THE CONSPICUOUS AMONG US

It’s the conspicuous among us who make us believe we should be doing what they are doing: searching for their roots, or wearing orange this season, or learning everything we can about clothes, décor, wine, coffee, chocolate, cheese or the food or flavor of the month. These are people who threw away their edit button. Bloggers telling us a bit about their lives and interests is, well, interesting - very! - especially when they show us their own clever projects and photos -  but those beating us over the head with their proselytizing is another thing.

In the interest of saving time I’ve had to become a bit more selective about the blogs I follow.  When I first started blogging – writing and reading – I was like a kid in a candy store – gimme, gimme, gimme – and I delighted in it all. Now I’ve had it with many cobbled-together blogs.  The bloggers may once have had a lot to say, and they probably have strong followings, but the blog output of many of them has shrunk to a few lines strung together with a few appropriate, always quite lovely photos - almost invariably not their own - published perhaps when the fancy strikes them.  Perhaps they’re now famous and are putting out their own luscious books.  Perhaps they’re now too busy to blog but want to keep their site alive.  Perhaps I’ll drop them from my daily list because it’s not worth even the little time it takes to go to the blog and be disappointed again.

 

Not too many people read my Latelife Musings blog, so I’m grateful and delighted with those who do, especially the ones with their own great blogs who take the time out to read mine. I’m sure my complaint will go unnoticed by the blog-cobblers, but I just had to get it said. 

 

SERENDIPITY REVISITED

Here's a post from last May.  Happy Flag Day - I'm off to do some errands.

THE (LOST BUT SOMETIMES FOUND) ART OF SERENDIPITY            

 

Ah, serendipity. All by itself, the word strikes a pleasant note. We use it to mean the knack of making desirable discoveries by accident. Webster’s tells the first use of this word was by Horace Walpole (1717-92). In a letter to the American educator Horace Mann, Walpole said he formed it from the Persian fairy tale The Three Princes of Serendip, whose heroes "were always making discoveries, by accidents and sagacity, of things they were not in quest of." Serendip is an old name for Ceylon, now Sri Lanka.

Serendipity can’t be described as just dumb luck. The real secret to it is to be on the alert and ready for opportunities to do something different.  My husband and I have had many serendipitous experiences in our travels.  One fine May afternoon, way back when, after our first pub lunch and a lovely jaunt around southern England visiting Bodiam Castle, Battle (the Battle being the Battle of Hastings) and Rye, we got back to our base in Tenterden, Kent. We wandered off the High Street to the railroad station, part of the Kent and East Sussex Railway. We were admiring a lovely old train when we were approached by a charming man who asked us if we would like an adventure. Later we learned that the restoration and preservation of the light railway and its rolling stock was an entirely volunteer effort, and that part of their fund raising effort was to serve dinner in an authentically restored Pullman car. Here’s the serendipitous part: someone had had to cancel several bookings he’d made for dinner on the Wealden Pullman, and there were a few reservations on offer. We jumped at the chance.

Returning to our B & B to change into proper dinner attire, our host congratulated us on our fortune, admitting that he’d not yet had his own name come up on the waiting list. The bookings for this popular excursion, then run only on warm-weather Saturdays, were next to impossible to get. We understood why as the trip and the dinner progressed. Rolling serenely along through the countryside, seated at a table for two, we enjoyed a delicious four-course meal, served to perfection by perfectly uniformed volunteer waiters, complete with aperitifs and wines, port and cigars. We passed on the cigars. It certainly was just by accident that we turned up at the railway station at the right time, and I don’t think it took too much sagacity to take the chance for a different dining experience: we had to have diner no matter what. The picture I took of Frank, seated across the table, shows a smile of absolute delight and contentment. 

Serendipity was disembarking last from a cruise ship in Bergen, Norway, but finding ourselves first to be shown to a waiting taxi. Serendipity was arriving at the ornately Victorian Papplewick Pumping Station in Nottinghamshire on one of the few days in the year when they bring James Watt’s huge beam engines up to full, working steam.  It was deciding to go to a bullfight in St. Remy-de-Provence, and finding ourselves at a wonderful, elaborately-costumed ceremony on what turned out to be the re-opening day of the refurbished arena.

Of course we’ve missed what might have been serendipitous moments by being there too late: “you should have been here last week,” or too early: “can you stay until next week when…comes to town?” But we never dwell on what we might have been. After all, it isn’t as though we were sitting idly, twiddling our thumbs and waiting for things to happen. No, we’ve been very serendipitous in that respect.

 

WHAT DO YOU THINK THIS IS?

One June 7^th, I copied this exactly from A Femme d’Une Certain Age, one of the blogs on my daily rounds:

What Do You Think This Is?

 

 When I first saw it, I thought it was a vacuum cleaner, then I thought it was some tricked-out hair or skin or body steam machine. It is none of those things.

It's an iron. But, as you can see it's clearly more than an iron. It appears to be a complete dry cleaning pressing machine of some sort. It won the Grand Prize for innovative design at the 2013 Paris Fair.

It comes with lots of accessories, is called "Lift Pinky Pop" and is made by Lauraster. The price you may be wondering? A mere 499 Euros. Remember it's not just an iron, it is also all about design and that changes everything when you're toiling away, nest-ce pas?

 

What caught my attention was the bright pink and the LAURAstar.  Laura, that’s me! And I surely am a star – in my own little universe that is. Needless to say, I had to know more about this item. And at first I too thought it was a vacuum cleaner – I’ve got them on my mind since I recently bought a new one. But no, it’s a handy, dandy clothes care contraption. Yahoo has an advert video for it, and googling it will bring up TMI, if you’re inclined to do more research.  Whywouldya? It would take me eons of dry cleaning and ironing to justify its cost: 499 Euros? Oh, that’s about 655 US Dollars. It is available only in Europe, so western hemisphere appliance junkies will have to wait.

REMEMBRANCE OF THINGS LOST

A la recherche du temps perdu - Proust's Remembrance of Things Past,
or Times Lost, whichever way you might want to translate the title,
is a bit longer than my humble blog effort.

Do you, as I do, think about certain items you’ve lost or lost track of during your life?  Every once in a while I think of things I had over my seventy years,  fondly remembering of some of them, or really wishing I had some

others right now.

My daughters came to me by marriage, and they were already fifteen. But I have seven granddaughters, and I often wish I’d had my dolls to pass on to them. My sister and I “lost” our dolls via an overzealous Mother who decided, because we were then into our teens, that my sister and I didn’t need those dolls any more. She up and gave them to a local orphanage. I can still recall the tirade I went on because I was not pleased at all. And ooooh was she mad that I was mad! We weren’t even consulted: she just took them and gave them away. Many, many years later she thought to make it up to me by buying me one of the first Baby Beans dolls, and she told me that’s why she got the doll. By then it was all part of the past, and it didn’t make up for the loss of my beautiful Madam Alexander doll with the clothes my Mom had made, or my Amosandra doll, to name just my two favorites. I do still have the Baby Beans, as well as several other dolls I’ve accumulated in my adult years, but I still miss my childhood dolls.

Amosandra - someone else's, not mine, alas

There are a few books I miss. I miss my dragon book.  I’ve searched all over – on line or any time I was in a second-hand book store – but I’ve never found it. I don’t even remember the title of the book, but I can see the cover and the pictures in my mind’s eye. It was a story about a princess who found a baby dragon.  She was allowed to keep it as long as it didn’t use its fire.  Well, one night robbers came to the castle and the dragon used its fire to protect the princess.  Knowing it had done what was forbidden, it took itself away from the castle – and the rest of the story is how they found the dragon again.  I loved that story. I know the book was from England, so I’ve even searched there.  One day I’ll find it and I’ll probably break down in tears.  

When I was the same age as in the dragon book time, we had Christmas records, old 78’s, that were my favorites. (To this day the carols have to be sung that way, in that tempo, or they’re just wrong!) Over the years the records got chipped and cracked.  They are no longer playable, even if I had a record player, but I still have them. Yeah, I know, I’m a nut!  But one day, browsing in the CD’s in a store in the mall I came upon a re-recording of the original Robert Shaw Chorale album, Joy to the World. Well I just stood in that store, getting stares from some of the other customers, the tears just running down my face and my throat all choked up. Chokes me up now as I write just to think about that moment and how much I love that recording.  So – to end this paragraph – that is why I know I’d cry if I ever found my dragon book.

Let’s see, what else is on my list of remembered things past?  The Dutch wooden shoes I wore as a child. My Dad brought them home after the war. I had a pair to wear and a decorative pair. Gone. I outgrew the pair to wear, and the decorative pair went to that great closet in the sky. I bought ‘a pair to wear’ in Amsterdam, but I think you have to get accustomed to them from childhood – the new ones just hurt my instep after a while.

I miss three or four of my favorite dresses, none were very fancy or formal, wishing I’d just kept them in my closet to look at and just ‘have’. I’ve a turquoise silk shell and jacket that I’ve outgrown – I am, after all, a sometimes growing child! - I keep just because I love its color.

In the lost book category I’d also put B.F. Skinner’s Walden Two.  Yes, I know you can still find it, and yes, I have a copy, but losing the first two copies of the book taught me a lesson: don’t loan out your books.  Book plates do not insure you’ll ever get it back. I had to devise a system of reminders for myself to get my books back.  Over the years, trying to be gracious, I’ve loaned out other books. If I’m not really persistent in remembering to ask for them back I can kiss the books goodbye.  Unlike the dragon book, which might have gone the way of many childhood possessions, I’m not upset with the later losses because they were my own fault. How true: “Neither a borrower nor a lender be.”

CHAINSE

Needless to say, back in medieval times brassieres were
not yet invented for wearing under one's chainse,
nor did most of the ladies wear eye makeup like this.  But hey...

 

A few weeks ago I went to a lovely get-together.  Over fifty gals in our neighborhood had lunch at the Carolina Lakes Golf Club.  Lunch was great though a bit noisy, as it usually is if there is another function going on.  We were in the midst of a book club lunch and a rather large golf outing.  The course is, I’m told, though I’ve never played it, a really tough one. (I’ve always said I’d learn how to play golf when I could play at Pebble Beach! – never gonna happen, so it’s a safe thing to say.)

But the point of all this was the very interesting after lunch speaker, Bree Broderick. She’s a Mom and a chef and a lot of other things, but she is especially interested in medieval and Renaissance dress. Her talk was so interesting to me, especially since those are my favorite periods for historic fiction. I suppose the stories I read are geared to modern sensibilities. Bree, who specializes in women’s dress, said usually those gals had one chemise or chainse, an undergarment, and they wore it forever: I mean to work, to eat, to sleep, to very occasionally bathe.  Most folks didn’t have two of them, one had to do. O.K. are you thinking what I’m thinking? Must have smelled just divine in those ages.

Want to make one for yourself? Easy peasy!

more here - if you speak French, though

measurements are measurments in any language.

And just in case you are interested, here's a

glossary of medieval clothing terms.

Very interesting!

A WAY WITH WORDS - AGAIN

July 1978, Watkins Glen

(This essay was originally posted in March 2011. It's been a busy week so I decided to post it again.)

In 1892 an early version of the Pledge of Allegiance appeared in The Youth's Companion magazine. It read: "I pledge allegiance to my Flag and the Republic for which it stands; one nation indivisible, with liberty and justice for all."

I give a silent chuckle when I say our Pledge of Allegiance, any version, with or without ‘under God’, because I am reminded of my husband’s hearing one phrase of it as ‘and to the Republic for Richard Stands.’ He also remembers a sign he saw on the way to a scout camp in the mountains: Walter Aviable. Turns out the sign said ‘Water Available.’

The same thing happened to us at the bank where I worked for years. The bank president’s secretary wanted the file on Lester Attabush, referred to in a letter to the boss. We looked high and low for hours: couldn’t find it. Finally, in came one of the old bank hands, the one who taught me a debit from a credit and all things financial in between. He took one look at the letter she held and said: “Kathleen, you dummy, it says‘see letter attached!’”

Richard Stands=for which it stands, Walter Aviable=Water Available, Lester Attabush=letter attached. These are what are now called ‘mondegreens’, and I’d bet you’ve seen or heard some at one time in your life. Some are misread, but most mondegreens are misheardwords. Merriam-Webster’s now lists it as: mondegreen: word or phrase that results from a mishearing of something said or sung - from the mishearing in a Scottish ballad of “laid him on the green” as “Lady Mondegreen.” There are websites devoted to mondegreens, even Mondegreen-of-the-Day calendars. We all know that “there’s a bathroom on the right,” and “gladly the cross-eyed bear” because “A soft dancer turneth away wrath.”

People like mondegreens because they are a laugh at themselves in what they hear or see. To have a laugh at someone else you can look up spoonerisms. Most spoonerisms start out as spoken words. The switching of syllables of a set of words, deliberate or accidental, is named after a Reverend Spooner who was prone to using them inadvertently. As a Warden of New College, Oxford, William Archibald Spooner was a prominent man in Victorian England, so his tendency was widely known. In reference to the reigning Victoria, he is quoted as saying “Let us glaze our rasses to the queer old Dean” - there’s also a mondegreen there if you really listen. He is also known to have said “It is kisstomery to cuss the bride” and“Mardon me padam, this pie is occupewed.”

Churchill wrote The History of the English Speaking Peoples, often mistakenly referred to as Peeking Speeples, but who wrote Beeping Sleauty? That was Frederick Chase Taylor, better known as Colonel Stoopnagle on radio. He would tell fairy tales full of spoonerisms, and Hee Haw’s Archie Campbell would later do it on TV.

Some phrases such as ‘smart feller’ or ‘shining wit’ are deliberately un-spoonerized, and some, such as ‘bass ackwards’, are spoonerized deliberately. Shame on them! Getting into spoonerisms, usually the reversal of first letters or syllables, gets you into the reversal of internal ones: British politician Sir Stafford Cripps was once introduced as“Sir Stifford Crapps.” From “the Duck and Doochess of Windsor” we go to one of the most noted reversal of syllables: radio announcer Harry von Zell, probably to his eternal mortification, after saying it correctly many times during a tribute piece, referred to our 31^stPresident as “Hoobert Heever.”

Starrel, starrel little twink, how high up you am I think. I’m not under the alfluence of incohol, although some thinkle peep I am. Verbal blunders, imagined in mondegreens or actual in spoonerisms, are always good for a small dose of a medicinal laugh.

 

SIDETRACKED

My Grandfather

I got sidetracked yesterday.  A wonderful surprise arrived in the day’s mail: a book and a letter from a man in Germany who, it turns out, is the son of one of my mother’s cousins. His grandfather and mine, two of ten children, were brothers. I’m not sure what the technical term is – first cousin once removed, second cousin? – it’s neither here nor there.  He’d written a book in German, about his family: Dietz und Drucker.  I’m on the Drucker side.  Turns out he’d met some of our Drucker family here and they’d contributed to his research efforts.  As a wonderful Thank You he published a book in English about his Drucker family and ancestry.  Now he wants to update the book with more information about his American cousins. There were eight of them, and my grandparents had thirty-three grandchildren, so there’s a lot of information to be collected.

 

I got started first by answering his letter with an email, and attaching two of the old pictures I’d already scanned in. This morning so far, after receiving a wonderful email reply from him, I’ve been taking pictures of the large pictures I can’t scan, and scanning in the smaller stuff. My brother has our family album and I’ve emailed him to get him to join in on the project.

I’ve stayed in touch with only a few of my cousins, and this project is really bringing the memories flooding back.  It is wonderful to see pictures of them. Some of the gals have white hair!  Whew – so do I!  We’re all getting old!

 

So that’s why my usual Tuesday posting went missing – I don’t apologize!

 

My Grandmother

 

YOU'D GO CRAZY

TOO MUCH STUFF - TOO MUCH INFORMATION

 

Once, when I annoyed someone because I knew the correct answer on a quickie quiz, they muttered “know it all!” Well, I do have a lot of relatively useless trivia – such as where we get the concept of trivia – stored in my (alleged) mind. But it’s been said that if you knew it all you’d go crazy.

Just think of all there is to know – everything from the exact amount of pi* to the last time your neighbor went to the bathroom; the bloom time of every daffodil to the time of the next eclipse; the function of the microorganisms in your body to what is in the center of a black hole. There is too much to know.

 

Recently I read an article in Foreign Affairs on The Rise of Big Data. The article says that if all the available information today were put on CDs there would be five piles of them reaching up to the moon. TMI, TMI. Even knowing that TMI means Too Much Information is TMI. Like spiders, they are saving everything that hits the web, from learned essays to the latest tweets. I’m so glad that none of my own thoughts about day to day happenings will stick to that sticky web – I don’t post on Facebook and I don’t tweet. To me this is all ‘evidence’ junk: evidence of something done, something won, or a presence somewhere thought significant to someone.  I’m not social enough for social media. I know that the vast majority of people care less about what I do, though this blog will probably make the cut.

I suppose all this stuff has to be saved because one never knows when a biographer might want to know what his subject wrote about the events on a certain day, or what plans a mad bomber hatched, but really, all that stuff is junk.  Would we be better off now if Einstein or Hitler or Alexander the Great had tweeted? How ‘bout if Lucretia Borgia or Thomas Jefferson were on Facebook? We’ll never know – and I’m so glad.

 

*Pi, I’ve now learned, is infinite. Around the same time I read the article on the rise of big data, I came upon an article from Slate called Your Life in Pi. Speaking of TMI, the Pi article tells me "Pi is an infinite, nonrepeating decimal - meaning that every possible number combination exists somewhere in pi. Converted into ASCII text, somewhere in that infinite string of digits is the name of every person you will ever love, the date, time, and manner of your death, and the answers to all the great questions of the universe. Converted into a bitmap, somewhere in that infinite string of digits is a pixel-perfect representation of the first thing you saw on this earth, the last thing you will see before your life leaves you, and all the moments, momentous and mundane, that will occur between those two points. All information that has ever existed or will ever exist, the DNA of every being in the universe, EVERYTHING: all contained in the ratio of a circumference and a diameter."  Whew!  Let someone else convert things into ASCII – I went pi-eyed just googling that.

I can’t begin to know when or even if our store of information will outgrow our ability to store it, but I think I’ll not be around to worry about it.

SHRINKING TUNA

Egad!  I just saw an ad for tuna – Chicken of the Sea.  I must admit that I haven’t yet seen the actual item on the shelf, but it is 4, count ’em: FOUR! ounces, probably  - I could almost guarantee it! - packed in the same size can. Remember way back in the not too distant past when tuna was 7 ounces? (I do know there were once 8 oz. cans too. But the slip from 8 to 7 eluded me.) I still have in my pantry one special 6 ounce can, and several 5’s – but a 7 ounce can of tuna is a thing of the past.  Just think of any of the recipes you and I might have that have that call for a 7, even 8 ounce can of tuna – now we’ll have to double the 4.

It’s like this with a lot of grocery items. Remember when a pound can of coffee weighed 16 ounces? The same size can now holds 11.5 ounces.  They say (you know who ‘they’ are) it makes the same amount of coffee. Oh, really?  And now a half gallon of ice cream weighs 1.5 quarts (unless you get Trader Joe’s Vanilla – which, as my unsolicited testimonial, is absolutely creamy delicious – and that is the whole half gallon.) And a lot of ice cream these days – usually the crazy mixed variety – is called frozen dessert, not ice cream, but that’s food for another rant.

So, on to my perennial question: why not just leave the same amount – tuna, coffee, crackers, ricotta, ice cream, whatever – and raise the price to cover the costs. Gasp! Raise the price? That’s not good for business.

We know, for example, that meat prices have risen, but a pound of ground round is a pound of ground round: the scales usually don’t lie. A dozen eggs are still a dozen. It appears that they can’t mess much with items that aren’t in packages: fresh meat, eggs, vegetables, fruit and flowers. so the prices have to go up. But we are lulled into thinking that many grocery shelf item prices have stayed the same because they can get away with the fine print on a box or can – or cheese package: Kraft Cracker Barrel was originally 10 ounces – now its 8. We just reach out and grab the familiar item from its usual place on the shelf.

And, just as an aside, think of the resource savings if the tuna or coffee or crackers came in a smaller package.  Ah well, c’est la vie these days.

 

Here's the ad from Harris Teeter:

Chicken of the Sea

Solid Light Tuna - No Drain         

4.00 oz

($1.50 VIC Card Members)
Sale price valid through Tuesday, May 21, 2013

Reg. $1.99

$0.50 oz

$1.99

ALL GOOD WISHES FOR THE SEVENTEENTH OF MAY

This will be a busy day for me – I've a luncheon to attend; it’s Syttende Mai, Norwegian Constitution Day, the day when they celebrate the signing of their own constitution and their independence from Sweden; it’s my son and daughter-in-law’s anniversary: Zen Hugs to them; and, celebrated according to the Chinese lunar calendar, it’s the day for this year’s celebration of Buddha’s birthday.

As always on Syttende Mai we will be flying our Norwegian colors – red, white and blue, of course – and, this year, having Norwegian kjøttkaker, their meat cakes. I use a variation of Andreas Viestad’s recipe. To me they’re better than any Swedish meatballs, and served with lots of lingonberry preserves they are just delicious. Sometimes in the past we’ve had seafood au gratin or fiskefarse.  Fiskefarse, even fiske bröd, are better ways to say fiskepudding, fish pudding. Doesn’t sound too appetizing does it? We Americans conjure up images of a sweet for after dinner, the Europeans think savory. But it is really delicious. I’ve put the recipe on Latelife Recipes.

 

Andreas Viestad's version of Norwegian kjøttkaker -
have to have those lingonberries!

Buddha’s birthday brings my dear Canadian friend to mind. Her wonderful blog is here. Read her blogs and you’ll know why Buddha’s birthday brings her to mind. Actually, there are a lot of things that bring her to mind. As I write this on the 15^th she is having an operation, maybe this very minute. I’m regularly sending warm Zen Hugs thoughts up to her for a successful outcome and a speedy recovery.



At the Jogye Temple in Seoul
This colorful picture is from the BBC

It is also the birthday of, among many other notables, Eric Satie.  So to celebrate his day I shall play the haunting Gymnopédies while I prepare those Norwegian kjøttkaker and chant om mani padme hum.

 

 

 

 

NATIONAL STRAWBERRY MONTH

 

Ah yes – May is National Strawberry month.  Here in the Carolinas we get

lots of luscious strawberries – a deliciously welcome change from the

sometimes partially white and tasteless things that are the winter offerings in the supermarkets.

 

Some of the most wonderful, hugest strawberries I ever had were the daily fare in restaurants and hostelries in France and Italy in the spring. I think the deliciousness of them was akin to the deliciousness of hot dogs at the ball park: location, location, location. But the best tasting strawberries ever, big or small, were right outside our door when we lived in upstate New York – that is when we could beat the beasties, the chipmunks, squirrels and birds, to them.  I didn’t plant them: they came, along with my favorite Johnny-jump-ups, from God. They came in on the wind - or as a ‘gift’ from those same beasties - and planted themselves here and there in the garden. When they began to ripen I’d get out there early in the morning and harvest a handful. No bigger than maybe a baby lima bean, they were absolutely delicious on our cereal in the morning. I had better luck with the wild strawberries than I had with the wild blueberries or hazelnuts.  Those grew in the woods further from the house.  I’d see that they were almost ready to pick, but when I remembered to get back to them they were gone!  I do believe the vigilant beasties deserved them more than I did.

 

Tomorrow the Fresh Produce Club has its Market Day here in Sun City Carolina Lakes.  I’ll be taking my empty quart boxes back to refill for this week’s supply of local strawberries.  I’ll be so sad when strawberry season is over – but the fresh peaches will soon follow.

 

WHAT DO YOU DO?

 

It was once taboo to ask a woman her age, and under some circumstances it still is. To that one I’d like to add “What do you do?” Sharon Santoni, in rebel mode at My French Country Home, got me wondering today. Lately she’s often been asked “What do you do?” – as in how do you make a living? Unless a gal is extremely gainfully employed as an extremely well paid executive and/or celebrity, with oodles of help to do all that she has to do, there is no short job description. The quickie comeback would be: "at which hour of the day?"

Mimicking Sharon’s list, depending on the time of day or day of the week I am chief cook and bottle washer, housemaid, laundress, chauffeur, supply officer, bookkeeper - like the beat, the list goes on. At my age I’ve added caregiver – the younger gals can usually add teacher to their list, although most of us are on a life-long quest to better our children.  Throw in some seasonal occupations such as gardener and some leisure occupations such as reading or crafting, and there you have it.

I really don’t mean to disparage my husband – you know how proud I am of all he’s done – but these past weeks when he’s been out of commission the only extra jobs I’ve had are designated driver and to take out the trash. The rest of what happens in the house goes on like clockwork. Minor mishaps I can handle. Should any major maladjustment arise I know help is – as it is for most women – only a phone call away.

In this community of “active adults” it’s easiest to ask a person where’s they’re from – relatively few are from the Carolinas – and it’s easy to ask a man what he did before he retired. But unless the information is offered gratis, or if she’s introduced by someone else who includes her curriculum vitae, we never ask what a gal did before she moved here or retired because we know what she did, we know what she still does: a lot of work!

 

IMAGINARY FRIENDS

My doll Deadly (I made her) and some of her pals.

The blurb on Sunday’s New York Times webpage was this:

Opinion

A Child’s Wild Kingdom

By JON MOOALLEM

Why do our kids still have imaginary animal friends?

 Ha! Imaginary friends! The article was about how children usually have animal figures as imaginary friends and how those children, little animals themselves, relate to the animal world as they grow up.

It has been my observation that it is usually the oldest or only child in the family who has imaginary friends.  The younger ones have the older ones as friends and usually don’t need imaginary ones.  My oldest granddaughter had great imaginary friends: Dench and Shari, and a third one whose name I’ve forgotten. It was a delight to be sitting somewhere near her but where she couldn’t see us, and she would interact with her friends.

My own imaginary friends, I was told later by my mother, were Jesus, Mary and Leadus. Leadus? I guess it could be spelled that way: I got it from “Lead us not into temptation.”  I guess I must have told her that at one time. ‘cause that’s what she told me. Really.

Deadly, in red, with the whole gang.

 

MARTHA STEWART AND I...

 

    …are both 71. Both blonde – and that’s where the similarities end. This past Sunday’s Parade magazine had her and her age on the cover.  (Actually, she’s a year or so older. She’s 71; I’m only in my 71^st year.)

 

I do know from past reading that she sleeps far less than I do – maybe four hours a night, so she’s packed a lot more activity into her life than I’d ever dreamed of when I was asleep and she was awake and productive.   She’s a gal who knows what she wants and knows how to get it, and I admire her for that. 

 

Darn, I wish I’d saved all my issues of Living – I was a charter subscriber.  After a while I no longer wanted to give all those issues house room, so I went through them, cut out some of her greatest ideas, and recycled the rest. I’ve rarely disagreed with her methods, and I applaud the easy-to-follow way the magazine presents to those who’ve really got no clue how to do things like polish silver, fold a sheet, and keep their clothes. I know of many gals whose mothers never taught them basics like those.

 

And Martha is a lot more fit than I am – I’ll have to work on that!

 

My preferred form of exercise.

 

THE SCARF

 

Sometimes I am such a slob!  Last night I got lasagna sauce on my oldest, most favorite scarf.  I’ve had it for over fifty years, and it is a large silk square map of the London Underground.  Frank had seen it many times over the years, but it never struck him as being significant until son Joe, a frequent London visitor, said it was probably worth a bit of money. (Who cares? My heirs can sell it – I want to wear it now.)  So – I’d quickly treated the sauce stains so they wouldn’t set and I washed the scarf this morning. On my way into the bathroom to hang the damp scarp over the towel rack, Frank said “Where did you get that scarf?”  And therein lies an interesting tale.

When my sister was a senior in high school she did a bit of light housekeeping for a young, chic, single co-worker of our Mom’s. This gal was getting married and had amassed quite a wardrobe.  Come the time when the honeymoon was over and they began living in this posh home on Old Brookville, New York, the new husband decided he didn’t like any of this gal’s trousseau.  He told her to give it all away. And that’s what she did: she gave it all to Karen.  Both of them were tall and slim and the clothes fit my sister to a T. I was many inches shorter and, as I am still, on the chunky side, so I got some of the things that didn’t have sizes.  Things like an absolutely fabulous red fox fur hat that I wore skiing for years - this was back in 1960, before all the fur foofaraw; a wonderful, huge wicker pocketbook with leather lid and handle; and The Scarf.  I just love the scarf.

But can you imagine the situation? He took her out and re-dressed her from top to toe - well, to the ankles:her shoes were acceptable. It’s the stuff that Silhouette romances are made of – gorgeous gal, handsome guy, lots of money - except that they didn’t live happily ever after.  She shoulda known something was a bit off kilter.  Two lovely children later they were divorced. 

MINIMALISM AND ME

 

While perusing an article in Slate, Is Minimalism Really Sustainable?, I remembered an idea I had years ago.  The premise was this: You are going on a rocket ship to somewhere. You will be provided with whatever you need in the way of food and clothing. You may bring along only ten items and those must fit in the backpack provided.

I thought about this for days. I got me thinking seriously about what was important to me. What would I have brought? Books, of course, but which ones? This was before the advent of eBooks, but even then I was sure that, should I have any time to read in my busy, interesting new life, they’d have a way for me to read. But still I wanted a few of my favorite books in the bag.  I did include a picture or two of my family – at that time I had no one picture of all of us. Oh yes, the little figurine I’d purchased with some of my first babysitting money – I still have it all these years later, and it’s still on my list. Sometimes, to this day, I remember and try to come up with a new set of nine more things. I say ‘try’ because I’m stuck at just two or three.

I’ve always loved historic fiction, especially that set in medieval times. The characters in much of what I read, unless they were royalty and had trunks full of stuff, had few possessions. If disaster struck and they lost everything they lost little – or it seemed that way in the books: the folks just kept on keepin’ on. Many folks had just the clothes on their backs – with maybe an extra tunic or dress for festive days – and what could fit in a purse or scrip.  Folks had little to pass on to their children.

Our parents passed on just a few precious things to us, and we’ll have those things and even more to pass on in turn to our children. Our stuff has accumulated over the years, and the kids are acquiring stuff even as I write, so eventually their stuff will have stuff.

I believe, given the funds, I become a minimalist. While I do have some very nice possessions, I look around and know that I could very easily do without most of them.  Then I think that rather than becoming a minimalist I am just getting lazier: fewer possessions mean less to take care of.

Being a minimalist these days - or at least what I'd like to call mimimalism for myself - requires a healthy bank balance. Had I oodles of cash I could get myself to a ritzy retirement home where they’d clean for me, straighten up my space, do my laundry, and serve lovely meals in the main dining room, leaving me to read to my heart’s content.  Perhaps, not wanting too much scheduled for the mornings, I’d rustle up breakfast for myself when I deign to arise and face the world.  Maybe I’d go for a snack in the afternoon.

There’s a new retirement ‘home’ opening a few miles north of us – I think I’ll check it out.



My very maximialistic desk.

BUSINESS CARDS

Business cards these days are ubiquitous as fast food. Vista Print will print up 250 for you for just $10.00 – sometimes less.  When we moved south I took them up on their offer: new house, new phones, nice cards, why not?

 

My regular readers know that I buy books.  Most of what I buy are used books. A recent purchase came with two business cards as bookmarks – bookmarks? I wonder.  One was a gal from the Desert Research Institute of the University of Nevada in Reno. The other was a guy from the Department of Water Resources in Boise, Idaho.  I could make up a scenario about a gal and a guy meeting, but then a third person had their cards in the book.  Where did that person meet the other two? I say that it had to be a convention – but one was in personnel, the other was an ecologist. They are related in that a desert needs water? – maybe. What sort of gathering would bring in those two people?  I can’t jump to conclusions because where will never be evidence enough for me to conclude anything from just two business cards. ‘Tis a puzzlement, and one that tickles my mind.