Today, if she were still alive, my mother would be 100 years old. I am glad that she is no longer struggling in her body, as she surely would be if she had lived this long. But I do miss her. I wonder what she would make of the Internet and Facebook. Had that come along in her lifetime, I am sure she would have used it well to connect with the women whom she had gone to high school and then nursing school with in the 1920's and 1930's.
She lived through the watersheds of the Great War (World War I), World War II, the Great Depression and Vatican II. She knew food shortages and rationing--I remember her stories about adding food coloring to the margarine to make it look like butter and the shortage of sugar during World War II. I am sure that she and her mother must have planted a Victory Garden.
She loved pretty things--I still have a plum-velvet gown that she wore to go dancing and several vintage bags that speak "roaring twenties" when I take them out of my drawers now and hold them in my hands.
Mama made the best lemon-meringue pie that I have ever eaten. So much so that neither of her daughters even try to replicate it. She also made stuffed cabbage and apple dumplings, good German dishes that filled a cold winter's day kitchen with warmth and wonderful smells.
I remember "helping" her to make a meatloaf when I was about four. Her patience was amazing. I also remember wanting to imitate her by ironing--I was allowed to start with the dish towels, pillow cases and Papa's handkerchiefs and work up gradually to more complicated items. Eventually, I was accomplished enough to use the Mangle not only for flat things but even for my father's dress shirts.
Mama was an accomplished musician, singing in the church choir and playing the piano. The piano has not been played for many years, but will move to Phoenix soon, I hope, there to be played by her great-grandchildren.
She would have loved the picture-sharing of digital photography and the Internet that makes it possible to see a new-born baby or the Christmas celebration almost immediately. Her daughters have not learned how to use Skype yet, but I think she would be using it.
I live in the house she lived in. I cook with her pots and pans, bread pan and tools. While I have added some things of my own, there is a continuity here that I love. I love picking up tools that either of my parents used and having a sense of connection of my hands to their hands. I still have the yellow Pyrex bowl that Mama used to mix that meatloaf in that I helped to make when I was four.
The furniture in the living room is the same--some of it belonged to my Grandmother. It has become "antique", simply by lasting for so long. I like thinking about Mama and her Mama when I go into my living room.
When my mother was a child, Gregorian Chant was the norm for the liturgy of the Catholic church. The school, St. Mary's, that Mama attended as a child, had its own prayer book for the children. I have that book. I also have her beautiful First Communion prayer book and a collection of missals that she treasured. She and Papa were both grateful to find a Gregorian Mass in the seventies, and I am grateful that community is still here.
I wonder what she would make of today's culture, all the media blur, the noise and distractions and especially the incivility. I remember both of my parents for their courtesy and kindness.
So I remember you my dear, today. One hundred years is a long time indeed. I am grateful for this lady who was my mother. Grateful to be alive to remember her, too.
Showing posts with label remembering. Show all posts
Showing posts with label remembering. Show all posts
Friday, September 10, 2010
Tuesday, June 8, 2010
Remembering
Today, I have been remembering my father, who died eleven years ago today. He was the soul of patience and kindness and one of the most devout (although private about it) Catholics I have ever known. I still miss him, although I think it is fair to say that I no longer grieve except in the general sense perhaps, that grieving, like original sin, is a part of the human condition.
I lit a candle for him on Gratefulness.org http://bit.ly/9e9ZxN Gratefulness is one of my all time favorite web sites. I was intrigued the very first time that I found it that it is possible to light the candle by clicking on the link--and then the flame flickers! It is lovely.
Papa was a handsome man, with the good looks known as "black Irish"--dark, dark brown hair with red and gold highlights, thick, curly hair and green eyes. He also had long, dark eyelashes. Mama commented on both the hair and the eyelashes in a kind of sighing, life-isn't-fair-tone, that men had all the luck. (Of course, I am sure that both attributes had helped attract her to him in the first place!)
He was not tall, but he was strong. Working after school and on weekends while he was young unloading groceries at the store's dock and stocking shelves had done for him what gym workouts do for young men today. Shoveling snow and using a push mower on the lawns of our houses as well as walking the dog kept him in shape until emphysema began to assert itself when he was in his sixties.
Shortly before I had polio, Papa was teaching me to ride a two-wheeled bike, with the "training wheels" gradually being raised on the back of it and I remember that Fall that he was teaching me to roller skate as well. He walked backwards, gently holding my hands, while I skated towards him until I could let go and then he was simply there to lend me confidence that he would catch me if I fell.
"Confidence that he would catch me if I fell", that sums up a lot about the the good fatherly relationship that he had with both his daughters. He was there for us in so many ways that we didn't even realize then, for we took it as normal that both parents would be there, but that now we look back from the vantage point of aging and see it for the tremendous gift that it was.
He took me to the airport with all my trunks and suitcases and just plain stuff when I left home for graduate school in Chicago. A few years earlier he had proudly walked my sister down the aisle of the little church we loved so much in Palo Alto, watching a few days later as her new husband's car and the u-haul it pulled rounded the corner and they drove out of sight, beginning the journey of their new life together in Ohio.
So many years later, eleven years ago this week, we all came together again as the choir he loved, and that I had once sung with, sang him home to his new life after death. I do not believe in eternal "rest", since I think it is too passive. I do hope for eternal rejoicing and I hope that includes a good bit of remembrance and reminiscing. (Papa was also blessed with the Irish gift of gab and a great story-teller.)
I don't believe that our culture values fatherhood enough, and I think that I have written about that before, here in this blog. I can remember that Papa did not like the sit-coms that were popular in the late 50's and early 60's because they made the fathers look like such dummies--or even fall-guys for the patient and always right wife, or the too smart kid. He most certainly did not fit that model!
I am grateful today for the life of this good man and the great gift of family life that I was given as a child. Grateful too for the way in which my parents instilled the old-fashioned virtues by living them every day in their marriage and their relationship to us.
It is good to have had such a father.
Frederick James Manor
February 16, 1920-June 8, 1999
Requiescat in Pace
Rejoice with the angels forever.
I lit a candle for him on Gratefulness.org http://bit.ly/9e9ZxN Gratefulness is one of my all time favorite web sites. I was intrigued the very first time that I found it that it is possible to light the candle by clicking on the link--and then the flame flickers! It is lovely.
Papa was a handsome man, with the good looks known as "black Irish"--dark, dark brown hair with red and gold highlights, thick, curly hair and green eyes. He also had long, dark eyelashes. Mama commented on both the hair and the eyelashes in a kind of sighing, life-isn't-fair-tone, that men had all the luck. (Of course, I am sure that both attributes had helped attract her to him in the first place!)
He was not tall, but he was strong. Working after school and on weekends while he was young unloading groceries at the store's dock and stocking shelves had done for him what gym workouts do for young men today. Shoveling snow and using a push mower on the lawns of our houses as well as walking the dog kept him in shape until emphysema began to assert itself when he was in his sixties.
Shortly before I had polio, Papa was teaching me to ride a two-wheeled bike, with the "training wheels" gradually being raised on the back of it and I remember that Fall that he was teaching me to roller skate as well. He walked backwards, gently holding my hands, while I skated towards him until I could let go and then he was simply there to lend me confidence that he would catch me if I fell.
"Confidence that he would catch me if I fell", that sums up a lot about the the good fatherly relationship that he had with both his daughters. He was there for us in so many ways that we didn't even realize then, for we took it as normal that both parents would be there, but that now we look back from the vantage point of aging and see it for the tremendous gift that it was.
He took me to the airport with all my trunks and suitcases and just plain stuff when I left home for graduate school in Chicago. A few years earlier he had proudly walked my sister down the aisle of the little church we loved so much in Palo Alto, watching a few days later as her new husband's car and the u-haul it pulled rounded the corner and they drove out of sight, beginning the journey of their new life together in Ohio.
So many years later, eleven years ago this week, we all came together again as the choir he loved, and that I had once sung with, sang him home to his new life after death. I do not believe in eternal "rest", since I think it is too passive. I do hope for eternal rejoicing and I hope that includes a good bit of remembrance and reminiscing. (Papa was also blessed with the Irish gift of gab and a great story-teller.)
I don't believe that our culture values fatherhood enough, and I think that I have written about that before, here in this blog. I can remember that Papa did not like the sit-coms that were popular in the late 50's and early 60's because they made the fathers look like such dummies--or even fall-guys for the patient and always right wife, or the too smart kid. He most certainly did not fit that model!
I am grateful today for the life of this good man and the great gift of family life that I was given as a child. Grateful too for the way in which my parents instilled the old-fashioned virtues by living them every day in their marriage and their relationship to us.
It is good to have had such a father.
Frederick James Manor
February 16, 1920-June 8, 1999
Requiescat in Pace
Rejoice with the angels forever.
Thursday, February 4, 2010
Remembering my Godmother
My godmother, Mary Catherine (Mertes) Walker, died Jan 23, 2010. She was born August 31, 1917. World War I had less than three months to run its course in Armistice in November. She was twelve years old, not quite ready for high school when the stock market crashed in 1929. When it came time for High School, Mary Kate, as she was known throughout her lifetime, attended Notre Dame, the same school that her first-cousin, Helen Rose (Mertes) Manor had attended before her. (Decades later, my niece Jennifer also attended that high school and took great pride in looking up her predecessors in the archives of the school newspaper.)
I seem to remember that Mary Kate took a secretarial course after High School and she was able to find work in spite of the depression and the advent of World War II. Shortly after the war she married Charles Walker, "Charlie" and they settled down to the tasks of raising a family--six children, five girls and one boy.
I remember this family well from my own childhood in Toledo and the time that my sister and I spent several days with them while our parents supervised the loading of all our belongings unto a moving van and the cleaning and closing of our little house prior to our own great trek across the continent in the 1955 Chevy Bel Air sedan that I sold a few years ago to someone who was eager to restore it.
I have been thinking of Mary Kate for the last ten days. How many loads of laundry did it take, hauled up and down flights of stairs to keep a family of eight clean and dressed with towels and bedding to boot? Please remember that in those days most of the clothes and all of the linen--even the kitchen dish towels --needed ironing. (And on Saturdays, my godmother took her turn bringing the church linens she had also found the time to launder to the church where she joined several other women in cleaning the sacristy and setting out the linen for Masses the next day.)
How many pounds of potatoes did she peel and cakes did she bake in the years that it took to raise a family of six children? Not to mention the children and grandchildren. In addition, like the church laundry, there would have also been baking for the church bake sales and cooking for the potlucks, spaghetti dinners and fish frys that every church holds to raise funds. That doesn't include the casseroles delivered to people in the parish when illness or death struck a house.
Over the last decade Mary Kate and I talked on the phone occasionally, not frequently enough. I drew on her deep faith and quiet strength to go forward with my own life. She told me, "If you fall asleep while you are saying your prayers, your guardian Angel finishes them for you." (Does it count if you meant to say your prayers, but fall asleep reading yet another mystery novel from the library, because you have to get them all finished before the library volunteer brings some more?)
Like my father, she never had an unkind word to say about anyone or anything. "If you can't say something good about someone, don't say anything," was a watch word that she lived by. Like my parents, too, she lived the everyday virtue of charity in her kindness, courtesy and service to others.
Last week, partly out of necessity, and partly, I think because I was remembering Mary Kate and my mother too and pondering how much work these women quietly did everyday to make our lives glad, I found myself in a frenzy of "multi-tasking" household chores. One afternoon I had bread in the bread machine (no bread machine in the 1950's), laundry in both the washer and the dryer (no dryer until the mid-1950's) and muffins in the oven. At one point I almost muffed the muffins--forgot they were in the oven and they nearly burned. In between, I washed dishes. Nothing compared to the dishes Mary Kate, with eight people in the house, washed everyday.
By the time I ate my supper that night, I had appetite, felt that I had earned it and savored it, simple as it was. (Tomato soup and muffins.) I thought about housework, including cooking, as I have for the past year or so, as the foundation to the practice of the virtue of humility. Just as kindness and courtesy are the foundation of the virtue of charity.
Most of us are not called upon to practice heroic virtue. Still finding the virtue in homely things may keep us well enough in body and in spirit to live a long and happy life. Saying the rosary every day, (or a comparable practice) as I suspect my godmother did isn't a bad idea either.
I am grateful for the life of my godmother and the lives of my parents and others whom I miss who have gone before me. I miss her and I will continue to miss her along with Mama and Papa. It was a simpler life in someways; I have nostalgia for those long gone days, partly because I was a child then. (Perhaps that is another blog post.) Remembering Mary Kate and my parents will give me the foundation for continuing my own life in this all too modern century that I live in.
I seem to remember that Mary Kate took a secretarial course after High School and she was able to find work in spite of the depression and the advent of World War II. Shortly after the war she married Charles Walker, "Charlie" and they settled down to the tasks of raising a family--six children, five girls and one boy.
I remember this family well from my own childhood in Toledo and the time that my sister and I spent several days with them while our parents supervised the loading of all our belongings unto a moving van and the cleaning and closing of our little house prior to our own great trek across the continent in the 1955 Chevy Bel Air sedan that I sold a few years ago to someone who was eager to restore it.
I have been thinking of Mary Kate for the last ten days. How many loads of laundry did it take, hauled up and down flights of stairs to keep a family of eight clean and dressed with towels and bedding to boot? Please remember that in those days most of the clothes and all of the linen--even the kitchen dish towels --needed ironing. (And on Saturdays, my godmother took her turn bringing the church linens she had also found the time to launder to the church where she joined several other women in cleaning the sacristy and setting out the linen for Masses the next day.)
How many pounds of potatoes did she peel and cakes did she bake in the years that it took to raise a family of six children? Not to mention the children and grandchildren. In addition, like the church laundry, there would have also been baking for the church bake sales and cooking for the potlucks, spaghetti dinners and fish frys that every church holds to raise funds. That doesn't include the casseroles delivered to people in the parish when illness or death struck a house.
Over the last decade Mary Kate and I talked on the phone occasionally, not frequently enough. I drew on her deep faith and quiet strength to go forward with my own life. She told me, "If you fall asleep while you are saying your prayers, your guardian Angel finishes them for you." (Does it count if you meant to say your prayers, but fall asleep reading yet another mystery novel from the library, because you have to get them all finished before the library volunteer brings some more?)
Like my father, she never had an unkind word to say about anyone or anything. "If you can't say something good about someone, don't say anything," was a watch word that she lived by. Like my parents, too, she lived the everyday virtue of charity in her kindness, courtesy and service to others.
Last week, partly out of necessity, and partly, I think because I was remembering Mary Kate and my mother too and pondering how much work these women quietly did everyday to make our lives glad, I found myself in a frenzy of "multi-tasking" household chores. One afternoon I had bread in the bread machine (no bread machine in the 1950's), laundry in both the washer and the dryer (no dryer until the mid-1950's) and muffins in the oven. At one point I almost muffed the muffins--forgot they were in the oven and they nearly burned. In between, I washed dishes. Nothing compared to the dishes Mary Kate, with eight people in the house, washed everyday.
By the time I ate my supper that night, I had appetite, felt that I had earned it and savored it, simple as it was. (Tomato soup and muffins.) I thought about housework, including cooking, as I have for the past year or so, as the foundation to the practice of the virtue of humility. Just as kindness and courtesy are the foundation of the virtue of charity.
Most of us are not called upon to practice heroic virtue. Still finding the virtue in homely things may keep us well enough in body and in spirit to live a long and happy life. Saying the rosary every day, (or a comparable practice) as I suspect my godmother did isn't a bad idea either.
I am grateful for the life of my godmother and the lives of my parents and others whom I miss who have gone before me. I miss her and I will continue to miss her along with Mama and Papa. It was a simpler life in someways; I have nostalgia for those long gone days, partly because I was a child then. (Perhaps that is another blog post.) Remembering Mary Kate and my parents will give me the foundation for continuing my own life in this all too modern century that I live in.
Monday, August 17, 2009
Journeys Taken
Fifty years ago today, on August 17, 1959 my family arrived in the Bay Area in our 1955 Chevy Bel Air, a green and white two-door sedan with a fully loaded car top carrier and an equally loaded trunk. (Ah, the capacity of that trunk! ) We had spent the night in Virginia City, Nevada, an historic silver mining town. I remember a Polar Bear mounted in a glass case--something that was rather shocking then and would be utterly appalling, if not actually illegal, now. The beauty of the creature still haunts me.
Papa knew that we would make it to our destination that day, so he allowed time for
lingering and being on vacation as it were. We had spent the last nine days driving across the country from Toledo, Ohio. Across the Midwest plains states, bypassing Chicago--Papa did not like city traffic, (Much later I realized that he had actually lived in Chicago for a short time when he was assigned to the Great Lakes Naval Station to fill out his contracted term with the Navy after the war in the Pacific ended.)
Through Iowa with its, "Iowa has more pigs than people" highway signs, we stayed overnight in Nebraska at a Motor Inn, a wonderful place that had been built in the 1920's. With its two bedrooms, spacious bathroom, front entry hall that would easily have doubled as a sitting room if it had had furniture, and tiny kitchen ("kitchenette") we could have spent a week there--if there had been something to do!
Our journey took us to Wyoming and I remember eating lunch in a town called Laramie and marveling at the splendor of the mountains. "Purple mountains majesties" became real to me that day. Onwards to Utah, with even grander scenery we stayed over on the fourteenth of August. The next day, the fifteenth, was the Feast of the Assumption, a Holy Day of Obligation, so Papa inquired of the cashier at the restaurant where we ate supper and then we found the church we would go to in the morning and checked the schedule for morning Mass.
Very bright and early the next morning we arrived at an empty parking lot and watched sunrise in the Rocky mountains, wondering where the people were who should be attending Mass. Only after we had been sitting there for a bit, did our parents realize that the time zones had changed and we were an hour ahead of everybody! We went back to our motel and gathered our things together so that we would be ready to leave after Mass. We could not eat breakfast, of course, because we wanted to receive Communion and the laws of fasting still held in 1959.
I remember seeing sisters in the congregation with the great white headdresses that would later show up on tv in Sally Field's "the Flying Nun". Daughters of Charity, perhaps? Mass was quick and breakfast eaten and we were on our way again, marveling still at the deep drop and glorious mountains that we drove through. That night was spent in Elko, Nevada, I believe and then two days later we were home, although we did not call it that yet.
It was the essence of the great American Road Trip. I may still have the AAA "Triptik" somewhere in the house. It changed our families lives, of course, for we became Californians and our parents lived out there lives here, as I very well may, in this house that I still live in.
I am grateful for these memories and for my family today. Grateful too for the Bay Areas's natural air conditioning, that I love!
Papa knew that we would make it to our destination that day, so he allowed time for
lingering and being on vacation as it were. We had spent the last nine days driving across the country from Toledo, Ohio. Across the Midwest plains states, bypassing Chicago--Papa did not like city traffic, (Much later I realized that he had actually lived in Chicago for a short time when he was assigned to the Great Lakes Naval Station to fill out his contracted term with the Navy after the war in the Pacific ended.)
Through Iowa with its, "Iowa has more pigs than people" highway signs, we stayed overnight in Nebraska at a Motor Inn, a wonderful place that had been built in the 1920's. With its two bedrooms, spacious bathroom, front entry hall that would easily have doubled as a sitting room if it had had furniture, and tiny kitchen ("kitchenette") we could have spent a week there--if there had been something to do!
Our journey took us to Wyoming and I remember eating lunch in a town called Laramie and marveling at the splendor of the mountains. "Purple mountains majesties" became real to me that day. Onwards to Utah, with even grander scenery we stayed over on the fourteenth of August. The next day, the fifteenth, was the Feast of the Assumption, a Holy Day of Obligation, so Papa inquired of the cashier at the restaurant where we ate supper and then we found the church we would go to in the morning and checked the schedule for morning Mass.
Very bright and early the next morning we arrived at an empty parking lot and watched sunrise in the Rocky mountains, wondering where the people were who should be attending Mass. Only after we had been sitting there for a bit, did our parents realize that the time zones had changed and we were an hour ahead of everybody! We went back to our motel and gathered our things together so that we would be ready to leave after Mass. We could not eat breakfast, of course, because we wanted to receive Communion and the laws of fasting still held in 1959.
I remember seeing sisters in the congregation with the great white headdresses that would later show up on tv in Sally Field's "the Flying Nun". Daughters of Charity, perhaps? Mass was quick and breakfast eaten and we were on our way again, marveling still at the deep drop and glorious mountains that we drove through. That night was spent in Elko, Nevada, I believe and then two days later we were home, although we did not call it that yet.
It was the essence of the great American Road Trip. I may still have the AAA "Triptik" somewhere in the house. It changed our families lives, of course, for we became Californians and our parents lived out there lives here, as I very well may, in this house that I still live in.
I am grateful for these memories and for my family today. Grateful too for the Bay Areas's natural air conditioning, that I love!
Saturday, June 20, 2009
Summer is Here
After an almost heat wave that didn't quite materialize I am back to sitting with a blanket wrapped around me. It is officially the first day of summer (or will be in three hours).
I celebrated by baking a Garvey's Irish Brown Bread. This is a mix that requires the addition of just one ingredient--buttermilk. It is delicious and quick. I will make it a pantry staple from now on. The mix came to me from Planet Organics. They are delivering once a month on a Friday, because that is my delivery day. The produce is beautiful. I also cooked zucchini this afternoon. They were so beautiful that I should have grabbed my camera and taken their portrait, but the space in the kitchen is a little confined and too cluttered. They were actually delicious raw too.
A neighbor, who has a prolific garden, has been supplying me with kale and salad greens. It is one of those amazing facts of life to watch a pile of kale that has filled a large skillet to overflowing shrink to a small bunch in the cooking. I keep wanting to cook it with bacon and onions, but bacon isn't one of the things that I normally have on hand.
The kale would also be good with sausages, which reminds me of summer meals of potato salad and sausages brought from Wisconsin or Milwaukee by friends as each went home for a summer visit to his respective family and came back with a carry-on filled with sausages--enough to feed fifteen to twenty people gathered to feast after singing Vespers on a Sunday evening in Palo Alto thirty or so years ago. Beer, of course, was the beverage of choice to go with the sausages.
A six pack of Guinness resides in my kitchen at the moment. One bottle, along with 2 oz of water will combine with other ingredients to make a loaf of whole wheat beer bread, the recipe I cited two weeks ago. Some more of it will be used to make the chocolate beer cake that I also cited. Since that will require opening more than one bottle, and since I no longer drink alcohol, I want to time it so that the leftover can go into the pot of whatever I am cooking at the time. (I have no aversion to alcohol, but prefer not to drink alone. Anyway, sausages, kale and onions with beer would be good. (Maybe should go back to Planet Organics and peruse the sausage offerings.)
I am intrigued by the growth of a company such as Planet Organics, the farmers markets and the CSA movement. Community Supported Agriculture brings the farm to the urban dweller though subscription boxes of produce while providing capital to the cash strapped farm. I love this and I also love the Farmer's Markets.
I am grateful for the lovely cool weather this weekend and the chance to catch up cooking, which I do not do on hot days! I am also grateful for this lovely food in my pantry and fridge and for the Internet, which gives me a constant supply of new recipes and sources for a plethora of fine ingredients.
Happy Father's Day tomorrow to you all. (And again if I could just learn to proofread before I post, what I write might make more sense! Sorry to anyone who read the uncorrected version.)
I celebrated by baking a Garvey's Irish Brown Bread. This is a mix that requires the addition of just one ingredient--buttermilk. It is delicious and quick. I will make it a pantry staple from now on. The mix came to me from Planet Organics. They are delivering once a month on a Friday, because that is my delivery day. The produce is beautiful. I also cooked zucchini this afternoon. They were so beautiful that I should have grabbed my camera and taken their portrait, but the space in the kitchen is a little confined and too cluttered. They were actually delicious raw too.
A neighbor, who has a prolific garden, has been supplying me with kale and salad greens. It is one of those amazing facts of life to watch a pile of kale that has filled a large skillet to overflowing shrink to a small bunch in the cooking. I keep wanting to cook it with bacon and onions, but bacon isn't one of the things that I normally have on hand.
The kale would also be good with sausages, which reminds me of summer meals of potato salad and sausages brought from Wisconsin or Milwaukee by friends as each went home for a summer visit to his respective family and came back with a carry-on filled with sausages--enough to feed fifteen to twenty people gathered to feast after singing Vespers on a Sunday evening in Palo Alto thirty or so years ago. Beer, of course, was the beverage of choice to go with the sausages.
A six pack of Guinness resides in my kitchen at the moment. One bottle, along with 2 oz of water will combine with other ingredients to make a loaf of whole wheat beer bread, the recipe I cited two weeks ago. Some more of it will be used to make the chocolate beer cake that I also cited. Since that will require opening more than one bottle, and since I no longer drink alcohol, I want to time it so that the leftover can go into the pot of whatever I am cooking at the time. (I have no aversion to alcohol, but prefer not to drink alone. Anyway, sausages, kale and onions with beer would be good. (Maybe should go back to Planet Organics and peruse the sausage offerings.)
I am intrigued by the growth of a company such as Planet Organics, the farmers markets and the CSA movement. Community Supported Agriculture brings the farm to the urban dweller though subscription boxes of produce while providing capital to the cash strapped farm. I love this and I also love the Farmer's Markets.
I am grateful for the lovely cool weather this weekend and the chance to catch up cooking, which I do not do on hot days! I am also grateful for this lovely food in my pantry and fridge and for the Internet, which gives me a constant supply of new recipes and sources for a plethora of fine ingredients.
Happy Father's Day tomorrow to you all. (And again if I could just learn to proofread before I post, what I write might make more sense! Sorry to anyone who read the uncorrected version.)
Friday, June 12, 2009
Remembering
I have been thinking of my father a great deal this week. It has been a busy week, so I have not posted as I had planned. Monday was the tenth anniversary of Papa's death. (That is the official date, although he actually died on June 6; he was kept breathing on life support.) Yesterday, the eleventh of June was the corresponding tenth anniversary of his funeral, a Gregorian Requiem, as he had always wished it would be, sung by the St. Ann Choir at St. Athanasius Church, the Church where he and Mama were among the forty or fifty founding couples who built the parish from its beginnng in 1959.
Ironically, yesterday the Senate of the United States passed a much belated law giving the FDA authority to regulate tobacco. It is ironic to me because my father died from emphysema, a smoker's disease. Up to 1985, when he quit smoking, every picture of Papa that we have showed him with a cigarette in his hand. He smoked his last cigarette on June 6, (D-Day), 1985 and made a mark on his bathroom wall (now painted over.) Fourteen years later he collapsed and was revived by the paramedics only to have a massive heart attack in the emergency room from which he was again resuscitated, but never regained consciousness. I found it ironic then that he died on the anniversary of D-Day and of the day when he had quit smoking.
He called emphysema, "an old man's disease, an old veteran's disease", and told me about how his becoming hooked on cigarettes was linked to his service in the war. After one incident of combat, he said, someone offered him a cigarette and the combined adrenaline rush from combat and the nicotine caused him to become addicted as he had not been before.
I remember in my childhood in Toledo once when I was ten or eleven years old coming upon his cigarette in the ashtray on a table in the living room where he had left it while we ate lunch in the kitchen. It was nearly burned down and I could not resist taking a puff. The hot smoke and disgusting taste of the thing made me cough and I had to go into the bathroom and close the door so that I could cough and recover and not admit to stealing a drag on the cigarette. I couldn't comprehend why he smoked. It was just so yucky. (Years later I would become a smoker myself and I quite some months before Papa did.)
So I am very glad that the FDA will finally regulate tobacco. I have often wondered if he had quit sooner, would we have enjoyed his company, his intellect, his wit, his grace and charm and his joy and pride in us longer? He would, I am sure, take great pride in his grandchildren who in the past decade have become accomplished adults. He would be charmed and chuckle over the antics of his first great-grandchild, my grand-nephew whose first haircut pictures arrived in my inbox this week and made me laugh.
Often when I load new pictures from my digital camera unto the computer, I think of my father, wistfully for he was a skilled photographer himself and also a computer programmer. He did not live long enough to see the advent of the scanner, printers or digital camera into this house, but I am sure that he would so enjoy them. The prints I have made from old family photos adorn my shelves. I made them within the first year after he died as my own grief gave way to mourning and the mourning was turned into remembrance through the work of documenting our family history and printing out these pictures. He would have been amazed by the quality of the prints and enjoyed having his family around him again, as I do.
I wish the technology could have come sooner, that the Internet could have come sooner. I know he would be so pleased to see me re-inventing the little business that he helped me with and watched over in the eighties as I learned to garden and make potpourri. (Although he would be glad to know that I am no longer growing what seemed to be bizillions of seedlings all over the dining room.)
Tonight I watched an episode of NCSI, a program that he never saw, but that I think he would enjoy. I miss sharing these things with him. The books that I read, the television programs that I watch have less savor without someone, Papa in particular, to share them with.
Cooking is harder too, now than when he was alive ten years ago. Part of that, of course, is that I am ten years older now and physical tasks are not so easy as they were then. (That is relative, too, of course.) Lacking someone to share my "creations" with makes the task harder too and scaling back from cooking for two to cooking for one is a challenge as well.
Papa rarely talked about his time in the Navy or the war as my sister and I were growing up, but it was a seminal part of his life, if for no other reasons than that it took him away for three years and it solidified his occasional social practice of smoking an occasional cigarette into an addiction that ultimately took his life. Before it did that, it also robbed him of robust vigor that would have been his.
Two months ago when friends cleaned out my garage they found the following artifacts that were part of Papa's Navy Service tucked away in a drawer.
The first I call an insignia, but I am truly not sure what it is. The second is a pocket Morse code "cheater". I assume that this is from the time that he spent in Navy Officer Training at Princeton in the Fall of 1943. The last is the emblem from his cap.
Finally, here is his official portrait in his uniform, which I have also posted on the Squidoo lens that I have done about him--Fred is Peace, that is in the links to the right.
I am grateful for the life of my father, for my memories of him and I hope that the time will come when fewer people smoke and no one any longer dies from smoking related illnesses.
Ironically, yesterday the Senate of the United States passed a much belated law giving the FDA authority to regulate tobacco. It is ironic to me because my father died from emphysema, a smoker's disease. Up to 1985, when he quit smoking, every picture of Papa that we have showed him with a cigarette in his hand. He smoked his last cigarette on June 6, (D-Day), 1985 and made a mark on his bathroom wall (now painted over.) Fourteen years later he collapsed and was revived by the paramedics only to have a massive heart attack in the emergency room from which he was again resuscitated, but never regained consciousness. I found it ironic then that he died on the anniversary of D-Day and of the day when he had quit smoking.
He called emphysema, "an old man's disease, an old veteran's disease", and told me about how his becoming hooked on cigarettes was linked to his service in the war. After one incident of combat, he said, someone offered him a cigarette and the combined adrenaline rush from combat and the nicotine caused him to become addicted as he had not been before.
I remember in my childhood in Toledo once when I was ten or eleven years old coming upon his cigarette in the ashtray on a table in the living room where he had left it while we ate lunch in the kitchen. It was nearly burned down and I could not resist taking a puff. The hot smoke and disgusting taste of the thing made me cough and I had to go into the bathroom and close the door so that I could cough and recover and not admit to stealing a drag on the cigarette. I couldn't comprehend why he smoked. It was just so yucky. (Years later I would become a smoker myself and I quite some months before Papa did.)
So I am very glad that the FDA will finally regulate tobacco. I have often wondered if he had quit sooner, would we have enjoyed his company, his intellect, his wit, his grace and charm and his joy and pride in us longer? He would, I am sure, take great pride in his grandchildren who in the past decade have become accomplished adults. He would be charmed and chuckle over the antics of his first great-grandchild, my grand-nephew whose first haircut pictures arrived in my inbox this week and made me laugh.
Often when I load new pictures from my digital camera unto the computer, I think of my father, wistfully for he was a skilled photographer himself and also a computer programmer. He did not live long enough to see the advent of the scanner, printers or digital camera into this house, but I am sure that he would so enjoy them. The prints I have made from old family photos adorn my shelves. I made them within the first year after he died as my own grief gave way to mourning and the mourning was turned into remembrance through the work of documenting our family history and printing out these pictures. He would have been amazed by the quality of the prints and enjoyed having his family around him again, as I do.
I wish the technology could have come sooner, that the Internet could have come sooner. I know he would be so pleased to see me re-inventing the little business that he helped me with and watched over in the eighties as I learned to garden and make potpourri. (Although he would be glad to know that I am no longer growing what seemed to be bizillions of seedlings all over the dining room.)
Tonight I watched an episode of NCSI, a program that he never saw, but that I think he would enjoy. I miss sharing these things with him. The books that I read, the television programs that I watch have less savor without someone, Papa in particular, to share them with.
Cooking is harder too, now than when he was alive ten years ago. Part of that, of course, is that I am ten years older now and physical tasks are not so easy as they were then. (That is relative, too, of course.) Lacking someone to share my "creations" with makes the task harder too and scaling back from cooking for two to cooking for one is a challenge as well.
Papa rarely talked about his time in the Navy or the war as my sister and I were growing up, but it was a seminal part of his life, if for no other reasons than that it took him away for three years and it solidified his occasional social practice of smoking an occasional cigarette into an addiction that ultimately took his life. Before it did that, it also robbed him of robust vigor that would have been his.
Two months ago when friends cleaned out my garage they found the following artifacts that were part of Papa's Navy Service tucked away in a drawer.
The first I call an insignia, but I am truly not sure what it is. The second is a pocket Morse code "cheater". I assume that this is from the time that he spent in Navy Officer Training at Princeton in the Fall of 1943. The last is the emblem from his cap.
Finally, here is his official portrait in his uniform, which I have also posted on the Squidoo lens that I have done about him--Fred is Peace, that is in the links to the right.
I am grateful for the life of my father, for my memories of him and I hope that the time will come when fewer people smoke and no one any longer dies from smoking related illnesses.
Sunday, May 31, 2009
Back to Blogging
Allergies have been keeping me feeling unwell and it seems that when my head is stuffy I don't write much. The time has gotten away from me.
Today is Pentecost, the day the Holy Spirit filled the Apostles and they went out and began their preaching ministry. It is a good day to reflect on the Spirit and on new beginnings. A new season is underway, too with summer almost upon us.
Pentecost can be a hot, hot day. I remember melting in the heat and singing the Mass in Polyphony, grateful for the cool chapel and the even cooler Adobe house with its tile roof that was then the Newman Center for Stanford University where the choir sang. In particular, I remember slaving through a heat wave to make a duck pate and a cake and other goodies for the baptism of one of my god-children, now a young man in his twenties. Time has flown far too quickly.
As I wrote about the Apostles beginning their preaching ministries, I wondered what they would make of our new technologies? Babelfish and Google translator, would be the modern day tools to get the word out in multi-languages and Facebook and Twitter would carry the message to the whole world. They would use them all, I am sure.
A Blessed Pentecost. I am grateful for the Spirit even though at this point in my life I am weary, too and even my faith is weary. Renewal is a necessity!
Today is Pentecost, the day the Holy Spirit filled the Apostles and they went out and began their preaching ministry. It is a good day to reflect on the Spirit and on new beginnings. A new season is underway, too with summer almost upon us.
Pentecost can be a hot, hot day. I remember melting in the heat and singing the Mass in Polyphony, grateful for the cool chapel and the even cooler Adobe house with its tile roof that was then the Newman Center for Stanford University where the choir sang. In particular, I remember slaving through a heat wave to make a duck pate and a cake and other goodies for the baptism of one of my god-children, now a young man in his twenties. Time has flown far too quickly.
As I wrote about the Apostles beginning their preaching ministries, I wondered what they would make of our new technologies? Babelfish and Google translator, would be the modern day tools to get the word out in multi-languages and Facebook and Twitter would carry the message to the whole world. They would use them all, I am sure.
A Blessed Pentecost. I am grateful for the Spirit even though at this point in my life I am weary, too and even my faith is weary. Renewal is a necessity!
Friday, August 15, 2008
Friday too soon
This week has evaporated. I have had the magnificent blessing of helpers for hours at a time. My living room is starting to emerge from clutter. Soon it will no longer look like a gigantic sorting shed and will start to look and function like a living room again. I can hardly wait.
Two closets were cleared in one day and more things are ready to give away or sell at a yard sale and some just plain junk is gone. The "big room", aka, master bedroom, is starting to take shape as the sewing/crafts space I imagined it would be at the end of last summer.
The dining room table, a family heirloom that is at the heart of my home, is visible and clothed with a new albeit, plastic, tablecloth and stands ready for guests.
A young friend, who is about to start her college years at UC Berkeley, has been helping me by translating part of my Cafepress site into Spanish. This is so exciting and I am eager to get to work on posting her translations into a separate section, "Nuevo, en Espanol". I took one semester of Spanish in college and wish that I had never stopped! Is sixty too old to learn a new language?
I am also remembering a friend who died this week. A wonderful, beautiful woman with a voice like honey and the Tennessee accent to match it, who devoted her life to her family. She was intelligent, quick-witted, loving and full of common-sense and she lived to be ninety-seven. She will be missed by the entire community who knew her. Requiescat in Pace, dear friend. I hope that you are rejoicing in heaven.
So it has been a full week without the number of blog posts I planned, but so much is being accomplished here. Earlier in the week my sister and I came up with this little ditty (and my friend who just died would have laughed with us at it, I think)
Throw, throw, throw your junk, merrily out the door. Merrily, merrily, merrily keep on throwing more. The tune, I think, is obvious.
I am grateful for the week that is past, the week that is ahead and the life of my friend, whom I will not forget.
Two closets were cleared in one day and more things are ready to give away or sell at a yard sale and some just plain junk is gone. The "big room", aka, master bedroom, is starting to take shape as the sewing/crafts space I imagined it would be at the end of last summer.
The dining room table, a family heirloom that is at the heart of my home, is visible and clothed with a new albeit, plastic, tablecloth and stands ready for guests.
A young friend, who is about to start her college years at UC Berkeley, has been helping me by translating part of my Cafepress site into Spanish. This is so exciting and I am eager to get to work on posting her translations into a separate section, "Nuevo, en Espanol". I took one semester of Spanish in college and wish that I had never stopped! Is sixty too old to learn a new language?
I am also remembering a friend who died this week. A wonderful, beautiful woman with a voice like honey and the Tennessee accent to match it, who devoted her life to her family. She was intelligent, quick-witted, loving and full of common-sense and she lived to be ninety-seven. She will be missed by the entire community who knew her. Requiescat in Pace, dear friend. I hope that you are rejoicing in heaven.
So it has been a full week without the number of blog posts I planned, but so much is being accomplished here. Earlier in the week my sister and I came up with this little ditty (and my friend who just died would have laughed with us at it, I think)
Throw, throw, throw your junk, merrily out the door. Merrily, merrily, merrily keep on throwing more. The tune, I think, is obvious.
I am grateful for the week that is past, the week that is ahead and the life of my friend, whom I will not forget.
Saturday, July 19, 2008
Birthdays
Today is my only nephew's thirtieth birthday. Such a beautiful baby he was and it doesn't seem that long ago. (Although in some ways more than that, time is doing an elliptical thing on me now at my age.) Now he is the father of a baby who will soon be one year old himself. They are all in Toledo, celebrating this milestone birthday and a first wedding anniversary.
We are the old folks now, even though we don't feel that old. Just tired. I remember Mama and Papa on the day my nephew, their first grandchild, was born. They were so proud and pleased, wishing that 2500 miles didn't separate them from holding him and oohing and ahing. Those same miles separate me today, but with email, and digital cameras and youtube, we are only minutes, even milliseconds away.
As I have reveled in the pictures being sent back and forth this year, I have also dug out the old photos, sent by snail mail and just as eagerly awaited and enjoyed. The pictures of a tiny baby lying still curled up and with his tiny little perfect rump in the air. Later the toddler. One Halloween a little boy in a Davy
Crockett hat and costume, perfectly tucked away and waiting for him, saved by his father's mother. A mental image of a large pile of luggage piled into the garage and a small boy asking, "Aunt Maggie do you always travel with so much luggage?" "Only when I'm moving home, my dear." (An equally impressive amount of luggage and boxes and whatever filled the borrowed van when his parents moved him to collage fourteen years later.) A photo of a small boy getting on the school bus for the first time is followed by many Christmas and Easter photos with a pretty little sister, both in their holiday best.
One year when Toledo stores where depleted of that year's perfect toy, Papa and I scoured the stores out here and found He-Man's castle. Before it was sent on I had to play with it myself (just checking to make sure that all the parts were really there, you know.)
Baseball, basketball, football and finally Lacrosse filled my nephew's growing up years along with school, friends, family and Scouts. One of my most cherished photos shows him with his parents on the occasion of his Eagle award. Now, I believe, he is leading a Cub Scout troop himself and coaching Lacrosse. Service is a family tradition as his Dad coached Little League and his Mom is still a scout leader.
Pictures of graduations have given way to one with a chocolate Labrador. That has finally given way to the picture on my dining room table. Taken on the beach at Key West it shows a handsome and confident young man with his beautiful new wife. I love you both. Happy birthday, happy first anniversary and many more. May you grow in love and peace.
We are the old folks now, even though we don't feel that old. Just tired. I remember Mama and Papa on the day my nephew, their first grandchild, was born. They were so proud and pleased, wishing that 2500 miles didn't separate them from holding him and oohing and ahing. Those same miles separate me today, but with email, and digital cameras and youtube, we are only minutes, even milliseconds away.
As I have reveled in the pictures being sent back and forth this year, I have also dug out the old photos, sent by snail mail and just as eagerly awaited and enjoyed. The pictures of a tiny baby lying still curled up and with his tiny little perfect rump in the air. Later the toddler. One Halloween a little boy in a Davy
Crockett hat and costume, perfectly tucked away and waiting for him, saved by his father's mother. A mental image of a large pile of luggage piled into the garage and a small boy asking, "Aunt Maggie do you always travel with so much luggage?" "Only when I'm moving home, my dear." (An equally impressive amount of luggage and boxes and whatever filled the borrowed van when his parents moved him to collage fourteen years later.) A photo of a small boy getting on the school bus for the first time is followed by many Christmas and Easter photos with a pretty little sister, both in their holiday best.
One year when Toledo stores where depleted of that year's perfect toy, Papa and I scoured the stores out here and found He-Man's castle. Before it was sent on I had to play with it myself (just checking to make sure that all the parts were really there, you know.)
Baseball, basketball, football and finally Lacrosse filled my nephew's growing up years along with school, friends, family and Scouts. One of my most cherished photos shows him with his parents on the occasion of his Eagle award. Now, I believe, he is leading a Cub Scout troop himself and coaching Lacrosse. Service is a family tradition as his Dad coached Little League and his Mom is still a scout leader.
Pictures of graduations have given way to one with a chocolate Labrador. That has finally given way to the picture on my dining room table. Taken on the beach at Key West it shows a handsome and confident young man with his beautiful new wife. I love you both. Happy birthday, happy first anniversary and many more. May you grow in love and peace.
Monday, June 16, 2008
Sunshine and Letting Go
Yesterday was Father's Day and a friend who remembered my father called late in the day to let me know that she was thinking of him and remembering him. I appreciated that very much. For the last nine years Father's Day has been so hard because shortly before he died I had ordered his presents and was itching for them to come so that I could surprise him with them. They came a few days after his funeral and I cried and put them away. One was a cd of music from movie soundtracks that include a piece he had especially liked, the music from that PBS series from the 1980's, Reilly Ace of Spies. I can not hear that on the radio still without tearing up and thinking that he never received my present. I can't remember what the other one was though, probably a book. So time is helping this.
As I write two friends are working in the side yard. My neighbor's plum tree lost a branch last Monday just as the heat wave got under way. After it is cleaned out and the branches with too many plums trimmed back, I don't think there will be much left. It was glorious this spring with an abundance of white flowers. I don't think that I was able to have anyone take any pictures, but every time I looked out at it I tried to memorize it just in case. I think its flowering this year, a month late may have indeed been its swan song.
For decades I have loved that tree, the white blossoms speak joy to me. Most years it bloomed in February at exactly the same time. In 1983 it bloomed while Mama was dying in the intensive care unit. I have thought of it ever since as her resurrection tree and felt on some level that when it goes, so will I.
The latter has really been mostly because the tree provided deep, luxurious shade to my bedroom window in summer's worst heat. It served so faithfully and well without any additional water than what it received from the rain. If it is truly unsaveable, as I expect it is, I will miss it terribly and grieve for it. It is and was a friend to me.
It is a Satsuma plum tree, the plums deep purple from stone to skin. Sweet and juicy the plum was a treat just off the tree and even more so after refrigerating it. Once in its heyday--and mine--I made splendid plum chutney from the fruit with garlic and hot chiles added. It was good enough that I could have entered it in the County fair, for it always won praise from friends whom I gifted it with at Christmas time.
Thinking about the plum tree makes me think of those times gone by. Mama made jam from some of the plums that was still on the shelves after she died. It was delicious on her home-made whole wheat bread. Bread baking and the sweet smell of jam bubbling on the stove, two food memories that are also smell memories.
The fruit along with fruit from an apricot tree would ripen on the hottest days, always on the hottest days, of course. Ripe fruit has to be attended to on its terms, immediately, or else it becomes compost or garbage very quickly. So it would be time to haul out the dutch oven and the wooden spoon, the hand grinder and the canning jars and rings (lids would already have been on the grocery list some weeks before so as to get them before the store ran out)and the work would begin.
The first time my sister and I tried canning was the year in the seventies that the grocery stores ran out of half-pint canning jars. This was actually a national shortage and I am sure in some parts of the country it was a real crisis. We bought three quarter pints and pints and even some quart jars. Every recipe that we chose made more than it said it would. We made zucchini pickles, canned apple slices and best of all, pear raisin mincemeat.
The pear raisin mincemeat and the chutneys were the best along with apricot jam when we had apricots from someone's tree. One year a friend gave me a large bag of Gravenstein apples. My recollection is that that one bag became four half pint jars of apple butter. Maybe it was six. It was essence of apple and it was sublime.
It has probably been almost twenty years since I have done any canning. I have had to let go of that too.
I will pray for the plum tree tonight when I go to bed. We will see. My friend is confidant that she can rig a shade structure of some sort so that I will survive. The side yard is only six feet deep, not deep enough for much. I wish it were ten or twelve. Twenty or twenty-five would be even better; then I could have a real garden in it. I am grateful today for the memories and the friends who helping with such hard work. Grateful too that it is cool.
As I write two friends are working in the side yard. My neighbor's plum tree lost a branch last Monday just as the heat wave got under way. After it is cleaned out and the branches with too many plums trimmed back, I don't think there will be much left. It was glorious this spring with an abundance of white flowers. I don't think that I was able to have anyone take any pictures, but every time I looked out at it I tried to memorize it just in case. I think its flowering this year, a month late may have indeed been its swan song.
For decades I have loved that tree, the white blossoms speak joy to me. Most years it bloomed in February at exactly the same time. In 1983 it bloomed while Mama was dying in the intensive care unit. I have thought of it ever since as her resurrection tree and felt on some level that when it goes, so will I.
The latter has really been mostly because the tree provided deep, luxurious shade to my bedroom window in summer's worst heat. It served so faithfully and well without any additional water than what it received from the rain. If it is truly unsaveable, as I expect it is, I will miss it terribly and grieve for it. It is and was a friend to me.
It is a Satsuma plum tree, the plums deep purple from stone to skin. Sweet and juicy the plum was a treat just off the tree and even more so after refrigerating it. Once in its heyday--and mine--I made splendid plum chutney from the fruit with garlic and hot chiles added. It was good enough that I could have entered it in the County fair, for it always won praise from friends whom I gifted it with at Christmas time.
Thinking about the plum tree makes me think of those times gone by. Mama made jam from some of the plums that was still on the shelves after she died. It was delicious on her home-made whole wheat bread. Bread baking and the sweet smell of jam bubbling on the stove, two food memories that are also smell memories.
The fruit along with fruit from an apricot tree would ripen on the hottest days, always on the hottest days, of course. Ripe fruit has to be attended to on its terms, immediately, or else it becomes compost or garbage very quickly. So it would be time to haul out the dutch oven and the wooden spoon, the hand grinder and the canning jars and rings (lids would already have been on the grocery list some weeks before so as to get them before the store ran out)and the work would begin.
The first time my sister and I tried canning was the year in the seventies that the grocery stores ran out of half-pint canning jars. This was actually a national shortage and I am sure in some parts of the country it was a real crisis. We bought three quarter pints and pints and even some quart jars. Every recipe that we chose made more than it said it would. We made zucchini pickles, canned apple slices and best of all, pear raisin mincemeat.
The pear raisin mincemeat and the chutneys were the best along with apricot jam when we had apricots from someone's tree. One year a friend gave me a large bag of Gravenstein apples. My recollection is that that one bag became four half pint jars of apple butter. Maybe it was six. It was essence of apple and it was sublime.
It has probably been almost twenty years since I have done any canning. I have had to let go of that too.
I will pray for the plum tree tonight when I go to bed. We will see. My friend is confidant that she can rig a shade structure of some sort so that I will survive. The side yard is only six feet deep, not deep enough for much. I wish it were ten or twelve. Twenty or twenty-five would be even better; then I could have a real garden in it. I am grateful today for the memories and the friends who helping with such hard work. Grateful too that it is cool.
Monday, June 2, 2008
Deconstruction Completed
For decades the house across the street from mine had a swimming pool that filled the front patio (now frequently referred to as the courtyard). Surrounded by a high fence, as are most of the houses in my neighborhood, the pool could not be seen. It took five days of pounding with a jack hammer and backloading with a small bulldozer, I called it a "baby dozer"--sort of like a baby dinosaur--to remove the concrete. Then the biggest truck I have ever seen on my street, a two-barreled black tanker pulled up and downloaded dirt into the street. The next day the 'dozer driver began trundling dirt into the yard through the hole that had been made by removing part of the fence. A friend and I watched on Friday and he commented that watching construction was mesmerizing. I found it so. Today they are tamping down the new dirt with a compactor and removing equipment. Peace and quiet will return and perhaps I can blog every day or so again. Writing was not possible last week!
I am glad for the young couple who bought the house two summers ago that they are going forward with their plans. The pool was in disrepair--probably too far gone to repair--and costly to maintain. It had become a "mosquito-breeder" and therefore even more costly to maintain because of the concern about West Nile Virus.
While the pool was being pounded out last week, I found myself thinking about my own memories of that pool. Seven or eight owners have passed through the house during the fifty plus years since it was built. Early on we knew the neighbors because two daughters were classmates in the same school. I remember that we were invited to swim and just to visit and that on one occasion we went over with our new young Keeshond to introduce her to the neighbors. They had a poodle and Frosty and the poodle began chasing around the perimeter of the pool. Frustrated because she wasn't catching the poodle, Frosty cut across the diagonal of the pool. The look on her face as she hit the water was something that I have never seen since and never forgotten. Part shock, part terror and then finally rage. Papa kicked off his shoes and was just about to dive in when we all realized that she was "dog paddling" toward the edge of the pool. Instinct had kicked in and she knew exactly what to do. One furious mass of wet fur was hauled out of the water. On dry land, she proceeded to shake water over all of us to let us know exactly how she felt about being bamboozled. A bath and more shaking followed at home because, of course, we had to get the chlorine out of her fur.
A decade later I was going to graduate school and coming home for the summers. The next neighbors kindly allowed me to use the pool so that I could exercise and keep in shape for my return to Chicago in the Fall.
It was a nice pool and I am glad that I do not have one to contend with in my patio. I figure that at today's prices the cost of removing a swimming pool is probably about the sum that my parents received for the two bedroom, one bath "bungalow" that we lived in in Toledo before we came to California.
Silence. At last. As I have been writing the last truck has pulled away and it is so quiet that it is almost delicious. I will stop clicking and clacking away here and savor it.
I am glad for the young couple who bought the house two summers ago that they are going forward with their plans. The pool was in disrepair--probably too far gone to repair--and costly to maintain. It had become a "mosquito-breeder" and therefore even more costly to maintain because of the concern about West Nile Virus.
While the pool was being pounded out last week, I found myself thinking about my own memories of that pool. Seven or eight owners have passed through the house during the fifty plus years since it was built. Early on we knew the neighbors because two daughters were classmates in the same school. I remember that we were invited to swim and just to visit and that on one occasion we went over with our new young Keeshond to introduce her to the neighbors. They had a poodle and Frosty and the poodle began chasing around the perimeter of the pool. Frustrated because she wasn't catching the poodle, Frosty cut across the diagonal of the pool. The look on her face as she hit the water was something that I have never seen since and never forgotten. Part shock, part terror and then finally rage. Papa kicked off his shoes and was just about to dive in when we all realized that she was "dog paddling" toward the edge of the pool. Instinct had kicked in and she knew exactly what to do. One furious mass of wet fur was hauled out of the water. On dry land, she proceeded to shake water over all of us to let us know exactly how she felt about being bamboozled. A bath and more shaking followed at home because, of course, we had to get the chlorine out of her fur.
A decade later I was going to graduate school and coming home for the summers. The next neighbors kindly allowed me to use the pool so that I could exercise and keep in shape for my return to Chicago in the Fall.
It was a nice pool and I am glad that I do not have one to contend with in my patio. I figure that at today's prices the cost of removing a swimming pool is probably about the sum that my parents received for the two bedroom, one bath "bungalow" that we lived in in Toledo before we came to California.
Silence. At last. As I have been writing the last truck has pulled away and it is so quiet that it is almost delicious. I will stop clicking and clacking away here and savor it.
Tuesday, February 19, 2008
Remembering Mama
Today is the twenty-fifth anniversary of the death of my mother, Helen Rose. A petite woman, she had more than sufficient energy and fire to make up for her small stature. I remember that she was pretty, had a ready smile and a lilting laugh. Her complexion was perfect, "peaches and cream" or rosy like her nickname. Her eyes were large and brown and both her daughters inherited them.
Her hands were always busy and once when I was small I commented that her hands were beautiful--I had been watching her ply a needle deftly and quickly into blue fabric she was transforming into doll clothes for one of my dolls. She looked down at her hands and was startled. "These hands?", she said. "These are dish pan hands." But she never failed to keep her nails neat and I also remember sitting at her vanity watching her put on lipstick and wanting to be old enough to do the same.
My mother graduated from a Catholic girls school, in fact the same school that decades later her granddaughter, would graduate from, Notre Dame in Toledo, Ohio. The depression came soon after; Mama put aside her dream to be a music teacher and instead of going to a four year college went to nursing school at St. Vincent's School of Nursing. It was a boarding in school, so even though she lived within walking distance of home, she "boarded in". She told wonderful stories of how strict the nuns were (the nun who taught dietetics threw things if the students got the material wrong), mutton cooking in the cafeteria and smelling so bad that she never again ate either mutton or lamb, and of hiding with other girls in the walk in closet, a blanket carefully stuffed along the bottom of the door so that no lights from their flashlights would show as they devoured a goodie basket someone had received from home, or studied after lights out for exams.
Her graduation picture in her starched uniform is on the buffet in the dining room and I can look over as I write this. The formal uniform with its cap speaks of her accomplishment and professionalism that I totally took for granted growing up. Mama described herself as "just a housewife", in today's terms a "stay at home Mom". How blessed we were!
She taught us to cook and bake, to sew, to sing, to pray, to laugh, to believe, to serve others, to hope and to love. She made the best birthday cakes--mine were usually chocolate with chocolate frosting and I still have her recipes. I remember that when a bad thunderstorm threatened she would unplug the tv (after we got one in 1952) and put the kitchen stool in the middle of the living room floor with her little statue of St. Anne de Beaupre and kneel and say the rosary that the storm would pass.
In fact, so far as I know, the only real vacation trip she ever took before she married was to the shrine of St. Anne in Canada. The statue was her souvenir and she bequeathed it to me.
Her piano still sits in my living room, virtually unplayed now for twenty-five years. It will find a new home soon,again and a voice with someone who will play it.
I miss her today and remember her with love, gratitude and joy.
Her hands were always busy and once when I was small I commented that her hands were beautiful--I had been watching her ply a needle deftly and quickly into blue fabric she was transforming into doll clothes for one of my dolls. She looked down at her hands and was startled. "These hands?", she said. "These are dish pan hands." But she never failed to keep her nails neat and I also remember sitting at her vanity watching her put on lipstick and wanting to be old enough to do the same.
My mother graduated from a Catholic girls school, in fact the same school that decades later her granddaughter, would graduate from, Notre Dame in Toledo, Ohio. The depression came soon after; Mama put aside her dream to be a music teacher and instead of going to a four year college went to nursing school at St. Vincent's School of Nursing. It was a boarding in school, so even though she lived within walking distance of home, she "boarded in". She told wonderful stories of how strict the nuns were (the nun who taught dietetics threw things if the students got the material wrong), mutton cooking in the cafeteria and smelling so bad that she never again ate either mutton or lamb, and of hiding with other girls in the walk in closet, a blanket carefully stuffed along the bottom of the door so that no lights from their flashlights would show as they devoured a goodie basket someone had received from home, or studied after lights out for exams.
Her graduation picture in her starched uniform is on the buffet in the dining room and I can look over as I write this. The formal uniform with its cap speaks of her accomplishment and professionalism that I totally took for granted growing up. Mama described herself as "just a housewife", in today's terms a "stay at home Mom". How blessed we were!
She taught us to cook and bake, to sew, to sing, to pray, to laugh, to believe, to serve others, to hope and to love. She made the best birthday cakes--mine were usually chocolate with chocolate frosting and I still have her recipes. I remember that when a bad thunderstorm threatened she would unplug the tv (after we got one in 1952) and put the kitchen stool in the middle of the living room floor with her little statue of St. Anne de Beaupre and kneel and say the rosary that the storm would pass.
In fact, so far as I know, the only real vacation trip she ever took before she married was to the shrine of St. Anne in Canada. The statue was her souvenir and she bequeathed it to me.
Her piano still sits in my living room, virtually unplayed now for twenty-five years. It will find a new home soon,again and a voice with someone who will play it.
I miss her today and remember her with love, gratitude and joy.
Sunday, January 20, 2008
Sunday in Ordinary Time
Or should I just call it computer frustration again? I am locked into what seems to be an endless upload loop for a small picture file that blogger can't seem to upload? Anybody else remember "do loops", I think that was what they were called from Fortran in the seventies? If the programmer forgot to close the loop they ran endlessly. I wonder if something like that is going on here. It is so frustrating not to be able to fire off an email or pick up the phone and request help.
I took two programming courses in the seventies. Fortran, which could have been quite interesting and elegant, if the small programming exercises had related to anything I wanted to do. I remember that they seemed like the word problems of high school that had plagued me in algebra and geometry. So I didn't get very far. Then I took COBOL. Yuck. No way would I have guessed then that I would spend so much time at computers all day and sometimes well into the night.
till it would be good to either have the function work, or have a message appear that said that the system was down, or too many people were attempting to use it, or whatever. Since computers are mindless--as Papa used to say, "they only do what you tell them to do"--it would be nice if somebody would tell it to tell me. Sigh.
It is the Second Sunday in Ordinary time. I liked the old designations of Sundays after Epiphany better. The first reading is Is.3, 5-6. (Getting the punctuation right here is almost as tricky as it was in Fortran.) The Lord says, "You are my servant, Israel...I will make you a light to the nations." We are servants. We are also lights. How do we shine on this cold, gray, dreary January day and to whom do we spread for our lights, which are really the light of the Lord? Good challenge.
The responsorial Psalm is Ps 40:2,4,7-8,8-9,10. Why are the verses so chopped up? Some day I will get organized enough to have the Bible at hand while I do this and see what is left out. "And he put a new song into my mouth," is my favorite line today. I need a new song, one of praise and thanksgiving, not of grumping.
The first reading is 1 Cor 1:1-3. Paul addresses the letter to, "you who have been sanctified in Christ Jesus, called to be holy." Do many of us think about this, in between the computer frustrations, the weather complaints, the rising gas prices, all of the ills and travails that so quickly and completely overtake our daily lives, that in the midst of it all we are called to be holy? I remember thinking about it a great deal when I was young. I had a passion for it. As a child I believed that each of us was called to be a saint. I haven't given it much thought lately. Maybe it is time to take it out and look at it again. Then the concept of called. Not on the phone, not through the email, not to one more task before wearily crawling into bed, but really, truly, genuinely, fully called by God. Called to be the persons that we are yes. Called to our vocations, yes. Most of all called to be holy. Makes me think of the dervishes whom read about in one of Merton's books when I was young--I would like to twirl with the very giddiness of the concept. Called to be holy. A little joy and much holiness to leaven today's grayness and blah ordinariness.
Jn. 1:29-34 is the Gospel. John the Baptist baptizing Jesus and proclaiming him Lord. So it is the Feast of St. John the Baptist, conflated into ordinary time after all. (When I went to look for the readings in my lazy Internet way, I was expecting to see the header, Feast of St. John the Baptist. Funny we are called, today, and all days to be holy, but we no longer acknowledge those who were. Maybe we are embarrassed by them. Their hair wasn't neat enough, their clothes were too worn, their table manners weren't up to par. The canon of the saints does include quite a few real and venerable characters after all.)
So let us proclaim the Lord and seek holiness--as well as the simple solutions to our simple problems. Happy Feast.
I took two programming courses in the seventies. Fortran, which could have been quite interesting and elegant, if the small programming exercises had related to anything I wanted to do. I remember that they seemed like the word problems of high school that had plagued me in algebra and geometry. So I didn't get very far. Then I took COBOL. Yuck. No way would I have guessed then that I would spend so much time at computers all day and sometimes well into the night.
till it would be good to either have the function work, or have a message appear that said that the system was down, or too many people were attempting to use it, or whatever. Since computers are mindless--as Papa used to say, "they only do what you tell them to do"--it would be nice if somebody would tell it to tell me. Sigh.
It is the Second Sunday in Ordinary time. I liked the old designations of Sundays after Epiphany better. The first reading is Is.3, 5-6. (Getting the punctuation right here is almost as tricky as it was in Fortran.) The Lord says, "You are my servant, Israel...I will make you a light to the nations." We are servants. We are also lights. How do we shine on this cold, gray, dreary January day and to whom do we spread for our lights, which are really the light of the Lord? Good challenge.
The responsorial Psalm is Ps 40:2,4,7-8,8-9,10. Why are the verses so chopped up? Some day I will get organized enough to have the Bible at hand while I do this and see what is left out. "And he put a new song into my mouth," is my favorite line today. I need a new song, one of praise and thanksgiving, not of grumping.
The first reading is 1 Cor 1:1-3. Paul addresses the letter to, "you who have been sanctified in Christ Jesus, called to be holy." Do many of us think about this, in between the computer frustrations, the weather complaints, the rising gas prices, all of the ills and travails that so quickly and completely overtake our daily lives, that in the midst of it all we are called to be holy? I remember thinking about it a great deal when I was young. I had a passion for it. As a child I believed that each of us was called to be a saint. I haven't given it much thought lately. Maybe it is time to take it out and look at it again. Then the concept of called. Not on the phone, not through the email, not to one more task before wearily crawling into bed, but really, truly, genuinely, fully called by God. Called to be the persons that we are yes. Called to our vocations, yes. Most of all called to be holy. Makes me think of the dervishes whom read about in one of Merton's books when I was young--I would like to twirl with the very giddiness of the concept. Called to be holy. A little joy and much holiness to leaven today's grayness and blah ordinariness.
Jn. 1:29-34 is the Gospel. John the Baptist baptizing Jesus and proclaiming him Lord. So it is the Feast of St. John the Baptist, conflated into ordinary time after all. (When I went to look for the readings in my lazy Internet way, I was expecting to see the header, Feast of St. John the Baptist. Funny we are called, today, and all days to be holy, but we no longer acknowledge those who were. Maybe we are embarrassed by them. Their hair wasn't neat enough, their clothes were too worn, their table manners weren't up to par. The canon of the saints does include quite a few real and venerable characters after all.)
So let us proclaim the Lord and seek holiness--as well as the simple solutions to our simple problems. Happy Feast.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
