Kent Kapers II

Hull House

2012-01-29T17:01:00.000-05:00

I was saddened to read that Hull House, founded in Chicago by Jane Addams over a hundred years ago, is closed. I had first read about her in a social work class many years ago at Kent State. It was one of the first settlement houses, established at that time to help immigrants acclimate to the new world. Since many of then were poor when they arrived, settlement houses were located in those sections of cities where people lived in poverty. These places became centers where people could gain the skills needed to get out of poverty, offering all sorts of tools need to accomplish that: literacy training, English, cooking, sewing, typing, advice on nutrition and generally what Albert 'iggns called "middle class morality," and he didn't mean that as a compliment. Middle and upper class white women would descend on impoverished communities, armed with what they saw as weapons against the conditions in which people lived in hopes of making things better. And it worked, first for immigrants from abroad and then for migrants to big cities from agrarian parts of the country. Hull House and Jane Addams were the pioneers. I guess as the culture changed, and educated women moved into the work place, with the kinds of careers that could not have been possible in Addams' time, even though social work became a respected profession and bureaucratized, the army diminished and the problems of the poor became more overwhelming, those settlement houses began to disappear.
Cleveland has Karamu House, founded about a hundred years ago,which took as its mission the arts: painting, sculpture, and its world class theater, along with the usual services. It is honing on by a thread, however, constantly struggling with funding. I knew two guys in college who had been Karamu House beneficiaries growing up in Cleveland, One was a painter and a dancer - Karamu House had a wonderful modern dance program back in the 30s and 40w when he was growing up. One was a gifted sculptor.
There is another settlement house in the Tremont area, which has gone form Jewish to Latino over the last fifty years or so. Besides the settlement house, this area also has a magnificent socially conscious church, which built a gymnasium annexed to the church for the use of the local residents.
The last two years I was working, I was asked to consult in the poorest community in the county to see what kinds of needs out agency might be able to address in the area of drug/alcohol prevention and education. I attended a series of community meetings over a period of months. This community is very old, one of the Western Reserve towns in this part of Ohio. However during WWII, throngs of folks moved in to work in the arsenal, which was producing ammunition, including some pretty evil bombs and incendiary weaponry. To accommodate the influx and series of wooden barrack like apartments were thrown together and rented to the newcomers, many of whom were from Appalachia, After the war, people stayed on, since jobs were plentiful, but not very well paying. Over time, some of the barracks burned down, some were deserted and some were lived in by transients. About forty years ago, they were bought up and rehabbed - a bit - and became low cost and Section 8 housing for the marginally employed. One of the reasons I was asked to consult there is that an acquaintance of mine had bought a group of them. He is a community organizer of sorts and his goal was to change the tenants from renters to buyers, and he wanted to prepare them for home ownership and middle class morality, you see. I spent several months at gatherings where he was trying to help them take ownership of the idea of owning and maintaining property.
They were fine people but as far as I was concerned, drugs and alcohol were the least of their problems; in fact probably one of the ways to cope with their sense of helplessness about their powers to take charge of their lives. It's a largely white community, many single mothers on ADC, poor or no transportation. The town is located at the fat north edge of the county, with all the resources (hospital and doctors, dentists, inexpensive grocery stores, county services like food stamps, domestic violence shelter) 20 miles to the south. Looking around at the people at the meetings, I saw obesity, missing teeth, swollen legs, inadequate clothing, all the hallmarks of people in need who didn't seem to know that they deserved better. One woman talked about the bad water in her apartment and that she didn't want to call the water department because she didn't want to get the owner (the guy who was trying to get them to become owners themselves) in trouble.
When I got back to the office the next day after hearing this, I told my boos that what they needed there was a settlement house, a place where they could learn about nutrition, get job skill, child care, literacy training, have a satellite county service center, and them maybe we could look into what kinds of info they might need about alcohol and drug problems and what to do about that. Organizing a settlement house was not part of out mission statement, nor was there any other agency prepared to do that.
A few years ago, there was a new elementary school built in that community. and the old school has been turned into - a community center, offering almost all of the services I imagined all those years ago. I don't know whose idea is was, but it is a very active and busy place, in which everyone takes great pride. The library shares the building and from what I see in the local newspaper, it seems to be the sort of library that goes beyond providing books and CDs and draws all ages with fun activities.
This is the best kind of "settlement house," which sprang form the community on its own, with people seeing a need and bringing it to life without being told what they need. I haven't been in touch with the acquaintance who got me involved all those years ago, so I don't know how his rant to own strategy worked, but I'll bet he's happy with what the community has done for itself with his help at the beginning.

And Hull House in Chicago is no more.

Movies, Movies, Movies

2012-01-15T20:17:00.000-05:00

The end of this past year has provided some really fine flicks. Today, John and I went to see "The Artist." What a clever, funny, sweet film this is. I can't pronounce the lead actors' names, but they are both adorable. It should win the Oscar for originality, of nothing else: a silent film about silent films. Beautiful black and white. Great sound track music with a variety of music genres. It's the kind of movie that sticks with you.
The Golden Globe Awards show is on tonight, with Ricky Gervais as Emcee. I shall be watching "Downton Abbey," of course, but I'll tape it just to see whose inflated egos get punctured by Gervais.
If I were awarding tacky objects for the best films I saw this year I would choose the following:
Best movie: "Hugo"
Best actor: Ryan Goseling for "The Ides of March"
Best Actress: Michele Williams for "My Week With Marilyn"
Best Supporting Actress: Viola Davis or Octavia Spencer in "The Help"
Best Supporting Actor: Jonah Hill for "Moneyball"
Best Director: Martin Scorsese for "Hugo"
Best Musical Score: "Midnight in Paris"
Best Script: George Clooney for "Ides of March"
I doubt that this list will match the actual awards. I hated to skip George Cleooney for acting in "The Descendants" and Woody Allen for directing "Midnight in Paris," and aso that movie for best film.
Who knows who or what may the voted "the best," but the above performers and films are the ones I loved the most.
And I'd see "Hugo" again in a New York minute. (What the hell IS a New York minte?)

A Winter Ramble

2012-01-11T15:51:00.001-05:00

John knows that I have missed my old car rambles now that I am a pedestrian/passenger. The snow melted and the weather turned sunny and pleasant, so we took off the other morning to visit old haunts. We headed for Carrollton, some fifty miles or so south of here. Carrollton has became a fracking center, a regular boom town, according to the papers, and I wanted to see it before it disappeared into the void, perhaps literally. We went the back way, which takes you over the hills and far away, with plenty of long views over lovely hills. We encountered no fracking sites, although we did see a lot of dump trucks all the same make, trundling down the roads south of Carrollton.

One of our goals was to eat lunch at the airport diner, a place of mom's home cookin' and pilot types. The only other people there this time, however, were a quartet of traveling salespeople who were discussing mileage points at hotels and airlines rather than wind vectors and narrow escapes in thunderstorms. Since we had some mince pie at home, we passed up the home made pie for which this diner is famous. The room is decorated with model planes, airplane wall paper, and there used to be a propeller clock which seems to be gone now.

After lunch we went into Carrollton because I wanted to see the last honest to goodness dime store anywhere in this part of Ohio. It's a Ben Franklin. It has wooden floors and the clerks wear smocks. It has a candy counter. It has a huge fabric section, along with patterns, spools of thread, notions, and embroidery floss. It has rows of kitchen gadgets (probably all made in China, and one whole section of tea towels and dish cloths. It has toys, books, crayons and paste pots. One of the clerks told me that there are a lot of quilters in town.
After that, we headed down to Harrison County (where there's a monument to Clark Gable who lived there as a boy) to get to the Moravian Trail, which climbs up the ridge over Tappan Lake. This area is where we saw whole convoys of dumptrucks. This used to be a coal mining area, so the roads are built for heavy traffic, but those strip mines have long been played out. This oil company from Oklahoma has been all over this part of the state, buying leases for drilling into the Utica Shale 2000 feet below. The area is also very poor, so the money is tempting . There's a huge controversy brewing because of the consequences of careless drilling, the most worrisome of which is the pollution of the aquifers, to say nothing of creating instability underground. There have been 11 or so earthquakes over near Youngstown, one of which we felt here in Kent.
However, up in the hills it's just as beautiful in winter as it is in the spring, even though everything is brown and tan with bare trees. You can see for miles. The general store in Deersville is closed for renovation, whatever that means for a place that sells ice cream, beef jerky waders, bullets and bait. I hope they don't fancy it up too much.
We stopped in New Philadelphia, a really nice little city with a very fine non-Starbucks coffee shop for cappuccino, tea and scones. It was a very nice trip and I appreciated the chance to go back to some of my favorite places again. I think we'll go back in the spring, if they haven't fracked the whole place to bits.

Cuppa

2012-01-04T17:12:00.001-05:00

Well, the Mozart balls and the Lebkuchen are gone, along with some other tasty treats from Germany. What we have left is some very fine fruity tea, perfect for a late and snowy afternoon refresher. We have several different flavors to keep things interesting. These are special winter teas, so I have to imagine that the folks in Deutschland are also enjoying the same things five hours earlier than I am. By the time I am sipping this delightful tea, most of them are already in bed, or should be. I don't mean my relatives over there, a couple of whom are probably out and about with friends or on Facebook all night.
We took the tree down on Monday, along with the manger and now we are just back to an Amish plainness, without the glitter of Christmas to brighten up the place. I am getting ready for the long haul, preparing for the gloom of the season.
There will be some bright spots: Cleveland Orchestra concerts, the HD Met operas and, most of all, the annual Robbie Burns Night coming up on the 21st of January. The KSU theater department is putting on "Ragtime," which is a very fine musical. I saw it a couple of years ago at the Weathervane Theater in Akron and they did a splendid job of it. Given the quality of the the university theater department, it should be equally good.
I do feel hemmed in by snow now, though, since I have developed a fear of falling. I don't fall a lot, of course, in solid ground, but snow and ice are treacherous for geezers. We don't bounce like younger folks, tending to lie there with broken body parts. I do have my ski pole walking sticks but they seem rather excessive when everyone else is just striding along. What ever!
So I'll be drinking lots of that fruity winter tea while the snow swirls about and enjoy the rare sunny, dry days that come along.

In this picture is a lovely tea cozy, knitted for me by JayBell . It is much admired by all who see it.

L'heure Bleu Sacre Bleu!

2012-01-02T20:45:00.003-05:00

This time of year there's a certain time of day when the world outside my window turns blue, especially when there is snows on the ground. It's a lovely shade of blue and I'm sure there's a word for it - not so dark as cobalt but of the same hue. We've had snow showers off and on all day, but there's only a powdery coating on the lawn, a harbinger of things to come for the next four months or so. So I'll be seeing that blue for some time. Sacre bleu!
Polly left on New Year's eve. Her time here went so fast. As we did last year when she was home for Christmas, we went to a lot of movies, since this is the time when the producers pour out their Oscar contenders. While she was here we saw: "Ides of March", "War Horse," and "My Week With Marilyn". She and John went to see "The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo." I was disappointed in the beginning of "War Horse," since Steven Spielberg couldn't resist cuteness, having a goddam goose chasing a landlord for laughs, making the father, who in the book was a mean, violent farmer into a pitiable drunk, involving the whole village in watching the young man plow up a stony field with the star, who was part thoroughbred (illustrating a sort of "Rocky" moment). It was a dumbing down of the book, since Hollywood directors underestimate the intelligence of children----except for Scorsese who did such a beautiful job with "Hugo." For those who haven't seen "Hugo," it has come and gone so fast you might have to wait for the DVD, which is a shame because it is a celebration of movies, the kind that are most enjoyable in a theater. (Sally gave me a copy of the book for Christmas and it's a wonderful addition to my illustrated book collection). I've never been much of a fan of Marilyn Monroe, except for "Some Like It Hot." I always felt sorry for her as an exploited person. Michelle Williams, who plays her in the above movie, is just terrific and I am sure will be nominated for an Oscar and any other film awards going this year. "Ides of March" is a very good film about how a political idealist becomes a political cynic. Ryan Gosling is mighty fine; I had not seen him before and I hope to see him again in a film worthy of his talent.
We did the usual Boar's Head ritual at the magnificent cathedral in Cleveland. This year there were TWO donkeys, one a miniature. This year the donkey wasn't forced to climb the steps, since last year it had balked and caused Joseph a deal of trouble. I heard that the miniature donkey was there to keep the large on company. There were two pygmy goats with the shepherds, one of which kept bleating all the way to the end of the sanctuary where the holy infant was trying to sleep and all. After the pageant they serve ham, mince pie and plum pudding with rum sauce (it's an Episcopalian venue). We partook , even though we were going to No.l Pho for the usual post Boar's Head meal. Came home, watched a little TV and went to bed while it was still 2011.

Fun and Feasting

2011-12-26T13:15:00.003-05:00

Christmas Eve eve, we went up to the West Side Market, a sort of family tradition of late. It was festive, as it always is during the holiday season. I was happy to see that the Greek bakery lady was back. The last few times I had been there she was not at her usual place behind the counter. I found out that her father, the baker, had had a stroke and she and her husband had been taking care of him. Now she is both baking and selling and she has not mastered all of his recipes, especially the little tortes I love, but will soon be up to speed. The vendors were jolly, some wearing silly Santa hats. We had lunch at Min Anh, the Vietnamese restaurant on the west side. Delicious food there, as usual. For this reason we got to the market a little later, which meant that some of the vendors were cutting prices and we bought a lot of stuff which has been used for great dinners.
Christmas Eve, Polly decided to make pierogis, using an online recipe. They were excellent, but she says that she will never so that again - too labor intensive. We ate a lot, gave some away to a friend who dropped by with a nice beef roast (That's the kind of friend to have!!), and still had some left to freeze for later. Emily had sent a box of German goodies which we are trying not to gobble down all at once, things like Mozart balls and Lebkuchen, not for the calorie conscious.
Christmas morning started with John's pancake breakfast, which kept us full enough until the late afternoon and dinner. Christmas dinner was a sumptuous feast, with duck prepared by John with Polly's homemade marmalade and two great side dishes (armored turnips and Brussels spouts) and a mince pie by the chef d'jour Polly. She has spent a lot of time in the kitchen during her visit home, and her way with food is much appreciated. I did stir myself enough to make some plain old mashed potatoes and Sally did the clean up.
Today the Kinder are taking a hike in the Cuyahoga Valley National Park and then we are going to the movies with dinner to follow at the Chinese restaurant next to the theater. And after that, we'll come home and finish the mince pie.

The Dead Cat Christmas Card

2011-12-21T19:31:00.001-05:00

Since Dupree has been my Christmas card subject for lo! these many years, I had to include him again this year. So his little spirit joins me in wishing everyone

A very pleasant and peaceful Christmas holiday season.

Embellishing the Tree

2011-12-21T17:53:00.005-05:00

The siblings put the tree up the other day and trimmed it mightily. Polly is the usual arbiter of what goes on and what does NOT go on. This used to cause the annual putting up the tree fight. However, now everyone being in their fifties, or close to it, the trimming went smoothly. Polly had the idea to use some of my German Jumping Jacks, which are a great addition.
I love these things and have a selection of them: Mozart from Salzburg, a lederhosen wearing lad from Rothenburg and a jester from Oberammergau, the home of the Passion Play. Perhaps there was a jester somewhere during the Passion, but I do not know exactly how that role would fit in with the general scheme of things.

The Slovenly Peter is John's but I have hung it up with my others. Slovenly Peter was the creation of Dr. (of what I do not know) Heinrich Hoffman, a series of cautionary tales for children, in which infantile miscreants suffered all sorts of gruesome chastisements: getting their fingers cut off, being drowned in an ink well, exploding from over eating, and the like. My sister and I absolutely loved this book when we were very young children. At some point the libraries took it off the shelves as being too intense for delicate children, and I didn't see it for years. My friend Bob Morrow, a former art teacher of mine, had an original copy of it he had had saved from his childhood. I was able to find a copy of it from Blackwell's in Oxford. Anyway, there he is, along with a miniature Peter which I bought at the Chriskindlmarkt in Akron a couple of years ago when they had brought in a group of jolly Germans to brighten up the holiday season here in Northeastern Ohio.
Before I found my Slovenly Peter book, feeling that my children would benefit from this sort of thing and thinking they would find it as hilarious as my sister and I had, I got them a couple of similar books by Hillaire Beloc, titled "Cautionary Tales for Bad Children." Alas, they did not find it funny, but were rather terrified by the fates of some of the kiddos - burning up in a fire (playing with matches and being eaten by a lion (disobeying the warning signs at the zoo.) I think they're still dealing with this in therapy. We were much hardier in the old says.
The tree looks great.

What Does It All Mean?

2011-12-19T10:53:00.000-05:00

I wrote a post a while back about how, in Catholic school, we were presented with concepts well above our understanding, burdening our little minds with weighty theological terminology. A lot of this came in the Catechism, in which a question was asked and an answer given to be memorized. In the very early grades, some of this we could understand, if we cared to delve into it, but most the our responses sprang to our lips automatically, for which we could accumulate holy pictures of agonized looking saints. By the fourth grade, preparing for Confirmation, things got a bit more complicated, and asking for explanations was not encouraged. Our heads were full of big words about bigger matters, like "occasions of sin," "plenary and partial indulgences," "transubstantiation," and the like. We never never questioned these mysteries, so they stuck in out little heads forever.

The illustration above, done by Sally when she was 7 or 8, is an excellent example of the way a child's mind, confronted with one of those mysterious pronouncements in religion class, tries to get around that mystery. I don't think anyone answered her query. I don't remember hearing about a wind blowing through the room during the visit of the holy spirit. I remember being confused as a child by pictures of the apostles with little flames over their heads. I knew it had something to do with Pentecost. My nun didn't mention what that meant or anything about a wind. In Sally's picture, she has a sort of round thing dripping with flames hanging over the table at which the apostles were seated, as if they had yet to settle on the heads of the apostles. She needed to get that wind out of the way first. I love the look on the face of the questioning apostle. I have saved this drawing for over forty years. It is one of my favorites of the many drawings my children did. I cannot answer the question that Sally used this drawing to ask it.

December Sky

2011-12-14T16:30:00.001-05:00

I do not love to exercise. What I do like, though, is having done it. I like doing it early in the morning, because that's as bad as I'm going to feel the rest of the day. It's over by 8:00 a.m. and from then on, is on;y going to be better for that. I have been doing something exercise-ish early in the day for about 45 years or so. I was in an exercise program at the university for years, which involved floor stuff (stretching, bending ) and a lot of running. Then I did walking, lots of walking. After my first hip surgery, the elective one, I started Silver Sneakers, a program for geezers, which involved the stretching and bending stuff with a little mild aerobics thrown in. I have found all of this immensely boring, but I have done it anyway. Now I am in a water aerobics class which I actually enjoy, thanks to the other participants, a group of friendly, funny, smart women. We do this at 7 a.m. twice a week, which means I arise at 6:00 a.m., while it is now quite dark.
All this is just a lead up to the subject on this post, which is the beauty of the December morning sky. There is no other time like it. I don't know why, and I have seen years of early morning skies. In December the sky is the deepest and richest shade of dark blue. You can almost hear this color. For the past few days the moon has been full and pure glowing silver. In spite of light pollution, there are actually stars to be seen. Venus, of course, low in the western sky, smaller but as bright as the moon. I love this sky The moon shines into my room, but I have to get out of bed to see it. Early in the evening it is low and huge and then toward morning it is way high up in the western sky but still extremely bright. I remember flying home from some place years ago in December on a clear night and could see the silver pools of water far below as the moon reached them in a sort of explosion of brightness - the sort of magic that takes away the thought that you're in a speeding metal tube high above the earth. Even down on the ground, I love to go out to get the paper and just stand there and look up at the December sky and enjoy the moment.
Then I have to go and exercise.

See This Movie

2011-12-12T20:29:00.001-05:00

Yesterday Sally and I went to see "Hugo." It is based on the Caldecott award winning graphic novel and it is just a splendid movie, directed by Martin Scorsese, and it is an homage to the art of movie making. There is a version in 3-D which I did not want to see, because I never get the 3-D sensation and I can't think of any reason that anyone should need to see it in 3-D. It is beautifully cast and filmed in plain old 2-D. Ben Kingsley, whom I didn't recognize at first plays Papa Georges who turns out to be someone you may never have heard of unless you're a film nut like me. Sacha Baron Cohen plays a frustrated station guard in a fine and funny Peter Sellers kind of way without a trace of Borat.
If you have a brighter than average 8 or 9 year old kid relative or friend who has not had his/her wits dulled by the usual kid movie crap, I think the movie would be even more enjoyable than already is. It has not been very heavily promoted, so people are taking their children to see junk like the chipmunk movie, which is a shame. " Hugo" is set in the 30s and there's not one anachronistic use of language in it, which is refreshing, too.
Lovely flick. Don't miss it.

Meanderings

2011-12-07T20:37:00.000-05:00

I have been remiss in keeping up with my blog of late. No particular reason. Thanksgiving was busy, what with visiting relatives from far away, namely Polly and Emily. Polly spent a lot of time in the kitchen, much to our delight, since she is an excellent cook. Emily made her Gorgonzola pasta which we all love. A good time was had by all.
The girls and I went down to Salem to tour the Charles Burchfield house. Burchfield is one of my favorite artists, one of these great Ohio guys from the 30s and 40s. He did theses magical expressionist watercolor landscapes.The neat thing about the house is that copies of his paintings are positioned so that you can look out the windows and see what he saw, since not much has changed in the neighborhood over the past 100 years - a rare thing, indeed. Much of his work is in Buffalo, NY, since that's where he ended up. The Cleveland Museum of Art has some of this paintings also. He was a contemporary of Clyde Singer.
Went to see "The Descendants." which we all enjoyed. It's an Alexander Payne ("Election,""Sideways") flick set in Hawaii. Never liked Hawaiian music, but just loved it in this movie. And then there's George Clooney, who just gets better and better with every movie he makes. They need to give the guy an Oscar.
Of course, there was the loss of Dupree which was tempered somewhat by having everyone home. Then, of course, the girls left and the house was really empty. We keep thinking Dupree is still around. I mean after 17 years,m he was part of the furniture, only warmer, fuzzier and cuter. We really miss him.
Saturday's opera was "Rodalinda, a Handel work with much tessitura, a lot of it by two counter tenors. They had beautiful voices, except when the had to do their recitatives in falsetto, which came across like an old Sid Cesar skit, the one where he played a silent film star whose career was ruined by the arrival of sound. The one counter tenor even looked like Sid Cesar. When they were interviewed during intermission, they both had very deep male speaking voices. I'm not sure why Handel used that vocal range for those roles, since they both were regular guys, one of whom was married to the leading woman (Renee Fleming).So she's singing a duet with a guy who sounds like a woman. Oh, well. It's only the second opera by Handel that I've heard and it was a good lead up to a Messiah sing on Sunday which Sally and I attended up in Hiram. I haven't sung a "Messiah" for about fifty years, and even though I can whistle just about every chorus and a few of the arias, trying to follow it along was not easy and I got lost a couple of times. It didn't help that some tone deaf guy kept walking up behind me and throwing me off even more than I already was wandering about in the mass of notes. But it was great fun and the soloists were mostly great. That night it was up to the campus to hear the Kent Chorus do their Christmas program, which included a Missa Brevis by Haydn. I don't know why it seems as if every weekend I am engulfed in music. Coming up this Saturday is the Met "Faust," which looks good even though they are setting it in the 30s. But the misc will still be great. I think.
So, I guess I have been busy. Really enjoyed having all four of my grown children here for two weeks. Polly will be coming home again for Christmas, hurrah.

R.I.P. Dupree

2011-11-25T21:35:00.001-05:00

Today was a sad day at our house. It was inevitable, of course. I read somewhere that when we get a pet, we know that we will outlive it, but we continue to fall in love with our animals and go through the pain of loss eventually, over and over.
Dupree had been failing for some time. He could not process his food, but was hungry all the time. He was incontinent, which was not pleasant, for us and for him, since he was a fastidious groomer. Since he was not able to process food, he was so thin you could feel all his bones. Lately, he had been getting up into my lap, and staring right into my eyes as if telling me he was not happy. So this morning, John took him to the vet to release him from his misery. It was just too sad, but necessary.
John buried him in one of his favorite spots by the side of the house.
It's strange, but I keep thinking I hear him at the front door, or feel him jumping on the footrest of my throne.
He's had a good life, has been much loved, but will be much missed. He was a little over 17 years old, and until this past summer had remained a kitten. He used to climb up a tall fir tree on the corner of the house to get on the roof in order to walk over to the edge to meow over John's window to get his attention in the middle of the night. He would then climb down the lattice-like support of the porch roof like a monkey.
He liked to walk with his tail held high, like a plume over his back. He was a lovely cat and knew it. A fine purrer. Spoiled, too.
We told Dupree stories at dinner tonight and toasted his memory with wine and cranberry juice - separately, of course.
He was a very good cat.
You can read a poem I wrote about him here.http://kentkapersll.blogspot.com/2010/08/cat-prizes-for-me.html

Lotsa Stuff

2011-11-23T22:22:00.000-05:00

Good grief, Charlie Brown! Where has November gone? Right now I have a house full of company, most welcome, since they are all related to me by birth. This is the first time I have had all four adult children home at the same time for Thanksgiving in over ten years. Having long meals, talking, laughing, arguing on occasion and generally having a good time. I believe some singing is in order this evening. I shall probably retire early, since I had to get up early this morning to go to the retina guy, who is trying to retard the progress of macular degeneration. He is very sorry that I had to give up driving. Not his fault, I told him.
Well, before all of this I had a busy couple of weeks, music-wise and movie-wise. First of all, there was the live in HD Met production of "Siegfried," starring the wonderful Texan, Jay Hunter Morris. My ear for German is not that good , so I don't know if he sounded like a Texas German, or a German Texan. I only know that he has a terrific voice and looked great, all blond and tall and all. Even though it was six hours long, it went by in a flash. German mythology is about as wacky as most cultural mythology, with dragons and dwarfs and incestuous breeding and all and Wagner was a virulent anti -Semitic jerk, but he certainly could write some gorgeous music."Gotterdamerung" is coming up in February, with the same cast, so I think I'll catch that one, too, and watch the end of the gods.
Then Kent State theater department put on "A Chorus Line," a splendid production, with superb dancing and mostly good singing. There is a tendency these days for young women to speak in Munckhin like tones. Not sure where this is coming from, but when a desperate dancer is trying to sound dramatic, as the cast of this musical is wont to do , the voices sound too much like Donald Duck's girl friend, all up in the throat ans all. I think the theater department should start a required course in voice, not singing, but speaking, so that they will sound like adults. I can't imagine how Lady Macbeth would sound in that un-dulcet timbre, but it may be the coming thing. Other than that, it was a really fine show.
Sally and I went to see "The Way," because I have loved Martin Sheen since he was my shadow president during the long, dread days of the Bush administration. "The Way" is a lovely film about the Camino de Santiago, a pilgrimage taken by people in Northern Spain. The scenery is breathtaking and the performances are fine and funny, too. You can even enjoy it whilst being a pagan such as I am. There are no explosions, not too much religion, no F-words or sex scenes, which are getting downright tiresome these days. There';s not much to have sex with in this movie anyway, except maybe with a few rocks. I enjoyed it very much and highly recommend it.
Then there was " J. Edgar." a very dark, literally, movie with a miscast Leonardo DiCaprio, a tall, skinny guy wrapped in a fat suit to play a short, stocky J. Edgar Hoover. It was interesting, and cleverly arranged to make him look like a hero, except at the end when you learned that he lied a lot about his exploits. I did enjoy it, but wondered why the casting was what is was, considering that there are plenty of short guys who could have done it. like Matt Damon.
Last Saturday was another RD opera, this time "Satygraaha," about Gandhi in South Africa,which was by Phillipp Glass, who could put a hard-core insomniac into a coma-like snooze. However, it was very
interesting, especially the staging, which involved enormous puppets made of old newspaper (ya hadda be there) and a bright blue Krishna, who looked very much like Tiny Time, the late falsetto singer. The libretto was in Sanskrit, based on theBaghava Gita,which I really must read some day in the distant future. It was worth seeing, and I did wake myself up with a very short kind of a snort, the beginning of a snore. I dont'; think anyone heard it, being sound asleep for the most part. But I an glad that I saw it. Richard Croft, who played Gandhi, had the most beautiful voice, even though he sang a lot of repetitive lines - a factor in the general drowsiness which resulted. It was a very rueful performance for all.
I just finished "The Paris Wife," which I enjoyed immensely. It was about Hemingway's first wife, Hadley (a fictionalized account), and it was very fine and true and brave. And Heningway was a bit of a s--t. What else is new?

Time Travel, Sorta

2011-11-03T20:40:00.000-04:00

This past weekend was one of those in which all sorts of things are going on one after the other. I spent it gong from 12th century Sicily to 18th century Seville to 16th century London. Two operas and one movie later the only thing that's tired is my seat.
On Friday I went up to Cleveland with friends to see an opera put on by a small, but excellent opera company of a rarely performed work by a Polish composer who shall remain nameless. This opera company used to be headquartered here in town while the star was getting her PH.D.at the university. She is an amazingly wonderful bel canto soprano who is a joy to listen to. While they were here, they did a series of bel canto operas, by Donizetti, Bellini and others. They used the university as well as local churches in which to perform. I was really looking forward to hearing her again, even though the opera was one I'd never heard of. It begins in Sicily, travels to the mysterious East and ends up in ancient Greece. I think. It was sung in Polish, but there were projected subtitles, which I couldn't read, but never mind. It was written in the twenties and is the kind of formless music with lots of declamatory singing and no arias. The beautiful voice was mainly used in a kind o vocalise, hard to hear over the full orchestra and a chorus of loud male voices. They staged the opera in a large pseudo-Gothic church with terrible acoustics. Everything about the performance e was excellent, professionally done, great voices, etc., except that the music was just pretty bad, or not my cup of vodka. There was one character, called "The Shepherd," a young blond man, dressed all in white, with a lovely tenor voice, who minced around in a badly choreographed sort of dance, who was just unwatchable. He was supposed to represent Spirit, I think.I expressed to my companions, that I thought I knew why this work was so rarely performed, and they agreed. And both of them are musicians and know a lot more than I do about this sort of thing. We left before the third act. I hear that this opera is a classic in Poland. Okay.
The next day I went to see a real opera, one of those in HD form the Met. It was "Don Giovanni" and both of the male leads, Leporello and Don Giovanni were hunks with gorgeous voices. I noticed that Giovanni really got into his character, taking advantage of being a lech by vigorously feeling up the women he was seducing. They were supposed to be virtuous Spanish maiden, - well except for one, who was doing her best to get him to seduce her again and all. One of my favorite singers, Ramon Vargas, played Don Ottavio, and got to sing a couple of fine arias. He played one of the seducees boy friends, whom she didn't find too exciting compared with the hot seducer. The final scene, where the Comnmendatore sends Don Giovanni to hell was full of flames and smoke, but the women didn't get to see it, but heard about it later and were sad and all. No more feeling up time for them.
Monday, Sally and I went to see "Anonymous," which is all about how Shakespeare didn't write all those sonnets and plays because he was a right idjit. The actor who played him apparently viewed him as a Will Ferrell kind of guy, because that's how he portrayed him. We also learn that the Virgin Queen was not virginal, and dropped bastard babies all over the country, leaving them to be brought up by noble families, never learning of their royal heritage. All in all, this movie has its own story about that era, which makes for a fun movie. Great acting, costumes, sets, et cetera. When I took a Shakespeare course a few years ago, the professor, Kelly Gentoff, a Shakespeare scholar said at the beginning of the class: "Shakespeare wrote it all; nobody else wrote the sonnets and the plays." I wonder what Kelly would think of this movie. I think he wouldn't bother to see it in the first place.
On this Saturday, a friend and I are going to see the six hour "Siegfried." Renee Fleming interviewed the tenor Jay Hunter Morris, who is playing Siggy. It was hilarious. Morris is from Paris, Texas, has a great Heldentenor voice, but talks like the sausage guy Jimmy Dean. He claims to be right thrilled to be kissin' Debra Voigt. I reckonn we'll tote us some vittles for the two intermissions.

Red-faced at the Market

2011-10-25T21:43:00.002-04:00

Last Saturday was the penultimate market days for our great Farmers' Market in Kent. Sally and I went down to buy stuff and enjoy the ambiance. At this point, there is still a lot of produce available. I wanted some fresh lettuce from a particular stand which has the best, even this late in the season. That's the first place I started and I bought a lovely head of Boston lettuce. Then I went to the goat cheese stand just opposite the lettuce lady's place. I sampled a bit, which was delicious. Then I reached in my pocket for my wallet, only to discover that it was gone! I had just arrived, and hadn't moved more than 4 feet. I looked around, Sally looked around. I could not imagine that anyone there would have picked it up and walked away with it. I wandered down to where that day's musicians were entertaining the crowd and asked it I could use the mike for an announcement. They kindly ceded the mike and I plaintively asked that if anyone found it, would they please turn it in to the director's table. Soon I had all these people helping me, asking at each vendor's stand if they had seen it. All I could think of was having to call the bank, the credit card company, Macy's (where I had planned to go after the market to take advantage of their one day extravaganza sale - 50% off on select items!!) and the 50 bucks in the wallet with no way to get more because my debit card would be gone. We decided that we'd better go home and start calling. I had left my purse in the trunk, so Sally got it out and there was my wallet inside. I had totally forgotten that I had taken 20 bucks and put it in the pocket of the jacket I was wearing. I had forgotten that completely and instead of putting my wallet in my pocket I had just put the money in it. When I had reached into my pocket for the not there wallet, I hadn't dug down deep enough to feel the change from that twenty, so I didn't remember that at all. Sally went to the market director's table to tell her, and to announce that it had been found, and I felt like a total fool. All I could think of is that they would put it down to my being a fuzzy headed old person whose memory was slipping. I reason that it was one of those things that a person does without, and that I probably would have done the same thing when I was 44 instead of 84. So Saturday is the last day and I'm thinking I will just stay away.
And then I had been asked to write a letter to the editor in support of the library levy for the local library, which I hardly ever use because put up this new building which looks as if it was designed by someone who flunked out of the Architecture School of Stalinist Russia in 1947 (a bad year for architecture everywhere), the interior of which is also badly laid out. I wrote what I thought was a very nice letter, but when it appeared I realized that either their proofreader had goofed or I had (probably the latter) and instead of "100 years of library use" it read "100 tears". I admit that I am a terrible typist, really awful, and I am also not a very good proofreader either, as Emily and Sally are only too eager to tell me. But anyway, that's twice I have embarrassed myself publicly this week-end. One more time and I may have to change my name and relocate.
But I did get to Macy's great sale and bought two jackets for the price of one; one for Sally and one for me.

Faded Leaves

2011-10-18T18:29:00.000-04:00

For some reason, this fall has not produced the usual brilliant,t colorful foliage which I look forward to every October. I noticed this on that geezer bus tour last week. We were about 45 miles south of here, and most of the trees were already bare. The ones which were not bare had dull, faded colors. In my neighborhood, most of the trees are still green. The two maples in front of my house are usually a glowing golden color by now, filling my living room with the warm tinge of buttery yellow. We have had a lot of rain, record amounts, in fact, which usually keeps the trees green longer, but the hues now are the kind you get when there's been a drought. Even the brilliant red maple at the cider mill, the most photographed autumn tree in Portage County is just a muted, washed out looking shade of plum instead of the flaming scarlet that makes people bring their cameras when they come for cider. I have not had a chance to go through the golden tunnel of the maples out on Lake Rockwell road, so I don;t know if they are suffering from the same problem as the other trees around here, whatever that may be. My friend in nearby Hudson tells me that the trees in her neighborhood are lovely and colorful, but then, everything in Hudson is lovely, being upscale and all. Even the trees know their role in the overall scheme of a perfect Western Reserve town.
Below is a picture from the past of the golden tunnel.

Geezer Bus Tour

2011-10-17T15:33:00.001-04:00

Since this is my favorite season for going on a bit of a ramble, and since I can't drive any more, I went on a bus tour last week to one of my favorite places, Hanoverton. It is now a pretty small town, but it was built along the Sandy and Beaver canal back in the early 19th century. Unfortunately, the canal was never completed down the line, and it was pretty much abandoned. It looks like 18th century Philadelphia or Boston, with brick row houses. I believe that some of the earliest settlers were Quakers. When I first went there, many years ago, there was nothing much there and many of the houses were in pretty bad shape. The houses have since been restored, and there is the Spread Eagle Tavern, a tourist draw, and one of our destinations on this tour. It's a fine place for lunch. It's been beautifully restored, and is also an inn. One of the problems for me, however, is that the owner has decorated the public rooms with pictures of himself with the likes of Reagan and George Bush. I took Harriet down there for lunch once and told her that she was not allowed to comment until we got back in the car. I took another friend there, another fire breathing liberal, and told her the same thing. It's hard for us not to draw moustaches on pictures like that, but so far, we have held back and enjoyed the food and the non-conservative decor. Most of the buildings in the town are on the National Historic Register.
It is a conservative area. Clement Vallandingham, the leader of the Copperheads, lived in nearby Lisbon which was also home to the Apple Farm, a commune which hoped to improve the human species by breeding super men and women. It didn't last long, since, while there was a plenitude of male volunteers for the experiment, there was a reluctance on the part of females to participate. But I digress.
We made a brief stop at the Hanoverton cemetery for some feeble ghost stories by some not very good storytellers. One was dressed as a Confederate soldier, who professed that the war was about states' rights, not slavery. He was obviously a Copperhead. The other was supposed to be a town character and he stumbled through some tale, supposedly true, about a witch who really wasn't one, even though she put a spell on a family and they all died. Since it was a gray and windy day, this could have been a pretty good experience. The cemetery is old and full of spooky tress, but these tellers just weren't up to it.
Out final stop was a tour of Stonegate, a pseudo Tudor castle. It turned out to be a place I had read about a few years ago, which this guy built because he'd always wanted to live in the past. John had done a seminar there once on stone masonry; the guy had wanted to hold classes there in various areas of historic handicrafts, but nothing came of it. Now he does these tours in October and his wife teaches stained glass classes. They built the house of used materials from demolished buildings. They got the stone and a lot of the wood from the property and picked up some remarkable things from trash piles and dumps: windows, furniture, beams from old barns, lamps, etc, They learned how to plane wood, plaster walls, carve stone and wood and generally taught themselves all sorts of crafts. They got slate from a torn down church and learned how to do the roof. They designed Gothic doors for the three car garage, where they presumably keep their donkey cart. It took them 33 years to do all this and it is impressive, I must say. It's also a bit tacky in spots, and it seemed pretty gloomy on this gray day. He's a self made man, happy in his isolated castle. John said that he owns a large pizza franchise, but I didn't see any pizza oven in the Gothic kitchen.
We had earlier stopped at an apple orchard, where we had cider and doughnuts and I bought some really fine apples, Honey Crisps, that John made into a pie last night in our 1950s kitchen. I enjoyed the geezer tour, but I do miss driving to places like Hanoverton.

Macaw Meets Mole

2011-10-11T17:29:00.000-04:00

Had lunch yesterday with three women from my aerobics class. We met at a favorite Twin Lakes tavern, with lovely autumnal views of the lake, reflecting colorful tress on the other side. The specialty there is a wall-eye sandwich, which we all ordered. We started talking about times we'd been there before. Berry, who is a retired beautician and scuba dive,r recounted a true life tale of horror and hilarity. It seems that one of the women from the salon where she worked was getting married, and they decided to take her there for a pre-wedding party. They ate, they drank, and the bride-to-be especially drank and drank. This tavern had a pet yellow macaw. The tipsy bride decided that she wanted that macaw to sit on her shoulder. Now this lady also had on her cheek a large, dark mole. The macaw was brought to her table and set down on her shoulder. Mistaking the mole for a large, brown seed, it promptly began to snack. Screams ensued. Blood flowed. Most of the mole dangled from the curved. Don't know if the bird was smiling.
The bird was returned to its perch. The victim declined to go to the ER, since she did not want to appear there in her inebriated condition, perhaps before a waiting room possibly containing people who might know her. Betty, who is always prepared, had with her 1.) scissors, 2.)NewSkin and 3.)Bandaids, requisite tools of the thoughtful hairdresser and scuba diver. (She told us that NewSkin is perfect for the odd accidental ear snip while cutting hair. I did not know that. I have never had my ear snipped while getting my hair cut. Who knew?) The wounded was taken to the ladies' room and Betty stanched the blood, and performed quick surgery, snipping off the remains of the loose mole, applying NewSkin (which is antiseptic) and the Bandaid. As the now mole-less bride-to-be was escorted out by her friends one of them remarked, "I guess you'll be canceling the dove release at the wedding now?"

Post Script: The next day the woman went to the doctor who did some further cleaning up, and it healed scarlessly in time for the wedding.

Almost Gone

2011-09-28T15:16:00.003-04:00

There's not much better than ripe Ohio tomatoes. Right now they are available, but not for much longer. My own tomatoes did not do too well this summer, for some reason. (The beauty above is from a local farm.) Maybe I got the wrong kind of plant. They are small, but not like Roma small one, just small round ones. They work for sauces and salads, but what I really like are tomato sandwiches, with lots of mayonnaise with a sprinkle of salt. In my younger days I liked to eat a tomato like an apple, but for some reason I don't do that any more. Too messy? Whatever. But a good tomato sandwich, boy, that's summer.
Speaking of mayonnaise, it seems to have a negative connotation, but I have always liked the stuff. My mother used to make her own mayonnaise (as did Julia Child, I discovered when reading her book about living in France). Mother made it in this jar with a metal plunger. I know that she used Wesson Oil and lemon juice. It had a most delicate flavor. I don't think she added any spices. I'm sure there are recipes galore for home made mayonnaise, but I have never tried it.
Oh, this reminds me of Roz Chast's cartoon in the NYorker last week. It's a pie chart of typical blogs: one third are about yummy food the blogger has eaten (guilty), one third trying to sell one's book or whatever (guilty), and one third conspiracy theories (not guilty).But, I don't care. A tomato sandwich is a worthy subject , both to eat, and to write about.

Dupree Update

2011-09-28T14:55:00.001-04:00

It's been a rough summer for the aged cat who lives in this house. He's had a couple of infections which have responded to antibiotics. John is back from Athens County, which is a relief for all concerned, since I am not the only one who has had to listen to his constant whingeing and snubbing of food. He has developed a variety of yowls. When I refuse to cater to his food issues, he produces a drawn out unworldly kind of thing. If he were a human child, it would constitute sassy remark.
On the other hand, he is extremely affectionate, nestling up to me on the footrest of my throne. He also like to get into my lap and stare steadily at me, purring all the while. He is also very good at the vet. While John was away, Sally took him several times and was very proud of his good behavior both there and on the ride home, where he curled up on the front seat and slept.
I think he is on his 81/2 life, and it isn't easy for him or anyone else. Right now he is sleeping on the carpet, occasionally muttering a brief meow, a sort of "Don't forget that I'm here," sort of thing. Not likely.

A Walk in the Woods

2011-09-19T17:58:00.003-04:00

Every year, the Akron park system has a Fall Hiking Spree. There are something like 15 parks, and if you walk a trail in at least eight of them, you get a badge to put on your hiking staff. I did that about 15 years ago, skipped a few years and started again on the Sunday after 9/11/01, as did about half the population of the Akron area. I think we all wanted to get away from TV and newspapers and find comfort in nature. The parks are all beautiful. Some have ponds, some take you along the Cuyahoga River, some take you through gorges and up hills to viewing platforms. The trails are not paved, and some run along board walks over boggy areas. Some trails are 1 mile, some are three miles. You can see flora and fauna. As the fall progresses you go from deep green forests of late summer to the gold and red of autumn. It starts right after Labor Day and runs through November, I think. There are families with babes in strollers, grandparents and lots of interesting dogs. It's a wonderful thing to do on a golden afternoon. You cannot stop smiling.
I have not done this for a number of years, starting when I had a bum hip and had it replaced. I coulda and shoulda. Then I had that hip break and that put me off again. This year I decided to give it a try, perhaps not going enough to get another badge to add to my measly collection, but just to see how, or if, I could manage at least a mile. Yesterday, a gorgeous day of blue sky, puffy clouds and sunshine, Sally, John and I went off to Goodyear Park, along with a lot of other people. Sally has done this for years and her hiking staff has a nice bunch of colorful badges. She usually gets it all done by either late September or early October. John has done it for years, too, but he never bothers to get the badges. This spree has been going on for over forty years and you'll see people with that many badges on their staffs.
I didn't take my hiking staff, but instead used my German walking sticks. They are basically ski poles, but you'll see many people in Germany using them for walking, so I bought myself a pair the last time I was there. They give you upper body motion while you are walking along and help when you get to a hill. Unfortunately, I forgot to change my shoes, and realized that I still had my Crocs on - not a good thing to hike in. However, I managed to make the whole 1.4 mile walk, with a couple of bench sits in there.That's the most I've walked in a long time. Sally has promised to take me along on a few other ones, mainly the ones rated 1, which means that there are no big hills and that are usually the shorter ones. I'll miss a couple of my old favorites, but no need to push it, I always say. I remember seeing these really ancient people in the Lake District in England climbing up these practically perpendicular fells. They appeared to have calves of steel, and will probably never need a hip replacement.
One of the perks of this hiking thing is that you can have ice cream after. Yesterday we had frozen custard from Strickland's, an Akron institution with a secret ingredient which makes their custard very popular hereabouts, even for those who haven't just walked 1.4 miles. But if you have, you feel ever so noble and deserving.

Sunday

2011-09-14T19:50:00.000-04:00

So, I did not watch any of the ceremony going on in NYC. Listened to concerts on WCLV and WQXR commemorating the sad event of ten years ago. In the evening there was a repeat of the remarkable documentary by the two French brothers who came to NYC to do a film about a typical New York City fire department, which ended up as a horrifying documentary about the World Trade Center destruction. It is an amazing film, chilling, especially when you know what is going to happen. Miraculously enough, not one of the firemen form the station was injured or killed, even though they were in the Trade Center when the first building fell. You can hear it as the cameraman and the firemen are in the lobby of the other building. Everything goes black and them dim from the dust. One of the brothers had stayed at the fire station and then when he realizes what happened, he goes off to the WTC, sure that his brother is dead. This is a side story to what is actually happening and they captured everything with their cameras. There is no getting away from the horror of this event, especially since they covered some things that they can't even show. Watching it brought back the day it happened so vividly that I could feel the same stomach clutching dread that I felt that day. On this Sunday, it appeared that many people greeted the commemoration by waving flags, something that is peculiarly significant in this country.
One thing that no one mentioned was the resultant destruction of Iraq, which had nothing to do with the WTC destruction. For the 2998 lives lost in the USA from the Saudi terrorists, we have killed tens of thousands of Iraqis, including thousands of children, maimed thousands of innocent civilians, destroyed homes and cities and their culture. We are not memorializing them, nor are we mourning for them. We are waving flags to "celebrate our resiliency." In addition, we have lost thousands of young American lives and left more thousands with lost limbs and lost minds. We are naming streets and baseball fields for the dead and waving more flags as their hearses pass by on the way to the local cemetery.
I just finished a book about WWI, describing the horror of those muddy battlefields and men lining up, facing each other and shooting each other across No Man's Land. And twenty years later they went through it again, with bigger guns and bigger bombs and even more people killed.We haven't had that kind of war in this country since 1865, but Europe has, with cities left in rubble, land ripped to pieces, people killed by the millions, families torn apart, children left parentless and homeless, starving and dying from "collateral damage." We are still in shock from the WTC, the most violent man-made occurrence we have experienced in our lifetime. Are we as "resilient" as the Europeans? I don't think so. But we love that flag, don't we?

Favorite THings

2011-09-08T16:45:00.004-04:00

Last year when I was a guest for dinner at the home of my friend Jane, I was helping her with the dessert. She was making an apple crumble and she was peeling the apples and I was slicing them. She was using an ancient peeler, which seamed to be a bit dull. I told her about my wonderful peeler and that she should get one like it, which would be much easier than using the one she has. "Uh-uh," was her reply. She loves her peelre and has had it for years. She does not want a new peeler, uh-uh. That dull thing was an old friend and worked fine for her.
I realized that I also had pet gadgets, some old, some new which I cannot do without. Some I have had for fifty years or so, like some knives, a strainer, and a strawberry huller. I broke my glass lemon juicer a few years ago and was horrified to find that they don't make them any more. I found one in an antique shop and it was not expensive but I guard it with care.
The gadgets above are things I have to have. Only a couple of them are old, because the others hadn't been invented yet when I first stocked my kitchen. On the left is a zester, a gift from Polly,one of three I have which I use to grate nutmeg, Parmesan cheese and lemons or oranges. For some reason the light makes it look rusty, but it's not. Next to it is the strawberry huller , which is ancient and is only used when strawberries are ripe in Ohio. Below that is a little gadget I got up in Amish country for removing that leaf stem on tomatoes. I use it mostly in the summer, when Ohio tomatoes (our state veg or fruit depending on whom you believe) are ripe. The little orange thing is also from Amish country (and we think they have such a hard life!) used to strip orange peels and I cannot do without it. They don't last forever, so I usually buy a bunch of them. I only use that in the winter months when there are good oranges available. Then there's my magic peeler. First time I saw one of these was in Germany in my daughter's kitchen. I can't remember if I bought this over there or found it here, but I can't use the other kind. The next plastic object is a lemon slice squeezer. I've had it forever and I don't know where I got it, but it is indispensable when you don't want to use a whole lemon and you only need a tablespoon or two of lemon juice. It's old. Hovering over all is a cheese slicer. My late friend Harriet claims it was invented by a Norwegian (which Harriet was one of) and you can sere its outline on this one brand of cheese. It makes really nice slices of cheddar or Swiss to go on a cracker or to put between two slices of bread for grilled cheese sandwiches. It's not very old, and so much better than those crummy wire cutters which break right when you're in the mood for a grilled cheese sandwich.
I still have my 60 year old Revereware pans, only I don't shine the bottoms any more, but they're not gadgets, but nice familiar things I like very much.

Play Ball

2011-08-31T20:16:00.002-04:00

The Germans have gone up to watch the Clevelands play the Oaklands (apologies to Damon Runyan) on this last day of August, as their visit and summer both wane. They had a wonderful time up in Put-in-Bay last weekend and must go to the baseball game in order to get the full summer in American experience. I don't think the girls have ever seen a live major league game, but Chris has been a fan ever since he lived in San Francisco where he and Emily lived for a year before moving abroad. I expect they will busy themselves observing the behavior of the Cleveland baseball fan in order to report back to their friends in Deutschland. After all, Ohio is the ultimate American location. After all, it is the home of a whole bunch of American presidents,, being edged out in numbers by Virginia by one. Of course they have Washington and Jefferson, and we have the likes of Warren G. Harding.
I am staying home, enjoying the unnatural quiet - but I misspeak. I have the game on TV, occasionally glancing to see if I can spot the family,. They have seats in the nose bleed section, planning to move down to the good seats after a while. I am DVR-ing it so they can scan it when they get home and see if they can find themselves. Doesn't everybody do that? Before they left, Chris asked me if I had any poster board in order to make a sign. Alas, I do not stock such material.
I shall wander out now to the kitchen for a bowl of peach ice cream. Or maybe the coffee ice cream. Or maybe a dab of both.

Visitors from Abroad

2011-08-29T19:52:00.000-04:00

Three beautiful women and the Greek Prince Consort are currently visiting here in Kent. One is my daughter, Emily, and two are my grand daughters, Katina and Elena, and the other one my is darling son-in-law Chris. It's been a few years since Chris has been able to come with them., and we are so glad to see him. The girls are grown ups now and we have lively conversations. They spent the weekend in Put-in-Bay, and aren't back yet. It always amazes me that they find Lake Erie interesting, since they've been to much more glamorous spots in Europe. It's all in what you're used to and what is new to you.
The farmers' m,market Saturday was really energized by a drum group called the African Drums, made up mostly by white middle class types who have gotten the rhythm down right. Everyone was smiling and dancing around, although the vendors in their immediate vicinity must have gotten a bit tired of it after a few hours. At one produce stand, the vendor and a customer were discussing Wendell Berry, the poet, and he is a topic you would not hear at the Acme Supermarket produce section, unless someone from the English department happened to be sorting through the lettuce and talking to him/herself.
I ran into a fellow geezer there (the Acme) the other day, and got stuck listening to a monologue, the kind that includes things like ..."No, now that I think of it, it was in May...no, I take that back, it was December of 2001...no, wait, it was 1998, and then we went ..no, it wasn't then it was ..." For about an hour this went on. I think we need to educate people to recognize that when your listeners's eyes glaze over, or they start reading the product codes on the items in their cart, that's when maybe you should shut the hell up and move on.
Well, he's a nice geezer, really quite sweet but my fake hips can take only so much standing, and my face can only look interested for a shorter amount of time.
The picture is of one of Cris' artistic creations. When he makes a dish, it is always a work of art. This is tomatoes - the kind you can only get in August in Ohio - with mozzarella, basil, garlic,chives and balsamic vinegar. It was part of our favorite summer meal: Ohio corn on the cob, Blue Lake green beans and tomatoes. And then a trip to Stoddard's for frozen custard. That night the special was coffee chocolate chip. All's right with the world.

This and That

2011-08-23T15:59:00.002-04:00

The above photo is of my father and some classmates at Auburn, sometime around 1917 or so. They were in the ROTC, but by the time they graduated in 1920, WWI was over, so the band new first lieutenants had no war to go to . My father went up North to Holyoke MA, to intern at the Worthington Pump Co.,where he met a lovely young draftswoman (one of the first women draftsmen, hired to replace the men who had gone off to the war) who later became my mother.My father is the one with what my sister calls the Lyle Lovett hairdo. He was quite blond and handsome, but my mother told me that she preferred dark haired men, and was not impressed when he appeared over her drafting table. He was persistant, thank goodness or I would not be here.
He used to tell us that he had at one time played the mandolin, and the picture is the proof. We all became players o ukuleles, guitars and banjos, but never heard the mandolin master, probably because we never had a mandolin handy. It would be so nice to have a time machine and drop in on those boys of yesteryear. My sister is trying to figure out what kinds of things they would have been playing. There were a lot of good songs in those days: early Irving Berlin or George M. Cohan perhaps? They are obviously having a fine time. The man to the right of Pa is a man we called Uncle Nelson, his best friend, nicknamed "Swede." As small children,we got to know him when they were both working in New Jersey, before we moved to Atlanta. I just remember that his wife RosaNell had a great jointed, wooden Felix the Cat doll that I very much hoped she would give me. They never had any children, so I wonder what happened to it. No doubt it will show up on "Antiques Road Show" some day and be worth a fortune.
Went to Blossom Center on Saturday night to see the Joffrey Ballet. They are just a wonder, like feathers with muscles. They did a couple of Balanchine pieces, including a traditional pas de deux from "Swan Lake," but their strength is in the contemporary dance genre, at which they are best. I noticed a peculiar positioning of the feet of the female dancers during a life: they stick their feet out in a flexed position which looks very awkward and a bit dirty. They did that in a couple the ballets, both with different choreographers. It's the opposite of pointed toes and strange.
Went to see "Midnight in Paris" again with a a friend who hadn't seen it. Still great. Also saw "The Help" last week and wanted less of Skeeter and more of the Black women. Also I found the white Junior Leaguers pretty stereotyped as racists, in a way that was not believable. They were caricatures rather than real people, too over the top. Viola Davis and Octavia Spencer were brilliant. The actress who played the white trash woman was touching, and was also the same actress who played the saintly mother in "Tree of Life." which I would never have known if I hadn't looked it up on IMDB. That's versatility.
I ma re-reading "National Velvet," one of my favorite childhood books and nothing like the movie. It is so beautifully written, almost poetic, and so satisfying to a horse loving child, actually a horse loving child's dream come true. I identified with Velvet who looked nothing like Elizabeth Taylor, but like me, wan and blond and skinny. The movie got nithing right, and was on e of my first disappointments in a movie adaptation of a book I loved. One of the major goofs was that the horse was called "The Pie" because he was a piebald horse, not the glossy brown one in the movie. Stupid! My first copy of the of the book was a cheap edition that had little line drawings by Enid Bagnold's daughter, graceful little drawings of horses. The edition I have now is the 50th anniversary edition, which I bought twenty some years ago, with some very fine watercolor illustrations. Doesn't really need illustrations, though, because it is a wonder of writing. I have heard good things about the book "War Horse," which is also on Broadway now with these great life size horse puppets, and is coming out in December as a film by Steven Spielberg. Sally brought the book over for me to read. It's a children's book, but she loved it, as did a friend who told me about it last winter. When I finish "National Velvet" I have a stack of things to read. And the New Yorker, looming on a table in a 4 inch stack. Oy veh!

My Pedestrian Life

2011-08-16T14:57:00.001-04:00

Well, July was just so hot that I couldn't get it together enough to update this blog. John put an air conditioner in the living room, which helped to cool things off in the afternoon, and another one in my bedroom, which cooled things off at night. I have never done heat well, even though I spent my childhood in the South. As a child, though, going swimming as much as possible and playing in the hose and just playing led me to ignore the heat. It wasn't until we moved to Ohio that I became aware of how disgusting summer could be. Ohio has miserable summers because of the humidity and there weren't any public pools where we could cool off when we first moved up here. Of course this summer was worse than most, so I spent most of July in a stupor. Now it's August with the cool nights and brilliantly sunny days with a touch of cool in the mornings.
The big news in my life is that I have to give up driving. I can't pass the reading portion of the drivers' exam that you have to take to renew the license. In spite of the treatments, the macular degeneration has progressed to that point, so I am now a pedestrian. We do have a door to door bus service, but you have to call three days ahead of time to book it, which takes all the spontaneity out of going places. I love to drive. I love to just get into the car and head out to wherever all by myself. And then there's the practicality of being able to run to the store, the bank, the movies and museums or the post office when you need to. I am going to miss that. I'm a believer in the adage "He travels the fastest who travels alone," something I like to do. It will be interesting to see how this turns out.
Had an exciting week-end. First, on Saturday, the ATT Uverse, system, which runs my TV, computer and phone conked out. The mo st important of these services is my phone, especially since the next day was my birthday and I knew family would be calling and I had no way of letting them know that I had no phone. I called ATT on my cell phone and they promised that someone would be out to fix it that afternoon between 12 and four. Well, of course that didn't happen; they would be here around 6:30 the tech said later. I had an important event Saturday night. I had won a very nice evening at Blossom Music Center with a free dinner (with Bob Conrad, the guy who owns the best classical music station in the U.S. of A., WCLV in Cleveland), plus parking in the close in lot, which means you can park only steps from the restaurant and the pavilion. It turned out that they could do it early Sunday morning, so that took care of that. I could do without the computer and TV for a few hours, but not he phone. The problem is that no one knows my cell phone number, including me, so I would be incommunicado without my land line.
The evening at Blossom was lovely. John went with me, having driven up from Athens County, and Bob Conrad introduced me to the other winners as "Mary Lu Walker's sister," since he features her frequently on his nationally syndicated Weekend Radio program. (See your local listings for day and time.) He is a charming man and a great host. The concert featured Russian music and a marvelous pianist who played the hell out of a Prokofiev concerto whole clad in a stunning viviid red evening gown. John had already bought tickets for next week's Joffrey Ballet concert for my birthday, so we had this as an extra treat.On my actual birthday we had dinner at the Pufferbelly with Sally and Cynthia.
Yesterday some friends and I went to see "The Help." We went to the early matinee ($5 tickets and free popcorn) and the theater was packed. There was some problem with the projector during the last 15 minutes, so we all got free passes as we left. It was a good movie, with some fine performances. A couple of fiends tried to go last night, but found that the theater was sold out. My favorite film for the summer is still "Midnight in Paris." which I think I'll go see again. I have a couple of friends who haven't seen it yet, and it's playing up in Cleveland at the Cedar Lee, where all the good movies come, so I think I can wangle a ride. My brother Mike wondered if there were any Morgan Freemans in this area who would drive Miss G. around. If only.

That Old LIbrary Smell

2011-07-26T18:08:00.003-04:00

Things are different now in libraries. For the past ten years or so, out area libraries have been on a building spree, erecting very large spaces. And I mean, very large spaces, in which the shelving looks a bit lost and meager. High ceilings, vast staircases, miles of carpeting, and snack bars. Jusst in time for the revolution in reading materials, libraries are dedicating enormous spaces for traditional books. Many of them are also mounting tax levies for the voters, come November. They all had lots of money for their expansion, but now they need more dough for operations. I am all for libraries staying in operation, no matter what kinds of reading, or information resources they are going to handle, but I think it would have been a good idea to have more foresight, both in the financial end of things and in the future of reading material. There is a whole new generation of people, many of whom don't read at all, and those who do, use E-readers and God only knows what technology may change that.
But what I miss most of all is that library smell which permeated the smaller, more compact spaces which used to comprise the buildings of old. It hit you when you walked in, a combination of paper, cardboard, glue, dust, maybe the homeless in the periodical section, and on rainy days, ,wet wool. It gave off an aura of BOOKS, lots of BOOKS and primed one for the fun of finding just the one that would take you some place you'd never been.
I loved the library i n Springfield, Ohio. It was a Richardsonian stone building, with a tower which led to the children's room, named for Lois Lenski who had spent her childhood in that town. I loved her historical fiction about pioneers, Indian captives, New England small towns and adventurous and brave children. Our library in Atlanta, called the Wren's Nest because it was near the same named home Joel Chandler Harris, was basically a storefront and it was my first library and I loved it, but the ambiance of the one in Springfield was just so satisfying. The main reading room did have a fireplace and high ceiling which was later divided into a second floor.There were exciting glass floors in the non-fiction and reference sectionwhere my sister and I would get out Eveybody's Favorite Music books from which we would manage to murder some of the classics. (I shouldn't say that about her; she played very well.)
Summer was a great time for going to the library. Since we were pretty much library kids, we never got into the Nancy Drew books, since librarians apparently looked down on them, but we made up for it with mysteries by Augusta Huell Seaman, in which almost every story seemed to have its roots in the Lost Dauphin of France or the Princes in the Tower. They were very old fashioned books and we loved them. When we were older we got hooked the the "Jalna" series, which had been popular in the twenties. They were a multigenerational saga about a Canadian family, covering over a hundred years. There were scandals, chaste romances, births and deaths and we just dove into them. We devoured books by Richard Halliburton, who was an adventurer who traveled all over the world and did exciting things, or supposedly did exciting things. I think he was later revealed as one who embroidered his adventure a bit, but he knew how to tell a good story. All these books had that library smell, mainly because most of them were already pretty old by the time we got to them. We did go outside in the summer, swimming, biking and hanging out with friends, but there was many a day when the only sound in the house was of pages turning.
I have nothing against new libraries, and I know that they are still places to make discoveries and a wonderful asset to a community, a valuable resource for adding to the quality of life. They just don't smell like books any more.

Doing Things

2011-07-18T15:45:00.001-04:00

The Blossom Chamber Music concerts have started up again, but this year there are only six concerts cornets instead of nine, and I have already missed two of them. It usually runs through the second week of August, so I thought I had time. Rats! At any rate , I did get to one student concert and one faculty concert, both of which were splendid indeed. The faulty consists of regular KSU music department folks and Cleveland Orchestra players. The Miami String Quartet is the resident quartet at the university and they are outstanding. They did a "Death and the Maiden" that was just so moving ya wanted to die. They will be doing two more concerts and the students will be doing three more. I imagine the shortening of the summer sessions is for financial reasons, since the arts are in peril at this university now. Gotta give the president his obscene bonuses for just doing his damn job. Don't get me started.

Went over to the Akron Art Museum to see the Paula Nadelstern kaleidoscope quilts, a series of phenomenal works which look like paintings. I found out that her fabrics, which almost look embroidered, are from Liberty of London, with such sumptuous designs and colors that you are mystified by how she blends and marches patterns. She also uses brilliant silks and dyes. Her quilts are a made of myriads of tiny pieces, and according to the catalog, she makes them at her kitchen table in her Bronx apartment. Along with her quilts, the museum is displaying artist made kaleidoscopes, so you can look and watch the shifting designs that inspired the quilt artist.
The other show is a selection of works collected by the Vogels, that couple form New York who started collecting works by New York artists back in the 60s. They've been written up in magazines and newspapers because they don't fit the mold of most collectors. He worked at the post office; she was a librarian. They have given their multimillion dollar collection to the Notional Art Gallery in D. C., and this show is a small portion. It's mostly very minimalist, installation dependent stuff that interests me not at all. My favorite is a seines of water color blobs on notebook paper, the three hole kind, torn out of the notebook and framed simply. Dozens of them lined up in a long row. Red, Blue Yellow,Green, Aqua. Blobs. Now valuable, only because the Vogels collected them? I guess I'm a Philistine.
Went to see "Tree of Life." At the beginning, it looks it looks like one of the most pretentious films ever. I am a Terry Malick fan, ever since "Badlands ' and "Days of Heaven," so I stuck with it. It's uses sort of an indirect storytelling scheme, when the characters muse, whisper and do very little communicating with each other or the viewer directly. It reminded me of the early New Wave French films of the 60s, in that you sort of have to construct the story yourself. The young actors in it are so good and can use their faces and bodies to convey both thoughts emotions better than most adults. It's not a terrific movie, but I became absorbed in the family and their dynamics. "Days of Heaven" is much better and one of the most beautiful movies ever filmed. I did see some previews which look promising for the coming fall season.
Went to see the last harry Potter movie. I had not seen part 1, but it didn't matter. I have not read the books. I started the first one, expecting E. Nesbit and C.S. Lewis, but did not and quit reading after about 30 pages. But I must say I have loved the movies and this one was very, very good. Lots of CGI, of course, and noisy booing and things going up in flame and all creepy crawly creatures, etc. but very much fun and exciting and Alan Rickman turned out not to be such a bad guy. Interestingly, the audience was almost all adults and they applauded at the end.
In between all this, my fellow spellers and I participated in a spelling bee over in the Falls at the library. It was the worst bee I have ever been in. The person could not pronounce half the words, she did not have the origin or the definition of the words and it was painful. Our champion speller won, as she always does. She is amazing. I ran afoul of "idiosyncrasy," throwing in a "c" instead of an "s" at the end.
I outlasted a couple other spellers who got stuck with really hard words and mispronunciation on the part of the pronouncer...ot mispronouncer.

Contemplating Felineacide

2011-07-14T16:26:00.002-04:00

Dupree Danticat is driving me nuts. Since John is away, he is missing him, manifesting itself in melancholy yowling and manipulating me with his food. I open a can of Fancy Feast whatever, and he will scarf it down --for a while. Then it just sits on the plate and spoils, while he roams around the house yowling for more food. So I give him some new food, which he nibbles on and then abandons. What he likes at 8 a.m. he no longer likes at 11 a.m. Sometimes if I wait him out, he'll eat it. But sometimes he won't and complains in his Siamese-y yowl until I have to throw things at him. It's like having a two year old kid back in the house.

When he's not yowling he sits on my lap and stares at me while I'm trying to read. Very high maintenance, he is. He's older than I am, in cat years, and his teeth hurt and all, but he is very hard to live with these days. He is relentless and I am very tired of him.

Harriet

2011-07-11T16:14:00.002-04:00

A dear old friend died yesterday. Harriet Begala was ninety and had been in poor health for most of last year. She had moved into an assisted living center, a very nice one, but it was not her home. She had to leave her beautiful apartment in the Silk Mill, where she had been the first and only tenant for many months. It is an enormous old mill building alongside the Cuyahoga River in downtown Kent. Some early Kent entrepreneurs had tried to start a silk business there, importing worms from Japan and planting mulberry trees. Everything died and it went through a variety of businesses for over a hundred years before being left empty, until being bought by Jim Arthur, who set about restoring it and turning it into luxury apartments.
When she had to leave the house that she and Joe had built some 47 years ago, she was determined to live the way she wanted to. She called Jim, whose building was still in the midst of restoration, and told him she wanted an apartment as soon as one was available. She moved in as soon as the apartment was finished. When I would enter the almost empty building and ride the elevator up to her 4th floor aerie, I marveled at her courage on living in this vast structure pretty much by herself. She loved it. She made it beautiful, as she did with anything she touched, with her paintings, antiques and two silky cats, Tula and Bingo. She loved to entertain, to get a group of friends singing around the piano. I remember her once singing "Solvig's Song" from Peer Gynt in her old, sweet voice. Among the art on the walls were woodcuts she made many years ago of Norwegian folk figures from her Scandinavian heritage.
She was a woman of many sides: born in Norway, coming to adulthood in California and maturity in Kent, Ohio, her final home and the place which owes so much to her community activism. (Pictures of her as a young woman show the ultimate California blond, the girl in the in the white swim suit on the beach.) She used to say that she'd always be an outsider here, but I think that sense ended many years ago as the community caught up with what she was trying to change for the good. One of the founders of the Kent Environmental Council, which she and other began by picking up trash along the river, organizing a viable and vital group which has made Kent a leader in the movement. During the Viet Nam War, she was involved in the peace movement, which culminated in her enthusiastic support of George McGovern running his campaign here and in Akron. She was tireless, she was demanding, she was an idealist who didn't just dream, but acted and worked her and everyone else' butts off with great hope. It was a pleasure to work with her because of her enthusiasm and there were always plenty of laughs.
It's hard to describe her sense of humor. Quirky? She loved to tease and play little jokes. She had a record of the inimitable Florence Foster Jenkins, which she would have Joe play, and would tell the listeners that is was she, and just knew they would like it. Watching their stunned faces gave her great amusement. A few years ago, she startled a rather stuffy doctor by serenading him with "Darktown Strutters' Ball" as she lay on the examining table. Told me I should have seen his face. She decided one day that she and I should speak German at one of the KEC's breakfast meetings. Both of our German speaking abilities were minimal, so I declined and she said I was a spoilsport.
She could be blunt. She and the late Pam Quinn and I used to go out to dinner once a month, choosing a different place each time, not always successfully food wise. One spring evening, when she picked me up, she commented that I was all wrinkly, and said the same to Pam when she joined us. It turns out hat the weather had turned warm and both of us had pulled out summer clothes without bothering to iron them. So we were wrinkly and she let us know that she didn't approve. She was always turned out perfectly, favoring the blues and yellows that went with her coloring. Never a wrinkle.
The accompanying pictures were her pride and joy. She met Barack Obama at a conference in Cleveland back in 2006. In the first picture she is telling him that he will be president some day. When she came back from that meeting, she called the local paper to tell them what she had said to him. Two years later, she was not able to do her usual work on her campaign, but she was there, doing what she could and was thrilled with his election.
When Harriet had to leave her beloved apartment and move into assisted living, she was able to take some paintings and antiques, but had to give up Tula and Bingo, her furry companions and comfort. I know she grieved for them, but she became a presence at the center and made the best of things. I was amazed and impressed by her ability to adapt. This past year her health declined and her son moved her up to the Cleveland area. I never had a chance to say goodbye, which I regret, but she will always be in my thoughts and in the thoughts of many, many people whom she influenced so positively and in the quality of life in this community which she and her colleagues have spent their time improving.
Her body may no longer live, but her spirit certainly buzzes around this city.

My Mystery Lily

2011-06-29T15:08:00.000-04:00

Last year, this plant came up and grew tall like Jack's beanstalk. Eventually a lovely pale peach lily, just one, bloomed at the top. Within two days,m it was gone, snapped up by a voracious deer. It was just one of those passing magic moments. I had no idea where it had come from. It was just there.
This year the stalk started growing again, only this time, it has borne a whole slew of the beauties. No deer has as yet chomped on it, and it has been in bloom for over a week. It has a delicate, sweet scent and glows softly in the early evening.

I have written of my mysteriously disappearing underpants, but thtis is something that has appeared out of the blue. Could the underpants thief have guiltily decided that he/she owes me something and planted the lily in passing? I don't know, but I certainly am enjoying the sight and scent of it.

A Night of Shining Armor

2011-06-27T15:35:00.003-04:00

Last year, in a spate of gratitude for (or guilt) those wonderful chamber music concerts during the Blossom-Kent Summer program, I made a small contribution to the program. So about a month ago I received an invitation to an evening piano recital at one of those homes with a name, somewhere in the wilds of Trumbull County. I checked with my friend Ann who knows about this sort of thing and she said that it would probably be a fund raiser the the School of Music and that she knew nothing about this place or the host, but did know the name of the featured pianist, a recent graduate of the School of Music. Since the venue was rather out of the way, a small bus had been obtained to get a group of directionally challenged music lovers there in one piece and on time.
The invitation had mentioned "refreshments" and a coffee bar, so I didn't bother to eat before hand, expecting lavish hors d'ouvres one would expect at a house with a name. Down a winding driveway, we arrived at a rather large parking lot and proceeded to the recital site. First thing was a Phillip Johnson-esque pool house, without a pool in it, overlooking a grand stone patio with seats for several hundred, that over looking a pond, that being overlooked by - a WHITE grand piano! I expected Fred and Ginger to come dancing out of the shrubbery. Or at least a white peacock or two. There was a large, covered bar, where wine and soft drinks were being dispensed by a couple of cheery young women, shockingly NOT in uniform, the sort that should have had the name of the house embroidered thereon. Well, a busy host can't be expected to cover every freaking little detail.
Said host is a gastro- enterologist and there is obviously a LOT of money in gutwotk. A wandering musician pointed out the host. The doctor was wearing a suit, the likes of which has not been seen since the demise of the Rat Pack. It glowed. Pale blue, pale greenish stripes with a hint of coral. It shone. It dazzled. It blazed into the late summer afternoon murk like unto a Sicilian donkey cart. It could not be missed. You coulda read the Sunday NYTimes by it. I never got closer than 15 feet, but that suit was burned into the very synapses of my brain. I can't tell you how old this dude is because the glow obscured his face. And he was wearing a bright red tie.
After an hour of chatting and thinking that any minute a phalanx of Nubian slaves would arrive bearing figs and pomegranates, it became apparent that "refreshments" meant inhaling liquids available at the bar, where our bus driver had stationed himself while imbibing quantities of wine. I wouldn't have bee too upset by the lack of noshery, except that on the bus we had been told there would be stuff before the recital and dessert and coffee afterwards. That seemed official to me, but was not to be. We immediately faulted the host, of course. It was his place where we were stuck foodless.
At any rate, it was time for the recital and the host introduced the pianist and praised the School of Music for training him. The host loves Ravel and had been bowled over by the pianist's rendition of a Ravel Piano Concert lat year at the university. So there was music, accompanied by a few growling stomachs. The white piano had suffered a bit from its exposure to the damp air, but it was a very pleasant concert, including another music school graduate, a violinist.
Afterwards there was a not too subtle hint about supporting the School of Music, which is certainly a worthy cause. I fear it fell on empty stomachs, alas. The hope was that the host had invited other wealthy locals who would cough up some dinero and pledge to support the program. Food would have helped.
Then the host thanked everyone who had helped him put the evening more or less together - his office staff, his office manager and her daughters, his gardener, his landscaper and, in passing, mentioned that he has an art advisor, who was probably glad that no names were mentioned. He also announced that he had some big fund-raisers coming up at one of which the big draw would be one of the professional dancers from - wait for it - "Dancing With the Stars," Yay!
Now I know it's easy to make fun of tasteless rich people, so I must say that I think this shiny man was sincere in his desire to honor this young musician and provide him with a lovely venue for the recital, along with an apperciative audience. I feel like a bit of a snob for being so critical. He needed a party planner and a suit advisor, but I am sure that the pianist and his family were thrilled by the evening, as they should be. I think the host wants to use his money for good as a responsible community member. I'm not sure that he's the one who dropped the ball, food-wise, and it certainly was an evening to remember.
Ann and I hitched a ride home via friends, not being sure the bus driver was entirely road ready.

Lovely Music

2011-06-24T16:58:00.006-04:00

One of my favorite NPR programs is "From the Top." which celebrates young musicians from all over the country, kids from 10 or so through the teens. It features singers, instrumentalists of all types and classical and jazz expertise. (I fully expect my great nephew Drew to be on it some day. After two years as a cellist, he can rip off a Bach piece with ease. He's in the Columbus Youth Symphony and quite dedicated.)
This past Saturday, the program was broadcast from Indiana, and featured, among other things, a performance by Mikael Feinstein, who has just been names director of the American Songbook Collection in Indiana. I am going to attempt to send it along with this blog, because it is just such a beautiful rendition of a Gershwin tune.
Many years ago, Alec Wilder had a program on NPR, called the American Popular Song. He featured all the excellent American songwriters: Irving Berlin, Cole Porter, the Gershwins, Rogers and Hart, Rogers and Hanmnmerstein, Julie Styne, Withing, Frank Loessor, et. al. He had the fine singers to perform those songs, too, like Mel Torme, Margaret Whiting, Tony Bennett (when he could still sing) and a lot of New York cabaret and jazz singers. It was such a fine program. I think he (Alec Wilder, a composer himself) was responsible for creating the whole idea of honoring our songwriters as legitimate musicians, on a par with the lieder composers of the 19th century.
Michael Feinstein has carried on that tradition himself. He started out as an assistant to Ira Gershwin, annotating and cataloguing the great music of the Gershwin bothers. I guess it might have been possible that without these kinds of efforts, some of this music could have been lost, delegated to "Tin Pan Alley" hack work, instead of a valuable part of American culture.
My friend Helen Welch, an excellent singer, has made these works a vital part of her repertoire and has developed quite a following , singing with various symphony orchestras in Ohio , New York and Pennsylvania.
It's mighty good stuff. And Feinstein's version of "Love Walked In" is really beautiful. He's accompanied by a teenage string quartet, harpist in a superb arrangement.

Wheezing Geezer

2011-06-22T18:11:00.001-04:00

About thirty years ago, I developed asthma. I was a smoker, as were most of my generation. At the time, I also had three cats. Well, the cats and the cigarettes had to go. It took a while to get things under control, including a month at the National Jewish Hospital out in Denver, a month after which I was told, "You have asthma." After a few visits to the emergency room and new medications I managed to get it under control and breathing normally until I almost forgot about it. John brought the teeny Dupree home from a camping trip and he's never bothered me, although I did avoid getting too close for a few years.

Well suddenly over the last few weeks I started wheezing and last Friday night it was back to the emergency room, after years of avoiding it. They treated it and I went home, only to have to return on Saturday night and having to be admitted. Breathing is so fundamental that when you can't, it can be scary. I was there Sunday and most of Monday, mainly because my doctor only makes his rounds after 10:30 p.m.
Since John is down in Athens, Ohio, working, Sally had to bear the brunt of hauling me back and forth to the ER. She also discovered that my living room rug, which I had just vacuumed with my super duper new Kenmore vacuum cleaner was a hotbed of Dupree's undercoat, which she diligently scraped up by hand. Apparently it was too fine for the VC. I had been using a floor fan set on the rug, aimed at my chair for weeks. So, who knows if that's what did it. I only know that I haven't had a problem with Dupree in 17 years, so I don't think that's it. Thanks to Sally's hard work, it is now fine fur free - At least for a while.
Before John left, he installed a nice AC unit in the living room, which cools off the entire downstairs, so I don't need the fan any more. Cynthia came over last night and groomed the hell out of Dupree, so he should shed less. I am full of steroids, so nobody had better mess with me.

Midnight in Paris

2011-06-13T20:07:00.000-04:00

If you love to think about Paris in the 20s when all those ex-pat American literary greats, artists and musicians were living ands working there, you will like the latest Woody Allen movie. It is completely charming. Even though he has stereotyped the characters (Hemingway is a complete blowhard, speaking in the style he wrote, purposely funny), it is just such a fine fantasy that you wish you'd been there, too. His character even gives Luis Bunuel an idea for the movie that later made him famous. Man Ray talks about photographing a woman in the way he eventually did. Clever stuff.

Nice to see that the Woody Allen character is played by a younger actor, wearing the usual tweed jacket), so that you're spared the usual sight of 75 year old Allen with a 20 something woman' The soundtrack - Django Reinhardt, Sidney Bechet, Cole Porter - is just great. Woody Allen always has great soundtracks, like all that Gershwin in "Manhattan," a very uncomfortable movie about his infatuation for a high school girl - ugh! But great soundtrack. He also has the best cinematographers and Paris looks wonderful in this new movie. I've never been there, but it looks the way you think is. Oh, and Kathy Bates plays Gertrude Stein, but looks too much like Kathy Bates to be believable.

Dumber Than Dirt

2011-06-09T16:59:00.000-04:00

Wouldn't you hope that a person in a public position would have at least half a brain? Seriously. Why is it that these bozos do not understand cyberspace or the prevalence of the kind of technology that is gong to bite you in the butt if you do something stupid, really stupid? And why would anyone assume that a picture of his crotch is appealing? (Freud was wrong. It's not women who have penis envy; it's men, who can't wait to get into "mine's bigger than yours" competitions.)

This New York Wiener dude has got to have an IQ in the single digits if he thought he could get away with such juvenalia on the Internet. Some people are saying that sexual exploits should not be that cuase of ousting a politician from his job, but stupidity definitely should be.The sexual stuff is just pathetic but lack of good sense demonstrates the kind of fatal flaw of leadership. Yeah, I know, Bill Clinton was a total jerk, too, and I still don't understand how he could have been so stupid and arrogant.

Who knows how many of these idiots are running our government when they're not flashing their privates all over the Internet. I have no doubt there's a mad rush to cancel social media accounts as I write this --but once it's in there, it's in there, and somebody's gonna find it. Who's next?

Finished!

2011-06-03T20:40:00.000-04:00

Finally we have had three or four absolutely perfect June days, the kind you dream about in February in Ohio. 70 degrees, low humidity and no rain. Last weekend was very hot and humid and non-rainy, too, so John had a chance to paint his handiwork. Now a sparkling white lattice work graces the front entrance. John the historical restoration mason is now a restoration carpenter, but only around the house. His heart is still in stone and lime mortar.
And although this house is 60 yeas old, it doesn't qualify as any sort of historic property, other than being the sort that was built after WWII as a starter house foe young post-war families, which I guess is kinda, sorta historical.

Trajectories

2011-06-01T19:27:00.002-04:00

I don't know if it a factor of aging, but I do seem to drop a lot of things" coffee beans, keys, pills, change. I almost never drop breakable things fortunately. What i am noticing in this dropping syndrome, is that these things have this trajectory thing going on. I can drop something straight down, like a lead balloon straight-downess, but somehow the dropped item seems do have a life of its own. I never can find anything by looking straight down. You can have clues, like the ping on a hard surface or the fwump on a soft surface, but if there's a scrritch of a rolling object all is lost. Almost everything manages to roll, even square things, at least in my experience. Or maybe they hop.
Has it always been thus? Maybe the earth is turning too fast, thus throwing off all logic in the retrieval of fallen things by quickly spinning and carrying objects along to a new place. I drop a pill in the bathroom, f'rinstance, straight down. However, it is finally discovered in a far corner, one that I haven't dusted lately unless I've had company recently. I drop a coffee bean in the kitchen and find it in the hall. I drop a bracelet right next to my dresser and it ends up under my bed across the room.
Once when I was visiting my sister in Corning, N,Y. and we were walking down town, she met an acquaintance, chatted briefly and when we moved on she told me he was a blood splatter expert who had testified in the O.J. Simpson murder case. A blood splatter expert! A specialty for the high tech age. So I an wondering if out there we might find a fallen object expert who could tell where that object might fall, as surely there is some sort of trajectory pattern not unlike the pattern of blood splatter. I mean, there's gotta be some sort of physics involved here, like Newton's Law. I know that somewhere there is a nerdy doctoral student working on a dissertation about this, perhaps a scatter theory. I'd be happy to be in the experimental group.

A Little Bit of Spring

2011-05-30T10:16:00.009-04:00

I almost forgot. There was a brief rain-free day in the middle of May. My swamp iris burst into bloom, along with the forget-me-nots and lasted long enough for a few photos. My friend Cindy gave them to me a number of years ago and I really enjoy their color, such a lovely deep purple. They are smaller than regular iris. I probably should thin them because they are getting rather crowded. I saw a demo on thinning bulb plants a few years ago and it looks so brutal that I haven't been able to bring myself to do it. I need to do the same with my stella d'oros, too. I mean you have to take a sharp knife and just slash into the poor things and it's like separating Siamese - uh- conjoined twins or something.
At any rate, here they are in their brief glory and they and the lilacs suffuse my ssoul with shades of purple, mauve and lilac every spring, rain or no rain.

A Perspective on the ##&^@@! Rain

2011-05-28T18:49:00.003-04:00

I don't know where May has gone. I've had only one post at the beginning and here it is the 28th already. There was a disruption the second week of the month when Emily came for the Harper-Harper wedding in Columbus. That was a very fine thing, since it meant for me a reunion with my siblings, It was short, but delightful and the wedding was lovely. When we got back from Columbus there was also just a lot of hanging out - and shopping- with Emily. SO that accounted for pretty much the first half of the month.

The rest of the time it has been raining, raining and raining. My favor tie month awash, but very green for all that. I haven't got my garden in. I've only had a few rare days to hang out my laundry in that usual sweet spring air which I waited for all during the crummy winter we had. John hasn't had enough dry days to paint the lovely lattice work he construed for the front porch-ette. Life has bee sodden.

However: we have not had lethal tornadoes or deadly floods. When I saw the pictures of Joplin, Missouri, and the flooded rads and houses along the Mississippi, I decided that complaining about rain is really ridiculous. Of course, once I decided that, we had a night of terror, with tornado warnings, endless thunder and lightening and scary wind. My friend Ann had called to ask if I was planning to watch the final Oprah show and she was in the midst of getting a new TV installed and would I tape it and she could come over and we'd eat Chinese food and drink tea in honor of Oprah. I had not planned to watch this modern day Himmelfahrt, but Ann's such good company that I agreed. I DVRd it and Ann arrived bearing won ton soup and chicken broccoli and we settled down to receive Oprah's blessing and thank yous for being such wonderful fans from whom she had learned so much while teaching us how to live our lives to the fullest and all. I remembered why I had quit watching her show years ago, when she quit featuring transgendered dogs and cats and started turning into the Messiah. So we're eating and being blessed when the tornado sirens went off. Since we were watching a taped show, I thought I should check out the news and there was Kent right in the path of a tornado, with a breathless caller telling of swirling winds and flying roofs not 10 miles away. Ann, who's from Alaska where they don't have tornadoes, only bears wandering into your bathroom in the middle of the night, was getting nervous, so I paused the Ope and we descended to the basement, sitting on John.s buckets of lime...the mineral, not the fruit. I passed the time by telling her what the basement used to look like and how much time we had spent there during tornado warnings when the kids were little. The tornado warning went off finally, so we came back up and watched more self- aggrandizing crap until the power went off, before we got to see her cry. Ann left and I went to bed in the dark.

The power came on around 10:30, but then the lightning and thunder and wind started and kept up pretty much all night. There was a lot of damage scattered around the area, but nothing really serious, unless it was your personal roof that got holes poked in it.

But we were spared what so many people in the South and the Midwest have suffered. I can still complain about all the rain, but I don't feel good about it.

Whole Lotta Music

2011-05-03T16:54:00.026-04:00

This was another week-end of one musical performance after another, and a varied one, at that. It started off on Friday evening with the last "New Music" concert of the year at the university. Now I an the kind of music lover who likes to be able to whistle or hum what I hear after the concert. I was dragged to my first concert of this type last fall by a musician friend who told me that this program needs our support, especially with a university president who seems to be trying to make this place a vocational school. I actually enjoyed it quite a bit. They played around with both instruments and notes in a way of exploring possibilities. At one point they turned out all the lights and the instrumentalists surround the audience, and it was a bit like being musically breathed on, only without the germs or halitosis. I think ya hadda be there. So I have gone to almost all of their concerts.

This last one was not quite so interesting, and there was an annoying Lucio Berio saxophone solo which grated on the ear and the nerves, but there was a percussion piece that was dynamite. One of my spelling group friends was there. She is my age, and she is studying composition with one of the students whose composition was featured. She said that a person can't just vegetate because of being old, and she's looking for new ways to express herself. She's a musician and has done some traditional composing, but is excited about moving beyond the traditional. I still prefer listening to traditional music, but these concerts are fun and stretch my mind as well as irritate my ear drums.

Saturday was "Il Trovatore," which I consider the "Music Man" of all operas. I mean there's not a dead moment in the entire piece. One glorious melody follows another: arias, duets, trios. The cast consisted of four of the best singers now performing. Of course, the plot is ridiculous and convoluted, involving infanticide, fratricide, suicide, gypsy curses, and the usual doomed lovers. And there was Dimitri Horotovsky who is a Russian hunk who played the bad guy, which is what baritones usually have to do, so that the tenor can get the girl and all; that is, if he lives long enough. It was just a stunning performance all around. I shall miss the last one, which is "Die Walkure," but I'm not much of a Wagner fan, unless Anna Russell is explaining it.

Saturday night I went to hear a symphony concert by a neighboring town which shall remain nameless. If you've ever heard the Portsmouth Sinfonia, you might get some idea of the level of professionalism. It's an all volunteer group with professionals mixed in. I went because a friend's son was doing Beethoven's Violin Concerto. He's a professional musician from Chicago, with impressive credentials and international performances. This summer he will be that concertmaster of the San Francisco Opera orchestra. The first half of the program I was wondering if he had known what he was getting into. I needn't have worried. He was wonderful, so good that I didn't even hear the damned orchestra. I think he inspired them to crank up their competence. I could even forget their tortured version of a selection from "The Fire bird Suite" from the first half of the program. I heard later, since this is a volunteer group of quondam players, that not everyone shows up for rehearsals and that the conductor has high hopes when the performance tine rolls around. But this violinist made the evening worthwhile. And the last movement of that concerto is one of my favorite pieces of music to whistle. Catchy.

The finale of this music est was Sunday night, with the university symphony, the Kent State Chorus and the Kent Chorale preforming the magnificent Ralph Vaughan William's "Dona Nobis Pacem," which I had never heard. It's a very powerful number, especially one part based on a Walt Whitman poem mourning the death of soldiers, sad and moving and beautiful. The Kent Chorus is a mixture of townsfolk and srudents and they practice like bastards all year, doing one concert at Christmas and then this final one. One year they did "Carmina Burana" with something like 200 singers. It was amazing. And I have to say that this year they matched it - or surpassed it.

There are a couple of Cleveland Orchestra concerts coming up in May, the last of the year, and then there'll be the Blossom Chamber Concerts starting in July. I do get my fill of music around here. Nice.

Like Buttah

2011-04-29T16:02:00.015-04:00

I didn't intend to watch the Wedding of the Century, as some over-excited commentator called it. Today was the day of the annual Literacy Bee, in which I was participating as a member of Team KAOS (Kent Area Orthography Society) and I had spent most of my dream time spelling words like "fescennine," foehr" and "Boeotian." This is a fundraiser for the literacy coalition, and our team had already won it twice. So I woke up around 5:30 a.m. and decided to divert myself by watching the Event. First I had to listen to the likes of Baba Wawa, who has a habit of telling you much too much trivia, and others blathering away as the royals left Buckingham Palace for the Abbey.Gawd, they were so annoying. I could have turned the sound off, but then wouldn't have known who all those overdressed, mega-hatted people were, and what's the point of watching if you're not going to learn one royal from another? I did recognize Elton John, looking sweaty in the Abbey, bless him.

Before Kate showed up, there was much speculation about what the queen would be wearing. Well, HRH appeared on the red carpet, looking like 1.) a giant daffodil or 2.) one of those butter sculptures so beloved by Midwestern state fair goers. I almost went out to the kitchen to make toast to go with her, but Kate, whose dress has been the subject of much discussion, was about to make her entrance.

It seems that she had borrowed her grandmother's wedding dress from the dowdy fifties. (At least it wasn't like that outrageous monstrosity that poor Diana was burdened with. And I mean burdened; that dress was wearing her, I do believe, poor dear. She could have bee sheltering a passel of street urchins under that thing.) So Kate looked okay, if a bit retro.

So she and William were solemnly married, and now it's on to married life. The word is that they will not have a household staff (right!) so Kate will have to contend with the dried up blobs of toothpaste in the sink and hearing :"Honey, have you seen my epaulets?" and "What! Chicken ala Me for dinner again?" like any other married couple. I wish them well.

I got to hear the magnificent "Jerusalem" ringing through the Abbey. What is it about that song? Makes me all verklempt, and I'm only a teensy bit British. I had to miss the royal carriage and all because I had to get back to studying "keratomileusis." "autochthonous," and "xanthosis" for the bee. Those words never came up, but we won our third title. I missed on the word "propitiate." Go figure. I was SO prepared for those other words that I blew it on a simple one. I threw in a "c" instead of "t." But we won it anyway, thanks to the level heads of the other two team members. And I can get back to simple words and Spell Check.

Mum's Day

2011-04-22T11:09:00.008-04:00

So here is an opportunity to bring a tear of joy to the eye of the old lady in the rocking chair: a nice little illustrated memoir of the life of a mother from another age. It's better than chocolate or roses, since it will last 'way beyond the second Sunday in May. She can leaf through its pages when lonely, sigh over the quaintness of another time and place. I'm tellin' ya, it's a fine gift. Would I lie?

By the way, what do you think about the "Three Cups of Tea" scandal? I can guarantee that every word in MY book is the absolute truth. It's called "May: A New England Childhood." and you can go to Authorhouse.com, click on the Bookstore tab and type in that name, or my name. Very easy and they ship fast, so it will be ready for the big day. If you want to throw in a few chocolates and a rose or two well, that's okay. Or if you're a mother and would like o gift yourself,m , hey, do it.

A Mystery

2011-04-21T16:54:00.022-04:00

I have mentioned my underwear before ' in spite of the fact that such things used to be called "unmentionables." But, hey, we're in the 21st century and "reality" TV seems to find nothing unmentionable or unshowable.

When I did mentioned my unmentionables, I wrote of my favorite underpants, the cotton ones with the lacy elastic waistband, and how they don'[t seem to make them any more. For that reason I treasure them, the somewhat well-worn ones I have had for a number of years. I started out with six of them. This past year, one pair disappeared and I had only five. I have no idea where that one pair went. I am not in the habit of leaving my nether garments scattered about. I did not do that even in my younger days. I was not that kind of girl, as they used to say.

So this week, when I did the laundry, there was another pair missing, so now I am down to only four. How do these things go missing? I do not hang them out on the line , at the mercy of a passing pervert. (There was actually someone stealing underclothes off clothes lines a few years ago. I don't know if he, or she, was ever caught, but in any case, mine were never in danger, not being hung outside.)

I have, of course, scrounged around the washing machine, since things can get caught up inside the spinning tub. One of my sister's song hits is "The Lord of the Socks," a lament on the phenomena of finding only one sock of a pair in the laundry. The Lord of the Socks eats them, but she wrote nothing about his appetite for underpants. I mean,m yuck!

So I am slowly losing my favorite smalls, and I have no idea what has happened to them. They are not he sort of thing your average transvestite would be interested it; too plain, too unsexy. And I don't know how that person could even get at them, or how any person could. I know that Dupree has not taken them, even though cats do like to sleep on clean laundry.

I guess this will just have to be a mystery.

Whole Lotta Singin'

2011-04-18T16:42:00.007-04:00

In the past two weeks I have managed to take in three operas...and there's another coming up this Saturday. On April 9, I got in two in one day. The first was the Met HD live broadcast of Le Comte Dory, with adorable Juan Diego Flores, a bel canto comedy by Rossini. The opera started at 1 o'clock and Renee Fleming announced that Flores' wife had given birth to their first child within the hour. At the intermission, he said that it was born at 12:25 and he still made it to the Met by 1. That's dedication, I'd say, and he sang like his usual angelic self. I've see him in three operas now, and nobody has died in any of them.

The second opera I saw that Saturday was "Semele," by Handel, and it was a student production at the university. It had its comic moments, but Semele died at the end because she wanted to be immortal, like Jupiter, who had just whisked her off for a roll in the hay. She was good enough to bed,m but not worthy of deification, I guess. It was well done - well staged and directed, but there were some voices which need seasoning. I mean, after the Met production, how could any students measure up to that?

The last opera was an outstanding production by the Akron Symphony Orchestra of he great American opera "Porgy and Bess." The conductor started auditioning hundreds of local Black church choirs last winter, selecting a few singers for some parts and many for the chorus. The main leads were nationally known singers, but a couple of the local ones were just amazing. I had heard a concert version of "Porgy "with the Cleveland orchestra many years ago, but had never seen it staged. It was just wonderful, and the audience went wild with cheers and applause. Great stuff.

Coming up Saturday is "Capriccio," which I've never heard of even, with Renee Fleming getting to wear great clothes and being glamorous. Don't know if I'll like it. There are only a couple more of these things this year and it's been a very good year, too. Lotta good singin' goin' on.

What's for Dinner?

2011-04-15T10:41:00.019-04:00

If I should ever become rich, the first thing I would do is to hire a meal planner/cook/. I enjoy eating, but I am not one who finds cooking especially pleasurable. I cook from necessity. The actual act of preparing a meal is not the part that I find the most boring. It's figuring out what to have. I mean a person can't just have chili every night, or spaghetti, or macaroni and cheese, to say nothing of wienies and beans. A person needs variety. There are people who eat out a lot and always get the same thing, but I am not one of those people. And finding variety at home is hard, requiring foodal imagination, of which I have none.

However, the Akron Beacon Journal, one of the daily papers I read, has always had really good, creative food editors who are also very good writers. I now there are folks who buy cook books to read, and I am also not one of those people. I do not watch any of the food channels on TV, finding them not very funny or thought provoking. But I do look forward every week to the Wednesday BJ food section. The current editor, Lisa Abrams, has written some lovely pieces about her Lebanese family's life and cuisine. She did a little piece on a neighborhood ethnic grocer/bakery store a while back which made me feel ass if I'd been there. It's gone now, of course, like all neighborhood shops. She also provides some great recipes for all kinds of dishes, and includes recipes from other sources. I have a little box full of them, almost all of which I have tried, and in many cases, repeated. Some are easy, some are not.

This past Wednesday, there was a recipe for a chicken mango soup, which looked pretty good, so I decided to try it. It turned out to be quite labor intensive. First I had to find mangoes, which took trips to a couple of stores. Then I had to find affordable limes and cilantro, which I found in one place. Then I had to find creme fraiche without going to Akron, which I did not find because I was already tired of looking, so I got coconut milk, which the recipe said I could do. I already had curry powder and cinnamon.

There was a lot of peeling, chopping, dicing. Peeling a mango is easy; chopping is hard because of the enormous pit around which one must carve. I misread the amount of curry and had to scoop it back into the container, only I scooped it into the cinnamon container by mistake and then had to scoop it out of that. (The next time John makes an an apple pie, there may be an unusual, but interesting flavor added.) There was sauteing, blending, stirring. I opened the can of coconut milk without reading the label first, not realizing that it solidifies while canned, which means you gotta shake it or roll it or whatever so I had to transfer it to a lidded container and shake the hell out of it.

By the time it was done, the whole house smelled wonderful and I was exhausted. However, it was the most delicious thing I've eaten for a while, and even better the next day. Now I shall have to make it again. It should be easier, since I know where to find things, and that I should shake the coconut milk can before I open it. And I Shall get a good night's sleep before I make it and perhaps a nap in the afternoon first.

All the favorite soups we have here, carrot ginger bisque and butternut squash (John makes that one) require a lot of chopping, sauteing and blending, which must be what makes them so very good. But tiring. And I would still like someone else to do it.

If anyone wants to try this, get some rest beforehand.

A Little Restoration Work

2011-04-05T16:02:00.006-04:00

Out house doesn't qualify as a historical property, but the in-house restoration expert did a little of his expert work on the front stoop. The 60 year old supports for the overhang had developed a rather disgraceful condition.

They haven't been painted yet because it has bee too rainy and damp. They are made of cedar, and I think they'll last for more than 60 years.

Although John mostly works with stone and old brick, I think he did a very nice job. It gave him a chance to use his new table saw and to develop a new skill.

And I am very grateful to have an in-house restoration specialist.

The Roundabout Chickens of Suffolk

2011-03-29T16:58:00.015-04:00

In our town there is a move for folks to raise chickens, right here in the city. I wrote several months ago about one stray chicken who wandered away from her urban chicken yard and ended up in ours. John found her owner and received a reward of some half dozen delicious free range eggs. She has not returned, unfortunately; no more free eggs for us.

Apparently the notion of urban chicken farming has hit the United Kingdom. This morning on BBC4 radio, there was a whole program devoted to chickens and the Brits who love them. One woman takes her chickens (she only has two) on holiday with her, toting them in a cat carrier. She asked the interviewer if she would like to have a "chicken cuddle," which offer was accepted rather gingerly. The chicken jumped out of her arms, maybe realizing that the person wasn't really into it. No one was offended. There was a serious discussion of the chicken in history, mythology and religion, e.g. the cock that crowed three times while Peter denied Christ as predicted, the use of chickens in voodoo ceremonies, etc. I guess there's even some magical rooster involved in a Harry Potter spell of some sort. One person called chickens Velociraptors with fluffy knickers.

My favorite story, though, was about the feral chickens of the roundabout in Suffolk. No one knows how they ended up there; perhaps they were abandoned at some point by a failed urban chicken farmer. An older man noticed them and would feed them occasionally. One day, while he was there, a lorry accidentally dropped a sack of feed. The old man then got serious feeding them and they began to multiply. Merchants would give him feed for them, and he would walk from his home every morning, five miles each way, and feed what soon became a flock of three to four hundred chickens. He said he fed them to keep them out of the busy road. His legs finally gave out and he couldn't manage the trip any longer. Later he was shocked to discover that the flock had dwindled down to just a few chickens. They are still there, only about 20 now. He assumed some sort of predator got them. It seems that they are still getting fed by passing strangers, but they;ll never again have the services of their benefactor know as The Chicken Man of Bungay.

Noisy Village Pasttime

2011-03-25T16:34:00.015-04:00

I heard such good story on the BBC this morning. There's a small village called Broughton (population around 2000+) in Northhanptonshire which has an annual celebration called the "Tin Pan Band." It's gone on for hundreds of years. Some say it was started to scare away the gypsies; some say it's to keep away evil spirits.

It happens in the middle of December; on a Sunday night. When the church bell starts to toll for midnight, the villagers gather together bearing trash can lids, tin cans, pots and pans, pieces of sheet metal, tin horns or flutes, or anything metal, and march through the village, tooting or banging away with all their might. The noisier, the better. One man said that one year "a young lad followed us along, hitting the metal light poles with a hammer." They try to keep some sort of rhythm, not just random noise.

Some years ago, in 1929 to be exact, a few people complained of the noise and the local authorities tried to stop it, but a there were violent protests, so it continues. Normally the village is very, very quiet, since there is no tourist trade or large institutions or businesses of any kind there. Thus it is quite something to have such a loud burst of sound, even once a year.

One of the men interviewed said that at 88 and a half, he thinks that this will be the last one for him. His wife still plays her bugle in the parade, but his marching days are over, he says. He made a comment about old age which I find quite apt. He said, "There.s no practice for old age. You can't have a go at it to see if you like it. You're just IN it."

I say, bring on the tin can bands.

(I can't find an audio of it, but if you go to BBC.co.uk/radio4 and type in Brought Tin Can Band, you might be able to summon it up.)

Old Friend

2011-03-23T16:25:00.006-04:00

My friend Tom is a really old friend in every sense of the word. We've known each other for over 50 years and we are the same age. Tom is married to Mixie, and she is a tad younger than we are, but not by too much. They are both botanists. Tom taught in the biology department for many years, and Mix managed the Herbarium at the university.

Recently Tom's book of essays was published by the university press, and he gave me an inscribed copy. Now his magnum opus was a huge tome, a comprehensive study of Ohio plants. He worked on that one for years and it was the culminating work of his academic career, a scholarly volume for botanists to study and use as a reference.

This new book is a collection of essays, suitable for the layperson, focusing on the flowering plants and trees just around the Kent community. It relates how certain plants came to this area via the glaciers thousands of years ago, historical vignettes of early cultivation and the appearance and disappearance of certain native and non-native species.

One of the highlights of Tom's research around Kent, was his discovery of a bog full of tamarack trees, the largest stand of those trees in Ohio. They are deciduous fir trees, which shed their needles every fall. They don't really belong here but were brought down from the far north by the last glacier to crawl over Ohio - before it was Ohio. The bog is named for Tom and is a delightful place now, with a fine boardwalk and all kinds of interesting plant life, fortunately labeled for those of us who are botanically challenged. It is is also a great obscure connection to fame for whose of us who know him. I mean, how many people can say that they know the namesake of an eponymous bog?

When I went to pick up the book at their home, we had a great conversation about our younger days, when we were part of a lively group of social animals. Tom said that we were the Bright Young Things of the university community. I don't know about that, but I do know that we had such a good time with a group of such good people. Unfortunately, Tom and Mixie and I are pretty much the only ones left, and we are hardly the social butterflies of yesteryear. We miss our old friends a lot, but we revived some fine memories the other day. One of the disadvantages of getting old is losing people, so that you know more dead people than live people, and you don't get to spend so much time with the live ones still around.

And on that cheerful note, I close this post.

Irish Soda Bread Creates Dental Emergency

2011-03-22T18:49:00.019-04:00

Well, it was very, very good, that Irish soda bread, tasty and expeditious and all. The day after I made it, I decided to toast it. That newspaper article from which I got the recipe declared that it was simply delicious toasted.

The toaster accepted it easily. It popped up done just right, not to pale, not too dark. I slathered on some butter, which soaked into it perfectly. Smelled great, too. Toasty and all.

The first couple of bites went well. The third bit, however, contained something sharp and hard. Not just hard like the crust, but a different sort of hard like, perhaps a piece of - dear God in heaven, a piece of tooth! Specifically a piece of the last molar on my left lower jaw. It was the back of the molar, which had sort of kind of sheared off. Of course I called the dentist right away. It didn't hurt, so I was able to wait until the next day.

My fear was that he would look at it and say, "That tooth's gonna have to go." To my relief, but not to the relief of my bank account, he decided to put a very expensive crown on it. I have dental insurance, but it sucks big time. He said that everyone's dental insurance sucks. I don't have much choice here, because a person needs teeth if a person is to live on something besides gruel (whatever that is) for the rest of a person's life.

It used to be you could buy a car or a house for what it costs to have major dental work done. In the olden days people used to have all their teeth pulled when they were about 50 years old and wear choppers, and thank goodness we don't have to do that, but geez!

If you make soda bread be very, very careful, especially if you toast it, because most dental insurance sucks and I have my dentist's word on that. And all you dental insurance providers out there, shame on you.

Bad Onions and Other Non-News

2011-03-16T16:51:00.009-04:00

I have neglected this blog for a couple of weeks for no particular reason. I've been trying to get through a book that is driving me crazy. It's a really bad novel and I probably should just toss it, but there's a mystery involved and my OCD will not let me just skip to the end. The protagonist is a kid with Asberger's and the author must have caught it from him, because she just goes on and on and on and it's like being trapped by someone afflicted by the disorder. She digresses occasionally, but even her digressions are full of information you don't need. I feel like sticking sticky notes for future readers, like, "Didn't she just write the same thing back on page 135 and again on page 215?" "Don't you wish she'd just shut the hell up and get on with the story?" "Did anyone actually edit this goddam book?" So I decided to let it go and get back to my blog.

Onions. For some reason, I can't keep onions from going bad. I use a lot of onions when I cook.

Lately I find that they go soft and ugly - almost mushy and rank. I usually just get those net bags of yellow onions at the supermarket and they last forever - until recently. Is there some sort of onion blight happening? Is this an evil plot to get me to shop at Whole Foods? I try to be kind to onions. I store them in a cool, dry place. Since I use them pretty quickly, they shouldn't get all yucky on me. And now that Spring looms, they are sprouting - in the dark, like some science fiction life form ready to take over the kitchen, if not the world. I guess if I were starving I could use them in that condition, but being an American, I just throw them out. And I feel bad about that.

I'll be chopping onions, if I can find a few sound ones, as soon as I finish writing this post. I'm fixing an ethnically confused dinner tonight: Portuguese kale soup (only with spinach instead of kale because Ir's easier that way. You don't have to strip the spinach off the stems.) and Irish soda bread from a recipe in this morning's Beacon Journal Food page. The bread was easy to make and smells and looks delicious. According to the directions, you're supposed to let i sit, wrapped in a tea towel (a "tea" towel?) for five (5) hours after you take it out of the oven before you eat it. That would make us eating dinner around 9 o'clock and I can't wait that long. Besides, I'd miss "Modern Family." which isn't an option. So we'll eat it prematurely and hope for the best.

I realized too late that I should have drawn a picture of the soda bread, but when I did the onion drawing, I had not planned to make soda bread, So it will have to wait for its portrait for another time.

Go Away and Take Your Snow With You

2011-02-28T18:57:00.009-05:00

It's a cliche to complain about February, the longest month of the year, at least in Ohio. Even its name is mean. Is that f-e-b-r from the same root as febrile? I could look it up, but I have been turned snail-like and lethargic in my movements on account the pervading grayness. Life has become "who gives a flying fig?" in the daily lack of sun and warmth, to say nothing of the trash ad detritus reveled as rain falls and turns the snow into brownish, gray slop, in which is floating unidentifiable "things." Where did all that stuff come from? But then, who cares?

I was awakened in the middle of the night by thunder and flashes of lightning. Had I drifted off into a Rip Van Winkle stupor only to awaken in April? No. It was just February mooning us on its way out. March around here has had some fierce snow storms, so it's not over yet. But March does not beat us down like February. March goes out like a lamb and we can count on it to lighten our mood eventually.

So long, Feb. Try to coma back next year a kinder, gentler month.

Food

2011-02-23T13:04:00.013-05:00

I am not a gourmet cook by any means. I cook in order to eat, not because I particularly want to emulate the great chefs of the world. I have a friend, for instance, who watches the food channels only. She knows the details of every famous dish creator. She doesn't cook much herself, but she knows how to make a lot of things and who invented each wannabe Escoffierian delight.

However, there are a few things I make that I think are quite tasty and which do not require hours over a hot stove. One of these things is my spaghetti sauce. It is my own invention, evolved over years of discoveries of what mixes well with what. I have a neighbor, whom I do not know well, who is from Italy. When I told her of my ingredients, she literally threw up her hands and said, vehemently, "No! No! You do not make it that way. Just tomatoes, garlic, salt and pepper!" Another neighbor who was in on this conversation, whose husband's grandmother is Italian agreed with the protester. She makes this grandmother-in-laws spaghetti and doesn't use any of the ingredients I use. "No!"

I was shocked a few years ago to discover that a very dear in-law of Italian descent, whose aunt's spaghetti sauce is legend, that said aunt actually uses Ragu in her lasagna. Ragu! From an Italian! This in-law, whom I love dearly, has claimed that only Italians can make Italian food, and that those of us not of the blood are just being presumptuous to even try. And her aunt uses Ragu! Shocking!

So I make my sauce with tomatoes (canned in the winter, fresh when my tomatoes come in), tomato paste, onions, green peppers, garlic, oregano, rosemary, basil, Worcester sauce, a bay leaf, salt and pepper and chicken stock if you have any handy, or even left over gravy. All this is apparently a crime, but everyone who's tasted it has loved it, including a few Italians, whom I don't tell about the ingredients. In the summer I have all fresh herbs, but dried ones work fine in the winter.

Speakimg of gravy, I had some left over from a roast beast the other day. I used it to make mushroom barley soup. I happened to be out of Worcestershire sauce, which I like to use to de-glaze the pan. I have to say that I cannot cook without Worcestershire sauce. I don't use it on oatmeal or dessert, but I love it with just about everything. My father taught me to use it in scrambled eggs, just a soupcon, to add flavor. That started me using it in lots of other stuff. Anyway here I was with sauteing onions and mushrooms and no Lea and Perrins. I decided to try a bit of balsamic vinegar and a bit of sherry and I must say it was just a very fine mushroom barley soup. Since I don't have any French friends or neighbors to tell me "No! No!" I guess I'll try it again. Soup is very forgiving, I have found, and this winter it's been a godsend.

Tonight it's beef stew in the slow cooker and I can spend the afternoon reading, or trying to catch up with all the Oscar winning movies I've been DVR-ing on TCM. Yesterday I watched "Chariots of Fire." So good.

Water

2011-02-14T18:39:00.011-05:00

Right now I am missing my water aerobics class. I slipped on ice a couple of weeks ago and skinned my shin. I got an infected spot which is healing but I'm not allowed to go into the pool until all is clear, which should be next week. I really miss it, because if I'm not doing that, I am a slug. I do not like exercise much, but it's something that a person must do; otherwise stagnation sets in.

The water feels so good - it's warm - and I do enjoy the companionship of the women in the class. Some of them have decamped to Florida for a couple of months, which was a wise thing to do this particular winter. We laugh a lot, which is also a healthy thing to do. When I broke my hip last March they brought cards, candy and lots of good smelling lotions and plants. We do that when someone is out for a while with an illness or surgery.

Most of us wear unflattering, expensive bathing suits which don't fade in chlorinated water. We look like a bunch of nuns. Most of the women are 50-60ish. I think there are a couple in their 70s, but I am the only real geezer in the group, so they think it is remarkable that I can stand upright most of the time (except when I slip in the snow.)

One dear, kind women, who is also from Kent, picks me up so I don't have to drive in the dark- the class is at 7 am. My favorite time is the make up class on Fridays at 4:30 in the afternoon when there is sun shining on the pool and you can forget all about the snow and ice out there. We never have sun on the pool in the mornings, even in summer, because we are on the wrong side of the building. I look forward to going back very soon.

Addendum: Saw "Nixon in China" from the Met on Saturday. It was fascinating. The same singer has played Nixon since 1987 and I think he has morphed into him. It was terrific. The libretto was based on actual documents from the 1972 meetings and the dinner. In the scene with the famous overstuffed armchairs, Mao is waxing philosophical, Nixon is trying to talk business and Henry Kissinger has no idea of what's going on. Madame Mao is strident and shows off her ballet of the Red Detachment of Women. Pat Nixon wants to go back to the past. It's not something I want to see again, however. The music is very repetitive and things move very slowly. But I'm glad I went to see it.

Spot the Kitty

2011-02-09T18:47:00.018-05:00

Once when my friend Susan and I were in London, we watched this really daffy morning TV show every day whilst breaking our fast. It was during the Christmas season and they were running a contest called "Spot the Pudding," Some poor sod was wandering around London dressed as a Christmas pudding, complete with a sprig of holly, and if you spotted it, you could win some sort of prize - a gift basket from Fortnum & Mason perhaps? Well, Susan and I spent a lot of time wandering about London ourselves and never spotted the puddling. We never happened to catch the program when someone HAD spotted the pudding, so we never found out what the prize was or where the pudding had been spotted. And some poor alum of the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts was probably in that pudding costume, trying to break into the big time. Coulda been Colin Firth, even.

All this has nothing to do with my post today, except that in the above picture, you may want to try to spot Dupree. I love to watch him strolling down the sidewalk between the banks of snow. In his younger days, he would bound right through the snow, coming in with snowballs all over his belly. Now as a geezercat, he prefers the shoveled sidewalks and this is how he looks. Too cute, I think.

Hibernation

2011-02-07T19:03:00.016-05:00

Snowed again today. What is this, Siberia? Under that snow is ice. Under that ice is tundra. Ivan Ivanovich is digging in the snow, hoping to find a few potatoes to stave off starvation. Anna Karenina is weeping and planning to throw herself under a train, if there's one handy. The sky is gray. A lot of the snow on the ground is gray. It is early in February. There is no end in sight.

I have decided to hibernate. Ice is hazardous to geezers. There is no need to go out. I have U-Verse TV and TCM is doing their annual 31 days of Oscar. I have already recorded a ton of fine old movies to watch. I have a number of books stacked up by my throne. The furnace is working. So I shall hibernate until there is some hope of real sunshine, not reflected off snow. Bears are smart and they don't even have TV or books with which to pass the time, so they sleep a lot.

I may do that , too.

Get Ready for Valentine's Day Now

2011-01-31T20:20:00.027-05:00

Here's a chance to make your Valentine happy on the big day. This family story picture book will surely reach the heart of any sentimental person who likes living in the past, which is not a bad place to be these days. There are no sex scenes, everyone is fully clothes, wearing very fully clothed clothing, in fact. There are no cell phones, no Facebook, no one is Tweeting or texting. There is evidence in this book that people actually talked with each other and ate slow food.

This book can be obtained through Authorhouse here and will make a dandy Valentine gift, because it is very sweet and non-fattening. You could include chocolate with the book, but it is not really necessary. And if you have a rich old aunt, she may so pleased that she will leave you her entire estate.

On a different note: Last night I made a fine dinner for the birthday boy (John) with recipes I got from last week's Parade magazine (Jan.23). The entree, called Tray Baked Chicken is by Jamie Oliver, and the dessert is called Pear Flip Flop. Both were well received by the consumers. I'm sure you can find them online.

Now on to -ugh- February.

Well, some sales person I am. The name of the book is "May: A New England Childhood."

Smoky Dupree

2011-01-28T20:11:00.006-05:00

Last summer when Dupree was so ill we thought he was a goner, one of his problems was that his formerly soft belly fur was a mass of snarls and mats. He had been doing his summer shedding, but he had not been groomed often enough, with the result that the tangles were too thick to respond to the usual brush or nubby grooming glove. When John took him to the vet, one of the things she did was to shave his belly and get rid of the mess of mats. He didn't seem to mind having an almost bare belly.

When the fur started growing back lo! and behold! it was a lovely soft smoky blueish gray. And now, not just the belly fur is that color, but his whole undercoat is that lovely soft shade. It is most becoming, and gives him a very prince-like appearance, a bi-color coat, like one of those smoky black Persian cats you see on cat calendars. It is hard to resist in passing, when he is sleeping as in the picture above, when one must pause and give it a feel, which makes his toes curl. Not bad for a cat of advanced age. It's enough to make you want to shave all his fur off and see what hapens...a cat of another color.

Burns Night Review

2011-01-26T20:14:00.024-05:00

Well, it just worked out fine. Our usual group was mostly absent, but we had some new talent and a new audience. A fine crowd attended and the folks from the Brimfield Historical Society put on a fine spread of eatables. John emceed the proceedings with wit and charm, even though he is my son and I shouldn't brag on him, as they say. He began by reading a poem by Edgar McCormick, the late professor of English at KSU, a writer, a poet and one of the founders of the Brinfield Historical Society, for whom the room we were meeting in was named.

There's a man named Merle who can recite four hours of Robert Frost if you'll let him. He regaled us with Frost, Dickinson, Burns and Sandberg among others. Merle is a sort of minstrel who has committed to memory just about the works of any poet worth mentioning. He doesn't just recite, though, he gives you the poem with his voice, his face, his gestures and his whole body. He's a local treasure and we were so lucky that he showed up.

A woman who told us about her father's hobo days during the depression, gave us a genuine hobo song, one I'd never heard. She used to sing with a polka band, and she was in good voice. John and Sally sang "Hard Times," which went with the hobo theme. Another woman, a retired librarian, gave us a review of an Alexander McCall Smith book set in Edinburgh, which she assured us that we would love. I believed her. We had a 10 year old with great timing who told as joke his Poppy had told him. It was clean and funny.

Beth, a terrific folk singer from Cleveland sang a song I love, "In the Sally Gardens," and later did "The Long Black Veil." She has a beautiful voice and could have been out some place singing for money, so it was lovely to have her and her talent with us. I did a couple of stories, but not the one I'd planned to do. I had told it years ago, but I just wasn't sure about it, so I ran a couple of oldies, which worked for this new audience.

There were several Burnell family songs, like "Leaning on the Everlasting Arms," in which we were joined by Saunis, one of the usual gang. She and Ted, her husband, did a great bawdy song about a drunken Scotsman who fell asleep in his kilt and was surprised to find in the morning that he had received a blue ribbon on a certain part of his anatomy.

I think the star turn was provided by friend David C. who introduced (to some of the younger members of the gathering) the famous Scot of vaudeville days, Sir Harry Lauder. David is half Scot on his mother's side and he grew up listening to scratchy recordings of Sir Harry singing "Roamin' in the Gloamin'." He played Harry's version, on tape, and then we heard the 5 year old David C.'s version, to which the response was a universal "Awwwwww." Then he proceeded to belt out the song, with the audience joining in the chorus. It was a hit!

We ended up with "Auld Lang Syne," a final nod to Robbie Burns himself. 'Twas a lovely evening and we expect it will happen again next year with more performers, now that they've seen it once; at least one man said he'll sing next year and he's already practicing.

Mozart Goodie

2011-01-19T14:54:00.008-05:00

Emily just sent a package of sinfully delicious German chocolate things. Our favorite, which are also available here in the U.S. of A. are Mozart Kugeln, better known as Mozart balls. In his hometown of Salzburg, it seems as if every shop window is filled with Mozart balls. The packaging is beautiful, all shiny gold and red and purple with his portrait curving over the plump round confection.

First there is an outer shell of dark chocolate (very good for you with its antioxidants and all), then a thin shell of light chocolate (still good for you because it makes you feel good), then a thick layer of marzipan (good for you because it's almond paste and we all know that almonds are good for you) and then the center of soft chocolate. It's a gift that keeps on giving.

There were also other chocolates in this packet, all fine, but Mozart takes the prize. We ration them, because a person could just go crazy and scarf up a batch of them without thinking, while enjoying the Jupiter symphony or that great trio from Cosi Fan Tutti.

Ah, sweet Mozart!

Robbie's Birthday in Ohio

2011-01-19T10:59:00.004-05:00

What started in our living room a number of years ago has now gone public. We've had to move it for the last 10 years or so, using , first to the UU church social hall (basement) and for the last two yeasts the Kelso House (Brinfield Historical Society) meeting room. John has been on the board of the historical society for several years and this year that body decided to make the Robbie Burns night a part of their public offerings. We hope that many folks will show up for it this coming Saturday night (Jan. 22). We hope our old friends will also show up as they have in the past.

Last year was the first year we actually had a Scotsman wearing a kilt and playing bagpipes. He did not criticize our lack of Scotch whiskey or the Sacred Haggis. Our version of this festival is a lot less formal than the usual celebration. We do require that guests perform: tell a joke, tell a story, sing a song, play an instrument, do a jig or whistle a tune. It's always fun and surprising and everyone seems to have a good time. I know that we do. The audience is uncritical and appreciative. I'll let you know how it turns out in this new format.

Movie Madness Marathon

2011-01-13T16:24:00.016-05:00

Oldest daughter Polly was here for three weeks and left last Sunday to return to Provincetown. leaving an empty spot in the old home place. While she was here we managed to catch a bunch of movies, trying to get in the Oscar contenders. Besides which I went on my own to see "The Tourist." which is at no risk to being a contender for anything, even though Johnny Depp was in it, a what-was-I-thinking role for my darling Johnny. Venice was gorgeous, Johnny looked like hell and Angelina was very scary looking. It was a Hitchcockian thing and not boring.

I saw so many films in such short order that I may have placed Jeff Bridges in a tutu curing the Duke of York's stammer, or the Duke duking it out with Angelina, and Natalie Portman doing tour jetes in a gondola.

Soring it all out, "Back Swan" was a third rate "Red Shoes," but very entertaining. Not nearly enough dancing, in spite of all the hoop-la about her practicing for months to recover her balletic skills. Never showed her feet, just the arms and hands, which I can't imagine required so many months to perfect.

"The King's Speech," starring everyone's favorite Mr. Darcy; he was splendid, as was Geoffrey Rush. It was painful to watch his struggle and equally painful to watch the kind of family he had barely survived: a brother, the ultimate Brit twit; a mother, the Ice Queen; a jolly clueless father. All of the performances were superb and made one glad not to be a royal.

"The Fighter" was about another dysfunctional family, but one with juice and heat and emotions all over the place. I'm not a fight movie fan, but this was about more than that, and again, the performances were just amazingly good. Christian Bale as a crack head and Mark Walberg as his younger brother were so, so good. Melissa Leo played this impossible mother, the opposite of the Ice Queen and much more loving - but impossible even so. Fine movie.

"True Grit," probably my favorite because Jeff Bridges is so very good as is everyone else in the movie. And the sound track, which is variations on "Leaning on the Everlasting Arms," a Burnell performance favorite, is just beautiful. Sally and I couldn't help but sing along, even though we were probably annoying the hell of the people in front of us. I haven't seen the John Wayne version for years; Polly's theory about that one is that they played it "cute," even though it's good, and that this one is more from the original book. The girl was terrific. There was an interview with the Coen brothers on Terry Gross the other day and she asked them where they found a girl with such a fine voice, since American teenagers seem to have that irritating nasal quality, a late version of the Valley Girl patois, They said the casting director interviews thousands before finding the act res they cast. It was such a satisfying flick. Last night there was an American Masters special on Jeff Bridges, from "The Last Picture Show" to "True Grit," including clips of The Dude from "The Big Lebowski," which I've probably spelled wrong.

R.I.P. A very fine singer died today: Margaret Whiting. Lovely voice, very big in the 40s and 50s. Worth hearing now.

Trapped by the Wrap

2010-12-31T15:37:00.014-05:00

On Christmas, if you've been good, you get things, like this fine laptop. You also get useful gadgets of the the tech variety. What you also get with these gadgets, and food, and toiletries, and household products, is that which contains them, many times a rigid, transparent packaging which looks like glass but is apparently made of Kryptonite. These containers are dangerous, requiring the use of a box cutter, hatchet, screwdriver, pliers and a large box of Band-aids and maybe the occasional tourniquet. I think the purpose of this armor is to prevent thievery, since products are now available freely from the shelves of the modern store. I remember the bad old days when you had to ask the person behind the counter to fetch whatever you wanted to buy. Who wants to go back to that? Who even remembers that besides those of us of great age? There must be an easier way to make this packaging more accessible and still discourage the light fingered nerd who desires some futuristic device at the local Best Buy.

Because the modern toddler cannot resist drinking drain cleaner, we now have most household products almost impossible to open. I am at the age where I even have trouble opening a package of gum. Right now in my kitchen is a new bottle of dishwasher liquid, the top of which is the kind you have to press really hard to release the tabs that lock it, in order to screw it off. I cannot do this without a wide jawed wrench of some kind, which I am not in the habit of having at hand among my kitchen utensils. Fortunately, I have a son handy for such things, but what about geezers who live alone? Hey, new job op - opening things for geezers!

Ian Frazier has written some hilarious short pieces in the New Yorker featuring "The Cursing Mommy." It's as if he's living next door and has bugged my house, since that is how I cope with my frustration over trying to open things, even the goddam waxed paper inside the freaking cereal boxes. When I'm in that state I should not even be around sharp things, like knives and scissors which I need if I want my breakfast. I know I am not alone in this. In fact, I think I read somewhere that there have been some serious injuries from the damn clam shell packaging. I wonder if the insurance industry is behind this?

I don't have access to my scanner right now, so I had to do the illustration for this piece with Photo Shop, which I haven't done for a while and almost forgot how to. Got the plastic thing from Google and the photo from my camera. Such fun!

Festivities

2010-12-27T17:24:00.046-05:00

I am composing this on my new gigantic laptop. I think John got tired of hearing me curse using my very slow Dell, and decided to provide me with one that has speed and a lot of bells and whistles. It's lovely. By coincidence, Sally got me a neat little Passport portable hard drive, so I can empty the old one and pass it on to a deserving citizen who can take over the cursing.

As is usual when Polly and Sally are here at the same time, there is very little conversation, rather the clicking of computer key boards as they commune with people who are elsewhere. On Christmas day, with my new computer's built in camera, we had one of those broken Skype sessions with Emily and Chris and visitor DCB in Germany. The main problem was with the heavy Skype traffic, the result of which is frozen pictures, many "Can you hear me nows?" and un-Christmas spirit frustration.

We had an nontraditional, for us, Christmas dinner. John decided that we should have duck, rather than roast beast. He went to Difeo's, a poultry purveyor in Akron, and brought home a 6 pound Long Island duckling. He also was the cook for the fowl, basting it with red currant jam and orange juice. It was sooo good. Polly prepared roasted sweet potatoes, and Brussels sprouts cooked with bacon and maple syrup. Sally made a red and green salad with baby spinach and raspberries. I did nothing, ab-so-lute-ly nothing. It was the most flavorful, delicious Christmas dinner ever. Polly also made bread pudding in lieu of the plum variety, but it was equally spicy and filled with raisins. walnuts and apples. Feast!

We made the usual trek to Cleveland for the Boar's Head Festival at Trinity Cathedral. It seemed to be bigger than in the past, and wonderfully colorful. There's nothing like hearing a brass choir in such a beautiful stone cathedral. They even serve ham and mince pie afterwards, and this time we partook before we took off for the Number One Pho, a Viet Namese restaurant housed in what looks like an Edward Hopper painting in a rather dodgy industrial section of East Cleveland. I tired to emulate a Hopper with my camera, but the light was just not bright enough and all was blurred. Besides, I was not sure that the other patrons wanted to have a picture taken that may show up on Facebook some day, especially if they were there with someone their wife or husband may not approve of.

We're having some very fine left over split pea soup made by the chef du jour from Provincetown, who is as much an artist in the kitchen as in the studio. At some point this week, we are going up to the Police Museum in Cleveland, which promises some very gruesome artifacts from a number of unsolved murders, an interest my children seem to have developed on their own. Makes me wonder what may be in store for me as I get older and creakier. I may need to hire a bodyguard.

These are some Ladies of the Court, who entered sweetly singing a lullaby for the Holy Infant so tender and mild. So lovely were their voices in that huge space.

Merry Christmas

2010-12-21T14:19:00.004-05:00

Woolworth's Five and Dime

2010-12-21T12:30:00.012-05:00

I want my dime store back. That's where I used to do m y Christmas shopping. I would have 50 cents to buy gifts for the entire family, and I would get wonderful things for them there. I remember the pseudo cloisonnne incense burner I bought for my mother one year. It was orange and green and brown, with gold beading, and I thought it was beautiful. I don't think we had any incense, but that didn't matter. To a seven year old it was magical. I bet if it was on "Antique Road Show" now, it would fetch a pretty penny. Woolworth's was full of bright, shiny things, which was what Christmas was all about. In those days, there were tons of things that were actually five or ten cents in price. I think that incense burner was a whole quarter, which meant that the other family members got lesser treasures. You could also find great wind-up toys, little china dolls or animal families, tops, marbles, Big Little books, and all those things that no longer exist in the world of children, so are not missed.

These stores were still around when my children were little, and that's where they shopped at Christmas, too. I still have a few things they bought down at the Woolworth's at University Plaza years ago, like a gold-sh locket , in which I put their pictures, and a necklace with a big "G" on it. Never go me a fake cloisonne incense burner. I think they had better taste, or figured that I had.

Even when prices rose above 5 and 10 cents, dime stores were great places to find simple things: dish towels, kitchen gadgets, gold fish and turtles, coloring books and paper dolls. What reminded me of this is that yesterday, John decided that we should make gingerbread men. I had tossed out all my cookie cutters years ago and I realized that there was no dime store to go to to find a new one. All of that stuff is now relegated to specialty kitchen stores, which carry over priced gadgets for people whose hobby is cooking. Coking as a hobby! What a concept.

The same thing happened a few years ago when I broke my glass juicer, a simple reamer I had had for 40 years or so, which I had probably gotten at Woolworth's, along with a spatula or a slotted spoon. I went to the only outlet available to me - ugh - Walmart - which had destroyed the local very fine Kmart, which was a really good substitute for the old dime store. In fact, I think Kmart is descended from the old Kress' (in the South) or Kresge's in the North. So I'm at -ugh- Walmart, and I ask where the juicers' are, and the guy led me to the housewares department and shows me this cheap plastic thing. I said, "But I want a glass one like the one I broke. I'd had it for forty years." He smiled and said,"You 'd had it for forty years or more. That's exactly why they don't make that kind any more." So I ended up finding one at an antique store, and I treat it very carefully.

So, anyway, there was no handy Woolworth's, McCrory's or Kresge's to go to to find a gingerbread man cookie cutter. As I was on a bit of a journey to find a gift, I realized that I was going right by one of those complexes (Aurora Farms)which has tons of shops, including a couple of kitchen ones, I drove around and found a parking spot not too far from one of them, went in , asked a lady in an apron if they had such a thing and they did. It wasn't even expensive. It wasn't exactly the shape I was looking for, and it looked like a person of indeterminate sex, but a person for all that, so I bought it. Since I wasn't in a dime store, there was really nothing else to look at except that they had tons of sample's of their specialty dips, so I grazed thorough a number of them and left. When I got home, I discovered that John and Polly had found an almost identical one, even cheaper, at another kitchen shop in Hudson, a very posh one that offers gourmet cooking classes for those for whom cooking is a hobby instead of a *&#$@% chore that you have to do every day.

But I digress. Had there been a Woolworth's handy, it would have been so much more fun and lots more things to browse. I used to buy a very fine journal there every year until they closed. No one else has them, so I don't even keep a journal any more. There were still Woolworth's in England , at least a few years ago in Scunthorpe, where I bought a very fine tea cozy. It was just like the ones we used to have here. Lovely. I always loved dime stores.

Beware the Grand Inquisitor!

2010-12-13T17:45:00.006-05:00

This is not about a Monty Python skit, although I half expected Terry Jones to appear when one of the characters sang this phrase twice - in Italian, which I don't understand, but there were subtitles. I went to see "Don Carlo" on Saturday, the live from the Met HD version. It's the reddest opera I've ever seem. The set and costumes designers went a bit too far here with the most blazing shades if red in the spectrum.

The story is as follows: Don Carlo, the prince of Spain, is betrothed to Elizabeth, Princess of France, one of those deals they used to do with helpless royal offspring, where they'll meet for the first time on their wedding day. BUT - they accidentally meet in a forest, so they can sing a duet and fall in love. Their countries are at war, and unbeknown st to them, Carlo's Pa, Filippo, decides that HE wants to marry Elizabeth, as part of a deal to end the war, the bastard! A side story involves Carlo's BFF Roderigo, who's a baritone, so that he and Carlo, who's a tenor, can sing a really great duet professing their BFF-ishness, and they hug a lot during this number and swear their undying love and all, and you start to wonder. Roderigo goes off to help the Flemish (at least the people of Flanders, and I don't think they're call Flanderish) and asks Carlo to ask his Pa to call off his Spanish conquerors and leave the Flanders folks be.

Well, there's a lot of singing and all, and there goes Elizabeth walking around in very red clothes with Filippo,m who's also clad in crimson, and Carlo, in black as befits a heartbroken prince, weeps and moans like a bastard. This is 16th century Spain and the Inquisition is still the main hobby of the Church, and when Roderigo comes back from Flanders and confronts Filippo about his unjust war on Flanders, Filippo tells him, "Beware the Grand Inquisitor!" Since the Church pretty much ran the world in those days, if you piss off the king, you're dissing the Church, so you'd better beware the Grand Inquisitor and all

So there's this scene with Filippo singing this gorgeous aria, about how Elizabeth never loved him - duh!- an he makes a deal with the G.I. to turn his own son into the Inquisition, along with Roderigo. At least I think that's what the deal was. Anyway, Roderigo gets shot during an Auto da Fe, with people getting burned all up behind a huge scrim with the face of Jesus on it, in case you didn't get the irony. Carlo cradles Roderigo in his arms. Roderigo singes "Morire" or something like that which means "I'm dying here, but first, I'm gonna sing ya a little tune," which he does, a very beautiful aria and all He's singing this while lying on the ground with this huge starchy collar almost covering his mouth. He dies, finally A few minutes later, Carlo gets stuck with a sword by somebody I didn't know, and the ghost of his grandfather - Filippo's father- takes him away to Paradise, where Roderigo awaits! And Elizabeth is left with Filippo, the bastard.

It's a five hour opera and the best music is in the last act, and I enjoyed the whole thing Those wacky royals and priests! Those folks who want a theocracy should check out this opera.

Pleasurs of Flesh

2010-11-29T15:08:00.011-05:00

The best part of Thanksgiving, for me, are the days after, when fine turkey sandwiches are available until there's nothing left but the carcass. The perfect turkey sandwich is made as follows: white bread, mayonnaise, white meat with a sprinkle of salt, accompanied by a glass of cold milk. I have done this with whole grain bread, dressing and cranberry sauce, but this year the dressing was so good we ate it all on Thanksgiving Day, and the cranberry sauce didn't jell properly, so I'm back to the traditional as described and pictured above. John and I went up to the West Side Market Saturday and bought some wonderful Hungarian crusty white bread, which makes the ultimate old fashioned turkey sandwich. By the way, I think the dressing was so good is that I was out of sage, so I went out into the garden and picked some parsley, rosemary and thyme and used that instead. Excellent.

I spent the first half of my life (so far) under the Catholic church's ruling of no meat on Friday. This meant agony on the day after Thanksgiving, with the turkey sitting in the refrigerator, exuding all its roasted turkeyness, untouchable. If I spent the day with non-Catholic (that's how we described those not lucky enough to be born into the true religion) friends, when their mother would get out the turkey and slice off those luscious pieces of white meat for luncheon sandwiches, I had to eat peanut butter and silently offer up my suffering for the lost souls in Purgatory, as the nuns often advised us to do when in pain. Or I could just curse my ill-born religious luck. We'd stay up until Friday midnight, and as soon as the minute hand moved past twelve, we'd all race to the kitchen and attack the turkey, scarfing it down like those poor starving children in China we were always hearing about.

The irony of all this was that, if we went to Mass on Friday, we could partake of the body and blood of Christ, which if you believe in Transubstantiation, which we' re bound to do, we were eating meat, or flesh and blood, actually. Whichever pope infallibly made up these rules was not much of a logician. I asked our parish pries about Transubstantiation once, asking if it wasn't meant to be symbolic, and he said that it was one of the basic tenets of the Church. In fact, I used to lead the congregation with my guitar in a jaunty little song with the chorus, "Eat His Body, Drink His Blood, Allelu, allelu, allelu!" Well, both the priest and I left the church soon after, he to marry an ex-nun who looked like Elizabeth Taylor at her most gorgeous, I to become pretty much a Druid, never more to urge people to participate in cannablism. Then Pope Juan Two Three opened the windows of the church to let in some 18th century air. and we started having hamburgers on Fridays, and turkey on the day after Thanksgiving, the day that merchants call Black Friday. Yes!

Obscure Connection to Fame

2010-11-23T17:05:00.013-05:00

I mentioned a couple of posts ago that I would be having a couple of pieces in the Cleveland Museum of Art, drawings I did during the Drawing in the Galleries class. It's not exactly the same as being featured in an actual gallery, but there you are. It's quite a nice exhibit, featuring works from all of the classes from the fall schedule. So we can all brag.

The Degas is one of the dancers from the "Frieze of Dancers," one of my favorite things in the museum. The mask is from the African gallery, and it caught my eye because of the fine hat, made of woven straw, very complex and interesting. As I mentioned before, it was used in a circumcision ceremony and is not a happy face. But the hat is perky!

Annual Turkey Fest

2010-11-23T15:34:00.018-05:00

The other day, when I was checking out a bunch of candles for the Thanksgiving table, the check out lady mentioned that she was having 22 people for Thanksgiving. I told her that I would have to lie down with a cold cloth on my head if producing such an event were up to me. My parents had moved far away from their families, so we never had droves of relatives showing up for holiday meals, just our nuclear family of seven, which I think was quite enough for my mother. My job was polishing the apples and arranging the center piece fruit bowl, drapmg the grapes picturesquely. When I married and had my own children, we never went away to relatives' homes at Thanksgiving and that's the way it's always been.

I had only one experience with one of those large, extended family affairs. It was the first year we were married, and my husband and I went down to a small town on the Ohio River, where most of his aunts lived. They were all large women, named Frieda, Ernestine, Beulah and Genevieve. They didn't much like men, a consequence of their father , the local school superintendant, having left their mother in 1915 to marry his secretary and start a whole new family, none of whom were ever mentioned. They themselves had all married, presumably in order to have children, since there didn't seem to be much evidence of affection or even friendship between the spouses once they had each produced one or two children.

We met at Aunt Genevieve's big house, which contained Uncle Herb's general store and the village post office. When my husband and I went into the dining room, with its groaning table, I realized that I was the only woman in the room, among the silent and hungry men. "Where are your mother and the aunts?" I whispered to my husband. "Oh, they'll eat in the kitchen," he said. "They like it that way." Occasionally one of the aproned sisters would come into the room to see if we needed anything. I could hear them in the kitchen, laughing and chatting away, while I sat amongst the men who ate more food than I'd ever seen a human being put away. It was good country food, much of it home-canned. There was no turkey on the table; the women had sliced it in the kitchen and put in on the table in a huge mound on a platter. (My father had always carved the turkey; it was a guy thin in our family.) Needless to say, everything was delicious. But I muttered to my husband that there was no way I would ever eat Thanksgiving dinner in the kitchen wearing an apron.

When I went into the kitchen to help with the dishes, the women were all sitting around the large room on straight chairs, with their plates in their laps, gabbing and laughing. All of the men had left the table and waddled into the parlor to watch football. As soon as the kitchen was clean there came the request for some of that good pie and coffee, which the women dutifully provided on trays for the stuffed sports lovers in the parlor. (I could just see how my mother would have reacrted to these men: "You want pie? I'll give you pie!--Right in your face!") I have a feeling the air in the parlor was not too fragrant, given the amount of food and the speed with which it had been ingested. I didn't venture in, but went outside and had a cigarette with my husband. He had grown up with this holiday pattern and was a bit surprised that I found it strange. But I never ate Thanksgiving dinner in the kitchen on a straight chair wearing an apron. And men can get their own damn pie and coffee in my house.

Others in my family do the big Thanksgiving dinner and have a lot of fun with it. My brother Micheal and his wife have about 40 or so people, all relatives, and my sister Mary Lucille with just her kids and grad kids can add up to about 30 if everyone shows up. Everyone pitches in and nobody eats in the kitchen wearing an apron. We will be just four here, and that will be fine. After dinner we'll watch one of those movies we all love: this year I think it will be "To Kill a Mockingbird," which I'm DVR-ing tonight while I'm up in Cleveland seeing "Billy Eliot."

Good times.

Music! Drama! Theater!

2010-11-15T15:47:00.009-05:00

Every once in a while, there's a period of a few days when there are all sort of interesting things happen one after the other. This past week-end started on Friday night with the KSU production of "Brigadoon." Now this is probably the lamest musical ever written - and by Lerner and Loewe yet, the guys who wrote "My Fair Lady." I only went to see it because the university theater department puts on simply splendid musical productions - with the exception of that terrible "Jane Eyre" a couple of years ago. So off we went, not expecting anything too wonderful. BUT the thing was just delightful, thanks to the excellent dancing and singing, the costume design and the lighting. They even did a half way decent job with the Scots accent, usually the downfall of college productions. Way entertaining!

Saturday afternoon, a friend and I went to see "Don Pasquale," the latest HD transmission from the Met. A Donizetti opera, there was fine bel canto singing and a lot of cornball Italian comedy, with the diva a magnificent Russian, Anna Netrebko. I love these HD productions. Between the acts, you get to see them moving the massive sets into place by a team of some hundred stagehands. It was a fun comic opera and nobody died.

Sunday afternoon I went to see "For Colored Girls." I had seen the play years ago and just loved it. When I heard that they'd made a movie of it, I wondered how they would do that, since the play is basically poetry. I had also heard that Tyler Perry was producing it and he is the guy who dresses up as a bossy woman and that he had played the Chittlin' Circuit for years with comedies amid a the Black community. Since this isn't a comedy, I wondered what he would do with it. I must say he did a good job and respected the original work. This is not an easy story to watch, since it involves not only the impact on women of racism, but of sexism and violence against women as well. The cast is first rate, consisting of some of the best actresses in film and theater. It is certainly not and Italian comedy.

Sunday evening I went to hear the KSU symphony up on campus. The first piece was probably the most annoying music Beethoven ever composed. It was a triple concerto for cello, violin and piano and consisted of the same melody over and over again - not even variations, just the same damn melody in the first and third movements, with about ten possible endings that never happened....well, until it finally did after I had given up all hope of that happening. The players were great, but someone needed to tell Ludwig that it was really boring. Maybe he compose it after he lost his hearing and he didn't know he was being repetitive. The final piece was Brahms' 4th symphony, which started badly but ended perfectly. It was a fine evening.

So that was my week-end of music, drama and more music. So tonight I'll watch "Dancing With the Stars" and come down to earth. With a bang.

Poetry on the Cheap

2010-11-09T16:09:00.017-05:00

When my mother was growing up in the early days of the 20th century, one of her main pleasures was reading. Her own mother had always read to, and sung to, her children. There was a great library in their small New England city and my mother treasured the opportunity to explore the shelves and find books to enjoy.

When my mother was in her eighties, she received letter from a long ago play mate, someone she hadn't seen or heard from in probably 65 years or so. This woman had lived with her grandmother next door to my mother's family. Her father was a vaudeville performer, a widower, and often away on the road for long stretches of time. She was writing after many years, to tell my mother how much she had loved coming to their house, because there was a love of books and music, and that she had gotten her life long love of reading from listening to my mother's mother reading to her children, or anyone else who happened to be there. This pleased my mother n o end, and I thought it was just a fine thing to hear.

My mother took after her own mother, and when we were little, she would read to us every night at bedtime. She'd also sing us songs she had learned in her childhood.One of my favorite poems was "Winken, Blinken and Nod." A few years ago, I found a copy of the very Eugene Field picture book of poems from which she read to us. It has in it, "The Sugar Plum Tree," "The Calico Cat and the Gingham Dog" which she also read. The book has the most bizarre illustrations in it, which used to fascinate us, and finding's this book in a used book store, simply swept me away into the past.

One song that she sang was "Babes in the Woods," a terrifying tale of two little children who were stolen away on a bright summers' day and lost in the woods so I've heard people say. Well, they end up dead, of course. The tune is mournful and somewhat lugubrious, and we would wail and Mother would say, "I'm not ever going to sing that song again." I mean,, my sister and I were two little children! It was only a few years later, after we had moved to Georgia from New Jersey that the Lindbergh baby was kidnapped. In New Jersey! Anyway, a few nights later, we'd beg her to sing it again, she would, we would wail, and so on and so on. I think we finally got over it when we reached our teens.

When the Depression hit, we moved to Atlanta, where my father had been transferred by Fairbanks -Morse. In the move, we lost our "Winken" book, but mother found these fine little books of poetry in the dime store. These are not our original copies, but ones that I once again found in used book stores Again , looking at then is another step into my childhood. The poems range from Shakespeare to T.S. Eliot. They are amazing, given the general illiteracy of out current time. These little books probably cost all of 15 cents.

The ones for children have all the wonderful children's' poets of the time: Rose Fyleman, Rachel Field, Cristina Rossetti, Robert Lois Stevenson, Eleanor Fajeon, Edward Lear and more. Along with them, were Robert Frost, Yeats, Wordsworth, John Masefield and other poets who wrote so wonderfully about life and nature in ways that children could appreciate. There were quite a few poems about fairies. That would never go over now. I think today's kids would even let Tinker Bell die.

One little book that mother bought for herself had several poems that I liked to read because they made me sad: Poe's "Annabel Lee," a mournful tale of lost love- and death, and a truly heart-breaking poem, "Four Little Foxes," tiny newborn kits whose mother ..."Her feet within a trap, her blood upon the snow.." has left them shivering and blue with cold... I tell ya, it's unbearable! I guess I had a morbid streak at 8.

It's all about words and imagery, and all in these cheap little books with black and white illustrations!

I Hab a Bad, Bad Code

2010-11-05T15:38:00.008-04:00

"When I was sick, and lay abed,

I had two pillows at my head .."

Thus begins one of my favorite poems from Stevenson's "A Child's Garden of Verses," a book my mother read to us when we were small. There is a wonderful illustration by Jessie Wilcox Smith, of a small boy lying in his bed, with a toy village placed her and there in his "Land of Counterpane." Oh, it is ever so cozy.

That's what it was like being sick when I was a kid. Oh, I didn't have a toy village, but there were books and crayons and no school. There was Campbell's chicken rice soup, soda crackers, ginger ale and Jell-o - and paper dolls. When I moved to the couch in the living room I could listen to the soap operas on the radio: "Vic and Sade,""Ma Perkins," and "Pepper Young's Family." Having a cold then was fun. Then.

Now it is a miserable, painful, messy, awful condition that seems to last forever until you can't remember what feeling well is like. The head aches, the nose hurts, the eyes burn and the sneezing and coughing go on forever and keep you awake at night. I've got all the herbal teas, the ginger ale, the crackers and chi ken soup and throat lozenges which provide only temporary relief. Right now I'm missing the spaghetti night at the First Christian Church, but I don't have much of an appetite anyway. My house is littered with snotty tissues and I want my mama.

I know it will end sometime in the near future, but that looks rather bleak after the rotten election results. Wothell is wrong with people? Has this country gone nuts? Even when the damn cold is gone, I'll still have to cope with living amongst people who think it's better to go back to the stone age of the Tea Partyites.

Well, I gotta go blow my dann nose.

Messing Around in the Museum

2010-11-04T16:30:00.035-04:00

I just finished an 8 week class (one a week) at the Cleveland Museum of Art, called "Drawing in the Galleries." We started out with five students, but ended up with only three. We began in the Rodin Sculpture Gallery, which is located in a new part of the museum; it's basically a glass box, so the lighting is perfect. Unfortunately, their Rodin collection is not particularly distinguished, but it was a good exercise to begin with, if a tad boring.

We worked with charcoal the first two sessions, working in black and white to get a sense of values. Since most of the time we were in the new East Wing, we were only allowed to use pastel pencils. Before all the new construction, students were able to bring in paints and regular pastels, but now everything is so new and shiny that such messy media are verboten.

We drew in the Egyptian exhibit, the African exhibit, the Impressionist gallery, the Post Modern gallery and the American Impressionist gallery. Along the way, we had to do quick timed drawings of some sculptures by various artists. I think we all liked the more modern galleries best, although the instructor had promised us the Dutch Masters, too, but we never got there. There's a Franz Hals there that I wanted to try.I discovered a Gabriele Munter which I'd never noticed before, so I did that one. I don't know how long they've had it, but I was glad to see it.

At the end - yesterday- we had a general critique and the instructor chose several of our things to hang in the student gallery, just down the hall from the classrooms in the education wing. But it's a hall which visitors to the museum have to pass on their way to the main galleries, so we can all say that we have work at the Cleveland Museum of Art. Mine are a drawing from the Degas "Frieze of Dancers" and an African mask used in a circumcision rite. Needless to say, it does not portray a happy face.

Above are the originals of the Gabriele Munter painting and the Picasso from the museum and at the bottom are my copies, more or less. You can see that even copying what you see, it's the real artists who knew what they were doing.

To Get Into My Yard

2010-11-02T15:31:00.005-04:00

This past Saturday was the last day of the market for the year. Oh, they will have an indoor market for a couple of days in late November with Christmas goodies - cheese, jellies, soap, maple syrup, but the fine summery things will have to wait until next year. My friend Susan was here for the week-end, so we went and bought peppers and kale and squash. I had already gotten a lovely pie pumpkin the week before, in hopes that John would make one of his fine pies. He has been too busy, so the pumpkins is sitting on the counter with a couple of butternut squash which one of us will make into soup soon.

When Susan and I got home from the market, I heard the unmistakable sound of a clucking chicken. Susan thought it was probably a goose flying over. It seemed improbable that that a chicken would be anywhere in the vicinity of my backyard, but it sounded like a chicken to me.

Then, when I looked out of the kitchen window after I got in, there WAS a chicken, a beautiful white, fat chicken strutting around the backyard, pecking at the ground, and checking out John's truck. A live chicken!

There has been move in this town to allow people to keep chickens. It's all part of the urban farming movement. City council is fighting this move, claiming that rats are attracted to chicken coops on account of the feed. To say nothing of hungry coyotes after the rats.

When I was a child in Atlanta, many folks kept chickens in the city. Hearing roosters crowing in the morning was common. I'll never forget when I was at a playmate's house (her name was Dorothy Crawford and she had a big brother named Beau) and their servant came out with an axe, grabbed one of their chickens, took it to the chopping block and decapitated it with one blow. The headless creature then hopped about, spurting blood everywhere around the yard for a while before collapsing and being taken into the kitchen for dinner. The family's, not the chi ken's. Cold blooded murder! I was six, and I can still see it. We never kept chickens, and bought ours already dead, so I never saw that again.

So anyway, we had this white chicken in the back yard, strutting and clucking and no idea where she had come from. Susan and I went off to see "Waiting for Superman, an excellent documentary, and when we came back, the chicken was gone. John went around the neighborhood and found her owners, who apparently are raising chi kens, and have been doing so, in spite of City Council's refusing to allow it. Good for them. If we start seeing well-fed rats or coyote we'll know whom to blame.

So the chicken is back with her sister hens, but she did cross the road to get to our back yard, which answers that age old question. And I hope she never gets her head chopped off for some one's dinner.

Out With the Old, In With the Fake

2010-10-26T15:16:00.017-04:00

There is a trend here in Ohio, where a frenzy of mall building has destroyed the down towns of small cities. They are building fake small towns, Disney-esque in appearance, after tearing down the existing old buildings and replacing them with psuedo-Victorian/Federal brick-fronted "shoppes." These picturesque villages contain no hardware stores, no little pharmacies, no dry cleaners or other mainstays of small towns. Rather, they are full of upscale clothing stores, chain stores, over priced ice cream shops, and various restaurants. And more upscale clothing stores. There are paving stones in the narrow streets and cast iron street lamps (Or maybe they're made of plastic designers to look like cast iron.) There is some on street (or maybe I should call it on-lane parking) but mostly the places are surrounded by huge parking lots, so that one can approach the "village" from a distance, across the non-verdant fields of asphalt. We're not in Hardy country, in spite of the vaguely British names of these places.

My small town, which used to have an actual downtown in which one could find just about anything one needed, has long since died from defection to the many malls surrounding us. We still have some nice old buildings, in which some enterprising folks have started small retail businesses: a book store, a gift shop featuring well-crafted items, a chocolate shop...and bars, and bars and three or four tattoo parlors.

In the last year or so, a gazillionaire has managed to put up a string of fake Federal style building fronts over a group of nondescipt buildings and brought in some boutique-y businesses which are now the pride of the Chamber of Commerce. The effort is to get the students from the university to come into the downtown and shop. He is apparently unaware that students already come downtown in droves to drink and get tattoos. Many of the service businesses which students used to need in town- banks, post office, restaurants - are available on campus, along with stationery, CDs, and periodicals.

Now, with stimulus money as a boost, the town and university fathers are in the process of realizing their dream of having a conference center and hotel right downtown, along with a multi-modal facility for buses, bicycles and car parking. A conference center! A hotel! Now hundreds of people will come to Kent for conferences and stay in a state of the art hotel! There also will be an enormous visitor center right on the by-pass, right in the city, for the university! An esplanade wends its way through the campus right into the downtown, to ease the way for students seeking to get a tattoo! Dozens of houses will be torn down for this symbolic yellow brick road to the many bars.

Right now the hotel/conference center site, one whole square block, is a desolate area of earth scraped over what used to be buildings and houses. I waited too long to get a picture of what it looked like for several weeks, when all you could see were the remains of foundations and basements of what used to be there. It's all surrounded by chain link fences. Building will start soon. There will be retail located in the hotel and the multi modal building - tattoo parlors, bars, maybe a pool hall or game arcade.

And when it's done, we'll have jolly crowds showing up to cheer for our half -baked football team, our pretty good basketball team and who knows what else. The theme is red brick and a mish mash of architectural styles. The buildings will be good for about thirty years at the most and some ambitious developer will tear them down find a new use for the land - maybe a mega tattoo parlor with attached bar.

On the other end of town, the landscape has been made barren in order to build an enormous bridge supposedly to ease traffic over the river. Unfortunately, the design will complicate matters severely, especially since the no-planning committee approved the construction of a mega service station right on the corner by the traffic light, where two main roads come together, both of which are nightmarishly busy during rush hour. It's one of the few ways to get out of town on the north side and there are thousands of commuters who use that intersection every day going both ways. Oy weh!

I don't expect things never to change, it's just that the people in charge around here have no vision, even though they think they have. They still be live in bricks and mortar retail as the salvation of their town, rather than look at the future and how people's needs will change. So they tear things down.

Changing Seasons, Changing Clothes

2010-10-19T16:04:00.008-04:00

It's the time of year to get out the fall and winter clothes and put away the summer stuff. Twice a year I go through the same chore, and the Amvets, collectors of other people's cast-offs, fill their trucks with things that people don't want anymore, including clothes that I am just plain tired of. At my age, I don't usually wear things out. I just get really, really bored with my clothes. (Why do people say bored "of" these days? That's what my kids said when they were little, but now I hear adults using that phrase.) This year I got particularly bored with some things I've had for about 6 or 7 years. I just don't want to wear them any more, ever. They're not worn out, but my interest in them is.

Now this is the sort of thing about which I feel guilty, on the order of that thing that mothers used to day about starving children in China. It just seems so dog in the manger.Well, what happened this year is that I kept getting theses Land's End catalogues which had some things I have been trying to find forever, namely, long-sleeved cotton tee shirts which are long enough for my torso, with a crew neck, and all in the most terrific colors. For the last ten years they have made the kind that would hit my around the belly button, with V-necks, boat necks, or scoop necks. I found more at Kohl's and, and old fashioned cardigans, without ruffles or any fancy buttons. Bean's and Land's End don't even have that kind. So I had to buy a lot of new things that I won't be bored with for some time to come. And the beauty part is that all of these things were ON SALE!

Around the house, I usually wear favorites things, like a couple a really nice long sleeved undershirt-y weave things that I bought at Kmart years ago and old blue jeans.

As you can see, I am not a high end shopper. I do clean up good, in the event that I have to attend something where a Kmart undershirt-y thing would not be appropriate, such as wedding or funerals.

The Cleveland Orchestra concerts start this Friday and I'll wear some of my new duds. Nobody gets too fancied up for these matinee concerts, since most of us are geezers who need sensible clothes that don't bore us.

A Diverse Rite

2010-10-15T14:35:00.007-04:00

Last Sunday was the day of the memorial service mentioned in my last blog. It was quite moving and a memorable memorial. First of all the church, St. Colman's in the near west side of Cleveland, is a most impressive space. Built in the early 20th century for Irish and German immigrants, it has the grandeur of a European cathedral. It was one of the many diocesan churches which was to be closed by order of the bishop. However, the pastor and the parishioners refused and fought with and won over the bishop. It is proudly the Irish church of Cleveland. I can't imagine how it could possibly have been closed. So now it still stands and serves a mixed congregation, since that area is now largely Latino.

The service started with a group "Om," a sort of audible breathing in and out which filled the space with a living hum. Lovely! Then there was a slide show of the life of the deceased (hereinafter designated as F.) presented by his brother, great family pictures of the two of them as children with their parents and as young adults. There were testimonials by F.'s friends, stories of a talented and witty person. In fact, one of the reasons the service was held at the church is that F. had written a story for the local newspaper about the church and its congregation and the need to preserve it. He had been a writer, a historian and a volunteer for many local historical sites, including the famous Playhouse Square, which is one of the highlights of downtown Cleveland.

One of his friends and Emily and John sang "If I Had a Hammer," a song he had like and everyone sang along. Sounded so fine in that great place.

The Buddhist part included some candle lighting. The Buddhists present were all white suburbanites wearing saffron robes. There was a lot of chanting in which we were invited to participate. Even though it was all written in the program, I had a hard time following it, and jut sort of did some Sha Nah Nah noises, which fit in with the general hubbub. It sounded good since there was a built-in reverberation there.

The final music piece was a kind of Jewish mourning song, sung by the folk singer along with a violinist, again the congregation joining in on the chorus. Even though I did not know F. well, I think he would have liked his send-off. In fact, it was a literal send-off in a way. The final ritual was the clapping of our hands three times while the Buddhist leader told F. that he could go now.

I like that idea . In fact, I thin it would be a good way to get rid of guests who stay too long. Clap! Clap! Clap! Off you go!

Ecumenical Farewell

2010-10-05T17:48:00.011-04:00

Emily is home for the third time in six months. In a previous blog I wrote about the tragic loss of our friend's brother. The friend came to our family through Emily, and he is one of her closest friends, so she came back to the U.S. of A. to be with him as he goes through this time of mourning. He has planned a memorial for his brother this coming week-end which promises to be a very interesting, as well as sad, event.

The deceased was a non-observant half-Jewish Buddhist. He had been very active in the Buddhist community in the Cleavland area, and there has already been a Buddhist memorial, so this one will be more ecumenical. There will be chanting, tabla drumming, incense burning, and various testimonials, one of which will be by a rabbi who is also a member of the Buddhist Kirtan in Cleveland. John and Emily will be singing a folk song with a friend of the deceased. There will be audience participation in the chanting and some rhythmic clapping.

All of this will be held in a beautiful Catholic church in an ethnic neighborhood on the near west side of Cleveland.

So I guess all the bases will be covered and the soul of the departed will be at peace at last. And our friend will be surrounded by people who care about him.

Fashionspeaek, et.al.

2010-09-23T16:12:00.014-04:00

Last week was fashion week, if anyone was paying any attention to such a thing. We used to have a local fashion writer on our little local daily paper and she would go to New York and hobnob with designers and media fashion stars and write a full report for the Sunday paper with accounts of luncheons at Park Avenue designers' luxurious apartments and all. This always struck me as somewhat over the top for our small town . I mean, the publisher's wife made her own goddam clothes, for cryin' out loud. This fashion editor wrote well enough to win awards for her breathless accounts of what she saw on the runways. She was also the editor of what used to be called the Society page, and was my favorite source for WCLV's "This Week in the Media," for which prizes were awarded to those sending in goofs from the media. I don't know how many prizes I won thanks to her: CDs, jewelry, tickets, etc. I even got something published in the New Yorker from one of her columns, plus a check for $25.00. But I digress.

My subject today is the irritating word choices that the fashion folks use. The first is their calling pants "pant," as in, "Here we have this divine pant from Gucci, in hot pink silk boucle,"

A pant is what one does in the heat of passion, or what your pooch does when the weather is hot. If you are wearing a pant, you may well be run in for indecent exposure. Maybe a one legged pair of pants could be called a pant, but then again, you may have the indecent exposure thing happening. The word "pants" is plural. Use it, dammit.

The other word usage which irritates the hell out of me is "You look well in that dress," or "That dress looks well on you." This is quite common, and is of those "between you and I" school of excruciating attempts at correctness. Clothing is moot capable of looking, therefore it cannot look well or even spectacularly. It is not capable of being ill, ergo, cannot look well. If one has been sick, then one can look well (healthier) even in rags, if need be, once one has recovered. It is okay to use the word "good." If something looks good on a person, clothing, a necklace, a tick, for goodness say tell them they look good, o r that the clothes they have on look good on them, or if they have torn them off and are panting, tell them that they had looked good, especially with their pants on.

God! Idiots!! - Napoleon Dynamite.

Gold and Blue Septemeber

2010-09-21T15:51:00.021-04:00

In spite of the drought which is turning the trees too early, we've had some lovely days this month. The corn stalks in the fields are already that dry tan hue, and they rattle in the breeze. The colors of the tree leaves are pale tans and faded reds rather than the bright golds, deep reds and oranges that should come in October. I fear we won't have that this year. However the sky is brilliant cobalt and the golden rod blazes in the fields.

Saturday I drove up to Rafael's bakery and took a different set of roads to get there. It was just beautiful: rows of white fenced meadows and neat farms, views for miles from the top of rolling hills. As I approached the village where his bakery is, it looked as if I were in New England, with the little church's white steeple poking up above the trees. I had never come to the village from that direction, so it was as if I were discovering it for the first time. I bought a loaf of his sweet bread, which has blueberries and strawberries studding the round loaf. Great with tea in the afternoon.

Yesterday, John and I drove up to Lake County to explore two historic sites. The first was the Kirtland Temple, built in 1833 by the followers of Joseph Smith, one of the founders of the Church of the Latter Day Saints. It is one of the most beautiful buildings I have ever been in. I am in awe of those early craftsmen, who did everything by hand. Every aspect of it it is so graceful and symmetrical. We were not allowed to take any pictures inside, unfortunately. The top floor is the educational area, and consists of these absolutely perfect connecting classrooms, so that when you look through the door of the last one, back into the first thee rooms, it's almost like looking through a mirror at a reflection of a series of doorways. Maybe you hadda b e there.

The downside of the tour is that you have to listen to the fantastic story of their religion. An angel named Maroni? At the dedication of the temple, there were flaming people dancing on the roof, dropping down from the sky, and Jesus came into the main room, as did a few of those Old Testament prophets, like Isaiah and all. Since all religions have their fantasies, I guess this one isn't all that ridiculous. But, an angel named Maroni? The first time I toured there, a number of years ago, I asked the guide who the architect was, and she said, "God." This time the guide told us that a number of skilled craftsman built it and that they used Jonathan Goldsmith's ( a Western Reserve architect of the 18th -early 19th century whose beautiful homes are still around) pattern books. It is an amazing edifice, that Temple, and I am sure that God would like it very much.

Next we went out the Kirtland-Chardon Road to explore a house that is in one of my books on Western Reserve architecture, which John wanted to see. It's a stone farmhouse, built around the same time ass the Temple. John went to a part f Canada this summer, to a small town called Cambridge, which had bee settled by Scottish stonemasons. It was a stone mason's paradise, and he was particularly intrigued by a certain style of cottage. Regent style?

The house we went to see is almost an exact replica of those kinds of cottages. It has bee re-habbed by the Herb Society of America and is now their national headquarters, a perfect fit for such an organization. It had been abandoned for a number of years, so they have had t o do a lot of work on it. In the early 20th century it had been owned by the architect (Hubbell) who designed the Cleveland Museum of Art and the West Side Market. He had made a few additions in the 20s, but had not disturbed the basic integrity of the building. The librarian showed John all through it, basement to attic, while I sat and enjoyed the sun shining through the windows. (Which reminds me: the glaziers of the Temple windows were none other than Brigham Young and his brother And all the inside windows still have their original glass panes!) It's a perfect sort of house, with two large front rooms and fine windows that bring in the light and give you a view of green things.

It was a good day to enjoy old buildings in the sun, especially in the Western Reserve, a little bit of old New England carved out off the forests of northeastern Ohio.

Enigma

2010-09-16T16:29:00.008-04:00

I had a few rants which I had planned for my next post, but a tragic event has put some perspective on what's really important. The brother of a very dear friend (a friend who is practically a family member) ended his life the other day, leaving everyone in a state of shock and deep sadness. I did not know the deceased very well, having only met him a few times, but his bereaved brother is very dear to me and to my family. He had talked about his brother to me, and I understood him to be a gifted but troubled person, but without any hint of ever being suicidal. It is so sad that he felt he had no other choice, and that he did not explore other options for whatever he was feeling that led him to take such a step.

Any death is sad, but death by one's own hand is not just sad, but leaves its survivors with so many unanswered question: Why ? What could I have done to stop it? Did I miss any signals? And , again, Why?

For many years, I worked at a mental health agency, first on the crisis line, then as a trainer of volunteers for the crisis line, and then as director of the community education program. As a volunteer I fielded calls from suicidal clients. I trained other volunteers to handle such calls. We had the advantage that if people called a hot line, they were ambivalent about actually going through with ending their lives. We also did have people call who had already taken pills and needed help to survive. It was frightening, rewarding work.

When I moved into eh community education program, my staff and I developed a number of programs dealing with mental health issues, including a school based suicide prevention program, in which we helped kids understand that there were school and community based resources to help them wrestle with family and personal issues which might cause them to feel desperate enough to consider suicide, that there were other options. From that we developed workshops for educators, social workers and church personnel to familiarize them with warning signs and resources. We were quite busy with requests for these programs, which, alas, are no longer available regularly in the community because of budget cuts.

One of the last workshops which I designed was on the aftermath of suicide, the impact on those left behind. The participants were social workers, ministers and educators. I had a number of people as presenters who had experienced the loss of a loved one in this way. a father, a mother and a widow. All had experienced guilt and anger along with the pain of loss. All had worked through their grief over a number of years, but it was a powerful experience, hearing their stories.

I bring all of this up because, even though I have worked with this issue, and have talked with suicidal people, there is still something so terrifying, so mysterious, so painful when it happens and when someone you know and care about is having to face that kind of nightmare. I know my friend will get through it; he has a lot of good friends, but I wish he didn't have to.

Dancin'

2010-09-10T17:15:00.010-04:00

After not going to Blossom Center but once all summer, we ended with a flurry of visits, My friend Helen performed with the Blossom Festival Orchestra (the Cleveland Orchestra was touring Europe at the time) and gave me comp box seats for the performance. Box seats!! In all the years I've gone thee I've either sat on the lawn on on the hard seats in the pavilion. It was quite a treat to have nice cushioned seating. The program was "Music for the Greatest Generation," and it was geezer city there....never seen so many walkers, wheelchairs and three legged canes. A bus load of them came in late and it took them forever to find and get into their seats. Helen did a group of great songs from that time, looking quite glamorous in blue stain. Her Mun was there, too, visiting from England. I took Mum up to Amish country the next week and we had a great time. She's NOT a geezer, being a young 70 and quite ambulatory.

My poetry award provided tickets to the final Blossom Center programs for the year. It was the Joffrey Ballet, with the Cleveland Orchestra as the pit band. Not bad! The young dancers were just terrific. Such leaps! Such grace! Such athleticism, especially in the make dancers! The whole company was a collection of these perfect little bodies, with one rather tall make dancer who was a splendid Corsaire. The music varied from Tchaikovsky, Phillip Glass, to Gottschalk. There was a witty Tarantella, with choreography by the great Balanchine, which I would love to see again.

It was a beautiful evening to be at Blossom Center. It is a wonderful venue for listening to music or watching ballet. Years ago when the girls were little, I took them there to watch the New York City Ballet, with the likes of Edward Vilella and Jzacques D'Amboise at their peak. They did Balanchine's "Jewels," all glitter and agility - beautiful.

It's been a while since I've seen live ballet, other than "Nutcracker." I used to have a season ticket to the Akron Ballet, which was developed by Heinz Poll who was a choreographer whose ballets are still being done here and there. The company dissolved after he died and funding disappeared. Too sad. It's hard for a city the size of Akron to support the arts now, with all the big factories closing. The art museum and the symphony are both very well supported and are high quality, but 30 miles north are two of the top cultural organizations in the country which draw more of the available money for such things. We're lucky to have access to all of those things where we live, as well as the university's offerings.

Dupree

The day after I received news of winning the poetry contest, Dupree promptly went into a decliner. He stopped eating , lay under his arbor vita tree all day without moving, and looked as if he was not long for this world. John rushed him to the vet, who hydrated him and took some blood tests. The vet gave him a steroid shot also. He continued to lie about and not eat. John took him back to the vet the next day who took X-rays and told John that there was cancer in Dupree's stomach and lungs. John decided to get a second opinion and took him to another vet. That one found a lot of gum infection and pulled a couple of teeth and started him on a course of antibiotics. He is eating again and seems to be a lot better. He is 16, and up until now, he has been quite kittenish. I hope he'll be with us for a while longer.

Bred, Good Bread

2010-08-28T16:40:00.012-04:00

I have written about Rafael before. He is the Spanish charmer who sells bread at the local farmer's market. Last year he bought a wonderful old building in a little village called Nelson. His place is on the village circle, on which there is a white painted wooden church, a white painted town hall, a former grocery store, which is now dwelling of some sort and Rafel's building. It's the kind of village which makes me want a time machine, so I could see what it was like in the 19th century, when it was a center where local farmers came to shop, to attend school and church and to socialized and run the town in the village hall. That hall is now used for meetings, social gatherings(e.g., the Women's Literary Society) and monthly Swiss steak dinners of high quality.

There are four main county roads that meet at the circle, which is why it's a fine place to open a bakery. The building which Rafael owns has always been favorite of mine. It started early in the 19th century (1824) as a church or a town hall. For years and years of the late 20th century it was pretty much a wreck. About 30 or so years ago, a couple of piano builders bought it and restored it, repairing the roof and the siding and strengthening the floors and walls. They only stayed a short time, however. Then it was bought by a man who tried to make it into a sort of general store. He did some further restoration and added some attractive landscaping. That didn't last and it sat empty for a number of years until Rafael took it over last fall.

Rafael was a DJ in Spain. He met the American woman who is now his wife one night when she came to the disco. He told me he put a bunch of records on and took her out for a walk, leaving the music to play on without him. Is that romantic? Hell, yes. She teaches at Hiram College, but she has been quite ill since Rafael has been at our market. The new bakery is not too far from their home, which is convenient for both of them.

I went up there for the first time the other day. Rafael greeted me with a hug. He loves the acoustics in the shop, which is an open three stories, all wood, so he ran up to the balcony where his CD player is and put on a medieval choir CD, which filled the space beautifully. He said that he is very busy and sells out every day he is open. The place smells wonderful, since he makes all kinds of breads,, sweet breads, nut breads, gluten free breads, Spanish bread (which is French bread, but he is Spanish, so that's what he calls it.)

When I was leaving, a big, burly trick driver came in and greeted Rafael with a "bonas tardies," a regular customer. I found out that Rafael also raises sheep, has them sheared and spins his own wool; there's a little spinning wheel behind one of the counters. He also lets the local quilters hang their quilts from the balcony and he handles the sales for them. He loves the look of them, so he is most happy to oblige them. They do add a lovely touch to the place.

When I left, he hugged me and said to tell my daughters he loves them all. It's mutual.

Cat Prizes for Me

2010-08-28T16:18:00.009-04:00

Dupree

We are old, he and I.
We walk more slowly
Than in our younger days.
But his tail is still held high
Like a plume on
The hat of a Victorian lady.
His topaz eyes still gleam.
Never a lap cat 'til now,
His old bones
Need our warmth
And my old bones find ease
In that soft, purring body.
Because we are old,
Dupree and I.

This is a poem I submitted to the WCLV (the Cleveland classical music station) for their Pet Poetry contest, along with a picture of Dupree. I won the grand prize, which consisted of a bunch of pet products and two tickets to the Blossom Festival and a CD of "Carnival of the Animals" and "Peter and the Wolf with Peter Schikele." I was quite surprised and if you go to WCLV's home page here you will see the whole thing. At least I think you will. It was read over the air twice and I missed it both times, since they did it on the early morning show when I am busy with the crossword puzzle and cannot be distracted.

Why Logic Fails

2010-08-24T15:57:00.005-04:00

We are now hearing that 26% of Republicans believe that President Obama is a Muslim. Again. I guess they have already forgotten the fuss that was made over the Methodist minister whose church he attended in Chicago, the Rev. Wright. Whatever. There was a really good article in Newsweek a couple of weeks ago (Aug. 16, to be exact). Titled "The Limits of Reason," the essay was a discussion of the fact that, although confronted with facts, people choose to believe their own version of reality. The author explains that confirmation bias, which she defines as "seeing and recalling only evidence that supports your beliefs" is a mechanism which allows people to avoid any appeals to reason or logic. She doesn't mention the Internet, but there is plenty of ammunition there which enables those who want to believe that the president is a Muslim, is not a native born American and any other information that meets their anti-Obama bias. Any factual data which belies their beliefs come up against a stone wall.

In discussing issues with others, our confirmation bias is stronger than reason, since, as the author says, "arguing is less about seeking the truth than about overcoming opposing views." This is a discouraging idea, but it is obvious if you have ever tried to use reason when discussing certain issues with those who are not open to factual information - which is my own bias. Emotions come into play, too,which only reinforce the need to hang on to our own biases. Of course, we like to think our own biases are the "right" ones. It is just difficult to hear people proclaiming so strongly opinions disguised as facts, or "facts" garnered from unreliable sources that have proven to be false. Truth suffers greatly these days.

Moving Right Along

2010-08-20T16:18:00.013-04:00

I had a very pleasant birthday last weekend. John took me up to Cleveland to see the very last road company performance of "The Phantom of the Opera" at one pf the fabulous Playhouse Square theaters. The theater is as ornate as the Phantom stage set, which is very ornate indeed. I am amazed at the magic that can be done with lighting, sound, sets and costumes. I'm not a Lloyd -Weber fan ---except for "Jesus Christ Superstar" --since all his music sounds alike, but this is a fun thing to watch and the Phantom had an incredibly good voice. We then went to the Mad Greek for a very fine dinner. I had a chicken dish which I replicated a few nights later: lemon juice, garlic, oregano, olive oil marinade with a dash of balsamic vinegar, then baked with onions, mushrooms and kalamat olives, which I didn't have on hand but will for the next time.

A very fine surprise was from Cynthia. She painted these beautiful panels for a cabinet in my room, based on an 18th century French wallpaper. This cabinet, now so elegant, is like most chest- like furniture in my hose: it's full of Stuff, stuff not worthy of the gorgeous exterior. The original cabinet was built by one of my brothers for my 78 rpm record albums, back in the day when such things were common. My husband made the doors and I think we kept clothes in it then. Now it looks like an heirloom.

I was happy birthdayed by phone, email, e-cards, regular cards and Facebook. It was very nice.

Three Out of Towners

Last week-end was also a time for visits by people who used to live in Kent. Two of them left here over forty years ago. One hadn't been back since then; one had been back a few times. Two of them had left as teen agers and are now middle aged. Nancy and Joe from near Philadelphia made a quick visit after being at Chautauqua for a week, and stayed in Kent with their old friends Lloyd and Roberta, who kindly invited me for breakfast and some catching up. Short visit, but we keep in touch via these blogs.

The next visitor was David, last seen here when he was 15. He was back for a 40th high school reunion. His parents and I were great friends and his mother in Massachusetts and I have stayed sporadically in touch for over all the years they've been gone from here. David is one of six children, all smart, all great looking and now all living on the East Coast. Their grandfather was one of my favorite English profs when I was a student. It was great to see him and hear all about the rest of the family. He didn't actually graduate from the University School, since they moved east when he was only 15, but he came back because the U. School went from kindergarten through high school and these were people he'd know throughout his childhood. He also had a chance to check out the houses he'd lived in and was shown through one of them by the current occupant. Nostalgia reigned.

The next visitor was Marcy and her husband Fred, who were taking son Nathaniel to Cornell to start his freshman year. They are both professors of philosophy at Indiana University and Nathaniel is going to study --philosophy. Marcy's parents were my second family here for years and I've known her since she was 4. They moved away from Kent when she was in high school and are both gone now, but she stops in Kent on her way to or from other places. Actually we met for lunch in Hudson, since they were on the road, avoiding freeways and exploring small towns along the way. Nathaniel is a darling and I have a feeling there will be some real empty nesitng going on in Bloomington for a while.

So I got a year older and saw a lot of people in one week-end and it was pretty good.

Cats in Dog Days

2010-08-11T15:26:00.003-04:00

Yesterday afternoon I looked out the front door and found these three cats sprawled out in front. Sateen was right on the front walk, Herman was in the hostas and Dupree was under the arbor vitae. They could have been dead, victims of an unknown assailant.However, they were only sound asleep, stretched out the length of their bodies in hopes of a breeze. Only one of these cats lives in this house, but he doesn't mind sharing space outside as demonstrated above.

Too bad humans can't do the same.

I Read the News Today, Oh Boy.

2010-08-10T15:20:00.007-04:00

Maybe it's the heat. (After a few days of bearable temperatures, it's back to the 90s.) It's gotten so I find it very hard to read or listen to news. It's not just the wreckage of the lives and careers of folks living on the Gulf coast, or the floods in China and Pakistan, or the choking smog in Moscow,or the endless and futile war in Afghanistan. It's the little things that the media seem to think we need to know.

We're being over radiated by the medical professions. This is something I'd rather not know, having been radiated for six weeks last year after the breast surgery If you have fat around your abdomen, you're doomed to shorter life. (Shorter than 83?) As a former skinny person who gave birth to 4 kids in 6 years, I have developed a paunch, which is abdominal fat, of course. The amount of air pollution because of the heat is killing old people and people with breathing problems. I fit both categories. Is forgetfulness a sign of Alzheimer's or normal aging? Quick, what picture won an Academy Award for Best Movie in 2009? Ads for pharmaceutical products contain long lists of side-effects which sound worse than the condition they are supposed to treat, mostly disgusting things like diarrhea, nose bleeds and, rarely(hah!), sudden death.

There seems to be an endless stream of these little tidbits, almost all of which portend imminent death or disability. Well, dammit, it's just TOO FREAKING MUCH INFORMATION!

"Ignorance is bliss" may be a cliche, but it rings with truthiness. Bliss is hard enough to achieve with all the big things happening in the world - well, actually impossible - but I don't need all those terrifying little bits of stuff in addition.

The Demon Racer

2010-07-27T18:29:00.021-04:00

A few posts ago, I wrote about the neighborhood where I spent my childhood. The recent Soap Box Derby last week-end in Akron reminded me of this horrible boy, Lamar, and his horrible sister ,Jackie. I shall not use their last name because, in the unlikely event that they reproduced, I would not like to defame any spawn still in existence.

Lamar was a bully. He swore, using words that are now common in restaurants, malls, sports venues, cable TV, etc., any place where people gather, especially young ones. He picked fights over nothing. Both Lamar and Jackie were sturdy children. Jackie would stand in the middle of the sidewalk, hands on hips, and dare you to get by her. Jackie had been attacked by a dog at some point in her young life (probably provoked by her brother) and bore the scar on her face. That fact and Godknowswhat kind of home those kids came from probably wee behind her meanness. However, I was a skinny little person and she probably could have knocked me down by breathing heavily on me and I was not about to psychoanalyze her personality even if I'd known what that meant. All I knew was that the pair of them terrified me and every other kid in the neighborhood

In 1934, the first Soap Box Derbies were held in various cities. In those days kids made their "cars" out of whatever they could find around the garage, basement or the local vacant lot/rubbish dump. Baby buggy wheels, coaster wagon wheels, mounted on boards with a wooden carton for a body were the usual elements of the kid derby car. Lamar put together something and went to the local race.

It was sponsored, along with other organizations, by Rich's Department Store, which was offering the grand prize: a genuine gas-powered mini-racer. The other prize for the winner was an all expense trip to Dayton, Ohio, for the first national Soap Box Derby. You have probably already guessed who won that mini-racer and the all expense trip to Dayton, Ohio. Now, 1934 was just about the height of the Depression. Kids in that time were lucky to get a used bicycle, much less a genuine gas powered anything. The only good thing about going to Ohio was that he would be on a train! And stay in a hotel! Lamar! And his name and picture were in both the Atlanta Constitution and the Atlanta Journal. Fame! Fortune! Lamar!

Well, at least he'd be out of the neighborhood for a few days, which meant freedom, a hiatus from fear. However, before that happened, we had to watch Lamar tool around the streets in his bright red and green gas powered min-racer from Rich's. Well, everyone was dying to get a ride , but knew there was no way anyone was going to ask Lamar for anything. And he knew it too, the little bastard. We stood on the sidewalk and watched him zoom (at around 3 mph) past with a smug look on his evil face.

I don't know how Lamar fared in Dayton, only that he did not become the first national champion of the first national Soap Box Derby. I don't remember how long he continued to drive his mini-racer; maybe it broke down, or his father took it apart and used the motor for something else.

The National Soap Box Derby moved to Akron, Ohio the next year where it continues to draw both boy and girl racers from all over the U. S. of A. The racing cars are now sleek fiber glass with standard wheels. The fiction of their being built by the kids is now over. It used to be held in August, and I would take the kids for school shopping at the two big department stores, which are, alas. no more. We would have lunch on Polsky's balcony and watch all the derby families at the other tables. There were special derby paper napkins and place mats. If we came a little early in the week we could watch the racer kids being driven down Main St. in convertibles and being greeted in front of the Mayflower Hotel by brass bands and pretty girls.

The Mayflower is now housing for people with disabilities and old folks in chronic poverty. Polsky's is part of the University of Akron and O'Neill's is occupied by a giant law firm. I think the kids are now welcomed at the new downtown baseball field , the pride of Akron, across from the old Mayflower. I'm sure that it is every bit as exciting as in the old days for those kids, but I am glad that we had our own fun back in the day.

But I wonder how many Lamars there are in that crowd of fresh faced kids?

Dispatch from Abroad

2010-07-24T11:53:00.008-04:00

Katina just celebrated Abschluss in Germany. Here is her mother's report.

In other words, Graduation Day. It started off in typical Burnell-Petrou disorganized fashion. First of all, I had to wake Katina up for school as I slept in myself...I was wondering why she was still in bed at 8:15 when school normally begins. But it turns out it didn't start until 9 a.m. Katina acted like it was no big deal - according to her, she just had to show up at school, pick up her final report card, give a gift to her teacher and have a glass of champagne. No formal ceremony, no parents. Well...thank God she asked me to drive her to school (it was raining, and god forbid her natural curls show up) because it was then that I saw hordes of dirndl clad mothers and daughters approaching the school. Totally bedraggled, unshowered and still in my pajamas, I asked her, "Wait...are parents supposed to be at this thing?" To which she slowly replied, "Um...I don't know...I didn't think so..." As if that weren't bad enough, the road to the school was blocked by Gymnasium brats blocking the way, going so far as to SIT ON MY CAR, refusing to move until I PAID them. WTF? I pleaded with the little f---ers that my daughter needed to get to her graduation, to which they just scoffed, "Too bad, pay us and we'll move". I could have throttled the privileged pimply faced brats. Apparently it's a custom for them to do this, to belittle the Realschule where Katina goes, to point out their "superiority" as Gymnasium students. As many of you know, Katina spent the majority of her high school education at Gymnasium, and this further justified my hatred of the place. I told them I had no money (again, no mercy, just braying laughter) and then I dug out a few cents from my wallet and threw it into the sweaty palms of the ringleader. By then, Katina had already fled the car in fury and impatience. I flew home, took the quickest shower of my life, threw on some nice duds and rode in the pouring rain on my bike to the school. Which was empty, because everyone was shoved into the airless church nearby. There was an endless mass going on which went on for an hour, full of that sort of droning folk music that makes you weak in the knees with misery and exhaustion. When that finally ended, we poured into the school, where the requisite glasses of Sekt and Mimosas were offered. In true Eileen Heckart fashion, I swilled a glass of Sekt, followed by a Mimosa, and threw some pretzel stix down my throat, realizing with horror that I hadn't even brushed my teeth yet, and my breath reeked of a combination of a dead mouse and garlic (perhaps THIS is the reason Katina doesn't inform us of school events?). Anyway, at this point I met up with Katina, who was surrounded by mama- and paparazzi snapping pix of their clique - of course, the parents all knew each other, and probably have for years, and one woman came up to me with a thick Bavarian accent and said, "Oh, I wondered who you belonged to!" (I said to Katina, "Story of my life.") Then we were rather unwillingly herded back to the church for more long winded speeches and folk music, but this time I was lucky to nab a seat in what appeared to be the foreigner section - i.e., the other 'garlic munchers' (as Chris and his siblings were called growing up in Anglo Australia). I dozed on and off while the speakers, in love with the sound of their own voices, wore us all to the ground. Give a German a microphone and purgatory ensues. Anyway, finally the wilting girls were given their diplomas, parental videocameras whirring, cameras clicking.
This dispatch contained a photo of Katina and some of her classmates. I am not using it because this blog is available to anyone who chances upon it. Needless to say, these are attractive young women and I don't like the idea of some creep drooling over a photo of them, especially Katina.

Salad Days

2010-07-19T16:11:00.017-04:00

Too hot to cook. Almost too hot to eat. So salads have become a staple for dinner. Salads have come a long way since I was a child. In those days, it was usually cut up tomatoes and iceberg lettuce with mayonnaise. Since we lived in Georgia there was also shrimp salad which I loved, at least the way my mother made it with mayonnaise.

When WWII came along and my father had the back yard plowed up and put in a "Victory Garden" we started having home grown leaf lettuce with oil and vinegar(probably Wesson Oil and Mott''s apple cider vinegar) along with spring onions and tomatoes from the garden. Mother rubbed the salad bowl with a clove of garlic for a continental touch. Of course, during the winter, it was back to lettuce and tomtoes with mayo. And, of course, tuna salad with onions and pickle relish and mayo. There was also apple salad, with raisins, celery and the inevitable mayo. Sometimes Mother would make her own mayo with oil, eggs and lemon juice. It was delicious. We were big on mayonnaise. One of our favorite grilled sandwiches was peanut butter and mayo - on white bread, or course.

But I digress. The subject is salad. How did we live without a gazillion kinds of greens, olive oil, feta, sunflower seeds, sliced almonds or pecans, kalamata olives, oregano or dill, balsamic or wine vinegars, shredded mozzarella, Parmesan, fruits, raw vegetables, bacon or diced chicken, or all the other things we can make a big whole meal salad from? It will be nice to get back to a cooked meal eventually, but for now salads are great. I had lunch (a BLT) at Ray's today with some women from my aerobics class and one of them is going to bring me a recipe tomorrow for a great sounding couscous salad. Who ever heard of couscous back in the old days? Outside of a souk in Morocco?

Food, glorious food, salad-wise!

Staying Temporarily Hydrated

2010-07-18T17:46:00.038-04:00

Ever since my experience with dehydration while in rehab for the broken hip, I have been very mindful of keeping hydrated. I keep a large container of ice water handy wherever I happen to be in my home. Especially in this beastly hot weather, I keep reading and hearing how important this is for geezers to keep that water going.

And that s the trouble with hydration. The life giving water does keep going. It does not seem to want to stay in my desiccated body very long. Our water aerobics instructor keeps telling us to bring a water bottle with us, which I refuse to do. I would have to get out of the water and dash to the loo and miss most of the exercising. As it is, I get a lot of exercise right here at home, dashing to the bathroom to dehydrate myself.

I have heard that the body gets used to this and regulates itself eventually. I have been drinking a lot of water for months now and it hasn't regulated anything. I've never been much of a water drinker. I have friends and children who have always been mighty water drinkers, who feel a thirst for it, gulping down great quantities of it. I almost never feel thirsty, even in hot weather, so I have to force myself to imbibe. I do not have to force myself to get rid of it; it forces me. I can be contentedly reading, or drawing and keep being interrupted by its demands. I have not choice, I guess, being old and dried up and at risk for blowing away, so I'll have to look at it as another form of exercise.

I have an addendum to my screed about the weather: my arms keep sticking to the drawing table, with the result that my drawing tools occasionally stick to my arm, too and I keep dropping pencils and such. My large bottle of water sticks to the coaster, which ends up dropping, or flying to the floor. More exercise spent leaning over to pick things up.

But life is good, innit? I just finished reading a good book (between trips to the bathroom), a fictional accocunt of the Bubonic Plague in a small English village in the 1660s. The inhabitants decided to quarantine thenselves to avoid spreading the plague to other villages in their vicinity. That actutally happened, but the author, Geraldine Brooks ("March"), made it into a very fine, if gruesome, story. I kept wanting to shout to the characters, "It's the fleas on the rats, people!" Alas, they didn't know that until the 1880s. Just so we can feel safe, since there are so many other things these days which can bump us off, the plague can be cured with antibiotics, if you haven't been using them for colds and such, for which they are no good anyway. One less thing to worry about. But I would not still not play with dead rats.

Summer Blossoming Music

2010-07-12T16:21:00.009-04:00

It's that time of time of year again, when young musicians from all over the world descend on Kent State's School of Music for the chance to be mentored by members of the Cleveland Orchestra. While they're learning , we're the lucky recipients of free chamber music concerts. On a hot summer afternoon, it's great to sit in a cool concert hall and listen to Mozart, Brahms, Dvorak, Schubert, Haydn and more contemporary, but still dead white European composers like Poulenc, Britten and Shostakovich. They'll occasionally throw in a really new composition, full of plucks, clicks and whines, but I enjoy it all.

I'm still doing sketches, but it's getting a bit tiresome, since where I sit only affords me either a first violinist or the violist in a string piece, or in the woodwinds, a clarinetist, flautist or oboist, depending on the seating arrangement for the group. Since they tend to bunch together , I seldom get a good view of the cellist or bassist. The oboist above is from a couple of years ago and I was struck by his slumping posture. I have a sketch of hi in a group and he is still slumping. I have wondered what sort of impression he must make when he auditions.

This year's group seems to be a cut above, although they are all usually very good. For some reason, this year we have five pianists from Korea. It's unusual to have that many pianists anyway. Yesterday all three of the numbers were with piano and the three that played were stupendous. I also noticed that there are a couple of high school students , both of them cellists. I can't remember if they've ever had high school students before. One played yesterday in a Shostakovich piano quintet winch was brilliant.

So, in a world where we tend to think of those under 25 spending their lives plugged into an electronic device, and being passive observers of virtual lives out there in the cyberworld, here are these young musicians who are making the most delightful music and appearing to enjoy it as much as the audience. Maybe they go back to the dorms and plug themselves in, but I doubt it. You can't make that kind of music without a lot of hard work and a love of making music.

It's July, Dammit!

2010-07-08T19:03:00.009-04:00

This is a summer version of a blog from last year. Is it very, very hot now? Yes, it is. And as soon as you turn on the radio or TV, you are being told that it is very, very hot now, and that it's going to be even hotter tomorrow, and that there's no relief in sight. When yo pick up the morning paper there is a headline that it is very, very, hot now. When you venture outside and meet up with a nother hot person, that person wants to know "Is it hot enough for ya?"

Well, it's July. It's summer. While there have been historical records of snow falling in July a hundred years ago, it is most generally HOT in July. It is most generally HOT in the summer.It is NOT news that it is hot in July. I do not wish to read or hear about this hotness. It will pass We have maybe only 10 - 15 days when it gets really hot, but then it goes away. If this were January and we had 90 degree weather , that would be news. I am perfectly able to discern hotness without having the media telling me this over and over. It's July dammit.

Along with the weather, we are also being inundated with non-news about LeBron James and whether he will abandon Cleveland for some other basketball venue. I am here to tell you that I don't give a s--t.

Oh, What An Interesting Name You Have!

2010-07-02T17:51:00.009-04:00

It has come to my attention that a couple of great nieces, whose middle name is Guenveur, have decided that they want to go by that name instead of the perfectly normal, easily spelled and pronounced names they already have been going by; lovely names, in fact, both of them. Obviously, they are of limited experience so far in their young lives. They have not had to introduce themselves to many people, or had to leave phone messages to business contacts.

They have not yet experiences that dead stop in social discourse, after being introduced, by having to pronounce the name several times, then being asked to to spell it out, resulting in being called Gwenver or Guinivere. They have not had to explain how they got that name, and what nationality it is. That have not had to deal with twits who giggle the next time they meet you and say that they just can't pronounce your name and would you tell them again? They have not yet been called, besides the misnomers already mentioned, Groover. Gunvor Govnor, Janvier (I am called this by a woman I have know for over 40 years), Gwen, Genver, Genvier, Gunnat - and a lot of other words that begin with "G" and end with "r." When you're working and have to meet a lot of people, it can be a big time waster.

And people always say, "What an INTERESTING name.!" Well, I guess that it might seem interesting if you don't have to struggle with it every time you meet someone. It's a great name for a hermit or a recluse. I expect the young ladies currently thinking of using that name think that's would be a great thing, to have an INTERESTING name. After thousands and thousands of times of the above results of having that name, I think they will find it not so interesting.

When I was in the third grade I decided to go by my first name (yes, Guenveur is my middle name, but it was the name I was called by from birth), which is Anne. Unfortunately, when the teacher called for Anne, I didn't respond. Then when I was in the ninth grade, new to high school, I decide to try spelling it Genver, not realizing that it was the "u" that made the hard "g", and sweet sister Eudora (now there's a name for ya) pronounced it "Jenver", thus leading Teddy Angelo, a no-neck football player, to call me Gennabee for the rest of my high school days. He was the only one to call me that, but I switch back to the usual damned spelling, and pronouncing and explaining.

It's a great middle name; it was my father's middle name and he used it until his college days when he switched to his first name, Sidney, and never looked back. I don't know if one is defined by a name, but I am who I am and would have been the same if I'd had the name my father wanted me to have: Sarah Jane. I would have been much less cranky about that name and I have always known that had I been named Sarah Jane, I would have been a perfectly splendid Sarah Jane.

Whence Came These Blossoms?

2010-06-23T14:25:00.013-04:00

I notice a tall plant growing in m little flower garden the other day, and also some small stalky things. The tall plant turned into this beautiful lily, which I did not plant and the stalky things turned into these little blue star shaped things. I have no names for them and no idea whence they came. The little blur things, the color of a June sky, grow as a single blossom on each stalk. I think they are from a bulb, since I did notice the stalks last year, but no flowers. The lily is a complete mystery and I'm happy to have it. I have a batch of stella d'oro lilies in the same patch, but I don't think they could have given birth to this different sort of lily. I know that seed plants can spring up because birds intestinal functions act as seed sowers - bur bulb plants? Not unless an emu happened to have wandered through my yard. Down in Holmes County, the Amish have taken to raising emus, rheas and ostriches, but they are flightless and it's a long walk from Sugarcreek to Kent. Perhaps a passing stranger, strolling by last fall, planted a surprise for me. I like it.