table visiting. I accept that people are coming to see me, not the house. I can forget that part of the ceiling looks like it is ready to all down. I can let my eye slide over the cobweb drape in the corner that I forgot to knock down and pretend I don’t see it….

And despite dithering for days about what I am going to fix, as long as I continue to prepare the food a day in advance and have a back-up plan so that I can snatch victory from the jaws of defeat, then "yes" to that question too….

And when she walked out the door, I felt that special sort of joy that come when one has spent some time with a kindred spirit.

“…clear skies, with occasional melancholy”

 Judy is reading a book Life's That Way, by Jim Beaver, about the death of his wife, and she feeds me occasional quotes. She wasn't sure if she should give me the book to read, because she worries it might be too painful. And before… way before… I might have agreed with her. But now I find that it often it takes a more eloquent person expressing how they feel as they walk through the death of a loved one to enable me to make sense of what I am feeling. He writes...

Today's one of those days when I catch myself saying, "I'm never going to get over this, am I?"  And then I remember the grief recovery proscription against projecting current feelings on the future. And so I allow myself the possibility of getting over this. Whatever that means.

Lots of twinges and groans from the heart today.  No special reason, no identifiable triggers.  Highs in the upper nineties, clear skies, with occasional melancholy.

Yet another similie to add to the collection.  This is like a runaway train headed down the rails and the engineer sees a disaster looming ahead and is powerless to stop it… Life is like a river, it flows over rapids, swirls and eddies and broadens into quiet pools…

May can be a tumultuous month as far as the weather is concerned. Some days will be crystal clear and beautiful and warm, and others crystal clear and beautiful and a bit nippy. It was very windy yesterday, Richard regretting that we do not have a windmill to generate power. Some mornings one wakes up to heavy fog hugging the land. Some days there are ferocious storms. In fact, it was about this time last year that a good portion of Joplin was destroyed by a tornado.

And the tumultuous weather is a good similie for the tumult in May on an emotional level as well.

Clear, with a chance of melancholy…

Even when one knows intellectually that one’s parents are going to eventually die, one is never quite ready for it. This was my third Mother’s day without my Mom and my second Mother’s Day without my son. Missing my mom so much. Being thankful I had the chance to be a mother myself… missing our son so much.

And overwhelmed at how loving my husband was on that day. He made me a pretend card as though our son were here to give it to me. He picked some daisies, as though they were from our son, and put them in the cup of the “trophy” our boy gave me on the last Mother’s Day we were to have.

And then on Wednesday morning of this week, I arrived back home from aerobics to a message from my Dad on the answering machine that his last surviving sister, Aunt Vera, had died. About 3 months ago she was given “3 to 6 months” to live, and the doctor had it about right. I am happy I got to see her last June when my niece got married. I am so sorry that my three cousins and their families have this sorrow in their lives.

I especially love this picture of her and my mother, which was taken 2 months before my mother died. 

It is one of the last pictures anybody took of my mother that I have, at any rate. My mother had a spiritual bond with Vera, and my sister tells me of a conversation she overheard between Mom and Vera shortly after Mom found out she had cancer. She had told my aunt, “Vera, I am on my way to heaven, and you’re a-comin’ with me…” And I believe she was right. I believe Vera is in heaven with her right now.

But it hasn’t been all sorrow and melancholy.

Early in the month, I moved the ancient cactus that once belonged to my Grandfather outside under a tree and poured about a half-gallon of water on it. This cactus was part of much larger cactus garden he had in his yard in the 1960s, and it went with him when he and my step-grandmother sold the house and moved into a mobile home park. And my father brought it with him when they came to visit us here in the early 1980s after my grandfather had died. 

A few days later one gorgeous flower appeared on the little prickly sausages.

A mother armadillo has taken up residence in the old culvert under our driveway, and Richard spotted her and 3 babies the other day as he was leaving in the truck; in fact, the babies were running around under the vehicle. He says one of them stopped to sniff his tire. These armadillos will almost certainly be killed on the highway in front of the house, but for the time being, they are safe with us. We do not have a fancy lawn, or beautiful flowerbeds, or an extensive garden. We don’t care if armadillos make holes in the ground looking for food.

Having decided we no longer wish to run the gauntlet of scolding wrens every time we come in or out of the back door, or listen to them berate the cat all day for sprawling on porch, we removed everything that they could possibly build a nest in from around the back door. 

So they constructed their nest this year in the coil of an air hose hanging on the back wall the garage (which used to be the side of our house). It is exactly at eye level as we come walking down the stairs,

 
 so we get a peak at the 4 fuzz-covered heads with gaping mouths that bob around waiting for mom and dad to bring bugs.

And my two nieces received their Master’s degrees on Wednesday. What a joy for all of us and especially their parents.

I believe Grandpa is especially proud of them. So am I... which reminds me...

Passing inspection

On more than one occasion, I have opened the packaging for a product I have bought and found a small slip of paper imprinted with variations of the wording “Inspected by….,” which I guess is to reassure me that there is some sort of quality control on the items the company has manufactured and shipped to the retailer.

Mothers often put their own version of an “Inspected by” on their children before they leave the house to go someplace where their appearance matters. One doesn’t want to be embarrassed by one’s child being dirty or poorly dressed, or whatever. Giving the kid a “once-over” to make sure the little darling hasn’t gotten into something between the time he or she was dressed and the time to leave or making sure the kid is wearing something halfway presentable.

I imagine mothers’ spit has cleaned up quite a few dirty faces down through the generations.

Now the problem I am facing is, “Who inspects the mothers?”

It was a lovely, warm evening. Richard decided to wear his Bermuda shorts and a light-weight shirt my sister had given him, and I decided to wear my pull-up jeans, the sort with an elastic waist and a fake fly and a fake snap, because they are comfortable, and a top my sister gave me that still fits, and so we hoisted ourselves into the truck off we went.

And as the sun was starting to get low in the sky on the night of the biggest full moon of the year, we journeyed out into the country and up a very rough driveway to the top of a hill to celebrate the birthday of the guy who fixes our computers.

We sat around on lawn chairs with a small group of other well-wishers and ate and were very careful about keeping an eye on our plates, which were being carefully watched by several of the Great Pyrenees dogs that she breeds and shows, as we watched the gorgeous moon rise up above the trees on the ridge.

Then I got up to go to the picnic table to get something else to eat, and for some reason, started to stick my hand in my pocket and discovered, much to my horror, that my pocket was not where it was supposed to be.

I had put my pants on backward.

And so I sauntered into the house, took my jeans off and put them on again the right way, and rejoined the party, feeling very silly indeed.

I hope nobody noticed.

I guess from now on I will have to recruit Richard to inspect me before I leave.

Awl, tars, and warplars

One day I was bustling around the kitchen and our boy walked in and said:

I’m gonna take miy cuar in and have the awl changed and see about getting some new tars.

I had not really noticed up to then, that this child, who had spent the first 18 months of his liefe in Los Angeles and from birth had heard everybody around him talking like Californians, and aside from his first intelligible sentence, which was  “Go by by car? Train,” had begun talking in earnest during the next 2 years when we were in Oregon—another place where people spoke without a very distinctive local accent that we could hear—had suddenly started putting a different spin on certain words.

Awl?

Tars?

I recall mentioning this to my friend Judy, whose husband was born and raised in the Ozarks a little more south of here, and who she met when they were students at colluge in Arikansus. She relayed a funny story about an incident early in their marriage where she was trying to hand him tools while he was up on a ladder fixing something. 

He asked her to hand him the “warplars.” 

She was from Indiana, and had no idea what he was talking about. He began to get a little frustrated with her because the warplars were not immediately forthcoming.  

She said she wasn’t sure what the warplars were and he said ‘you know, the warplars,” and suddenly the light went on and she figured out he meant “wire pliers.”

The whole business of regional accents and expressions is quite fascinating, but I suspect the regional distinctions in how words are pronounced and used may be starting blur a little because of television and because more and more people move from one place to another. It used to be all you had to do was open your mouth and a local knew “you ain’t from around here, are ya? And occasionally, that is still true. We have good friends now who just moved here from Massachusetts. I know they "ain't from around here!"

I know I have learned to modify how I speak since we arrived here in 1980, and so has Richard. The other day when we were picking up trash in front of Lee’s Tar Shop, he bent down and said, “Wouldja look at this! A piece of bobwar.”

This morning as I left to go to aerobics, I heard a brown thrasher in the big maple tree outside the house, filling the air with his amazing song. I couldn’t see him, of course, but his song was unmistakable. I wonder if birds from one region sing with an accent?

(P.S. Some words deliberately spelled wrong to stop "Text Enhance" from automatically putting in a link to advertisements)

Promises kept...

It was one of those odd coincidences that you can hardly believe is happening, but there it is.

Last week, at about 1 p.m., we arrived at the City Park where one of the city workers had arranged to meet us so we could watch him plant the tree that we promised our son we would plant for him along the walking path.

Well, that isn’t quite accurate. He wanted a pine tree planted, but unfortunately, the tree he wanted was not among the memorial trees offered for planting by the city. Even though it a tree native to Missouri, none of the nurseries we contacted in this area in an effort to get the tree ourselves had that variety of tree for sale in the right size. 

At the edge of a vacant lot on a road into town stands a beautiful tulip poplar tree

 

  

 

and since that variety happens to be one that the city did offer, we said our apologies in the Spirit to our son for not quite keeping our promise, and picked it to be planted.

Perhaps if we are still around 15 to 20 years from now, and I suspect it might take at least that long for the tree to mature enough to bloom, and if we able to hobble out to park, we might see it bloom.

The older areas of the park where memorial trees are planted has been filled up,  so the new trees are being planted in a recently cleared area of the park. It's sort of muddy and not very attractive right now, but it will be beautiful in years to come...

The man had already dug the hole, so as we watched he put the tree in and began to fill in...  

 and he pushed in the plaque on its steel post, and then, slowly…. slowly…. slowly…

two Burlington Northern-Santa Fe engines pulling a train crept down the track past the park. The men operating the train were likely not the railroad men who had befriended our boy over the years but… but the train appearing when it did could not have been more perfect if it had been arranged. 

Perhaps it was.

A bit of whimsy

We decided to visit some friends who we had not seen in a long time. In a conversation I had with the wife some time ago, after I told her that Richard had brought me a bouquet of flowers he had picked along side the road, she had complained in a funny way that nobody ever brought her flowers, so Richard decided to pick her a Spring bouquet.

At the time there were not a huge assortment of flowers to be had (I have fallen a bit behind on my blog) – dogwoods, some yellow flowers (mustard?), and the first of the tall purple flowers that bloom wild in the yard, but it was pretty enough.

She was tickled, I think as much because he remembered to pick them as she was that she actually had flowers sitting on her counter. She especially enjoyed the special vase we used to transport the flowers to her.

And then a few days later, Richard came back from his walk and carefully sets this down on my desk.

It is a blessing to be married to man who tries to figure out ways to make me laugh. And fortunately for him, it doesn't take much.

Olly olly oxen free

My husband has a fondness for bottles made of cobalt blue glass. Fortunately, he has not yet bitten by the bug to collect them -- we have little space here anymore for collections -- but occasionally he finds one. The other day while on a trash pick-up detail we found a blue beer bottle on the side of the road. He brought it back and admired it and then washed it out and tossed it into recycling. But then a few days later he found much larger cobalt blue vodka bottle, also discarded on the side of the road, with a peel off label. That one he is “going to do something with” but is not sure what. Perhaps he’ll use it to store olive oil or find a practical use for it. If not, it will simply sit someplace where he can see it and enjoy its beauty.

His pleasure at finding the bottles reminded me of a wonderful Ray Bradbury story “The Blue Bottle” in a book of his short stories Long After Midnight, which I have written about before here, and so I thought it would be good to read it to him the next time we drove someplace. And so I did.

We were still riding along when I finished the story, and so I turned the page to see what was next. "One Timeless Spring" was the title and as I skimmed through the opening paragraph my eye caught the words “olly olly oxen free…”

 

I am now of an age when I can actually sit down with the microfiche of my memories and roll through them, much as I did in the spring of 1970 for a report for a history class that led me to sit for several hours in the microfiche collection at the University of Southern California, looking at editions of the Los Angeles Times detailing the beginning of the roundup of some 120,000 Japanese Americans -- many of them who had been born in this country -- who were shipped off to interment camps in late March of 1942 for no other reason than because they were Japanese.  

As we motored down the highway, I traveled back another 10 years or so, back to the years when I was in elementary school, when I was 8... 9...10 years old, years when in the early evenings in the summer, after daylight savings time had advanced the clock, that the band of kids that lived in on our block would come to my house and we would play kick the can.

Olly olly oxen free free free…

I wonder how many 8-, 9- and 10-year-olds today have ever even hard those words, much less have played kick the can? Do groups of neighborhood children play together? I don't mean in organized sports that adults have organized, I mean outside in games they have organized themselves. What sorts of memories of childhood games will they have when they look back as 60-something-year-olds?

Now, just for fun, watch this short video (less than 2 minutes long), which is an updated version of a similar video used in a fascinating study done some years back that is detailed in quite an interesting book I have started. Follow the instructions.

Going to plan B…. and plan C….

I fairly regularly have minor disasters in the kitchen when it comes to preparing food -- it’s usually nothing very terrible, just the frustration of things not going exactly as planned.

The day before my last victim came for lunch, I found myself standing at the counter and picking out rice noodles from the vegetables of the Pad Thai dish I had made because it was only after I had put the meal together and tasted it that I realize the noddles were not quite cooked enough.

It seems intuitive that one would actually test the cooked noodles before adding them to the vegetables, but for some reason I didn’t – I had followed the cooking directions on the package and just assumed they would be done. So I had to cook them some more and then add them back. I was very glad that I had decided to make the dish a day ahead.

I had another little adventure in the kitchen recently. Having cruised by the market early Monday morning to see if there was any interesting meat marked down from not having been sold over the weekend, I found some really good deals on some steak and a very nice chuck roast.

On the way home the wheels began to spin about what I should do with this meat – all of them involving my large crock pot: Make chunks out of it and fix stew? Cover it in mushroom soup and onion soup mix? Make beef burgioni (that’s our joke pronunciation around here for boeuf bourguignon)?

I wrestled with this for a couple of more days and then realized if I didn’t do something quickly with the meat it was going to end up in the garbage, so I decided to make Willow Manor’s pot roast (which I have blogged about before).

I rubbed the spice mixture on the meat and turned the heat up under the big cast iron skillet and when it was good and hot I started to brown the meat. While that was sizzling I went in search of the raisins, which go in the sauce. I found them all right. And so had the ants. Even though the box of raisins was still wrapped in its the original cellophane packaging, the ants had found a way inside. When I opened the box I could see they had been very busy for quite a while and it wasn’t going to be a matter of simply washing the ants off and salvaging the raisins.

The raisins were ruint. Ruint, I tell you.

I tried to figure out what to do next. I stood there dithering for a bit. Do I really want to drop everything and rush into town for more raisins? No, I do not. Did we have any other raisins about, say in the refrigerator? No. We did not (I was wrong, however, because there were raisins in the refrigerator – pushed all the way to the back and behind something, which is the topic of another post I will get around to some day).

Aha. I have craisins (sweetened dried cranberries) that are in a much more secure container and so I decided to use them instead of the raisins.

Having completed the sauce and browned the meat, I went into the storage room to get the crock-pot to cook it in and realized that the crock-pot was not there.

I had loaned it to Judy a week earlier so she could use it on Saturday before to keep soup warm at the birthday party she held for her husband. As we were getting ready to leave the party, I said, “Don’t worry about rushing to get the crock pot back to me. I almost never cook in it…”

Except now.

Now what? The oven temperature for the pot roast was supposed to be 220 to 225, but I did not want to fire up the oven for 3 hours to cook it (trying to conserve electricity, doncha know). Our small convection oven has 5 preset temperatures, with the two lowest at 200-210 and 300-350, so I put it on for 30 minutes at 300 and then 30 minutes at 200 and so it went for a couple of hours, and it turned out great.

 

And Judy brought my crock-pot back the next day.