Scenes from the Journey

Eunice in the Springtime

2012-01-29T08:58:00.001-08:00

Eunice says, "Life isn't worth living."

Eunice says, "Every day is a gift."

Eunice says, "To live is to suffer."

Eunice says, "There is joy and beauty in everything."

In short, Eunice doesn't have a clue. She shifts like sand dunes in a high wind. Her moods are as firm and long-lasting as an ice cube in a sauna. Up and down, left and right. Follow Eunice as she tries to make sense out of—out of life? Forget it! Out of HER life" Not a chance! Out of the way the world is going? All she can do is rant.

Rant, Eunice. No one is listening anyway. Rant away. Rant, don't rant. The world will be the same. Save yourself the energy.

Withdraw. Read. Don't go out. OUT is where decisions have to be made. OUT is where you will have to decide what is right and what is wrong. OUT is where economic necessity meets social injustice. OUT is where us and them are always separate. OUT is where the twain shall never meet.

So that leaves Eunice up a creek without a paddle. She could walk home, I suppose, through the cold rocky creek. She'd ruin her shoes. Could she do it barefoot? Not bloomin' likely. Hurt her feet, she would, and not be able to go more than 20 yards before she'd give up. Poor Eunice.

Is there anything up this creek that will please her? Look around, Eunice. The leaves have tinged those black branches with the palest yellow-green mist. That's what happens this time of year, and Eunice does like that.

What else? Off in the woods she hears a cardinal doing his territorial call: this is MINE and only mine and don't come near, you other males, or I'll peck your eyes out. It sounds more friendly than that when Eunice filters it through her human ears, but she knows what he's really saying. She might as well be reading the headlines.

Okay, forget the cardinal. Look at the ground, Eunice. See the trilliums beneath the trees? See the may-apples, the patch of violets? Does that make you feel better?

Eunice, notice that the air is warm. Certainly warmer than the water in this creek you're up. So feel it. Stay away from the cold water where you're stuck without a paddle. Just notice on your skin the slightest hint of a soft breeze. Notice that you can take off the multiple layers you've been wearing during the long winter. Notice that the sun is dappling through the canopy, spotlighting this corner and that flower and this outcropping of stone and that blanket of bright green moss.

So what about it, Eunice? Yea or nay? Ah, well. I'll let you off the hook. Don't make a decision if you don't want to. And even if you do, you can always change it tomorrow, if your mood changes. And since you wrote the book on moods, Eunice, you certainly know that the one sure thing about moods is this: they always change.

www.anntudor.ca
http://www.scenesfromthejourney.blogspot.com

Winter

2012-01-22T12:57:00.001-08:00

When you walk in the woods

in winter,

hold your arms away from your sides,

lest the swish

of your sleeves

still

the silence of snow.

www.anntudor.ca
http://www.scenesfromthejourney.blogspot.com

Bread

2012-01-15T07:00:00.001-08:00

I'm not sure yet whether I want to write about wheat or about bread. But I'll start with bread. I love bread. I could live on nothing but bread—though of course, I don't. I'm a true twenty-first century woman. I watch my carb intake and I watch my wheat. But I DO love bread.

How do I love it? Let me count the ways. Sandwiches, for starters, and toast. (Did you know that if you toast bread you lower its GI number? True.) French toast, with jam or syrup or just plain powdered sugar. Bread pudding, plain or fancy, with or without a bourbon sauce and pecans. Thick-cut bread with a hole in the middle and an egg dropped in and then it's all baked until the egg is set.

And a bread and cheese sandwich brushed with olive oil and toasted in a black cast-iron ridged skillet, weighted or not. (Who needs a panini-maker?) Or open-faced summer sandwiches of bread spread with coarse-grain mustard, then topped with a slice from a perfect tomato and a slice of old cheddar, the whole thing broiled until the cheese melts.

Or bread for dessert: a slice of ciabatta or other good bread, and on it you put a couple of wafers of 70% or better chocolate. Stick this in a warm oven (leftover heat from an earlier baking is just fine). Take it out after a few minutes. When you look at it you'll think nothing has happened to the chocolate, but touch it with your finger and you will find that it is totally melted. Eat it warm. Or sprinkle it with fleur de sel before you eat it!

Another favourite bread dessert: bread with stone fruit. Halve and stone fresh plums, apricots, or peaches. Slice the fruit or not, depending on its size, and lay it on (buttered) bread in one layer, then bake it for ten to 15 minutes. When it comes from the oven, sprinkle the fruit with a teaspoon of sugar. The fruit is hot, so don't burn your tongue.

Bread pudding can range from bare-bones to high-falutin', and it's delicious no matter how it's done. And don't forget savoury bread puddings, sometimes called "strata," meaning layers. Use bread, lots of cheese, egg & milk beaten together, and any flavourings you want: bacon, ham, roasted red pepper, mustard, smoked salmon, parboiled broccoli. Let it stand overnight in the refrigerator so the bread soaks up all the liquid, then bake for 45 minutes in the morning for a perfect brunch dish.

The North American favourite taste is "crisp," according to the polls. And bread crumbs supply crisp. Fresh bread crumbs (run a couple of slices of bread through the food processor, and leave the crusts on, no matter what they tell you) can be mixed with a little olive oil and/or cheese and scattered over any kind of casserole, savoury or sweet, before it goes into the oven. Of course, the better the bread, the better the crumbs.

Dried bread crumbs (toast a couple cups of fresh bread crumbs in a slow oven until they are dry, then process them to a fine crumb) provide excellent crispness. If you have a leftover roast of any sort, slice it and spread it with good mustard. Dredge both sides of the mustarded meat in a plenitude of dry bread crumbs, then fry the meat in a little olive oil until both sides are crisp. Much better than a plain old slice of cold meat.

Many alternative health practitioners are quick to suggest wheat allergy as a possible source of health problems. Also there is the theory that if we crave a particular food it might be because we are allergic to it. I recognize that such an allergy might take a long time to discover. I have spent several six-week periods avoiding wheat. It is unpleasant but not impossible. And never have I seen the glimmer of a difference. It may be that my "rosacea" is actually a form of wheat allergy. But at my age, I'd rather have a red nose for the next ten years (a minor blemish compared to all the other ravages of old age) than spend them not eating wheat.

Bread, the staff of my life. The stuff of dreams.

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http://www.scenesfromthejourney.blogspot.com

Poutine

2012-01-08T07:40:00.001-08:00

I'll start with this: poutine. I hope I'm not treading on anyone's toes here, but I find poutine to be a strange combination of ingredients. Let's be sure I have it straight: poutine is essentially french fries covered in gravy (ersatz gravy, obviously, for there aren't enough roasted chickens in the world to make the gravy needed to service all the poutine eaters). So: fries, slathered in gravy, and then the whole thing covered (or dotted?) with raw cheese curds. Fermented milk. Nothing wrong with cheese curds—or with fries, for that matter, or gravy. I'm a very big fan of gravy myself, when there's an occasion for it (e.g., when a bird or beast has been roasted or fried: red-eye gravy, southern-style milk gravy on biscuits, smooth brown turkey gravy on mashed potatoes, and so forth). You'll get no argument from me for any of the poutine ingredients.

But the thing about french fries is this: fries are square-cut potato strips deep-fried in oil so that they become crisp. The point of deep-frying is crisp. (The favourite North American "flavour" has been found to be "crisp.") When your fries come to the table, you eat the skinniest, crispiest ones first. Q.E.D.

Poutine: French fries slathered in gravy. Gravy is by definition wet. And wet destroys crisp faster than paper can wrap rock. If you put WET (i.e., gravy) on CRISP (i.e., fries) you get soggy.

Ergo you are paying a huge caloric price—a huge proportion of your daily fat allowance—for your deep-fried potato strips (presumably because you like "crisp") and you are not reaping the benefit. You get no crisp with poutine. If the gravy is so important, why don't they just boil up strips of potato and cover THOSE with gravy. Don't waste your calories on fries if you aren't going to get your "crisp" fix from them.

Ah, I know. You're going to say that poutine with boiled strips of potato just wouldn't be the same.

Many upscale (read: expensive) establishments now make their own snobby versions of poutine, with elaborate sauces instead of gravy, fancier cheeses instead of the curds. But the spoiler formula of poutine is still there, even in the hands of a great chef: crisp covered with wet = soggy.

While on the topic of poutine, I must segue to a recent highly publicized poutine-eating contest, during which the winner, who has won many similar contests, ate something like 29 kilos of poutine in 10 minutes (my figures may be exaggerated, but the statement is true in principle).

Now, I ask you. I really ask you. These contests are so mind-blowingly disgusting that one doesn't know where to begin. Health? I can't even comment on what such rapid stuffing does to one's stomach. So shall I comment on the level of popular culture in the twenty-first century? Oh, you don't want to hear me on that. Decorum? Manners? And then we inevitably come back to health.

Imagine training for those fast-eating contests. You learn to nullify the gag reflex so that your throat is simply a long tube to the stomach that will accept anything you pack in. Shove it down. Shove it ALL down. You are teaching your throat to stay open as you cram limitless amounts of food into your face with both hands, bits of food stuffing up your nose, getting in your eyes, your ears.

Imagine practicing every day so that you can eat fifty hot dogs (hot dogs!) in five minutes. Or maybe I'm not up to date here. Maybe it's now done in thirty seconds.

I seem to remember "pie-eating contests" at state fairs of my youth. I never saw one, but the name sounds familiar. I always imagined them as relatively sedate affairs, where contestants sat at a table, fork in hand, and ate pieces of pie. I always pictured cherry or blueberry—some dark-red or purple fruit. The idea was to see how many pieces they could eat in a given time. Or how much time it took to eat a given number of pieces. But forks were used. Pie was tasted and chewed. There were smiles at the end, and only a little indigestion.

Perhaps that was just my fantasy. Certainly current pie-eating contests involve whole pies and two hands. Shovels might be appropriate utensils.

What could be better, then, than to eat poutine this way? All those once-crisp potatoes are soggy with gravy, and the curds are just the right size to be shoved down an open throat. There's nothing there you'd want to taste, anyway.

I'd like to end this on a more pleasant note, but I can't get rid of that image of packing in the poutine. Sorry.

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http://www.scenesfromthejourney.blogspot.com

Paying Attention, Again

2012-01-01T07:34:00.000-08:00

Traditionally, I deliver pre-Christmas baskets to about a dozen neighbors. In each basket are small items for the children, and a homemade coffeecake. My mother, Eileen, gave Christmas coffeecakes to friends and neighbors for decades. So did my sister Sari. One of Eileen's legacies was apparently the coffeecake gene.

I don't use Eileen's recipe (although I have it), but a similar one, rich with butter and eggs and cardamom. I shape mine into little fat braids (Eileen used to form them into large wreaths or Christmas tree shapes). In 2006, however, I considered cancelling the tradition because of the complications of extra visitors and my first-ever giant, Christmas-Day Birthday Party. But during the week before Christmas I decided I couldn't NOT make coffeecakes for the neighbours. So I added coffeecakes to my long to-do list.

I always start my coffeecakes with a sponge, which rises overnight. The sponge is made of yeast, flour, and water, and it bubbles up and becomes a fountain of yeast that is lively enough to raise the huge batch of dough.

Being a purist, I don't like to use dry yeast. I like the less-processed (or so I like to think) cake yeast, those little squares wrapped in silvery foil. Unfortunately, since few of us bake these days, cake yeast is almost impossible to find. I buy it in half-pound chunks from a baker, then I cut it into squares and freeze them all together in a heavy plastic bag. When I need yeast, I pry off a cube or two and proceed with the recipe. I've done it for years. It works a treat.

In the years leading up to Christmas 2006, however, we had been eating less bread than we had before, and we had found a source for a great but inexpensive ciabatta loaf, with a crusty crust and big fat holes. So not only were we eating less bread than we used to, but the bread we did eat was store-bought ciabatta. Therefore, I wasn't using much yeast, and I hadn't needed to buy more from the baker. So the frozen yeast I had on hand was three years old. Do you see where this is going?

The night before I was going to make the coffeecakes, I set my sponge. The yeast was fairly inert at the beginning, but I wasn't alarmed. Cake yeast (and especially frozen cake yeast) takes longer to begin fermenting. I started the sponge and went to bed.

The next morning, the sponge was not the bubbly and risen mass I was expecting. It was a little bit puffy, a little changed from the night before, but not its usual frothy self.

Now this is where it's useful to be paying attention. To be in the moment. I heard the little voice telling me that this would not end well. I knew on one level that I'd better re-think the project. But this knowing was overridden by a determination to do it—to go ahead and make the coffeecakes using this sponge. "It will all work out" is my mantra, and it usually serves me well, but sometimes that mantra needs to be informed by reality.

I made the coffeecakes. Two pounds of butter. A dozen eggs. A couple cups of sugar. A quarter-cup of cardamom. And enough flour to feed an army. I mixed it, kneaded it, and set it to rise.

Did it rise? Of course it did. Not as much as I'd have liked, but it did rise. Some.

So I shaped my braids. A dozen cute little rectangular braided coffeecakes on my three over-sized cookie sheets. I let them rise again.

Did they rise? Of course they did. Not as much as I'd have liked, but I knew the blast of heat from the oven would puff them up nicely. Wheat products respond well when you put them into a hot oven.

So I baked them. All day I'd been shouting down my misgivings or ignoring them completely as I immersed myself in the chaos of getting ready for Christmas. I had already prepared the neighbours' little baskets, complete with cards and notes. As soon as I added a coffee-cake to each basket, they'd be ready to deliver.

When I took the coffeecakes out of the oven, they were flat and heavy. Definitely not all right. Oh well, I thought, I'll just tell people to slice them and toast them. I'll just say they aren't as good as usual. I cooled and iced them, packaged them and delivered them, telling people to use them for toast.

And the next day, I cut a slice from the coffeecake I'd saved for us, to toast it for my own breakfast. Oh, disaster. Worse than I had thought. Not just dense and flat, but almost raw in the middle (unrisen dough doesn't bake right). I was undone. But it was too late.

Did people eat them? I was afraid to ask.

But here's what I did. On January 2, after all our visitors had gone home, I made a dozen coffeecakes using dry yeast. Newly purchased dry yeast. The coffeecakes were beautiful! I delivered them to neighbors with this note: "Attached is a delicious coffeecake to replace the dense, inedible loaf delivered earlier by some malevolent elf."

And I think I've got it now: I'm supposed to pay attention. To be there, wherever "there" is. Okay. NOW I've got it!

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Grandmother Stories from 2006

2011-12-25T05:02:00.001-08:00

Sam, just under two years of age, kicked his mother. He was wearing his cousin Burton's shoes at the time, shoes that Burton's mother had handed down to little Sam. I learned of this by phone. I said, "Hi, sweet Sam." And he said, "They're taking my shoes off!" And I asked why. And Sam said, "Because I kicked Mommy when I was wearing Burton's shoes." And I said, "Oh Sam, that isn't a very nice thing to do!" And Sam said, speaking in full sentences as he did from the very beginning of speech, said, "No, Nana. It isn't." The shoes were put away to wait for a wiser Sam.

We were approaching the departure date for our trip to Nova Scotia, where we would be watching Olivia, 6, and Burton, 9, for two weeks. Before we left I got a letter from Olivia, written and spelled by her, asking if, while I'm there, I would make her Halloween costume. So I phoned.

"What do you want to be for Halloween?"

"An M & M," says Livvy. Then later, "or a Jedi" (and what does a Jedi look like? Don't ask ME!). Then later "Princess Leia." And then Burton chimes in with "Or you could be a swizzle (or some such name)" and he described a tiny pink ball-like creature that's part of one of his computer games.

It was going to be an interesting sewing session.

During that same phone conversation I also talked with Burton.

"Nana," he says, "will you teach me to make pinwheels [that's the pastry kind, not the ones that blow in the wind] while you're here? That way I can have some whenever I want."

"Sure," I say.

"Actually, I think it's not really too hard to make them," says Burton, full of untried confidence.

"But the good thing," says the Nana, "is that you'll learn to make pie crust at the same time. So you can make a pie whenever you like."

"Actually," says Burton, "I don't much like pie. I just like pinwheels." So pinwheels it was, not a pie in sight. And at Halloween Livvy was a royal blue M&M, with a costume made from a hula hoop.

Later was another exchange. Burton says, "Nana, I just love the "Yuck" book you made for us. But I think you need to make a "Yum" book, too. I've already started listing things we like. But it's hard to find foods that start with "q".

For the "Yuck" book I used quinoa and quark. Burton says he thinks he likes quinoa now, so maybe we could re-use it with an opposite connotation. I suggest using "quiche." He says he's never heard of a quiche.

I need to talk to his mother about this failure to introduce him to one of the major food groups—the ubiquitous quiche.

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Excellently Improvised Soups

2011-12-18T05:07:00.001-08:00

In my mind it's so ordinary to improvise soup (whether or not "excellently") that the doing of it scarcely merits mention.

Winter squash? Cook with onions, garlic, and apple in stock or water. Throw in a potato if you have one. Season with salt and pepper and thyme. Puree. For greater elegance, run the puree through your food mill. Add cream, or milk and butter, or just plain milk.

Vegetable soup? Look in the vegetable crispers for what's on hand. (Omit crucifers unless you want their strong taste.) If you plan to puree this soup, cut veggies into same-sized chunks. For a textured, unpureed soup, cut them carefully into matching dice. Carrots, onions, celery, sweet potato, rutabaga, parsnips, winter greens. Tomatoes (canned or dried). Herb the soup the way you like.

I've never met a soup that wasn't improved by homemade croutons: cube leftover bread and toss with olive oil.

Fry up or bake (if the oven is already on). Sprinkle on soup as you eat it, a few at a time, so they don't get soggy.

The best way to eat soup? Puree it and serve it in a mug, for sipping. Goodness knows my mother taught me the proper way to approach a soup bowl (move the soup spoon away from you as you scoop the soup, sip the soup from the side of the spoon). I can don the mantle of civilization if forced to, sitting at a table and eating my soup with a spoon. But I'd rather lounge on a sofa, feet up, with a mug of hot, pureed soup in one hand and a book in the other, to indulge in my two favourite pastimes at the same time: eating and reading. Which is actually just one favourite pastime: eating-and-reading.

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Calas

2011-12-11T07:12:00.001-08:00

When I lived in Alabama during my first marriage, my parents came to visit us only once. I was perhaps 30 years old, still yearning to be seen by my parents (by my mother) as . . . as what? A daughter to be proud of? A worthy colleague? An equal? I was never sure what it was that I wanted, but I knew unequivocally that I had never gotten it from her.

They drove down from Indiana to stay with us for a long weekend—my husband and I, three children under five, and my parents, all folded into our tiny house for three days. I no longer remember what we ate, but I do remember my determination to make calas for my mother, Eileen.

It's not that there was a family tradition of calas. We have no ties to Louisiana. But I do love doughnuts, and I had always loved my mother's homemade doughnuts (I thought for years that she had invented doughnut holes all by herself). And the idea of making those yeast-raised rice fritters for our breakfast was irresistible.

In the evening, after dinner, I cooked the rice for the calas. Eileen was as excited as I was about having calas for breakfast. I let the rice cool.

Have you ever tried to cool cooked rice? Rice could be used as a heat source in the winter. You think it's cool enough (the coolness is an inch deep), but when you turn over a spoonful you find the center is still steaming. So you wait a bit longer and turn it over again. Cooling rice takes a long time.

I tend to be impatient. I decided it was time to add the softened yeast to the cooled rice and let the mixture rise overnight. So I did it.

And Eileen, having bitten her tongue for as long as she could bear, couldn't resist saying, "I think the rice might still be too hot."

I ignored her advice. It was my home. My kitchen. I was a grown-up. And so I did what she had accused me of doing all my life: I cut off my nose to spite my face.

I went ahead and added the yeast slurry to the rice, along with the other ingredients. And the minute I did it, I knew Eileen was right. (I actually knew it even before I mixed them together, but how could I give in?)

I spent the night waking periodically to send good thoughts to the yeast: please don't be dead! Please show that you were able to overcome the excessive heat of the rice. Please be growing and expanding in the morning.

Alas, my prayers were in vain (rather self-centered prayers that they were: please let me win!!). When I uncovered the bowl in the morning, the rice was inert, the same volume it had been the night before. The yeast had died. The calas were ruined. Eileen had known. And I had failed.

I don't remember what I did. Did I try to deep-fry the rice fritters without leavening, ending up with deep-fried rice-flavoured hockey pucks? Today, I might try to salvage them by leavening them with baking powder, but I didn't think to do that. Maybe I made sourdough pancakes with maple syrup, instead.

But the lesson I took from that failure was that—no, that's a lie. I took no lesson from it, other than the knowledge that I had once again had to swallow my humiliation.

Looking back, however, I see the pattern. I see how desperately I wanted to make my mother proud of me, to accept me. It may have looked, to the world outside, as if I was trying to impress her. But it was simpler than that, and more subtle: I just wanted to get her attention. I was just saying, "Here I AM! LOOK at me!"

I recently sent a piece to the family website commenting on the fact that I never felt that my mother loved me. My dear youngest brother, usually laconic to a fault, wrote back that Eileen loved us all. She just, for reasons related to her own childhood, had no idea how to express it.

One of my teachers used to say, "It is the duty of the parent to inflict the sacred wound." And I'll be durned if we don't all manage to perform that duty, one way or another.

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http://www.scenesfromthejourney.blogspot.com

Some Doughnut Thoughts

2011-12-04T05:28:00.001-08:00

If someone asked me to write about cutting a doughnut into pieces, I would have to ask: who would cut a doughnut into pieces? Why would you take that perfect shape—round, with a hole in the middle to ensure that the doughnut fries all the way through—and slice it? It's like slicing a banana. And the only time you should do THAT is to put a piece or two on the tray of the baby's highchair so you can watch the tiny fingers work at picking it up. (The only other time you'd slice a banana is if you live in France and are trying not to look like an uncivilized and wild New World bumpkin. In France, you eat your banana with a knife and fork, the way God intended.)

Where was I? Someone was talking about cutting a doughnut into pieces. I suppose you would do it if you had four people at your tea party and only one doughnut. You could slice it into 12 pieces, each slightly slanted, since you can't slice a round thing into square pieces. Even better, make it 13 pieces, so each person could have three and there would still remain a piece about which to say, "You take that last piece." "No, I couldn't possibly. You take it." And so on, a conversation that could last forever or until someone finally gives in and eats the durned thing.

Of course, since I have recently found that I actually have a wheat allergy, all this talk of doughnuts is academic. I have a choice, says my body. I can avoid wheat and look normal, or I can eat wheat and endure a painful, itchy, bright-red rash on the front of my neck. So far, I prefer to avoid wheat.

There are, as I'm sure everyone knows, seven zillion wheat-free (and gluten-free) recipes, most of them for sweet treats. One cookbook is called BabyCakes after the author's gluten-free bakery in New York City and Los Angeles. The lovely young author is very proud of her doughnuts. Like most wheat-free recipes, this one calls for a combination of oddball flours (in this case, brown rice flour, garbanzo and fava bean flour, potato starch, arrowroot, and the always essential xanthum gum). I haven't yet made myself a batch of wheat-free doughnuts, but I see a baker's dozen in my future, because who can live without doughnuts?

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Pumpkin Pie Time

2011-11-27T05:02:00.001-08:00

I woke to the sound of rustling leaves. The squirrels were running their daily marathon in and around my eaves troughs. I checked the clock: 6:30 a.m. Too early to get up, even though it would be a crisp October day, my favourite. I was rolling over to catch an extra half hour of zzzs when I remembered: two pumpkin pies were waiting in the refrigerator with my name on them.

I sprang from my bed and as I performed the morning ablutions, yesterday's kitchen orgy ran through my head: the mixing bowl, the freshly pureed pumpkin, the cloves and cinnamon and nutmeg. The pie shells, partially baked in advance so that the liquid of the filling wouldn't make the crust soggy.

All of that I had tackled in a Dionysian frenzy (it was an orgy, after all) until the two pies were in the oven and I was cheerily humming "Over the River and through the Woods." But I wasn't going to grandmother's house this year. I had made the two pies not for the family gathering but for me alone! Me!

And now, dressed in my fall best (jeans, turtleneck, and wool sweater) I raced to the refrigerator and opened it to spy my golden-orange pies, as colorful as the leaves on the maple tree in my front yard. I took one from the fridge and warmed it in a 300 degree oven as I made my coffee and took my vitamins (thus guaranteeing myself a long life). Then it was time. The pie was warm. I cut it into eighths, pretending that I would be eating only one or two pieces.

Five hours later I was bursting and the pie-plate was empty. Luckily, a second pumpkin pie still sat untouched in the refrigerator, in case anyone else was hungry.

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Beets

2011-11-20T07:01:00.001-08:00

I'm a fan of beets. My husband is not. It is a measure of my upbringing in the '50s that for ten years of the marriage I thought that meant I couldn't eat beets except occasionally at a restaurant.

It took my husband himself to say one day, "Just because I don't like beets (or sweet potatoes either, for that matter) doesn't mean you can't have them. I just won't eat any."

Ever since then I've bought beets when I wanted to, especially at the summer farmer's market, where I can buy teeny-tiny beets, then small beets a week or two later, then medium-sized beets, and finally, at the end of the summer, large beets—all with the leaves attached, of course. (My husband won't eat beet greens either, though he likes kale and collards).

When I arrived home at dinner time recently, our box of vegetables from Frontdoor Organics was waiting on my doorstep, with collards and beets to last us for two weeks. Before I left home that morning, I had put together a shepherd's pie. Taking advantage of the oven's being on to bake the shepherd's pie, I decided to roast the beets instead of boiling them. I cut off the beet tails, washed them, wrapped them in foil, and popped them into the oven.

While the oven did its work, I washed the grit from the beet greens and cooked them up to go with the shepherd's pie. I washed and de-ribbed and ribboned the collards and steamed them into docility for the freezer.

We ate shepherd's pie with gusto and (for me) beet greens.

Later, when the beets were done, I opened the foil package and let them cool while I finished a novel. Then I aproned myself and began to peel the beets at the sink.

I've peeled beets for years, you know. I love the way you push aside the remaining little crown of stems and then with your bare hands shove the skin down from the top to the tail. The skin slips off and your hands turn fresh-blood red so that you rinse them frequently to reassure yourself that you haven't inadvertently nicked a finger.

But this beet-peeling was different. I pushed off the crown of stems and began to peel. The skin was like velvet or fine suede, or maybe a much-washed linen: soft, pliable, with a velvety fuzziness about it. I was stunned. I stopped my usual "let's get this job over with" motions and felt the skin as I pulled it off the beet. Each peeling strip was a sensual experience. When I finished the first beet I picked up the next and nudged its crown off. Very slowly I pushed the first piece of peel toward the tail, feeling both sides of the skin and the smoothness of the peeled roasted beet. My hands, red with the mock-blood, slowly removed the peel. I resented the fact that I had bought only three beets (large ones, more than enough for me to eat) because now there was only one left to peel.

All good things come to an end. I collected the handful of velvety peelings and dropped them into the compost bucket. I sliced the three slippery beets, sprinkled them with walnut oil and balsamic vinegar, and put them in the refrigerator to accompany the next day's lunch.

Were these a new variety of velvet-skinned beet, or have I finally learned to give beets their full due?

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Booty!

2011-11-13T07:50:00.001-08:00

Booty. Pirates are making me walk the plank because I was after their booty.

"Go get your own booty!" they tell me. "You can't have ours. We stole this fair and square, using the sweat of our brow, using every muscle of our brains. This is hard-won, this booty is, and you can't have it."

This is the essence of pirating: every man for himself. No sharing of booty.

Having instructed me on the rules of piracy, they prick me with the points of their swords and force me off the end of the plank into the briny deep. Arms tied behind me, of course. Shark-infested waters, of course.

And as soon as I am in the water, the pirates hoist sail and take off, the ship skimming over the waves toward their next load of booty, Jolly Roger streaming from its flagpole at the bow.

And me? What happens to me? Well, you know the old stories: swallowed by a whale, perhaps. And then later a fleet of dolphins surrounds me and floats me to one of those New-Yorker-cartoon desert islands, a circle of land that is 25 feet in diameter and has one coconut palm for shelter.

I climb the palm tree. Spy a ship in the distance. Hail it by taking off and waving my white shirt. I'm saved!

I write a book about my adventures with the pirates and the deep blue sea. It's optioned by a famous movie director and I become richer than any of those original pirates.

And aren't THEY sorry when they see the movie of my adventures!!

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Unicorn Dream

2011-11-06T04:02:00.001-08:00

I ride the unicorn. Riding high. Don't know how I got there.

Was it a dream? (Who knows what a dream is? Is it what happens when you're wide awake? Or is it what happens when you are asleep?) Well, dream or not, it's as clear in my memory as the eggs I had for breakfast today.

People are gathered all along the path: a wide swath of a natural path through the never-cut growth of deep forest. The path is wide enough for me, my steed, and people flanking the path, a crowd at least four or five deep on each side.

What a sound they make. I've never been cheered before, at least not in this life, or not that I remember outside of a dream. I feel like a combination of Joan of Arc and Lady Godiva. Oh, yes. Did I forget to tell you that part? I am naked as a jaybird, in my altogether, and I have to admit that my hair isn't nearly long enough to cover my shame, as they say.

So it is hard for me to discern exactly why that multitude is cheering. Is it because I've done something to deserve applause, or is it simply because I am showing them my ta-tas?

Or maybe I am incidental and they are cheering my unicorn! She is a beautiful mare (okay, they're usually male, but this is my dream and she is a she. And this is one case where the female gets the long, stiff, pointy decoration). She is pure white, with a mother-of-pearl sheen to that beautiful central horn. The horn is like a third eye that just keeps extending and extending, allowing her to pull in more and more information from the world around her.

Sometimes a unicorn is depicted rearing up, standing on hind legs only, tail aloft and flowing. But as I ride her in my dream she is more decorous, now walking, now showing off a little dance step for the crowd.

I don't really have a memory of how we have come together in the dream. Well, that isn't quite true. I was walking through a meadow. Off in the far corner of the meadow was a little fenced-in part. And there she was, lying peacefully in the middle of that fenced area. I entered through a gate, she recognized me, and the next thing I know, we are parading through the forest being cheered by a crowd.

I won't try to decipher this dream. I'll just remember the joy of being carried through the forest on the back of a beautiful unicorn.

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Take More Than You Need

2011-10-30T08:07:00.001-07:00

She opens her hands and says, "Take more than you need. Pass them along. Spread these plants around."

And passers-by on the neighborhood sidewalk stop to contemplate the periwinkle and sweet woodruff and garlic chives loosely pressed into the soil in a cardboard box. They hesitate at first, not wanting to seem greedy, but the gardener insists. Her straw hat shades her eyes, so it's hard to see exactly what her motivation is. Maybe she's motive-less. She wants to get rid of all those weedings, but she can't bear to throw them on the compost heap.

The periwinkle, left on its own, will devour the entire garden, sending out stems that then sink tough, grasping roots wherever they land. Other plant varieties fear the periwinkle. Starting as a single little plant in a bare spot, it spreads down the slope, eating up the space once occupied by the perennial yellow alyssum—which has totally disappeared.

Oh, don't get the gardener started on the rapacious periwinkle! Even its flowers take part in the assault. The periwinkle comes into bloom just as the gardener has steeled herself to the job of ripping it out and reducing it back to its originally planned size. But who can be so heartless as to dig up a flowering plant? Who can consign those pretty blue flowers (she remembers her periwinkle blue cashmere sweater in grade 11) to the compost heap? So because of the flowers she procrastinates, and by the time the flowers have died away the periwinkle's new season is well entrenched, those grasping roots digging into new territory claiming, "Mine, mine, all mine!"

The garlic chives have a totally different strategy. She bought one clump of garlic chives years ago and was pleased to see the pretty white blossoms at the tips of the strong flower-stalks. Each blossom was made up of numerous flowers—somewhat like the botany of the dandelion—and when it was time, the blossom exploded, sending seeds to every part of her garden. She didn't know this, of course, that first year. No one had told her what to expect. But the following spring she found garlic chives everyplace. Still, that year she welcomed the blossoms again: "Oh, how pretty! Any flower is welcome in my garden." But that was the last year for THAT sort of indulgence.

War was declared. This gardener, so loath to do her weeding that she allows the vinca to battle with the other ground covers until a winner declares itself—this gardener set out to control her garlic chives. First, she uprooted most of the garlic chive plants (or so she thought) and ate the pungent stems. Then she attacked the blossoms of the remaining clumps. Whenever a flower stalk appeared, its bulbous tip hinting at its pregnancy, she pulled off the soon-to-flower tip and threw it away. Dozens of times a day, passing this part or that of her little rock garden, she snatched at those flower stalks, removing a dozen a day.

But, like the periwinkle, the garlic chives are still not under control, so every year she offers the superfluous plants to her neighbours: "Take more than you need. Please! I implore you to take more than you need."

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The Crowded Elevator

2011-10-23T05:33:00.001-07:00

When my brother lived in New York City years ago, he was desperate to fit in. He wanted to be taken for a New Yorker, not someone from out of town, so all his actions were designed to camouflage his Indiana roots. (Little did he realize that his apparently ineradicable Hoosier accent undermined his every effort. But that's a different story.)

Because my brother's office was in a skyscraper, his workday began and ended with a long elevator ride. It hadn't taken him long to learn the etiquette of the big city elevator: avoid eye contact and maintain silence. At that time (and I doubt that it has changed), a New York elevator experience was a silent one. The strangers in suits and ties faced the front of the box, unspeaking and unmoving.

Enter our irrepressible sister Sari, who had emerged from the womb babbling to the world around her. Sari's idea of a good time was to learn the life story of an airplane seatmate. An outing with Sari took twice as long as you wanted it to because she insisted on long conversations with every clerk, receptionist, and functionary. Sari could talk for 15 minutes on the phone to a wrong number.

During our brother's New York City days, many years ago, Sari flew from Denver to visit him. He was proud to show off to his little sister how well he could navigate the streets and subways of New York and to impress her with his version of a true City Guy. One day he even asked her to accompany him to his office so she could see how respected he was and how well he fit into the world of New York journalists.

It was his own fault. Any embarrassment he experienced was due to his having forgotten just who Sari was.

Together they passed through the lobby of his building and joined the throng of office workers and accountants and lawyers and journalists waiting for one of the elevators to land at their feet. Already Sari was glancing around, eyeing the crowd, beginning to form questions, to wonder who did what, where they were from originally, how long they'd been in the City.

Her brother could see that she was itching to begin eliciting life stories, and he began to sweat.

When the elevator came, they shuffled into the box along with a crowd of men in suits and turned to face the front. Silence was broken only by the humming of the elevator motor.

And Sari couldn't bear it. She probably knew that she shouldn't actually start talking to any (or, God forbid, ALL) of these strangers. But she was unable to stand in a crowd with her wonderful brother and NOT TALK. So she began to talk to HIM. She was going to start a conversation with her brother, in a New York City elevator, and the conversation would reveal to the crowd all the things that he routinely hid from his fellow city dwellers.

"So," she said (and even that one spoken word sent an electric shock through the rigid auras of the men in suits), "so, have you heard any news from Delphi lately?"

Without moving his lips, he muttered, "No." Perhaps Sari would take the hint that he didn't want to continue this conversation. He wanted to send her a dirty look to discourage her, but if he moved his head to look at her (or if he stomped on her foot, which is what he really wanted to do) it would be clear to all that he was the one this chatty woman was addressing.

"Well, I had a letter from the folks and Mother said Indiana's having a real heat wave right now."

Surely she was doing this on purpose. Now everyone knew that she was related to him and that he was not a real New Yorker but a Hoosier. He ignored her questions and exhaled with relief when the elevator reached his floor.

I've always thought that it was a miracle that he didn't murder Sari on that trip. He eventually forgave her (though I don't think he forgot his embarrassment). But Sari remained irrepressible for the rest of her life. She always made connections, she was never embarrassed, and she was determined to give everyone the opportunity to come into the center of her circle.

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The Little Maple Desk and Chair

2011-10-16T05:36:00.001-07:00

The slanted top of my little maple desk opens out to make a shelf on which I could, but don't, write.

I don't know where it came from originally. But when I went off to college I needed a desk, and my mother said, "You can take the little maple desk and the little maple chair." So I did.

After college, the desk and the chair both ended up back at my parents' house, but when my first husband and I settled in Alabama, we had room for the desk. The next time we were in Indiana, having driven up there with two babies in our little black Volkswagen bug, we tied the desk to the top of the car and took it south.

Foreseeing the possibility of rain, we wrapped the desk in plastic before we tied it to the car, but the wind made short work of that attempt at preservation. And then the rain started. For ten hours the little desk was bruised by wind and drowned by rain.

When we finally got home, a third of the maple veneer was warped and damaged. That was in 1964.

Today the desk, veneer still missing or loose, sits in a corner of my kitchen. Hidden behind its slanted lid are bankbooks, stamps, a stapler, two pairs of scissors, a receipt book, a ruler, and enough other little items to ensure that something gets jammed beneath the hinges whenever I open the lid. At one point in the last 25 years I honored it by buying pretty new hardware for its three drawers.

But the veneer! I should check the yellow pages, ask around, do some research, and find someone to fix it. Instead, I keep waiting for the moment when, at a party, I will unexpectedly meet the person who will say, "Oh yes. I do furniture. And I specialize in repairing the veneer on little maple desks." I'll hire him in a New York minute.

The little maple chair lives in my multi-purpose room upstairs. When we need extra seating for guests, it is the second chair in line to be pressed into dinner-party service.

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Fortune

2011-10-09T06:38:00.001-07:00

--I'll tell your fortune, cookie, if you like.

--Oh do, oh do!

--Okay, here goes. You will take a trip. Does that resonate with you?

--Oh yes, oh yes. I AM going on a trip.

--Good. I'm on a roll. You will meet a man. A man who is tall and dark.

--Oh yay, oh yay. I need to meet a tall, dark man! Tell me more.

--This man has two wooden legs.

--He what?!

--He has two LONG wooden legs. Oh wait, I see it more clearly now. He's on stilts. That's why I thought he was so tall.

--So what does he really look like? Not that looks are at all important.

--Here. Let me sense the spirit a little more deeply. Oh yes. I see. It's just a kid on stilts wearing a dark Batman mask. Sorry.

--Story of my life. And I'm NOT going to pay you!

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Spitballs

2011-10-02T14:44:00.001-07:00

The "little room" of my two-room elementary school was home to the first four grades, its pupils ranging from six to ten years old—quite a handful of an age span. Sister Mary Cecilia was equal to the challenge. She could listen to the times tables, explain the theology of that man on the cross, and clean up the pee from a timid first grader afraid to ask permission to visit the outdoor toilet. She could do all of this with one hand behind her back or—more accurately—one hand fingering the huge black rosary that hung from her waist.

But she couldn't deal with little Jack Anderson's spitballs. How do boys learn to make spitballs? Does Popular Mechanics run a yearly spitball article? Or is the skill passed from older to younger brother ("You want to tee off the teacher? Here's how. You take a bit of paper, chew it up . . .").

I don't know how Jack Anderson learned to make and send a spitball, but he was durned good at it. You'd be sitting at your little desk, one of six in a row nailed to a pair of parallel 1x4s, minding your own business. You might be intent on deciphering the answer to 2 plus 3. Minding your own business, as I said, or thinking about who you would play with at recess. Or looking at Mary Crosby's long black braids in front of you and longing to tug on them. Minding your own business.

And suddenly your little bare neck would be stung. You'd slap the spot, jumping from the shock. And there, on your neck, would be a tiny, sloppy-wet little ball of chewed-up paper.

Jack Anderson strikes again.

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The Contest

2011-09-25T05:01:00.001-07:00

"Jeepers creepers!' she began, "it's raining cats and dogs outside, a real gully-washer! I thought I was a goner a couple of times when my wellies slipped in that mud. Mud! You wouldn't believe the mud. Why it's as muddy as…as…as"

Ella's words trailed off. She had run out of trite metaphors and clichéd similes. She looked at James, who held the stopwatch.

"Sorry, Ella," he said. "You only lasted seven seconds. You're obviously not going to be a winner tonight. But, as you know, heavy the head that wears the crown! Being champion might have been just one more onerous burden for you. Let's move right along. Harold, you're next in line. How about you give a kick at the can?"

Harold cleared his throat and began: "Fourscore and seven years ago… Just kidding, folks. Just tickling your ribs, trying to get a rise out of you. Now here's the real McCoy, the real deal. I'm stepping out here, letting loose with all the bells and whistles and, as they say, I've got rings on my fingers and bells on my toes tonight. I could bend your ears till the cows come home, so don't get your hopes up that I'll let the golden ring slip through my fingers. Old Silver Tongue will be happy as a clam, as smug as a bug in a rug, chattering on for your pleasure. This sort of thing is like mother's milk to me, a piece of cake, as easy as pie. Why, I was born and raised on clichéd phrases and trite expressions. My talent is just a gift. A downright gift. And I'm not one to look a gift horse in the mouth. Now you just stop me, James, if I go on too long, but I think I can safely say that I'm the best of a bad bunch here tonight. I believe I've captured the gold ring and James has the stopwatch to prove it! How'd I do?"

Indeed, Harold's performance was hard to beat. He was crowned winner of the Citywide Cliché Contest, and he reigned in peace for the entire year.

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Apostrophe to a Cello

2011-09-18T14:01:00.001-07:00

Oh cello, whence comes (notice that old-timey construction) your human voice?

I've read that the violin most closely resembles the human voice. Well, that might be true if the voice in question is that of Isabel Barakdarian or Joan Sutherland. But for most of us, the violin's range is much higher than the range of our voices. To me, the violin can be screeching or ethereal, depending on who's playing it. But it seldom sounds to me like a human voice.

But you, you plump wooden darling, you are tuned to my voice and my heart. Your bottom string resonates like thunder at two octaves below middle C. Your top notes—for those who have practiced long enough to be able to make them beautiful—rival the violin in their vocal inaccessibility.

But your middle range! All those tenor timbres that sing from the heart! Those cello tones that groan with sorrow or uplift the heart with their full joy. You are the instrument for humans, you curvaceous beauty.

The bow engages your strings, moving back and forth so smoothly that it sounds like a singer practiced in circular breathing—a sung sound that never ends.

I can apostrophize further in this vein, but I don't want to turn your pretty head. So let's move on to the nitty-gritty. The rest of this monologue is a plea. Since I began studying your ways, I've never asked you for much. But now I'm asking you to respond to my hours of work and let me sound like a cellist. I want to make beautiful sounds not just occasionally but throughout a whole piece. If I give you my loving attention each time I play, surely you can respond to my intention, which is to create beauty.

If I work at becoming less rigid, can you not do the same? As I play the Bach that I've worked on for so many weeks, I ask for your indulgence. I will pay attention to intonation, to bowing technique, to the underlying musicality of the piece, to accuracy as the fingers of my left hand shift from one position to the next, from one string to the next. I will devote my attention to all of these things (not to mention the additional element of memorizing those notes!). And in return, what will you grant me? Can I ask you to sing? Can I plead with you to respond to my attempts to create beauty? Can I at least ask for your cooperation?

If I can get you to accommodate me to this extent, can I then move on and ask you to overlook my occasional gaffe? Will you be forgiving of those times when I use a smidgen too much pressure on the bow—or too little—or when I anticipate the string crossing by a hairsbreadth, a nano-second, or when the little finger of my left hand (called the fifth finger in real life but the fourth in cello language)—when that finger isn't quite strong enough to press the string firmly—in all of these cases I ask your indulgence. I ask for a little mercy. I ask you to give me, if only occasionally, the benefit of the doubt, an A for effort. In short, I ask you to be kind.

And in return I'll practice, I'll dust your dark wooden surface, I'll keep you away from roughhousing grandchildren.

Together perhaps, one day, we'll make beautiful music.

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A Shared Meal

2011-09-10T11:40:00.001-07:00

I'll have a bit more of that polenta, if you don't mind, Mr. Payne.

No problem, Ms. Joy. It's quite delicious. The menu described it as "Apache Polenta," quite a mingling of cultures. You'll notice, as you take a bite, that the polenta holds both grilled onion and grilled poblanos, giving it a southwestern flavor. And, of course, polenta itself is Italian.

You do go on, Mr. Payne. Sometimes for longer than one wants to listen.

Just a bit more, my dear, for I wanted to point out that the corn used for polenta is actually itself a New World product, thus this form of polenta is not really traditionally Italian. The original Italian polenta was made from chestnut flour or buckwheat flour. There. Now I've finished my lecture. You help yourself to a bite of this interesting dish, which seems to be cross-cultural but is actually, as I have shown, mono-cultural—that is, completely New World.

Ms. Joy takes a bite of the Apache Polenta from Mr. Payne's plate.

Um-m-m. Oh yes, it's quite good. I do like the poblano flavor here. But, Mr. Payne, must you always always elucidate? Do you feel you need to enlighten me with every single bite?

When you eat from my plate, Ms. Joy, you partake of more than just my food. By asking to dine with me, to eat what I eat, you are in effect asking that I share with you a part of myself. So that's what I've been doing.

And I thank you for it, truly I do. It's just that sometimes (not always, of course) I find your explanations and enlightenings just a tiny bit long-winded. Appropriate for the classroom, perhaps, but hardly what I want to listen to as I eat.

And may I ask, Ms. Joy, what it is that you would like to listen to as you eat? Or, more apropos, what is it that you like to eat? What is that mixture on your plate, for example?

Ah. You've forgotten what I ordered, have you? I don't know whether it would be to your taste. But it suits me so well. It's a mixture of tropical fruits, and I ordered it because it felt just right for this hot day. Would you like to try a bite from my plate?

Thank you, my dear. I don't mind if I do. M'm-m. Interesting. I never have much liked that silly star-fruit, myself. It makes up in appearance what it lacks in flavor, so I find it makes a better objet d'art than a food item. But here's a piece of mango. Oh yes indeed, that suits you. Ms. Joy. Mango is indeed a joyous taste. Of course, you know that in this country we get to sample only two or three varieties of mango, while actually dozens and dozens of varieties are grown around the world. So, while this particular mango is quite good, one can't help but wonder whether another type of mango might actually be better suited to this tropical salad of yours.

You know, Mr. Payne, I'm beginning to see just how well your name suits you. You do tend to be—well, yes, a pain. May I suggest that we enjoy our meal and not analyze it to death? Do you parse all of life in such detail?

Indeed I do, Ms. Joy. Parsing life gives me great pleasure, if Mr. Payne can be said to enjoy pleasure. The more I can divide life up into tiny little compartments, minuscule shades of meaning, then the more likely it is that I will find the almost-hidden, nearly-forgotten shards of pain. It is important to reveal their pain to people so they can wallow in it. Without me, they might be able to overlook it.

And that's a most disgusting sentiment, Mr. Payne. As "Joy" incarnate, I feel it is my duty to expand experience for people. The more sensation they can bring to an experience, the more likely it is that they will be able to transcend or to forget their pain. I find this a loftier goal than yours.

Each to his own taste, Ms. Joy. You do your thing and I'll do mine. Whose approach will be more popular? I'm quite sure mine will be. No one is actually looking for "Joy," no matter what they say. People want to feel their pain, dwell on it, hold it, bring it out and fondle it. Your happy-happy attitude is counter to what I have seen of human desire.

People change, Mr. Payne. Whole societies change. People need joy. And, whether or not you admit it, Joy can obliterate pain. In fact, I'm sorely tempted to do that right now. But no, instead of obliterating you, I'll just have another bite, from your plate, of your Apache Polenta.

No hard feelings, m'dear, I hope. Help yourself. And if you don't mind, I'll try a bit more of your slightly disappointing though still interesting tropical fruit salad.

Having realized that they will never come to agreement, Mr. Payne and Ms. Joy continue to eat from each other's plate.

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Prudence or Fear?

2011-09-04T04:54:00.001-07:00

I'm a wimp. I don't make waves. On the subway recently I sat at a right angle to (and several seats away from) a large young man. He slouched over two seats, but the car was not crowded, so I didn't begrudge him that extra space. He wore a ball cap pulled over his eyes. And his face was set in a scowl.

I noticed him only when I realized that I was hearing really ugly rap music. Two girls and a boy were beyond him in the car, and I hoped that the music was coming from them. (They looked a bit more approachable.) But as I kept glancing up from my reading I had to admit that the music was coming not from the two girls and their friend but from the glowering young man nearer to me. The music was not only truly dreadful, but it was not bleeding from his i-Pod. He had a radio or some device (I never did see it) playing at top volume into the subway car. This was not accidental. You might even say it was provocative.

Here's what I wanted to do. I wanted to say to him, in a non-censorious tone, that I did him the favour of not blasting my favourite opera into the public space of a subway car, and I wished he would pay me the same courtesy.

Here's what I did: nothing. I was afraid.

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How to Feed a Grandchild

2011-08-31T06:20:00.001-07:00

The phone rang. It was my Nova Scotia daughter saying, "Do you have time to listen to Livvy play "Oh Susanna"? Well, of course I do. Burton (11) and Livvy (8) started studying piano last October and have been chewing up the scenery ever since. So Livvy played (perfectly, I must say), "Oh Susannah," and then "B-I-N-G-O" and then two other pieces. I was so proud of her. As I was finding ever more complimentary words for her playing, she interrupted me: "Nana," she said, "when we come to Toronto this summer can we go to the Mandarin again?"

"Of course," said the Nana.

"Oh good," says Livvy, and it's fairly clear that the Mandarin is at least as large a draw for the Toronto trip as are Nana and Papadino. For those who have not had the pleasure of the Mandarin experience, it is a Chinese restaurant chain in Toronto and other southern Ontario cities. It offers a huge buffet that includes, for the benefit of timid eaters, a station with roast beef, hamburgers, hot dogs, mashed potatoes, and other items not usually recognized as typical Chinese dishes.

One summer we took Burton and Livvy, visiting from Nova Scotia, twice to the Mandarin. Livvy is a picky eater. On our first visit she stood with me just aside from the main buffet line, gave a glance down the length of their endless steam table, and wailed, "There's nothing here that I like!"

I was patient (I was a good Nana that day) and said there were no rules except that she had to choose at least SOME non-sweet food before she could have dessert. And whatever she chose she had to eat (Nana and Papadino don't believe in wasting food). I left her to her own selections and she returned to our table with a plate of white rice, mashed potatoes, French fries, and a roll.

Then she had seconds on all those "foods." Her brother, Burton, took on the role of taster for her and came up with a couple of items he thought she might like to try, just for variety. A sprig of broccoli. One baby carrot.

Finally it was dessert time. The Mandarin sets out half a dozen ice cream flavours, and patrons serve themselves as much as they want. Livvy was in heaven. She ate three large bowls of ice cream, one after another. No wonder the Mandarin is her favourite Toronto hangout!

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Oh, those fifties!

2011-08-21T07:29:00.001-07:00

I saw a photograph of my past recently. It was a picture from the National Geographic, not a shot from my family albums. And wherever they took that picture, I'm glad I'm not there. But seeing it tumbled me back to the past: the early-50s cars, the drugstore's trumpeting sign of "Borden's Ice Cream" and a fountain with not just Coca-Cola but fountain Cokes, the ones made with Coke syrup (also good for nausea and vomiting, you remember) and seltzer that bubbles out of the faucet into the little curved glass with ice and the syrup. You can have a cherry coke or a lemon coke or a vanilla coke if you want, for no extra charge. And one scoop of Borden's vanilla to go with it, in a metal inverted-cone dish, like a wide, short-stemmed martini glass, the dish lined with a heavy white paper cone. For a dime you get the ice cream and the Coke and the opportunity to sit in the back of the drugstore where the tables are and the teenagers are and you can pretend you're part of the group because for a few minutes, for half an hour, you are.

You get your dime by stopping by the family business on the way to the drugstore. You open the unattended register, take out a dime, and write your name and the amount ("Ann--$0.10") on the paper roll that advances when the till is opened. Nowadays, dimes are harder to get.

They've remodeled the old Opera House in my home town, I'm told. It's the third floor of the row of street-front stores on the east side of the courthouse square. When I was young it was not an opera house. It was, if anything, a storage space for the street-level stores beneath it. Whose idea was it (and better yet, whose money was it?) that turned it back into an opera house? And now tell me just who will be using it? The days of divas traveling to outlying areas are long gone. Will this become a tourist go-to place? A Vacation Destination? A historical wonder not to be missed? Well, stranger things have happened.

www.anntudor.ca
http://www.scenesfromthejourney.blogspot.com

More Thrill-a-Minute Adventures

2011-08-14T04:49:00.001-07:00

The story so far: Otello and I peeled vegetables. I walked. I fell on the ice and damaged my sternum. I went to my Continuum class. I walked from there to the subway. This brings us up to ten-thirty on Monday morning.

The next excitement for that day was my toning group. Eight of us meet once a month to tone and chant and work with the voice in any way we can. After warming up and toning OHM (the room resonated with thrilling overtones), we move to a new exercise. Our leader asks us to think of a song—any song at all—and imagine it as the sound track for the movie of our life. The song that popped into my head was Zip-pe-dee-doo-dah. And it wasn't until later that I remembered that it was, of all things, a Disney song. I am not a fan of Disney, in any of its corporate appearances. But there you are: me with a cheerful, upbeat Disney song as the soundtrack for the movie of my life.

So then someone chose a song about a train and New Orleans, which everyone but me seemed to know. I'd never heard it before in my life, while the others could sing the whole song by heart. That directed my thoughts to popular music and my [lack of a] relationship with it. It's long been clear that I know nothing about popular music after about 1956. In fact, it was only since I married my husband, with his amazing collection of popular music recordings (from the origins of recording through 1980) that I've learned to identify the occasional Beatles tune.

So what music DO I know aside from classical music and the popular songs of my junior high and high school years? (Can you sing Mairsie Doats? I can.) Then I remembered. Because of my children I know Jane Oliver (our house fairly reeked of Jane Oliver torch songs when someone's high school romance ended badly) and the Nylons. Also, in 1969 or 1970 I had a Joni Mitchell album that I listened to a lot.

So there. I do know a few pop names, though I doubt that anyone else knows Jane Oliver, and the Nylons are over the hill by now, having drifted off into an a capella sunset. That leaves me with Joni Mitchell. And Mairsie Doats.

Well, all of this thinking, occasioned by Zip-pe-dee-doo-dah, managed to clarify a bit of my relationship to popular culture. Wasn't THAT exciting?

After our toning we crossed Yonge Street to go to the Aji Sai for lunch. Could it get any better? Continuum (all about my body), toning (all about my sounds), and then a lunch with friends in a little Japanese place where they recognize us and greet us as old friends just because we eat there once a month!

But this is not the end of that day's excitement. After lunch I took the subway downtown to Sears. There I was, sternum still hurting, flowing body, tuned in to the sound of the universe, looking at: vacuum cleaners! We have a perfectly good upright that I hate and will not use. (My husband bought it when I wasn't with him. I said, "You use it, because I won't." So he has used it.) But I knew that if I had a vacuum cleaner that suited me, I would pull my own weight in the cleaning derby.

Have you looked at vacuum cleaners lately? They look like robots. Like implements for a space mission. It's all about bells and whistles and chrome trim. They are disgustingly ugly and pretentious. One Sears model cost $100 extra for a light that changes from red to green (or vice versa) to indicate an area where there is more dirt. It senses extra dirt. It senses extra dirt!!!

I bought an outdated model, $200 less than any of the others, exactly because it lacked most of the unneeded features and it had less chrome. Its biggest drawback, according to the saleswoman, is that after drawing out the electrical cord you have to manually hook it around a peg—otherwise it will spring back into its hole. When did we become a society too lazy to hook a cord around a peg? Anyway, I avoided all the parts I didn't want and saved a bundle, some of which I then spent on having the thing delivered. I'm looking forward to vacuuming with a machine that doesn't fall over when I use the hose attachment.

Now I'm still at Sears, still in the midst of my exciting day. Navigating my way to the subway takes me through the basement of the Sears store, where I see a display of sheets and towels. I think, "There's something around here that I'm looking for." Then I remember. I want a towel. One white towel, better than my other towels, just for me. I've had it in my head for months but never think of it. Here I am in towel-city. Towels on sale. Big fluffy towels, regularly $28, on sale for $14. I almost pass on by, knowing how awkward it is to buy things (especially with a damaged sternum): take off the green felt shoulder bag, then take off the backpack, where my wallet is. And then load up again when I've finished my purchase.

So I almost pass the towels by. And then I think "WWMHD" (what would my husband do?). Well, since he is a firm believer in retail therapy, I know what he would do. He'd buy half a dozen towels. So I bite the bullet and buy my one white towel, even though it means unloading and reloading the day's accumulation of stuff. Even though I have a damaged sternum.

And all of this is only the beginning of that week's excitement. You can see that it will be impossible for me to catalogue all the excitements of my life! It's taken three weeks just for me to get this far. I'll have to start keeping some of my exciting moments to myself.

And when I'm internalizing all that excitement, will I start bouncing as I walk? I'll let you know.

www.anntudor.ca
http://www.scenesfromthejourney.blogspot.com

A Thrill a Minute

2011-08-07T05:43:00.001-07:00

How exciting my life is I can barely tell you.

Where shall I begin?

"At the beginning" you may say,

but that's much too far away.

That's in the distant past.

And besides, the beginning

is not the exciting part.

The ending is what's becoming exciting,

on many different levels.

Take, for example, Saturday, March 8, 2008,

when I got to spend the day

(after my cursory but animated reading

of two newspapers)

in the kitchen preparing

beautiful market-bought raw materials

into a feast for friends

(and the market was exciting, too,

as always, but that was Thursday's thrill;

if I start going backwards,

I'll end up at the beginning

and, as I said, that part's less exciting).

So Saturday I was alone with the Met broadcast

(Otello with its love duet at the beginning

that almost compensates for

Desdemona's tragic death at the end).

And perhaps if Otello had been shrunk

by a good shrink

(Gabriel Byrnes comes to mind)

he wouldn't have allowed himself

to be swayed by Iago.

So that was Saturday's excitement.

Sunday was even better.

And then Monday.

But I'll have to tell you later.

www.anntudor.ca
http://www.scenesfromthejourney.blogspot.com

Kicking a Stone

2011-07-31T08:45:00.001-07:00

The rules for kicking a stone are simple and inflexible.

1. You can't do a foot-shift before kicking. You have to arrange your stride in advance to be in the right position to kick with the appropriate foot.

2. There's no re-placing a stone. If it goes into the rough (i.e., the grass or the gutter), you're out of the game.

That's all. And with these rules laid down, how long can you last, kicking a stone? Half a block? I used to be pretty good at it, but lately my aim is dicey. The stone is as likely to go to the right as to the left—and either of those is more likely than a straight shot that will send the stone forward on the sidewalk where it will stop and wait for my next available foot. A pine cone works in a stone-free environment. Don't use a stone so big that it damages your toe. Do I have to remind you not to kick a stone if you're wearing sandals?

www.anntudor.ca
http://www.scenesfromthejourney.blogspot.com

Swooning

2011-07-24T15:45:00.001-07:00

I once spent an evening swooning. I was at Indiana Beach, a resort in Monticello, the "gateway to the lakes" about fifteen miles from my home town. It was a thriving resort that pulled in big national acts. I saw Stan Kenton and his band at Indiana Beach (Maynard Ferguson—remember him?--on trumpet). When I saw the Dave Brubeck trio, I spent the whole evening standing right beside the wooden stage (most people were dancing), gazing with adoration at Paul Desmond as he played his saxophone. Oh, he was sexy. Oh he was handsome. Oh, I was young. I felt that he would surely feel me staring at him and would realize that I was in love, and then he would . . . he would . . .

Would WHAT, little girl? You didn't know, did you, what can happen to foolish star-struck teenagers. Well, an angel watched over me (or over HIM) and ensured that he didn't even know I was alive. I swooned with impunity.

www.anntudor.ca
http://www.scenesfromthejourney.blogspot.com

The Topaz Stone

2011-07-17T07:34:00.001-07:00

I found a polished rock, shaped like a humbug. It definitely looked like hard candy, shiny and striated with gold. It was a bit too large for popping into the mouth, but perhaps some judicious tongue-stroking and sucking would reduce it to a more manageable size. And then eventually it would just disappear.

But no, this isn't candy at all. That's just a tease. This is a stone, polished in a grinder until it looks like hard candy.

When I see a silky-smooth, irregularly shaped stone like this, I want to go out and buy a rock polisher so I can make my own smooth stones. We used to have one. I bought it when the children were young, thinking to establish a family hobby. But when we realized that it took days of tumbling for the machine to do its work—days of hearing an incessant low hum—we all lost interest. Now I think maybe I should buy myself a rock tumbler after all. It might be worth the annoying noise if I could create smooth stones like this little mock topaz.

I could take a handful of polished stones with me wherever I went, dropping them here and there. Leave one on a subway seat. Put several in the children's sandbox at the park. Tuck a few in my neighbors' flower-beds for them to find when digging in the garden. The stones, silent testimony that the snow angels blessed them during the long white winter, will offer the miraculous promise of spring.

Quilting

2011-07-10T04:10:00.001-07:00

I saw a picture of an old woman with a patchwork quilt on her lap. It's possible that it was simply a piece of beautifully printed fabric, but I think it was a quilt. And I wondered whether the woman had pieced it and quilted it herself.

In days long ago, she might have sewn the patches by hand, little running stitches one after the other joining together two-inch scraps of fabric. But whether she pieced it by hand or on her old treadle Singer machine, I'm sure she didn't actually quilt it alone.

For the quilting, she stretched it on a large frame so it was ready for that week's quilting bee. A dozen of her friends and neighbours seated themselves around the frame as if it were a large dining room table, and, each one with a needle in hand, they spent the afternoon quilting together the top, the batting, and the back in tiny, even stitches. Many hands make light work.

Irma Rombauer's definition of eternity is "two people and a ham." My definition of eternity is "a queen-sized quilt and one quilter." So this old woman was grateful to have had the help of her neighbours.

www.anntudor.ca
http://www.scenesfromthejourney.blogspot.com

Vanity, Vanity

2011-07-03T04:40:00.001-07:00

As we work to prepare my new website, Jeff says we need to set up a photo shoot. He is a photographer as well as a website designer, so it isn't surprising that he wants to enliven the site with photos—of me—in the kitchen. My kitchen.

Close-ups of my kitchen mean that I definitely have to make a few cosmetic changes. Some people might call this "cleaning." The extraneous items on my kitchen counters fill a whole box (a small box, I say in my defense). When that clutter has been swept aside, the counters look lean, mean, and ready for work.

It isn't just the counters. Before the deadline hour, I look dispassionately at my refrigerator. Oh, my. Outdated (by three or four years) photos of grandchildren partially overlap piles of their art work glommed to the fridge door by heavy-duty red magnets. I ruthlessly shove these all into boxes. Dozens of "aren't we clever" magnetized advertising cards have been slapped on to the fridge door over the years. I peel them off and discard them.

Then I come to the mood-revealer psychological chart (fifteen cartoon faces depicting emotional states). To use it, you choose the feeling of the moment and frame it with a movable little square frame, so that anyone who remembers to look at the thing can tell that you are ecstatic, angry, embarrassed, shy, etc. Both of our grandsons love this emotional tracking system, so it will go back on the fridge door after the shoot. Interesting that it is the male grandchildren, not the girls, who resort to this artificial means of expressing themselves. Now, don't read too much into this, Nana.

Counters are clean. Refrigerator door has been emptied and scrubbed (well, I had to scrub it, didn't I, once all those magnet-held items were removed?). The shiny white fridge door now reflects the light from the window opposite it, making the kitchen twice as bright.

What about me? My hair (oh, the hair is hopeless). My clothes: what will I wear? I'll wear jeans on the bottoms, and I choose three tops and three aprons and three pairs of earrings, plus a set of little hair-holding combs. All this is to change my appearance during the shoot so that the innocent viewer will think the photos have been snapped over a period of months. So clever.

And makeup. I'll put on a party face to fool the eye. Look, she has eyebrows! And look, cheekbones! And so forth through the cosmetic drawer of shame.

Jeff arrives and sets up the tripod. I pull out the pie crust dough I prepared the day before, so I can roll it out and whip up a batch of pinwheels as Jeff records my knuckles in close-up. At least we'll get to eat the pinwheels.

I peel a carrot. I chop an onion. I put a soup kettle on the unlit burner and pretend to stir the missing soup with a long-handled wooden spoon. That's an end to the cooking activity for the day.

Now Jeff wants shots of me in my environment. I stand on a stool before our 2000 cookbooks and pretend to reach for one, smiling mysteriously.

We move to the dining room. I am discovering that I, a classic no-pictures-please photophobe, quite like being the sole focus of Jeff's camera. Well, not the sole focus. Being a professional, he focuses on the lighting as much as on me. But I don't have to know that. I discover a new pleasure in smiling (Mona Lisa style) and looking straight at Jeff through the fat lens. I sit casually, arm draped over the back of a dining room chair, legs crossed, head leaning over onto hand (am I a contortionist? No, this looks very natural, Jeff says). I remember Blow Up and other movies about photographers and models. But Jeff doesn't ask me to move to music (if he did, perhaps I should choose Frauenliebe und Leben, given the domestic theme of the day). Does Jeff snap the shutter continually, is he urging me to twist and turn and smile and throw my head back and bend down so that my hair flops, a mane of Big Hair, over my face?

No to all of that. That would be fantasy, not reality.

But what fun to be the focus of the focus. When we're finished and I look at the shots, all that I notice is my head surrounded by an aureole of fluffy bright white hair. A trick of the light, I say to myself. Who IS this woman?

www.anntudor.ca
http://www.scenesfromthejourney.blogspot.com

Singing the Bones, a dialogue

2011-06-26T04:55:00.001-07:00

A: Ribs are the only bones I know of that things stick to.

B: Other things are BRED in the bone, aren't they?

A: And what sticks best is lamb shanks and pot roasts.

B: What's with the meat? Oatmeal is the classic stick-to-the-ribs food.

A. Oh, yeah. I forgot. Oatmeal.

B: So are there any other "bone" stories you want to investigate?

A: Skin and bones. Bone marrow. Marrow bones. I love marrow bones. I USED to love marrow bones.

B: My new Italian cookbook has a recipe for steak alla something. The picture shows a grilled steak surrounded by half a dozen sawed-up marrow bones, ready to be sucked.

A: Cholesterol city, if you ask me.

B: What sticks to the bone. Sticks and stones may hurt my bones, but words wither my psyche.

[Here, we must imagine that A and B become one voice.]

I don't think that's how the saying goes. But who on earth would ever try to convince children that "words will never hurt me." They'll parrot that to a tormentor, but inside they know they're lying. They'll feel the conflict of saying it because they know that sticks and stones cause bruises that heal, but words cause bruises that don't show and never heal.

How many of us can cite verbatim phrases that bruised us: "I'll never forgive you"; "I don't know what your best feature is, but it's certainly not your nose!"; "You're a culinary idiot"; "Can't you do anything right?"; "What do you mean you got an A-? That's a loser's grade. Where is the A?"; "Pretty is as pretty does"; "It was her choice to live far away from us; let HER pay for it."

It's hard to dim these voices. Even with the tinnitus and even without the hearing aid, they come through loud and clear and unmistakable and unforgettable.

"Unforgettable. That's what you are. Unforgettable. Though near or far….That's why darling it's incredible that someone so unforgettable thinks that I am unforgettable, too." Little Midwestern teenagers hung on Nat King Cole's every syllable and carried his lyrics around for years. Believing them. Building a life on them, the more fools they.

Memory is not to be trusted. Where are the words my father spoke to me (did he ever speak words to me? Or was I just one of the crowd he told jokes to?). Instead of words from my father I have in my head the lyrics to Spike Jones songs ("It's a beautiful day for the races; Stoogeham is the favorite today…"; or "'Dja ever see a tin flute dancing?..."); Gordon Jenkins' Seven Dreams ("They're after me, they're after me, I cannot get away. For life is colored rosy red and death is colored grey…").

In our family, conversation is likely to be interrupted by a song. One comment reminds someone else of a lyric, which she then sings. Perhaps this is because all our interaction when we were young involved songs and not actual conversation.

When my sister Sari and I were in our teens, we developed the parlor trick of alternating the syllables of a song. I'd sing, "Once" and she'd immediately respond with "I". Had. A. Se. Cret. Love. We'd sing the whole song and then collapse with laughter. More fun to perform than to listen to, I'm sure.

My brother Mike went through a long period of spelling and pronouncing our names backwards. I was Nna Nosnhoj. He was Ekim Nosnhoj. And so on through all six of us. Nosnhoj is not a name you can easily forget.

Most of the Spike Jones records were Mike's, and all of the Homer & Jethro were his. I was too genteel, too upwardly mobile—too much of a snob, in short—to listen to Homer & Jethro. Now, though, I think I missed out on a good thing. Mike says they were satirical, a really funny pair.

I preferred Sarah Vaughan singing Mountain Greenery. "In our mountain greenery, where God paints the scenery, just two happy people together….Beans could have no keener reception in a beanery than our mountain greenery home."

Given the title of this rambling essay, the only way to end is with "The foot bone's connected to the –ankle bone. The ankle bone's connected to the—leg bone…" And so forth.

www.anntudor.ca
http://www.scenesfromthejourney.blogspot.com

A Story of Two Stoves

2011-06-12T08:18:00.001-07:00

Alice has a gas stove in her kitchen. Virgil, who lives next door, has an electric stove. Alice thinks that it's time for Virgil to give serious thought to a change, and with good reason: Virgil's stove doesn't work.

For example, Virgil's right front element comes on only when set at high. It is thus a good burner for boiling water for his twice-weekly spaghetti dinner.

The left front burner works only at the levels of low and simmer. This is where he melts butter and makes stove-top custard.

The right rear burner doesn't work at all, no matter what the setting. This is where Virgil sets pots when he's too busy to put them in the cupboard.

The left rear burner works at all settings, but it's a small burner and is awkward to reach, being next to the wall, so he seldom uses it. Only if he were to cook an elaborate meal would he make use of the left rear burner, and Virgil doesn't cook many elaborate meals.

You might think that Virgil hates this stove, with its inconvenient idiosyncrasies. Nothing could be farther from the truth. Virgil likes making do. He relishes the challenge of remembering which burner is good for which task, and he pretends that it's like cooking on an AGA. He thinks the brain activity required to use his stove efficiently is actually insulating him from Alzheimer's as he grows older.

But Virgil has to contend with Alice. They chat often, as neighbors, and the subject of their conversation, to his chagrin, is frequently their stoves. Alice has a gas stove that she loves. Alice sees no virtue in muddling through with faulty electric elements. Alice is determined to persuade Virgil to come to the gas side of the fence, where the grass is always greener.

"I can boil water in half the time, Virgil," says Alice.

"I don't mind the extra time," says Virgil. "I just sit at the kitchen table and read the paper while I wait for the water to boil."

This conversation will continue with many variations until Alice succeeds in converting Virgil to her way of thinking. Alice doesn't give up easily.

On the other hand, they are both already of a certain age, or a bit past it. If Virgil can just outlive Alice, he can grow older in peace, making do with his barely-functioning electric stove.

www.anntudor.ca
http://www.scenesfromthejourney.blogspot.com

The Party's Over

2011-06-05T12:03:00.001-07:00

At the end of the party, if it has been at my house, I don't want everyone to leave. I want most people to leave, because by then I'm very tired of small talk, party conversation, circulating, and saying only nice things. But I want one couple, or maybe two, to stay. We will close the door on the departed partygoers, blow out most of the candles in the dining room and bring a few lit ones into the living room. Then we will sit around and talk. I know it's late by then, but I relish the openness of rehashing what went on. "Did you talk to Harold?" "Yeah. Did he tell you about Jenny?" "No, what's going on?"

And then I get to hear all the gossip that I missed while doing the circulating-hostess routine with a platter of hors-d'oeuvre. You can't be a part of every conversation at a party, especially if you are hosting it. So I need to sit with a few other people who acted as my eyes and ears and can fill me in on all those other conversations.

But eventually even those few will feel that their part of the party is over, and they leave. And then I exchange my pretty shoes for slippers and put on an apron. Dino and I bustle around putting food away, loading the dishwasher, and talking, just the two of us, about who said what to whom.

And finally, now, the party's over.

www.anntudor.ca
http://www.scenesfromthejourney.blogspot.com

Spring Things

2011-05-29T05:15:00.001-07:00

Move, pen, with the vigor of this early, unexpectedly beautiful spring. Move in honour of the forsythias that waved to you this morning. In the laneway forsythia branches draped themselves over the tall garden fence like so many languid Sirens, saying, "Help us, help us escape." I knew that if I got too close to them they would draw me onto the rocks and that would be the end of my ship's journey.

I passed them by, but I stayed on forsythia alert. When I reached the street I saw on my left a huge forsythia that had been allowed to flow, her golden locks streaming like those of a pre-Raphaelite maiden. Oh, for that just-out-of-bed forsythia look, wanton branches offering themselves to all comers.

And then further up the block I found the opposite. When I am empress, I will devise an appropriate punishment for those who dare to prune forsythias into rigid, flat-topped shrubs.

No, let's not go that way. Let's think along the lines of "Mother, forgive them for they know not what they do." These people need re-education, not punishment. As empress I will establish a school for gardening aesthetics and arrange for these louts to be sent for remedial work at the school, where they will learn the following lessons:

Lesson One: forsythias are sacred to spring. Without them there would be one less marker between the freezing days of winter and the balm of soft air on the skin.

Lesson Two: Forsythia grows in long, flowing branches. This is for a reasonnamely, that Mother Nature likes it that way. You lop off those waving branches at your peril. Do you want Mother as your enemy? Let them flow. Let that bush become as big as it wants to. Then glory in it for the length of its three golden flowering weeks.

Lesson Three: You may prune it, if you must, from the base. Please register for Pruning 101.

Lesson Four: If you wish, you may cut a few stalks from the base in February and bring them inside, which will force them to flower early. We deserve to be reminded of their promise during the interminable last weeks of winter, and luckily, forsythia is happy to oblige.

Forsooth, Forsythia, thou are forsworn.

Thine end is near, thy coming death foregone.

Happily thy life's prolonged

by Spring's cool days

(though shortened by its hot sun's rays).

Sooner or later, thy golden locks

will fall to ground, glory betrayed,

thy radiant self replaced

by summer's undistinguished green.

Forsooth, Forsythia, reveal to us again next year,

lest we expire with despair,

thy golden hair.

Upsetting the Applecart

2011-05-23T14:17:00.001-07:00

If by "applecart" you mean all the little safe routines we hide behind, then let me be the first to say that it's way past time to upset the applecart. I can almost hear the crash it will make, the cart itself turning over, axle breaking, one wheel cracking, the other spinning off into the darkness (applecarts are more properly upset in the dark, giving us the opportunity to face the unknown). And then there are the apples, those predictable, cherished apples: my things, my habits, my foods, my animate and inanimate loves. You know the drill: all my fabrics, all my papers and paints, all my children (oh, I believe that phrase has already been used).

See those apples rolling beyond reach, leaving the cart empty and me bereft of apples. Some are trapped under the cart. Some, having chased that spinning cartwheel off into the dark distance, are gone forever. Maybe by the time the light comes I will even have forgotten what they were. And then I'll never miss them.

Perhaps I can push my old broken cart upright again, call in the wheelwright (or maybe he deals only with wheels, not axles; no matter, since I need two new wheels as well). Get this show back on the road. A road show. Now, remind me where I was headed.

Oh, of course. I was moving in the direction of The Land of Old (or am I already there?). Now I'm traveling with a cart empty of apples rather than overflowing with a superfluity of them. Though at the moment I wouldn't mind having a few on hand for sustenance. Can I make it the whole way without food? I've become dependent on the kindness of strangers, though I have to say that there have been better times and better places for such reliance. I'm well aware of that, having passed three panhandlers in the last two days without dropping so much as a loonie in their cups. If I can't rely on the kindness of strangers during the rest of this journey, then that leaves me with only myself to rely on. Ye gods and little catfish, what a concept!

Spring Garden

2011-05-15T06:46:00.001-07:00

I've spent ninety minutes gardening every day for the past week, yet I've barely scratched the surface. As I've crouched over one small patch after another, I've pondered the question of why there's so much to do this yearas opposed to last year, when I hardly set foot in the front rock garden.

The difference is that last spring I was too busy to take on the garden. Then, by the time the first flush of spring had passed, the weather turned stinky-hot and I refused to go out into the heat to garden.

Talk about paying for one's sins! Last year's negligence has tripled this year's work. Lying awake the other night, rather than counting sheep I began to count the number of invasive species I have acquired over the years, inadvertently or through deliberate foolishness.

1) Garlic chives, once they are in flower, pop their little black seeds over a wide area, and the following year you find garlic chives growing vigorously in the midst of every grouping in the garden. Fail to eradicate them and the following year the problem multiplies exponentially.

2) Tradescantia's seeds do the same thing after hanging for a week in those little post-flowering seed pouches. It took me many years to realize that just because the tradescantia plants are flourishing doesn't mean that I have to leave them in the ground. That's why God made trowels! Now I dig them out as soon as I see them insinuating their long green leaves in unwanted places. Last year, of course, they got a reprieve, so this year I'm finding incipient stands of tradescantia every few feet.

3) In the flat part of the garden in front of the house, I planted (on the advice of a landscape architect), a spurge with a pale green variegated leaf. Its yellow flowers pop up on an eight-inch stem to stand above the leaves. Very pretty in late spring. But its ivy-like stems travel out to the wide world, and each terminus of a stem sets a tough root that hangs on for dear life when I try to pull it up. I've nearly finished yanking out that guy and his cousins by the dozens as they attempt to take over the world.

4) I admit that I actually bought a lily-of-the-valley plant years ago. It's my own fault. Much as I love the fragrancemuguet, in FrenchI am too lazy to pick more than a small handful to decorate the dining room table for two days. For the most part, I walk by the stand of lilies of the valley and see them testing the boundaries of their territory. Like all the rest of my invasive friends, they're doing their best to claim the entire garden as their rightful dwelling place.

5) But the violets are NOT my fault. I swear I never bought even that first plant. It came from nowherelike a monster alien in the moviesand it is winning the battle for garden space. And if I fail to do more than a token cutting of the lily-of-the-valley flowers, you can imagine how loath I am to create those pretty, French-style violet nosegays that poor women used to sell outside the theaters, offering violets to rich men for their attendant ladies. I don't pick many violets. But as soon as I finish with some of the other aggressive plants, I'm going to uproot every violet plant I can find. Ruthlessly. Enough with the violets. May this year be the last. (But I'll probably leave a token plant or two out of pity, and then the whole business will start all over again.)

6) The Greek oregano is almost under control. Its growth is as vigourous as its flavour is overpowering. So I'm hedging the truth; it is NOT under control in the slightest.

7) The mint comes up wherever it wants. Oh, I know. You should plant it in a pot that you sink into the ground. Well, the pot broke during some long-ago winter. Now the mint has its way with us. My husband, luckily, likes mint tea in the summer, so I taught him how to identify it (try smelling) and he now is a one-man mint-control machine and feels rich with his endless supply. Nonetheless, eternal vigilance is the price of freedom from excessive mint.

8) Visiting friends in Campbellford ten or so years ago, I bought a sweet little bright-green ground cover at the town market. It was called something like "butter & eggs." Its round, nickel-sized, shiny leaves are accompanied in mid-summer by pretty dandelion-yellow flowers. It looks as if butter wouldn't melt in its mouth, but I promise you that it is my second most invasive plant. Its long shoots reach out from the mother plant and, before I know it, it is in seven other locations, from each of which it sends out additional colonizing shoots. The plant I bought sat sedately in its spot for three years, never budging, never causing a problem. But once it reached critical mass, its aggression began. It wiped out other ground covers before I realized they were under attack. This is its last year as a free plant. I will cut a circle around the mother plant with my scissorsa generous circle, I promise youand then I will rip out with my bare hands any sweet-looking, round-leafed, yellow-flowered, vicious punk that dares to appear outside the circle.

9) Which brings me to vinca minor. A sturdy, attractive ground cover, its stems travel two, three, four feet in all directions, looking for an inch of ground to call its own. Another inch. And then it's on to the proverbial mile. It tramples over anything in its path. I've thought occasionally of abandoning the garden to these twothe vinca and the butter-and-eggsand letting them battle to the death. The vinca has an interesting self-preservation strategy. It flowers in May (periwinkle blue, of course), with blossoms so cheery and welcome that you say to yourself: There's no way I can pull these flowers out of my garden. I'll just wait until it has stopped blooming. And by that time, the vinca has taken over another four square feet.

This will be the year when I establish firm boundaries for each of my nine (count 'em: NINE) invasive little friends.

A Remnant of the Past

2011-05-08T13:53:00.001-07:00

What do we owe to the past?

My former husband recently gave me a little book bound in soft leather. He'd found it among his papers as he was sorting and weeding.

The little book is a prayer book. On the inside front cover is my name and my address in Montpellier, France, where I lived when I was 19. This prayer book, which I have no memory of, is now in my hands. Am I supposed to know what to do with it? Within its pages is a "holy card"a bookmark of thin cardboard edged in gold, with a religious image printed on one side. On the back of the holy card in my prayer book is an inscription saying that the book was presented to me by the Alain family in Montpellier.

I have no memory of this family. I did spend Christmas Day that year with a kind Catholic family. I don't remember their name, but I do remember finding a pearl in one of the oysters I ate at that Christmas dinner (my first raw oysters ever). It was my twentieth birthday, and I thought it was very special to have found a pearl on that day. So perhaps the Alain family were my Christmas hosts and it was they who gave me the little prayer book and the inscribed holy card. The prayer book is in French, of course, which I haven't spoken in 30 years.

The question is this: what do I do with it? It's safe to say that I won't be using it as part of my own spiritual practice. I don't want to bury it among my papers, deep in the basement, for someone else to deal with after I'm gone. I don't feel comfortable throwing it out. Is it a sacrilege to recycle a prayer book?

Let's see. I could call the Alliance Francaise and ask if they need a 50-year-old prayer book for their archival collection. I could call the local Catholic French-immersion high school and see if they want to add an old, virtually unused prayer book to their library collection.

In the meantime, as I work through the problem of how to dispose of it, it sits on top of my dresser. And we all know about dresser tops: I just cleaned that dresser top last week, sorting through six solid inches of things that needed to be filed or thrown out or otherwise Dealt With.

The minute I put the prayer book on that cleaned-off dresser, I knew it was a mistake. Any object, no matter how small, placed on a clean dresser-top acts as a magnet to attract more and more homeless objects. Soon a new pile covers the whole dresser top to a depth of six inches.

Back to the question. What do we owe the past? Does the prayer book represent the Alain family? Does it represent my year in France when I was 19 and 20? If I dispose of it will I be expunging the Alain family from my memory (though they were pretty much expunged already)? Does honoring the past mean that I am obliged to hang on to objects that I will never use again?

Or can I just let go of this book, no matter what part of my past it represents? Call me if you want it, and I'll dig it out from the bottom of the dresser-pile and send it to you.

Easter

2011-05-01T05:29:00.001-07:00

Say the word Easter and here's where my mind goes: four days of church-going.

Memory: Entering the church on Good Friday to see purple velvet covering the fourteen Stations of the Cross and the large crucifix above the altar and the life-sized statues of Mary and Joseph that flanked the altar. I could never figure out who draped all that purple velvet. Probably the overworked nuns.

Memory: The Holy Saturday Mass performed with wooden clappers instead of tinkling bells.

Memory: A Holy Saturday litany sung by the priest at the back of the church (I was in the choir loft right above him, so I never knew exactly what he was doing). But whatever he was doing, he punctuated his chant with "Flectamus genua!" (let us bend our knee), a phrase that has rung in my mind all these years just because of the way it sounds. Flectamus genua!! When someone chants that at you, you don't need to be told twice to bend that knee. After we had all knelt, even those of us out of sight in the choir loft, he would chant "Levate!" ("Get up!" Or rather, "Rise.") And we did. And then he would chant some more and tell us again to bend our knee. This went on a long time, which may actually be the reason I've remembered it.

Memory: A lengthy foot-washing business at the altar, though I don't remember whether it happened on Holy Thursday, Good Friday, or Holy Saturday. Nor do I remember who did what to whom. I think maybe the priest washed the feet of the teenaged altar boys. Now there's a penance!

Memory: An Easter candle three feet tall and three inches in diameter, set in a holder that was itself three feet tall. The creamy white candle was decorated with colored wax designs pressed on to it. I found it beautiful.

Memory: The priest wearing once-a-year celebratory vestments. I remember a rose chasuble garment with much gold embroidery.

Memory: My mother, Eileen, never one to make life easy for herself, subscribed to the (Irish?) view that on Easter one should wear new clothes, from the inside out. So at some point during Holy Week she bought new socks, underwear, and shoes for each of her six children and she managed to sew dresses for the three girls (usually from the same bolt of fabric) and shirts for the three boys (also matching, but not matching the girls' dresses, I hope). She bought the boys' pants.

Memory: The church choir, composed, as I remember it, entirely of girls from "the big room" of the parochial schoolthat is, girls in grades 5 through 8. Some of whom could sing. There were about ten of us in all, unless I'm totally mis-remembering this. It can't have been pleasant sitting in those hard pews listening to ten untrained pre-pubescent voices singing their version of Gregorian chant, accompanied by a wheezing organ.

Memory: The choir on Easter Sunday, which for me was the culmination of the choir experience because we sang my favorite hymn:

"The DAWN comes purpling o'er the SKY-EYE,

While AL-leluias filled the AI-AIR.

The EARTH held glorious jubilEE-EE,

Hell GNASHED its teeth in fierce de-SPAIR."

This was the verse. The chorus, a series of vigorous alleluias, was followed by another two pot-boiling verses that I have mercifully forgotten.

I'd like to say that the reason I loved it (you have to admit it has a certain panache) was the challenge of picturing "Hell" gnashing "its" teeth. What exactly would that look like? But I think the real reason I liked it was its punchy, vibrant rhythm.

Memory: When Easter Sunday Mass was over, we all went home in our new finery, had our pictures taken with a little brownie camera, and ate a ham dinner.

This completes the litany of Easter memories from my childhood.

A Little Angel

2011-04-24T11:53:00.001-07:00

I made a little angel years ago for our family Christmas tree. This was when we still had a car, and my son (then in his early teens) and I would drive to a Christmas tree farm northeast of Toronto and walk through the cultivated wilderness to search for a whopper of a tree to cut down. We would secure it to the top of the car with bungee cords and as we drove home the snow would begin to fall and it would begin to feel a lot like Christmas.

For many years this angel that I made sat on the tip-top of the central branch of those big trees. Her dress, of stiff, cream-colored satin, is trimmed with gold. And now she fits the top of my non-tree, which I delineate with lights only. No tree. No needles. No watering. Just little bright lights that fall from the ceiling to the corners of a board, making a stylized Christmas tree shape. If I want the smell, I can diffuse a little pine or spruce essential oil, but I usually forget to do that. From outside the house, you really think that you see the branches of a tree hiding there among the lights.

For my angel's hair I made a lot of French knots, the only embroidery stitch I can call up at will. Other stitches have to be researched and followed slavishly. I love to make French knots. The lengthened version of the French knot is called the bullion stitch, but it is easier to embroider the former than the latter.

What more can I tell you about my angel? Are angels Christian, or can they be claimed by anyone? Whether you believe in nature spirits or sky gods or the Great Femininesurely angels transcend the limits of the human imagination. An angel will arrive to help you out even if you don't go to an approved place of worship on Sunday (or any other day). Angels will help you no matter what you believe. They're here to help.

That's the New Age view, to which I sometimes subscribe. On the other hand, that might be a sanitized, namby-pamby view of angels, since I know they can also be fierce and demanding and uncompromising. They can ask things of us that we may not want to give.

I'll keep fierce angels in mind, and I'll hope that I can have a couple working on my behalf. But for Christmas trees I'll continue to use my benign little white satin angel with her French-knot hair and her gold pipe-cleaner halo.

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Morning at Grenadier Pond

2011-04-17T07:37:00.001-07:00

The curtain of drooping willows parts at my touch, and I move from the path, with its walkers and joggers (yes, even at this pre-dawn hour) into the presence of still water.

The mist rises from the little lake, signifying a disparity between air temperature and water temperature. But I prefer to see the mist as a symbolic veil over reality rather than as the inevitable physical result of the meeting of two different temperatures.

As I lower myself on to a patch of low weedsdew be damnedI can see the crescent moon sliding toward the western horizon. It gives less light than the gradually whitening eastern sky, but focusing on that constantly mutating moon begins to soothe my mind.

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Crows

2011-04-10T11:28:00.001-07:00

I saw an anonymous black bird on a postcard, and it brought to my mind the death of the crows. A plague has taken away my crows, who always greeted me as I left the house. Always a caw or two, or a full raucous greeting, and I'd say, "Hi, guys!"

They'd perch, three or four at a time, in the tree across the street until I was safely on my way, then go on about their own crow business: hunting food, doing some group-think activity, or practicing their shape-shifting.

In Deepak Chopra's novel MERLIN, the crows play a huge role, and Chopra makes it so clear how they think as one, how it is impossible (or nearly so, for on this hinges part of the story) to be a crow and to be an individual thinker. The group is all.

Well, that doesn't appeal much to me, though I don't think our modern, individualist societies give us much to be proud of. But that's the biggest stumbling block for me: to be one (make me one with everything, as the Buddhist said to the hotdog vendor)to be one with everything. And then where am I in all this? Where am I, this hard-won I? This I who lives and feels and cries and laughs. Who will know me, who will appreciate meme!when I am one with everything?

The crows have disappeared this year. We can only hope that this plague that has destroyed them is short-lived. I hope that the virus will die out, and within a year or two, those noisy, intelligent birds will be back again, protecting, warning, entertaining us from the tops of trees.

On a friend's island, years ago, I was singing, alone by the little lagoon. And as I started my last song (for I was tired and ready to rejoin company) I saw three crows fly to the tip of a tall, half-dead pine tree. They perched there, silent and unmoving, until I finished my song. And then, as one (make me one with everything), they flewswiftly, swiftlyinto the distant blue sky over Georgian Bay. They disappeared so quickly I wondered if I had even seen them at all. But I had.

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Villains

2011-04-03T08:11:00.001-07:00

I've been reading Brad Smith lately. He's been called (maybe by his own publicist) a Canadian Elmore Leonard, and this is true. His books are funny, smart, full of off-the-wall characters, and they usually involve a scam.

He always has a John-Wayne-type hero, the guy who doesn't care much about money and who is at home in the physical world (he can roof his own house, including creating the beams and rafters instead of using those pre-constructed roof struts). His heroes are the last whole men. They're like Robert Parker's Spencer but not as smart-mouthed.

Smith's villains have made me think. His characters are the people he meets in dingy bars and cheap motels. Well, I don't ever meet people in dingy bars or cheap motels because I never frequent either of those places. Therefore, I don't have access to villains. So I began to search for the villains in my own life. A sorrier crew it would be hard to imagine, yet they are the only villains I come across. Here they are:

The people who don't respond to the good-citizen slogan of "Be nice! Clear your ice!" All winter long I pick my way carefully across the sidewalk frontage of frozen lumps and humps, part of me desperate to avoid falling, another part of me planning the lawsuit if I do. This is laziness and thoughtlessness as villainy.

The people who let their cars idle, filling our city air with even more particulates for us to inhale. At 6:45 one morning recently in High Park I came across an empty car, lights on and motor running. The owner was nowhere in sight but, since the car was parked by the entrance to the off-leash area, I assume he was walking his dog. I was sorely tempted to get in the car and drive it 50 yards down the road, just to give him a scare. I didn't, but real car thieves are less reluctant. (There is apparently a thriving trade in early-morning stolen cars. The thief and his accomplice drive to the suburbs. They circle the streets until they spot yet another shiny SUV spewing its poisonous exhaust into the air so that the owner will be able to enjoy the comfort of a pre-warmed car. The thief just hops into the unlocked car left running for him, and he drives it off to the chop shop.)

The people who block subway doors so that passengers can't get out. These people are usually just ignorant and thoughtless, wanting to be the first ones to enter the car. But some blockers are more deliberate. My husband recently shared the subway car for six stops with a short, fat man who deliberately stood in the middle of the doorway at each stop, making it almost impossible for riders to get on or off through that door. At first it might have looked accidental, just one more thoughtless person. But the man moved from one side of the subway car to the other, depending on which side the door would be opening onto. And he smirked as he blocked the way. What grudge against the world was this man acting out?

My current villains are all urban and all relatively harmless. I'm going to have to apply some serious imaginative effort to create villains to people my next mystery novel. Or just start hanging out at dingy bars and cheap motels.

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Walking

2011-03-27T05:57:00.001-07:00

I had such a good time walking this morning. I was not in a hurry, so instead of walking briskly I was able towell, not to dawdle but to go at a walking pace, the pace the Italians call andante. It's not a pace that I'm really familiar with, since my usual walk is a brisk full stride.

This morning my walking pace felt to me like the universal pace of those who walk. At that pace you are making progress, you are moving to where you want to go, but you have time to see and absorb everything around you. You are with the countryside, with the front yards. That pace felt comfortable within my body. I felt connected to the inhabitants of Hardy's English villages, in those days when visiting the next village involved a walk of four or seven or ten miles. I can feel myself moving along the dusty path between villages and I know that my pace is the natural pace of man. At such a pace, even a bicycle seems much too fast.

This must be the pace that God had in mind when She created Adam and Eve. "Walk around this place," She said, "but slowly, not too fast. You aren't doing this for the aerobic value of the walk. You're doing it because I asked you to look around. See the flowers. Hear the birds." And so forth, She said to them, including a little speech about fruits and trees.

So the first thing they did, after a gentle amble over the grounds, was to use the roundness of the apple as their inspiration for putting wheels on things.

And here we aresuffocated by wheeled things and too numb to know that on some cosmic level the wheels have fallen off.

Will God even consider starting over with a new Adam, a new Eve? Maybe She'll tempt them with square tomatoes rather than round apples, thus completely avoiding the wheels business.

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Rice Pudding Memories

2011-03-20T06:38:00.001-07:00

My mother never made rice pudding. This, of course, could be a lie, but it may also be true. It feels true to me. She also never made bread puddingwhich suited me fine. The sliminess of pieces of Wonder Bread in bread pudding echoed the sliminess of Wonder Bread in the Thanksgiving turkey stuffing. I didn't like either one.

When my children were small, I made rice pudding often. If you use milk instead of cream, and not too much sugar, rice pudding is a relatively healthy dessert.

Ernest and Abigail had their daughter baptized to please Ernest's Catholic parents; and I, a lapsed Catholic, was the token godmother for this token baptism. I am ashamed to confess that I have long since forgotten the child's name.

The christening was followed by a classic French baptismal celebration. Both Ernest and Abigail had doctorates in French literature, and they were frank Francophiles.

The christening brunch, for twenty guests, took place at their house in Tuscaloosa. The tables were beautifully appointed with starched cloths and napkins, flowers in antique crystal vases, their bought-in-Paris antique silverware, and the pastel, candy-coated almonds that typify the French christening brunch. Ernest had done all the decorating for the day. He had also previously designed the entire the house, re-upholstering antique chairs with beautiful French tapestry, refinishing end tables and buffets. Ernest could do anything.

Ernest also cooked the meal for the celebration. I don't remember what he served for this spring-time brunch, but I know it was elegant, simple, and expensive. And for dessert, he made riz a l'imperatrice, the apotheosis of rice pudding. Julia's Mastering the Art of French Cooking, Volume 1, was all the rage among junior faculty members, and Ernest used Julia's recipe. It is to rice pudding what the Taj Mahal is to a sod house on the Prairies. It is complicated and time-consuming to make and is studded with candied fruit and made voluminous with whipped cream. Before serving it, Ernest turned it out onto a beautiful antique porcelain platter and decorated it with candied violets and fruits.

I've never forgotten it, never made it myself, and never eaten it since. Ernest's was enough for a lifetime.

Ernest was a wonderful, doting father who took excellent care of baby Sophie. Yes, perhaps she was a Sophie. Abigail was left, as she often was in that ménage, with very little to do. Ernest cooked, decorated, entertained, and cared for Sophie. Abigail breast-fed the baby for over a yearprobably because this was the only thing she did that Ernest couldn't do better.

We left town the following year on our own perilous journey into life. Ernest and Abigail became part of my past, and Sophie, if that is her name, is now in her early forties and has had to navigate the rapids of life without the guidance of her missing godmother.

Now where was I? Rice pudding.

There are so many recipes for rice pudding. I make a quick one from leftover rice, but the best ones are made by simmering a small amount of raw rice for several hours in sweetened milk, so that the rice is very, very soft and swollen. When I crave rice pudding, however, I usually want an instant gratification of my desire. So I add leftover cooked rice to milk, put in a little sugar and a few raisins, and cook it until I say it's finished, at which point I might add some vanilla. Then I put my rice pudding into a dish and eat it while I sit alone in a friendly room with my feet up and a book on my lap. No matter what ails me, rice pudding is bound to make me feel better.

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Twin Peaks

2011-03-13T08:28:00.001-07:00

The privacy of our bodies is an important public concern these days. Children are taught that their bodies are not to be touched by others, and that they have the right to say "no". When I began studying Therapeutic Touch years ago, the teachers emphasized that we should ask permission, before beginning a session, to touch the client. It was a formality, but one that gave appropriate power to the client. Here are two stories about touching.

One of the tales we were told when I was growing up in an Irish Catholic family is that nuns were not allowed to bathe naked. Whether this is/was true, I have no idea. But the way I heard it is that a nun covered her body with a thin muslin garment while bathing, so as not to be disturbed by (excited by? amazed at? curious about?) the sight of her naked body exposed to her own private gaze as she lay in the warm waters of her bath (cold waters, more likely). She soaped herself through muslin. Or so we were told. And you can just imagine the prurience such ultra-chaste bathing provoked in an impressionable child's mind.

But to return to my moutons. That was my background. Added to this were all the other societal prohibitions about touching a stranger without prior approval.

I went to a lingerie store looking for new bras. I was dissatisfied with the brand I had been wearing and felt I needed some help in finding a bra that fit well. Though the store was a large discount lingerie store, service was available for those who needed it. A young saleswoman helped me to choose several possible styles and I retired to the dressing room. Curtain pulled shut, I tried on one of the bras.

"How's it going?" called the saleswoman from the other side of the curtain. Then she peeked her head in. "No," she said, "that style does nothing for you. Try this other one." She ducked out of the space again, which I appreciated. I needed a little privacy.

So I took off one and put on the other.

"How's it going?" she called.

"Well," said I, "I think I like this one." She stepped around the curtain and looked at my bosoms critically. "Yes, that's better," she said.

And then, before I even was aware of what was happening, she inserted one small warm hand into the bra, cupped my breast, and moved everything around until, I guess, she felt I was properly filling the space available.

I was shocked. Not so much as a "by your leave" before she invaded what had heretofore been a fairly private space. She obviously gave it no thought at all. I assume that she actually spent her day adjusting soft breast tissue to fit its surrounding fabric. Her little hand was in and out in seconds. I bought four of the bras.

My second breast story demonstrates how extraordinarily naive I was even as recently as ten years ago.

It was a warm, muggy summer day, threatening rain. I walked to the Village to shop, but I took an umbrella, not wanting to be caught unprepared.

And a downpour indeed arrived as I marched up the final hill on the way home. I always walk briskly, and even more briskly when I'm being pelted by hard raindrops. It was cozy but noisy under the umbrella.

Being a fast walker, I overtook an older man going my way. He had no rain protection, and I couldn't bear the thought of his being soaked while I breezed by him, umbrella'd. I slowed to his pace and said, "Can I offer you some shelter?"

He smiled a little and accepted. He was about my size, small for a man. I said, "Hello." He said nothing but gestured as if he didn't understand English.

"Parlez-vous francais?" I asked, thinking that Canada's other official language was the next best choice.

No.

"Ukrainski?" I queried, ungrammatically I'm sure. Our Village is a hotbed of Ukrainians.

Still no response.

I paused, stuck with my grand gesture and just seeking to make conversation as we plugged along in the rain.

"Sprechen sie deutsch?"

No response. I imagined him as the aging father of some youngish couple in the neighbourhood, brought to Canada to be with family, but too old to begin to learn the language.

He had reached over at some point and was helping me to carry the umbrella, which I didn't mind, because an umbrella gets heavy to hold when you can't switch hands.

I was racking my brain for additional languages ("Pa russki?", "Hablo usted espagnol?"), still intent on being a companionable neighbour, when all of a sudden his hand left the umbrella and circled my breast.

I was in shock. Had he mistaken me for someone who might enjoy being fondled by a stranger? Or was he just curious as to what this idiot Canadian thought she was doing, offering to share the intimacy of an umbrella during a rainstorm?

I was incensed and speechless. In what language could I chastise him? None, obviously. My legs shifted gears and I motored away from him, hugging my umbrella handle to my bosom. I was moving so fast my legs must have looked like a running cartoon figure whose legs become wheels.

"Monsieur!" I sputtered as I pulled away from him. "Monsieur, vous etes . . . vous etes . . ."

I couldn't think of a word, but it was all right because by then I'd left him in the dust (or a puddle) and he could no longer hear me.

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Ruts

2011-02-27T05:03:00.001-08:00

"A life should leave deep tracks," says the poet. Shall I make that my new goal? Shall I focus on . . . oops! my mind, somewhat dim on the best of days and especially so today, just blanked out, the way TV sets used to turn off, shifting in the blink of an eye from ersatz joyous activity to a black blank screen with a tiny bright light at the center. You're probably too young to remember those old sets. But just like that is my mind, minus the glimmer of any sort of focused light at all.

Confusion reigns. What do I know, indeed, about anything? This is not a day for pronouncing on weighty topics like whether or not a life (is it really my life I'm discussing here?) should (and whence comes this external imperative?) leave deep tracks, aka ruts. As in inescapable ruts, ruts of drudgery and sameness and endless repetition.

Essay topic: "RutsGood or Bad?" Augment your essay with personal experience and quotations from great works of literature.

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Nothing/Something

2011-02-20T08:58:00.001-08:00

"From nothing, something," whether or not it is true in a general sense, makes a nice change from "from nothing, nothing" or even "from nothing TO nothing." Quit while you're ahead, sweet pea.

Nothing to say leads towait for itnothing to write. But "nothing" is not an absolute term. "There's nothing in the house to eat" just means we're out of milk and eggs, or carrots and onions, depending on your culinary requirements. But "I have nothing to wear" means different things to a picky teenager, a homeless woman,

and the society matron contemplating Saturday night's ball.

Mighty oaks grow from tiny acorns (or so they tell me; I've never seen it happen) and surely we consider an acorn to be next to nothingthough we might get some argument from the squirrel.

And from "nothing to say" I have come up with the something

of these few lines, thereby proving the theory. Q.E.D.

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Holding On

2011-02-13T08:27:00.001-08:00

When the time comes,

you'll have to pry

my cold dead hands

away from life.

The hold I have on here and now is tight.

The hold I have on here is much too much.

Loosen up, my dear.

Let go the hold you have on here

and hear the music of the spheres

informing you of what's out there.

Loose the hold you have on here.

To sense the motion of the spheres

to sense the union of the where,

just loose that hold you have on here.

Cling tightly to your hold on here

and you'll experience only that.

The tightness of your hold is what

you'll think life isand that's a fact.

But loose the hold, let your feet swing

into the rhythm of the thing,

the thing that buoys you up, my dear,

is at the heart of everything.

The Dalai Lama has no hold.

He wafts his way through all the world.

Clinging's not what he does best.

He's the example to the rest

of us, who tend to squeeze

our fists and tightly seize

the things we've hoarded from our quest.

The Dalai Lama's not that way.

He doesn't cling, he doesn't grip.

Whatever he holds, he lets it slip

into the void, then he floats free.

I have to ask: when did you see

a man as trouble-free as he?

So there's the lesson. Learn it now

and save yourself a lot of grief.

Let Dalai Lama show you how

to loosen your grip and find relief.

Release those tightly gripping fists.

Make mind blank, imagine mists

disguising mountains unexplored.

See the hold we have on here.

What good it does us disappears

in face of positive release

when we loose the hold we have on here.

Shave and a haircut, two bits.

Wear this shoe only if it fits.

But loose the grip just once and see

what joy it is to feel free.

To feel untethered, floating, light

and know you'll drift within the bright

white light of night's full moon.

This freedom's not an hour too soon.

The bell will ringwill you still hold?

Will you fail to see the world unfold

itself before your eyes?

Let go your hold, observe night's skies.

See the hold we have on here.

Let it go now, let go of fear.

Let go of rigid old beliefs

and face life freely. No longer steer

your course with strait-laced mien.

Surrender now to the unseen.

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Doors Closing

2011-02-06T07:02:00.001-08:00

One icy day I needed to make a subway trip. My grandson Sam had been sick and wasn't yet ready to go back to nursery school, so I was going to entertain him at home.

Because I'm afraid of falling on the ice, last year I bought by mail order a pair of ice cleats that slip on over your boots or shoes. This seemed to be the perfect day to wear them. I would need them particularly to walk from our house to the subway, I reasoned, and then again from the bus stop near Sam's house through the alleyway to their house. The alleyway is never shoveled or cleared of ice and snow, and I could imagine how treacherous it would be. Good thing I had my cleats.

Unfortunately, the mail order company had been less than forthright in setting out the sizes for their over-the-shoe cleats, and I had bought a Medium instead of a Large. They fit on my shoes, indeed, but barely, and only after much tugging and much straining of arthritic thumbs. It's a process you don't want to undertake often, or in public, or without a solid chair to sit on.

Consequently, I decided to put the cleats on at home and wear them until I reached Sam's house.

I left the house. The sidewalk to the subway was actually clear, so in order not to waste the magic holding power of the cleats, I walked in the street, near the curb, where ice and snow were still packed. And as I walked I realized that I was going to be wearing those cleats on my boots when I was in the subway station. Uh-oh, I thought, I'd better be careful.

So here I am in the station. I go down the steps very carefully, looking like a little old lady twice my age, clinging to the handrail with every step. But I make it. Pay my fare. And descend the next set of steps to the westbound platform. I need to be at the front end of the train, so I walk the entire length of the platform. "Don't hurry!" I tell myself (against all my natural impulses). I don't hurry. I place each foot very carefully and I make my way ("click, click, click, click") to the front end of the westbound platform. As I wait for the train, I stand near the wall and congratulate myself on how careful I have been.

The train roars in to the station from the tunnel and gradually slows to a stop. I'm perfectly placed, with a door straight ahead. As I move forward, my cleats belatedly recognize that there's no traction on this smooth tile floor, and my feet slip out from under me in a nano-second. Suddenly I am flat on my back in front of the subway door.

Because it's winter and it's cold, I am wearing my puffy watermelon pink winter jacket and my funky brown sheepskin pillbox hat with the earflaps and the trailing leather streamers. The coat is thick and the hat is even thicker. Thus, even though I slam flat onto my back and the back of my head, I'm not hurt.

A passenger leaving the train (she didn't expect to find me lying in her path on the platform) helps me up. I want to get up quickly and rush on to the train, but the conductor, even though he has seen the whole thing, rings the warning chimes and the door closes right in my face. I found this more upsetting than the actual fall.

Left alone sitting on the platform, my first action is to whip off the cleats (they're a snap to take off; it's only putting them ON that's difficult).

The next train arrives within a minute, so I reach the Old Mill station just in time to catch the 66A bus to Sam's house. I didn't lose any time by missing that train.

At the end of the bus ride, I am faced with walking the icy alleyway to Sam's house without my cleats. I am very cautious. See the Nana learn another lesson: she's learning to move slowly when circumstances demand it.

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Piano Tales

2011-01-30T05:37:00.001-08:00

The cement that holds our family together is music. How many angels can dance on the head of a pin? How many music stories can I fit into a little essay?

Baby Mary Eileen was the youngest of us all by far, and she is the only professional musician among my siblings. Our father never tired of telling the story of Mary's first piano recital. She was six--beautiful, blue-eyed Mary, with her curly dark hair and classically pale Irish skin. Imagine little Mary timidly walking up to the big baby grand in the church, the pews filled with her relatives and those of all her fellow-recitalists. She's been taking piano lessons for a year and she never has been too fond of practicing. Nonetheless, here she is at her first piano recital.

Mary approaches the keyboard, as they say, and she looks for middle C, the opening note for her little piece. She has been taught to find it by tracing her finger down from the first letter of the manufacturer's name on the upright board above the keys. Whoops! This is a different piano. There is a different placement of the manufacturer's name. Middle C is nowhere to be found.

Mary chooses a note that might be the right one and tries out her piece. Nope. Doesn't sound right. She stops and chooses another note. No luck. She tries three times in all, after which she simply chooses a note at random and plays the piece on whatever notes present themselves under her fingers. Relatively speaking, she plays the piece well: all the notes are in place relative to that first note. But the first note was not middle C, so the piece ends up being in lydian or perhaps mixolydian mode instead of in C major. Mary knows it's wrong, but what can she do? This piano obviously has no middle C. She finishes, bows to the applause, and takes her seat. She's done the best she could do.

In the meantime her father, Myron, and her sister Sara are in hysterics in the back pew. Myron has tears in his eyes from laughing so hard. Sara has nearly wet her pants from laughing.

And because our father, the tease, never lets go of a good story, Mary's first piano recital becomes a legend to be retold at every family feast, as regularly as a Scandinavian edda at the banquet of long-ago warriors.

Lest you think our father was all malice, however, here's my own piano recital story. I was a pupil of Mrs. Eikenberry, whom I adored as a teacher. I was a senior in high school and the recital, held in Mrs. Eikenberry's house, was for her "advanced" students. I was to play a Beethoven theme and variations that I'd been working on forever.

We arrivedparents and nervous performer. Suddenly I realized I was not wearing "my ring." This was a "friendship ring" my father had given me several years previously for my birthday. I later realized that my father never in his life bought a gift for any of his children or for his wife, so the ring purportedly from my father was actually chosen by my mother. But at the time, when I still thought it was possible to be my father's beloved daughter, I believed that he had given me my friendship ring.

But where was it? I had left it at home! Oh no, my lucky ring!! My ring that I nervously twiddled between my fingers, using pinky and long-man to twirl the ring that was on my right-hand ringman. Oh, and I was SO nervous that day. I knew I'd never be able to play without my ring. It was my talisman.

I asked my father to go home and get it for me. I couldn't play without it. Please, Daddy! He thought the request was ridiculous and pooh-poohed the whole idea. I pleaded, tears in my eyes. Finally my mother took my side and said, "Myron, just go home and get the ring!" And he did. (This was NOT across a big city, you understand. This was a three-minute drive in our old station wagon.) So he brought me the ring and I put it on, feeling immediately more at ease, or so I said. When my turn came I played the Beethoven as well as could be expected. And certainly no better than I would have without the ring.

And in the generation after ours, do we have musicians? The "children"now ranging from 30 to 50are either totally musical or totally lacking in musical interest. (The latter circumstance is obviously what happens when we marry outside our musical gene-pool.)

We have drummers, keyboardists, an acoustic bass, a couple of singers. Some are part-time professionals (as in, "Don't quit your day job!"); some just do it for fun. But the music gene is still strong among at least half of them and goes into the next generation. All the young parents watch the new babies for extraordinary talentalthough why they would is a mystery. Since they have seen the difficulties of the full-time musician's life, you'd think they would want to stomp out any musical talent, not encourage it.

I remember one of my daughters saying about her baby girl (only a month or two old at the time): "I was singing the mockingbird song and she hummed it along with me!!"

Well, maybe.

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The Chopsticks Breed Like Rabbits

2011-01-23T09:51:00.001-08:00

My kitchen has three drawers. Three is not very many, when it comes to kitchen drawers. To maximize space, I keep my cutlery in a wall-mounted box. The drawer by the stove contains vegetable peeler, can opener, bottle opener, spatulas, melon baller, pastry brush, ice pickall the regularly used tools, right at hand.

This leaves me with two other drawers, side by side to the right of the refrigerator. In one of them I keep a rubber mallet (for halving winter squashes), a pair of tongs for removing canning jars from boiling water, extra jar lids, and the re-usable plastic mobcaps (very old-fashioned) that I use instead of plastic wrap.

The one remaining drawer? That's where I keep my (sheathed in plastic) rasp for grating chocolate or hard cheeses, a few plastic spoons and forks for when I need to take a lunch, my favourite dough-scraper for lifting and trimming pie crust dough, and my pastry blender, never used for blending flour and lard but for mashing pinto beans for refried beans and avocado for guacamole.

Last week when we had guests I served the dessert but had forgotten to put the grated chocolate on top of it. (My husband noticed this because he had chosen a nice port specifically to go with the chocolate that I had said I'd be putting on top of the dessert.) I went to the drawer for the rasp but could not find it. I pawed, however, through dozens of pairs of chopsticks as I looked for the rasp. Where had they come from? I finally found the rasp, grated and distributed the chocolate, and finished out the evening.

The next day I removed every single chopstick from that drawer and put the huge pile on top of my husband's work space. You need to know that twenty years ago I did a lot of Chinese cooking. I laid in all the supplies and spent as much time as it took to make pot-stickers, moo-shu pork, kung-pao chicken, and twice-cooked pork. Them days is gone forever. So how had we managed to accumulate all these chopsticks? I promise you that we don't order in more than four times a yearand it's not usually Chinese. The only answer is that, in the dark privacy of that drawer, they are breeding like rabbits. It was time to put a stop to that.

Together we sorted the chopsticks into pairs and then groups. We finally kept four handmade pairs that I probably bought as Christmas stocking stuffers, plus one tarnished pair of silver chopsticks (who knows where THEY came from?). We put eighteen bamboo pairs (plus three singletons) into the discard pile. I said, "These are leaving the house! I don't care whether you give them to Goodwill or put them in the garbage, but they are OUT of my kitchen forever!"

Amazingly, my husband the packrat made no objection. But he gathered up the remaining group of chopsticks: 22 pairs of the cheap kind you get with Chinese take-out food, all of them still in their paper sleeves, all of them still joined at one end. I said, "These are also going out! The end! Get them out of here!"

And the packrat said, "I'll just keep these for a year. I'll store them in the basement and then I'll throw them out."

The chopsticks may still be in the basement, which is chock-a-block with things he is waiting to throw away someday, but at least they are no longer in one of my pitifully few kitchen drawers. When you have just three drawers, you want to fill them with essentials!

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A Sucker for Babies

2011-01-16T05:13:00.001-08:00

As the subway neared my stop, I left my seat and moved to the door, ready to get off. In the seat beside the door was a mother, her toddler in a stroller beside her. He was bundled up for what the weather would be outside, and he was eating his breakfast. Or snack. Mommy had a tangerine and was placing prepared sections in the tray of the stroller. The little guy reclined a bit against the sloping back of the stroller. His eyes wandered around the subway car as his hand would grope the tray for the next segment of tangerine. Occasionally he would use both hands to bring his sippy-cup up to his lips for a swig of juice. He was as happy and relaxed as a baby can be. When I caught his eye, I waved my mittened hand at him. He fluttered his pudgy fingers in return. He didn't give me a real smile, but just an acknowledgment that we were on friendly terms. He took another tangerine segment. I waved my black leather hand again. He fluttered the fingers of both hands. A two-handed wave. I smiledno, actually I was grinning widely. He was so muffled up, so quiet, so contented, with his round chubby fact and his body enclosed in yards and yards of snow-proof clothing. We reached the station. I very much wanted to catch his eye for one last wave, but he had lost interest in me. He looked around deliberately, still popping tangerine pieces into his little mouth. I was yesterday's lunch.

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Sophisticated Lady

2011-01-02T04:32:00.001-08:00

When I was young, a major character flaw was that I wanted to seem sophisticated. Perhaps that's the natural reaction of a small-town person learning to live in the larger world: you never want to appear to be someone who Doesn't Know.

To prove my sophistication, I read the Sunday New York Times from cover to cover and I subscribed to the New Yorker (and not just for the cartoons, thank you very much). My vast head-knowledge of The Way To Be contrasted interestingly with my lack of real-life experience.

When we lived in Lawrence, Kansas, we made the acquaintance of another couple who had children the same ages as ourstwo girls and a boy, like ours. The husband, Joel, taught math at the University of Kansas and was also a concert pianist. They were Orthodox Jews from New York City, and they were the first practicing Jews I had ever met. To me they were both exotic and sophisticated.

Joel made a monthly trip from Lawrence to Kansas City to stock up on kosher goods and deli food, and one day he asked if he could bring back something for us. I said, "Bring us half a dozen bagels. I just love bagels."

Well, wasn't THAT a lie! I had never in my life tasted a bagel and didn't know how to eat one. But I did know that bagels were sophisticated. I knew that New Yorkers ate lox and cream cheese and bagels on Sunday mornings as they read the New York Times. Here was my opportunity to learn how to eat bagels the Right Way. I would be eating Orthodox-sanctioned bagels. I couldn't wait to take this next step on the steep climb to sophistication.

When Joel arrived at our house in the late afternoon with a bag of bagels, I was the only one home. I paid him and thanked him and then offered him a coffee. He suggested that, since I had been so eager to obtain these bagels, I might want to eat one while it was still nice and fresh. I had been hoping to wait until Joel had left and my husband was around to offer his opinion on how to eat a bagel. But no. I was cornered into eating my first bagelwhich of course no one knew was my firstin front of Joel. Joel undoubtedly assumed, from all my big talk, that I was an experienced nosher of bagels. More likely, it never occurred to him that eating a bagel was something that had to be learned.

I sat on the sofa under the window. Joel sat on a chair across the room. He drank his coffee, and I held the cold, plain, unsliced bagel in my hand. How was I supposed to eat it? Like a doughnut? I nibbled a first bite. The bagel was so big that I couldn't take a larger bite. It was bread, all right. And although the outside crust was slightly sweet, it was certainly nothing like a doughnut. The bagel was dense and dry, and I couldn't help feeling that there was a better way to eat it than dry, cold, and out of hand. It was not exactly what I had been expecting, and it was hard for me to see why it was so popular. But I was stuck with the situation I had created.

"How's the bagel?" asked Joel.

"Delicious," I lied.

I sat there under Joel's eye nibbling at this very large, very dry bagel, and I knew that my embarrassment was all my own fault. I vowed yet again to stop trying to seem more sophisticated than I was. I vowed to admit my ignorance and acknowledge my lack of experience.

And sure enough, within some thirty or forty years, I was able to stop pretending to be someone I wasn't. Of course, by then I was fully sophisticated.

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Random Thoughts on the Season

2010-12-26T07:24:00.000-08:00

J., our neighbour for twenty years, kept a house that was a daunting example of cleanliness and thoughtful good taste. J. and I got along well, despite the fact that we were exact opposites. When she and her husband moved from the street, I bought at their yard sale three boxes of apricot-colored glass Christmas balls, a total of 18 ornaments. Every year I think of her as I hang these pretty things around the house. This year half of them decorate our dining-room chandelier, while the others are strung as a little garland under the mantle. When I look at them I remember J. with fondness, but this inevitably leads to my next J. thought: without fail, J. cleaned her house from top to bottom before Christmas.

This is a beautiful idea, in theoryto face the holidays with a fresh, clean living space. But theory and practice don't always meet harmoniously in my psyche. I know I will never have a pre-Christmas window-washing session, or clean out any closets or drawers in honor of the holidays. But seeing all of J.'s apricot-colored balls this year has inspired me to make a tiny little stab at cleanliness and order. Today, as soon as I finish writing this, I will vacuum the whole house, top to bottom. I promise. But no windows.

There are two types of people in my worldthose who delight in Christmas and those who cannot bear it. As usual, unable to make a lasting emotional decision, I manage to embody both of these views, though usually not at the same moment.

We all know the Christmas Enthusiast. This is the person who overfills an already loaded calendar, unable to resist taking on yet another burden as long as it is in the name of Christmas. Host the Christmas dinner? YES! Make the entire dinner, rather than parceling some of it out to willing relatives? YES! All obligations are warmly welcomed, as long as they bear the name of Christmas. That's enthusiasm.

I also know people who fervently hope that the whole season will just disappear. The tinsel and glitter and canned Christmas music (subtext: Buy more! Buy more!) are just too much for them. Sometimes these people can slip under the radar of Christmas and just spend a quiet day contentedly alone. Or perhaps they find happiness by cultivating their Jewish friends and going out for Chinese food and a movie instead of sitting in a family gathering simmering with decades-old tensions.

With all of this in mind, my hope for Christmas, every year, is, "A little balance, please!" I'm not sure how to achieve it, nor can I necessarily visualize just what it looks like. But I'll know it when I find it. It will involve genuine love, a continual re-grounding the moment we find ourselves spinning out of control, and the required amount of deep breathing needed to avoid insulting Aunt Tillie.

At the age of five, my grandson, Sam, came over to play. In his backpack he had a large, solid plastic wolf of ferocious mien, with a snout that opened threateningly and a hunched-over posture (this was an upright, bi-pedal wolf). Its arms dangled to the ground, ending in fully formed fingers with sharp talons. All in all, not a friendly looking wolf. But as he presented him to me, Sam pointed out that the wolf's mouth opened only so that he could drink hot chocolate. And his role in life (all Sam's toys are either good guys or bad guys) was benign. The wolf's long arms reached out not to grab and snatch, but to dispense, from his cupped hands, hot chocolate to all.

May the wolf at your door be the bearer of unlimited hot chocolate.

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Making a Little List

2010-12-19T06:16:00.001-08:00

Maybe making a list will light my way. A list different from the one I have with me right now (three oranges, one red onion, watercress, good black pants) and the one sitting on the counter at home (thank-you note to Mary, mail package, call Helen re lunch, water plants, etc.).

These are do-able tasks, which is why I like them. Sometimes I even pad them with notes like "file nails" just because it is so satisfying to cross off completed efforts. And, as satisfactions go, "file nails" is pretty easily achieved.

But a life list? Isn't it a little late to begin itemizing what it is I want out of life? ("Ask not what you want from life; ask rather what you are willing to put into it." But I paraphrase.) Many people make life lists of things they want to see or do. But nothing comes to my mind for such a list, except perhaps "see Aurora Borealis" and the closest I'm going to come to that is a video of it.

Okay. Make a durned list. Perhaps some good will come of this.

1. Rediscover joy. (Yeah. And next, how about "hang on to it this time"?)

2. Well. That was it. That's all I could come up with. Too many phone calls yesterday. Talking to too many people discombobulated me. A relative described her current life as a "trailer park soap opera," which is close to the truth, if a bit dramatic. And then last night I learned that my oldest granddaughter has just been told she can go on point in her ballet class. Congratulations, my dear. But I didn't really want this to happen. I wanted her to become enamoured of modern dance or jazz dance before she got sucked in to the romantic, painful life of a ballerina. And then, by a strange coincidence, two of my brothers called.

3. Really, this time. I'm determined to make this list, difficult as it seems to be. Okay. Figure out whether it's better to dwell on the current state of mind, with the goal of understanding it and being able to write about it for the elucidation of others, or to work like mad to get away from it, since it seems to be poisoning the well.

4. This is utterly pointless. Okay. Here it is: Know why everything has shifted. Is that vague enough?

I hoped that listing things would clarify what's going on, what I need. But it's not working. Nothing's working.

I spent the last two days making four dozen gift bags, using up remnants of precious fabric I've saved for twenty years. I guess that was my admission that I'm not going to be sewing anything important in the future. My crafting days are over.

But it was fun to whip out bag after bag and throw each one on the floor beside the sewing machine. And then when I had run through all the fabric, I ironed each bag, ending up with a neat, crisp pile of gift bags of all sizes, ready to be sent out into the wider world.

That's the kind of thing I need to put on my list. Something concrete: make more gift bags!

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The Colour of December

2010-12-12T07:19:00.001-08:00

In early December I rounded the corner into a paved laneway and saw a smashed pumpkin, still freshly bright orange inside. Its thick pumpkin flesh was open to the world, and its different shades of orange depended on the light and the planes of the smashed pumpkin.

How it got there remains a mystery, but the thought skimmed through my brain that this pumpkin was the only bit of color in the whole area. Everything else was dark: grey, black, brown, dark blue, and colorless dead grass. It reminded me of a trendy store window I passed once. The entire stock was displayed in minimalist fashion, and every itempants, jackets, tops, bottomswas either black or dark brown. I tried to imagine who would be drawn to enter such a shop. Could anyone really say, "Oh, this looks like fun"?

Ideas flit, flit, flit through my head. Just like my hair, they're here today, gone tomorrow. Or, more precisely, here now, gone the next second. (Which reminds me. Have you heard this one? "Every moment is a gift. That's why they call it the present.")

Now where was I? When I was imagining how many thoughts pass through my grey matter, I was reminded of my writing group. Surely everyone has as many thoughts as I do. Surely we are all little idea-factories. Imagine the ideating atoms flying through the room when we meet to write. Fly, fly, flit, here, there, captured, not captured, gone, back again, ideas flying faster than the eye can see or the hand can record.

This fanciful idea echoed a recent newspaper item reporting that some scientific endeavor determined that each of us thinks 70,000 thoughts an hour. Of those 70,000 flitting ideas, only a small percentage make it to conscious thought. Butand here's the strange parteven those that don't make it to conscious thought become part of our memory, according to the scientists. Even your unconscious thoughts are stored in your memory, my dear. It's no wonder you don't have room to remember where you put your car keys!

Some 70,000 unthought thoughts settle into our memories without our even knowing it, taking up space. Can these thoughts ever be used? How can you retrieve the memory of an unthought thought? How can you find it if you don't even know it's there?

Now I'm back to the flit-flit-flit phenomenon. I can't even remember or control the ideas I actually know about. And I haven't touched on the strangest part of all. How do scientists know that I have 70,000 ideas per whatever, and that these ideas go into my memory without my even having known that I was generating them? I certainly wasn't thinking those thoughts.

It's all too much for me. Just don't ever tell me that you've run out of ideas!

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December

2010-12-05T09:38:00.001-08:00

Think red. Or green. Or green and red. There you have December.

Think one or two brilliant blue skies. Think 29 or 30 milky overcast days. (Add Vitamin D to diet.) And there you have December.

We used to visit Santa Fe often, when one of our daughters lived in New Mexico. That's where we first learned to order "Christmas". In local restaurants, your enchiladas or tamales are topped with a chile sauce, and you are asked, "Red or green?" The red one will be made from deep dark anchos or guajillos or some combination of half a dozen red chiles. The green one (actually more a dull, light-greenie/brown in color) is made from fresh green chiles. Those who have trouble deciding between the two can order "Christmas"red on half of your order, green on the other half. My December includes both red and green.

And silver. I mustn't forget the silver. Tinsel, for example, or those little spiraling icicles made from old tin cans. Or my bright silver earrings shaped like miniature Christmas tree lights, a seasonal body decoration that once belonged to my sister Sari. (If I have enough Christmas parties to go to, I can alternate the silver tree lights with my own miniature, bright-red Christmas balls.)

Anyone who has synaesthesia will morph instantly from color (silver) to sound ("Silver Bells"). Last year I managed to avoid all malls, department stores, and large public gatherings through the month of December, so I didn't hear a single recording of "Silver Bells," which is a song I actually like when it's sung in harmony by pretty women's voices. And while I was thinking about "Silver Bells," I realized that several Christmases have gone by without my encountering a single rendition of Leroy Anderson's "Sleigh Ride." You remember that one, surely, from your high school chorus: "Outside the snow is falling and friends are calling 'Yoo-hoo'. . . something weather . . .something . . .for a sleigh ride together with you." I used to know all the words, and I revisited it almost every year for over fifty years. If I haven't heard it by December 23 this year, I'll have to download it onto my iPodor I would if I had one, or wanted one.

And speaking of knowing all the words, shall we all now recite (or better yet, sing, in the Fred Waring arrangement) " 'Twas the Night Before Christmas"? That's the one that will keep me company if I'm ever thrown into solitary confinement and have to amuse myself with the contents of my own mind. I have to admit that this year I invited a nonet of friends to learn the SATB arrangement, and last night we sang it for a group of thirty or so neighbours, with me at the piano. It went very well. The guests enjoyed the moosemeat chili that we served as their reward for coming out in the cold to hear a little amateur singing group.

The exigencies of song-writing, I'm sorry to say, led to the removal of the best words of the poem: "As dry leaves that before the wild hurricane fly, when they meet with an obstacle mount to the sky, so up to the housetop his coursers they flew, with a sleigh full of toys and Saint Nicholas, too!" What's not to like here?

With no further ado and no deep, hidden meaningbut with oodles of perhaps premature good will, I exclaim, ere I drive out of sight, "Merry Christmas to all, and to all: Good Night!"

www.anntudor.ca
http://scenesfromthejourney.blogspot.com

On Grandmothers

2010-11-28T08:37:00.001-08:00

Gramma. Nana. Gram. I never had one, myself, so I have no role model and no memories of sugar cookies. My children's paternal grandmother was warm and welcomingan excellent grandmother who would take them blackberry picking and cook wonderful Southern meals for them. My own mother was not particularly interested in her grandchildren, presumably because her six had pretty much exhausted her.

What should a grandma do? 1) Sit on the floor and play blocks without ever saying, "Now I have to leave to go do (whatever). You just play by yourself." 2) Play the nighty-night game over and over and over without changing a word until he tires of it, not you. (In truth, you were tired of it after the third repetition.) 3) Walk at a child's pace without ever saying, "Come on! Hurry! We have to hurry now!" 4) Give unlimited cuddles. 5) Play "monster Nana" until he suddenly becomes really frightened and says, "No monster Nana. Just Nana." And then you stop being a monster. 6) Help him to move the cello bow while you play Twinkle-Twinkle.

What else? Be available. Be aware. Be in the moment with him (and how good is that for you as well?!). Listen. Slow down. Don't rush him. Don't have an agenda. Be there. Be there for him.

The final instruction for being a good grandmother is to make sugar cookies and put them in a big ceramic cookie jar shaped like a cat.

www.anntudor.ca
http://scenesfromthejourney.blogspot.com

One of the WHAT?

2010-11-21T06:28:00.001-08:00

I've got to get this off my chest. Batten down the hatches for a small rant.

Have you noticed that otherwise excellent authors and journalists are now freely using the phrase "one of the only . . ."? Think about this. A restaurant, for example, can be "the only restaurant that serves a certain dish," or it can be "one of the few restaurants that serve a certain dish". But it can't be "one of the only restaurants. . ." Really, it can't.

I don't approve of defacing library books, but if I see that phrase once more I'm going to get out the red pen.

I'll admit that my intermittent concern for the difference between "lie" and "lay" (and their respective principal parts) is too nit-picky for most people. I'm willing to let that drop. But "one of the only" is such an offense against clear thinking that it has to be stopped before it spreads.

If you are one of those who use that phrase, I'm not demanding a public confession. I just want you to stop it!

www.anntudor.ca
http://scenesfromthejourney.blogspot.com

Hog Capital of the World

2010-11-14T05:19:00.001-08:00

Two years ago, our friends the Smiths admitted that they ate dinner in front of the TV. I was shocked. My husband and I always sat at the dining room table, providing us with an opportunity to talk, even on those evenings when we didn't take advantage of it.

But did you ever notice that discovering how someone else lives gives you tacit permission to do the same? Thus, over the space of several months, we began to take a tray upstairs to the small den and to eat, plates on knees, while watching the screen. This happened with no acknowledgment. We never discussed the fact that what seemed to be our principled decision to eat in the dining room was so casually subverted.

I need to say that we don't watch "TV." We watch a 1930s movie (last night it was Mae West and Cary Grant) or a BBC costume drama. We've seen all of Jane Austen's novels as filmed by the BBC in the 1970s, as well as "Middlemarch", which I have more than once tried and failed to read in its original novel form. So we eat to the beat of high culture, not the networks' latest sitcom.

Recently, just as we had begun to eat our spaghetti (awkward as the dickens to eat from your lap), my brother Jerry called from Portsmouth, New Hampshire. Jerry is laconic, but that evening he was delightfully chatty. I abandoned my cooling spaghetti and turned away from the paused shot on the TV screen showing Mae West as a lion tamer. Talking to Jerry is both pleasurable and rare.

Jerry loves to cook and he told me that recently he had bought a pork shoulder roast for a family dinner. As he removed the plastic wrapper from the supermarket meat package, he noticed the sticker saying, "Indiana pork." And then, in smaller print, the words "Product of Delphi, Indiana." Our home town, Delphi, Indiana, has reached the world stage.

It used to be that the near-by town of Flora, Delphi's rival for county seat, called itself, "Hog Capital of the World"and proclaimed that honor on the revolving bank sign at the town's one stoplight. Now, apparently, Delphi has eclipsed Flora and is distributing its self-referenced pig parts at least as far as a supermarket in Portsmouth, New Hampshire.

Today New Hampshire, tomorrow the world! Go, Delphi!

www.anntudor.ca
http://scenesfromthejourney.blogspot.com

Being Thrifty

2010-11-07T06:46:00.001-08:00

The era of thrift is returning, but it'll still be a while before those 40-somethings start darning their socks. For me, of course, the era of thrift never left. Some part of me still follows the guidelines of "How to Live on Practically Nothing" a book that was my bible during graduate school and then again when I was on my own with three kids in Denver. Roz Chast, the New Yorker cartoonist, once showed a woman hanging washed plastic bags on her clothesline. The tag was something like, "When the environmentally conscious meet the perennially thrifty." I saw nothing funny in that cartoon; that was my life.

Perhaps this background information will help you understand my story. I own four sweatshirts. Not one of them is less than ten years old. Although I've tried to keep the stains to a minimum, the cuff and waistband ribbings are looking very shabby, and the neck ribbing of my grey one is permanently soiled. So, though I hated the very idea of it, I decided to splurge: I would buy myself a new sweatshirt and pitch all four of my current ones. Would I actually be able to do that? To throw away four sweatshirts?

The search began. I hate to shop, but I did actually go into a shop to look for a sweatshirt. The closest things they had were zippered fleece garments of 100% polyester, made in China. I couldn't make myself buy one.

At first, I thought maybe I'd cut off and save the logos from the three of my four sweatshirts that have words on them. (The fourth one is the oldest, a coral-pink colour that I love, despite the fact that it has stretched to well beyond a flattering length.)

My black sweatshirt says, "Napoleon." I bought it in a fit of enthusiasm and chauvinism after we saw the premier of a locally written and produced Broadway-bound musical about Napoleon. It closed in London later (before Broadway), so I figure my sweatshirt is a collector's item.

My grey sweatshirt is from my home town, bought in 2004 when I attended my fiftieth high school reunion. In appliquéd black and gold cursive, it says, "Delphi Oracles." I keep it not from nostalgia but from the still-unrealized hope that some day someone will say, "Why do you have a sweatshirt cheering on the Greek seers?"

And the purple sweatshirt, the one with the tattered ribbing, says, "Basketry Focus 1995," a souvenir of the international conference of basket makers that our local Basketry Network hosted all those years ago. I keep itwell, why do I keep it? To remind me, perhaps, of the ragged cuticles I sported during those five years when I made baskets from dyed and dampened reeds.

So you can see why, despite their shabbiness now, I am a bit reluctant to replace any of these with some polyester, made-in-China upstart. I marched all of them into the sewing room and attacked them with my best fabric scissors. Off came the black ribbing. Without a qualm I lopped off the sleeve cuffs of all four shirts. The neck ribbing of my Delphi Oracles shirt is now in the trash.

Some people, before undertaking this drastic surgery, might have gone to the fabric cupboard to check the supplies. I know I have several lengths of ribbings left from a period 15 years ago when I sewed with knits. But I actually have no idea at all what I will usewhat colors, what widthsto refurbish these old sweatshirts. So for the moment they sit on the cutting table, naked without their ribbings but open to any and all expectations of new life. Soon there will be a renaissance of sweatshirts on my shelf, logos intact, testaments to my thrift, ingenuity, and just plain pig-headedness.

www.anntudor.ca
http://scenesfromthejourney.blogspot.com

Ultimately, Change

2010-10-31T06:58:00.001-07:00

So four-year-old Sam and his parents are at the dinner table. Sam eats two bites of his meal and says, "I'm done!"

"Wait a minute," says his mother. "You need to eat more than that. Please eat four bites of this, and three bites of that, and then you can leave the table."

So Sam eats one bite of each food and says, "I'm done."

"No," says his mother, "not yet. I need for you to eat more dinner than that."

And Sam turns to her and says, "I recognize my own body, Mommy!"

Now there's a show-stopper! That's a pretty heavy thought for a four-year-old. I know some sixty-year-olds who still don't recognize their own bodies!

Of course, we don't know whether Sam actually does or whether he's parroting something he heard (and where on earth did he hear it?). Could his body actually be telling him that five bites of food will suffice to carry him through the night? Or is Sam just testing the waters again?

Olivia (Livvy) is now a very active eight-year-old with a beautiful smile. When Olivia is happy, she lights up the world. When she isn't, you know it. And the line between happy and unhappy is a very fine one.

Several months ago (Olivia was only seven at the time, if that makes any difference), Olivia's mother decided to rearrange the playroom. This is a large room at the side of the house that holds the computer, the television, a couch, and several containers of toys, including the dress-up box. Burton (11) uses the computer for his games (and he and Olivia have one of those Wii things as well). The computer is also used for all the restaurant accounts and to search the Internet for recipes, news, and ideas concerning the restaurant. You can see that the room is heavily used, and its furniture wasn't so much arranged as plunked in there on moving day. Olivia's mother wanted to create order out of chaos.

"No!" screams Livvy. "No! Don't change it! I hate it when you move things! Don't do it!"

She cried and screamed (big tears) for forty minutes, while her mother moved desks and couches and box after box of toys.

When the room was finished (and her mother doubly exhausted from having had to endure Livvy's protests at the same time), Olivia went into the newly arranged room and said, "This is really neat! I love it, Mommy!"

Rebuilding and redecorating after the fire at the restaurant (October 2006) took almost seven months. The children were busy with school and gymnastics and skating, so they didn't visit the restaurant very often as the renovation was happening.

Finally it was ready, and the family went downtown to see the new version of the family business: a moved entrance, new windows, a revised traffic flow, different placement of tables, and a whole new color scheme.

Livvy walked in, took one look, and began to cry. "I don't like it! I want our OLD restaurant! I don't want this one. I HATE it!" She cried for fifteen minutes, sobbing (big tears flowing from her lovely golden-hazel eyes). And then, as she and Burton explored the new terrain, she ran to her mother and said, "This is really nice! I love this restaurant!"

Very few people really like change, despite its inevitability. But children really don't like change. And Olivia really, really doesn't like change. But a few tears later, she adjusts to the New Reality and that becomes the solid ground on which she stands.

We adults don't have it so simple, since our ultimate learning is that the solid ground is only fleetingly solid. Even as we gratefully stamp our feet on it and say, "HERE's what I like," it is preparing its next shift. The earthquakes can be large or small, they come and go, and we eventually know that our "solid ground" is actually just another tectonic plate on the move.

Change: yet another person is gone, vanished. Get used to it. Last week I learned of the deaths of a friend's sister, a client's mother, and the husband of a dear friend. That's a lot for a single week. Here today, gone tomorrow.

Change, change. Lord give me the strength to deal with change, and the wisdom to accept that change is all I'm ever going to see.

www.anntudor.ca
http://scenesfromthejourney.blogspot.com

My New Toy

2010-10-24T06:39:00.001-07:00

Hooray! Hooray! I have a new toy and it's making me happy. Here's how it came to me. We make it a point to attend our local Junction Arts Fair every year, primarily so I can eat my fill of street food (especially the BBQ'd corn rubbed with lime and spices). This year I picked up a flyer for a "visual journaling" workshop offered by one of the exhibiting artists.

Now, I have to tell you that I hate journaling. Writers are supposed to keep a journal, but I don't. I did spend a year writing the dreaded "morning pages" recommended by Julia Cameron in The Artist's Way, but as soon as her prescribed time period was up, I stopped journaling. No more of that for me.

But, of course, I always think I should be journaling. Surely any fledgling writer needs to be keeping daily notes. Well, not me. But I was drawn to the flyer for "visual journaling" because I thought it might teach me to add drawings to a writing notebook, thus making the whole thing prettier and enticing enough to start a daily journal.

So I signed up. The workshop was small (only four of us plus the teacher). At each place setting was a complement of materials: a large sketchbook with 50 sheets of 11x14 paper. A tin of watercolors. A wide, natural-bristle brush and a small watercolor brush. Two charcoal pencils. A bottle of India ink and both a pen and a twig to dip into the ink. I hadn't expected such bounty: a starter-set of art supplies, to take home with me after the workshop!

The instructor gave us a few hints at the beginning: 1) She likes to start off with a watercolor wash, to eliminate the intimidating dead-whiteness of the page. 2) She likes to use matte medium to create a resist. And 3) she uses a hair dryer to speed the drying time between applications of paint or matte medium.

There were magazines to mine for images, if we needed a starting point. And then we were on our own, set free to play for the rest of the evening.

In our teacher's experience, doing this visual journal daily led her to great insights, to the solving of problems (both artistic and life), and to complete changes in the way she approaches her life. Obviously, the benefit comes from engaging, on a regular basis, the right side of the brain.

But for me the point of the exercise was this: I've never given myself permission to experiment in the field of the visual arts. When I was making things everyday, during my crafts period, it was all about product. I had no time to play around with process. Product was king.

So I've never had time to play with my art supplies. When I make things (cards, gifts), each one has to be a finished product. I don't allow myself the time to see what will happen if I start with an oil pastel and then watercolor over it. Or if I layer different colors, interspersed with the matte medium. No playing for me, please. I'm a serious person.

Part of the workshop was the suggestion that we commit to doing one page a day in our new sketchbook. Imagine that: a page every day. So here's what my day looks like now. Every morning, I work on a page for about half an hour, either before breakfast or just after. I sit at my table, turn on the good light, and begin playing. I date each page as I finish. I use every tool I've got: stamps, punches, fabric, colors of all kinds (acrylics, watercolours, stamp pads, gel pens, colored pencils), and the indispensable matte medium.

I have no illusions that this will change my life. Maybe it will, but that's not why I'm doing it. I'm doing it because it's a daily journal that is not painful. A written journal is an effort, something that I have to push myself to do (so I don't do it). But a visual journal is different. I start each day by engaging the right brain, and what could be more fun than that?

Every day I learn something new about how to move from a white sheet of paper to a beautiful (in the eye of this beholder) picture. It's like going to art school but without the angst. No pressure. No deadlines. Just play, play, play.

P.S. Anyone in the Toronto area who is interested in the workshop can reach the instructor at info@rhondanolan.com.