'Possum Patch

Cooking Ugghh!!

2011-11-16T16:52:00.001-08:00

Granma's Chicken Stretch

One Chicken=3-4 Meals

I roast chicken pretty much like beef. That is, put whole chicken in the roaster pan (the one you used for the beef roast) with chopped up onion and chopped celery... Like I say, I never throw much away and this is a great way to use the tops off celery that most people throw away . Tops for this purpose can be kept in fridge in a baggie quite awhile or frozen by filling the baggie that the tops are in with water. Be sure and get as much air out as possible and leave a little room for the water to expand. If you freeze it this way you can just toss the frozen blob in the pan with chicken and it just adds moisture. Salt and pepper well.

Bake about an hour at about 350 degrees or until it is done enough to flake off the bone.

Meal 1: Baked chicken and mashed potatoes with gravy. Or..Baked chicken with rice and Chicken Gravy

Remove chicken body from pan and put on serving plate. Look in the roasting pan. Remember..think “pure gold” …with a streak of sunshine. Chicken broth is yummy and can be made from the goopy stuff left in the pan just by pouring in 3-6 cups water. With one of those serving spoons with holes in it dish out any slimy celery parts that don’t look appetizing to you. You may want to let it cool a few minutes so you can skim off any excess fat with a big spoon. Pour half into another pan to cool.

When it’s cool pour into baggies for freezing like you did the beef gravy so you can use it for other stuff. The half that you didn’t take out can be thickened with flour like you did with the beef.. Now you are looking at gravy again. Serve with 1: Hungry Jack instant mashed potatoes or 2: instant rice with a handful of broccoli tossed in, salad, green beans, buttered broccoli….anything green. Remember the bag of frozen hot rolls? Now is a good time.. Most of the white meat is gone at this meal but..

That still leaves a lot of meat. If it doesn’t, buy a bigger chicken or cook two next time. Let remains of chicken body cool. Pull the rest of meat off the bones..it will be a lot of really good dark meat but still some white meat around breastbone and ribs..and cut across the grain into chunks. Hopefully you will have two sandwich-size baggies of chicken cubes. One for each of two more meals.

Meal Two: Chicken Pot Pie In a large pan put three cups water or maybe four..dump in a bag of the frozen broth..a handful or two of flour, salt and pepper well and bring to boil while stirring like you did for gravy. If it doesn’t thicken fairly soon it isn’t gonna so make a paste of a 1/4 cup water and about 2-3 tblsp of flour and ad while stirring. It will lump a little (remember about putting thickening in hot stuff?) but no one will notice because everything else in pot pie is lumpy anyway. Dump in a half can of Cr of Chicken soup, (The other half can be frozen in a baggie for chicken and noodles etc.) a can of mixed vegetables, a bag of the frozen chicken chunks and heat long enough to thaw chicken chunks and thicken

Don’t overcook. Pour into bake dish or 9”X9” pan, cover with pie crust and bake at 400 degrees until crust is brown.

Pie crust is just flour and lard with a very small amount of water. The more water the tougher the crust. Generally about 1 ½ cups flour, salted, three heaping tblsp of shortening.. (Crisco or some cheaper thing in the round can..I always use cheap..) mix the shortening in by squishing it repeatedly with a fork until it looks dry-mealy like. It is right if you can pinch it and it stays together..now add a couple tblsp water or maybe four tblsp..you will be tempted to think it is too dry but just keep squishing with the fork.. it should make a ball in your fist now. If it does, roll it out and put on top of chicken stuff in pan and bake. If it doesn’t, it may never, so roll it out anyway. You’ll be surprised at how good it tastes anyway. Celery sticks are good with Chicken Pot Pie.

Meal 3: Chicken and Homemade noodles. Put a couple of quarts of water and a bag of frozen chicken goop/broth in a pan, salt well and bring to a strong boil. When boiling well, add noodles a few at a time so they will not stick together and stir. Adjust heat so they continue to boil but do not boil over. Noodles tend to scorch so stir and keep heat barely boiling. At first noodles will float..keep cooking, stirring occasionally until noodles don’t float anymore and are tender to bite into or fork.. When noodles are done there shouldn’t be much liquid on them..just soupy like.. drop in a bag of chicken chunks. For extra flavor you can add a half of a can of Cr of Chicken soup. A handful of frozen peas or carrots tossed in makes it look pretty.

Homemade noodles are easy. Put a couple of cups of flour in a big bowl..well maybe three cups. (Remember..cooking is a science..it is not the amounts as much as the relativity of each ingredient to the other.) Add a tsp of salt. I used to make really crappy noodles until someone told me to put a half tsp of baking powder in the flour so I do. Now I make good noodles. Baking Powder really makes tender noodles. With a big spoon make a well in the flour/salt/baking powder mix and break some eggs into the well. Start with three eggs. Now you squish the egg/flour mixture with a fork until it is just right. This takes practice. Strangely enough, the drier the dough the better the noodles. So when you roll it out it should be very dry. I generally put a half cup or so of flour on the roll-out board, wad up the dough and place it on the flour and start rolling. The dough should be dry enough that it is a little hard to roll out but will. I generally just roll out half at a time. It works better for me that way. Cut in strips..drop into boilng broth.

P.S. You can buy great frozen noodles and even packaged egg noodles make a good fast meal with left over chicken and broth.

Cooking..Ugh!!

2011-11-16T10:52:00.001-08:00

How to Cook With Almost Nothing

The key to stretching food and eating reasonably well is 75%planning, 15% shopping and 10% time in the kitchen.

First I must say that I am not a good cook. I hate to cook and consider every minute in the kitchen time better spent elsewhere. That said, I do like to eat and always had kids that were notorious for the amount of food they required at regular intervals. (Neighbor kids whose mother’s complained about what their kids wouldn’t eat, ate like horses at our house.) I do not like to eat in restaurants and have been unable to find anyone willing to cook for me. So the following is my compromise with the kitchen trap.

Incidentally, if you think leftovers are a bad thing go to someone else’s Blog.

Also if you think that you deserve to eat whatever your whim dreams up today and you can afford to snatch up those $15 per pound T-Bones, go to someone else’s Blog.

However, if you have figured out that you’re going to be hungry periodically but would rather spend time with your dog, watch the chickens go to roost, have a few laughs with friends or relatives, this is the place for you.

Rule #1: Plan meals ahead and work your plan.

Rule #2a: Until you really get good at this..

Don’t go to the store without a list and buy only what’s on the list

Rule#2b:

Buy what’s on sale and use the“Stretch” concept you are already so familiar with that you can now “improvise”.

My Shopping Rules:

Rule#1: Buy food that will make at least two meals, particularly meat. You may refer to these purchases as a roasting chicken, beef roast, ham etc.. I just call them hunks of meat. The only thing I buy that only makes one meal is pork chops and chicken drumsticks. I always buy family packs of these items and divide and freeze for another day.

Rule#2: Don’t buy any more of that crap in boxes than you have to. It is never good for you and seldom even pretends to taste good. The rule about staying on the outside aisles is a good one. Of course no one does this totally but make an effort. Good food is cheaper than meds.

Rule#3 Keep a tally as you shop so you will learn not to overspend.

The next page or two are the procedures I perform in the kitchen ..perfected over those earlier years while I became even more motivated to avoid cooking but still not have to suffer the irritation of small children whining for food. This can be very annoying.

In order to cook the following there is some basic stuff you need to keep on hand.

My basic stuff is:

Flour, shortening, sugar, eggs, oleo,salt, pepper, onions, carrots and potatoes.

Recipes:

What to Do With a Hunk of Beef.

Day One: Pot Roast With Carrots and Potatoes.

We’ll start with beef because it is my all around fav. First buy about a five pound hunk of beef. Chuck roast or Rump Roast is what they call it in the store.

I have a small roaster pan..one of those dark blue things with the black flecks..that I use when I’m home.. If I’m not going to be home I use the crock-pot.

Stick the meat hunk in the roaster pan with a half of an onion, a celery stalk if you have it and a cup or two of water. Put the lid on and let it bake for about 2 hours at 350degrees. I like meat tender.

You can do a lot of really fun stuff in that 2 hours so don’t hang around the stove worrying about the meat hunk.. Trust me..it’s cooking.

Peel enough potatoes and carrots for a meal and stick them in with the meat..put lid back on and cook another hour or so. You need something green to go with this so you need to keep a bag of salad stuff in the frig or frozen peas..gr beans etc.. I grab a handful of green stuff out of the bag, (it keeps in the fridge a week or so) swish it under the faucet real good..and B has a good salad. I never buy ice-berg lettuce..so little food value.. hot rolls are good also but not necessary. Remember you don’t have to bake the whole pack of hot rolls.. Keep a bag frozen..it’s a little wasteful energy-wise to just heat up a couple of rolls but nobody’s perfect.

Take meat and vegs out of pan and onto serving platter bowl etc.. See all that brown, half-burnt scummy looking stuff in the bottom of the roasting pan? Pure gold.. Do not discard.. In a bowl, old jar, plastic butter thing..mix 3 cups cold water with a hefty bunch of flour. I think about 1/3 cup. Blend it well. Set roaster over stove burner on medium (or high if you can stay focused) and pour in flour and water stirring constantly for a few minutes until you’re looking at gravy. If it’s too thick pour in another cup of water..if too thin make a little paste of two heaping tbsp of flour in ¼ cup cold water and pour in to thicken more. DON”T PUT FLOUR IN HOT STUFF OR IT JUST MAKES LUMPS.. I always have a little water set on the stove in case I have mis figured on the thick part. Lumpy gravy still eats well but some people are particular about it. It takes a little practice.

AFTER MEAL PREP FOR NEXT MEALs: Cut remaining meat in half against the grain if possible and put in baggies to freeze or refrigerate if you will be using it the next day. Pour cooled left over gravy into baggies and freeze for later. This will be used in other meals and can be used in soups, hash, pot pie beef and noodles etc

Meal Two: Hash Assuming you still have at least half of the roast left (if you don’t buy a bigger one next time) fry a skillet of potatoes, carrots and onions (do not brown but barely if at all) and cut into them with spatula to make them small pieces, I like to toss in a handful of frozen peas..cut one of the left over beef hunks into small pieces and toss it in, dump in one of the bags of left-over gravy and simmer on low (medium if you’re still focused) until all is tender and mixes well. Salt and pepper.

You can 1. eat this as hash with bread and butter or 2; add more water to make it soupy..put canned biscuits on top and cover to simmer for about ten minutes for stew and beef dumplings ( add water if it gets too dry) or 3: put frozen (I don’t like canned for this) biscuits on top and bake 10minutes for a Beef and Biscuit pot pie.

Meal Three: Hot Beef Sandwich

(I use instant potatoes (HungryJack brand is best) for this because B likes them.)

Thaw and heat bag of leftover beef gravy in microwave. Remember to open the bag and place in bowl so it doesn’t explode.. bad news that.. If you bought a rump roast and can cut it against the grain (so it will be tender enough) you can make hot beef sandwiches by:Slicing for sandwiches and set aside to nuke until hot. Cut a couple slices of bread triangle-wise and place one slice on plate with room between triangles for mashed potatoes, place nuked beef slices on triangle, cover with other slice-triangle, scoop mashed potatoes between sandwich parts and cover with hot gravy.

*There is no such thing as too much left over gravy. I like to keep little baggies..about 2/3 cup..of gravy frozen. It is good for flavoring up Hamburger Stew..Beef and Noodles etc.

(I like Hamburger Stew. It is good, hot and very good for you.)

Hamburger Stew

Brown a pound of hamburger with chopped up onion, toss a handful of flour over it (to thicken a little) add a can or two of mixed vegetables, a can of tomatoes and a bag of left over gravy. I also use any appropriate leftover veggies in fridge. (not broccoli,asparagus, radishes etc) I like to put in a cup of chopped-up cooked cabbage but the cabbage has to be cooked separately or the other stuff is over cooked.If you don’t do the cabbage this takes about 10 minutes. Salt and pepper.

Well, all this cooking has made me tired so I will tell you how to stretch a chicken next time. Home made noodles are really good and very easy to make.

My Friend, Bo Stopped by Today.

2011-10-01T08:08:00.000-07:00

My friend, Bo stopped by today.

He had a couple of empty plastic milk jugs and was looking for free water. I asked him if their water had quit on them but he said, “Nope. Me and Windy are fixin’ to help out Lorellen over at her place.”

Lorellen was Bunny’s best friend I guess forever and even was in her wedding party. That is to say, she stood behind Windy in the event he tried to break and run but I guess he was tired of evadin’ and avoidin’ because the wedding went right through to the end.

What’s wrong with Lorellen’s water?” I asked Bo. But he didn’t want to talk about it much. It seems he had that one-eyed goat out to Lorellen’s place and tied it to the old pump handle on the well and while he was inside yacking it up with Lorellen and her husband the goat got to feistyin’ around and broke through the boards. When Bo went back out all he saw was a broke piece of twine that he had the goat tied with. Lorellen was madder than all get out when she found out a danged goat had got itself drowned in her well.

“Well, “says Bo, “She’s livin’ in her Grampa Tud Foster’s old place and he never would have it hooked up to the Federal supply like regular folks did” “Said it was a waste of good pipe and all, them having a good well.” And I said, “Well, I woulda thought Lorellen and her husband woulda had it hooked up.”

“Well, no,” says Bo, “Lorellen’s kind of eggcentric. You know how she is.”

“Well,” I say, “She is her Grampa’s kin and he was strange enough for two.” And wantin’ to change the subject I say, “Bo, how do you suppose Old Tud ever got such an odd name, anyway?” And Bo said, “Well I asked him that once that last year before he died when he was spending so much time settin’, just settin’, out on that old porch looking at stuff no one else could see I guess because he would sure strike up a good conversation all by himself and one day he was just a chit chattin’ to thin air and I stopped and chit chatted awhile with him and I asked him about if Tud was his real name and he said “No, it wasn’t.”

“The way Tud told it was that he was the tail end of six boys,” says Bo, “and his Ma, wantin’ a girl like most women do, took advantage of Old Pappy’s, that’s what Tud called him, Old Pappy, bein’ gone to the woods for three days with a couple a fellas he hung out with and she named the new arrival Maudie Charlene, sayin’ she would make him her girl. The Doc even had it done up on paper at the court house. Well, Old Pappy uz madder than all get out and said, “Anyone I hear callin’ that little turd Maudie Charlene or anything like is going to get throwed down and stomped on..so nobody ever did but the turd part stuck and they just called him Little Turd ‘til he went off to school and Mz. Floreen Justice, who was teaching back then, misunderstood Little Turd’s way of speakin’..their folks was from Tennessee..and wrote him down as “Tud” and that’s how he is called that to this day.”

“I thought on that for awhile then I said, "Well, it’s too bad about the water, anyway”.

We filled the jugs up at the spigot and Bo said, “See ya around,” and I said “See ya, Bo” and he started up his old truck and rattled off. I kept on doing what I was doing when he came which was not much of nothin’, and pretty soon I got tired of that and went in and went to bed.

Bunny's Getting Married

2011-07-22T08:05:00.000-07:00

My friend, Bo, stopped by last night. He just wanted to bum a can of Coke off me.

Also he was hiding out from his mom, Pauletta Dean Ray and Bunny, his sister because of the wedding coming up and all.

He said, “Yeah, Bunny is finally gonna tie the knot.”

That’s one way of looking at it. To my mind she just finally ran poor old Windy Wilson to ground. Windy’s name was really Clifford Winston Wilson but I never knew him to be called anything but Windy. Windy wasn’t much of a talker so you’ll just have to figure out for yourself how he came by his callin’ name.

Bunny had almost made it to be married twice before, both times to the slippery Windy. But like Bo said “Bunny ain’t nothin’ if she ain’t persistent.”

The first time she had a run-a-way gig all planned, with her and Windy lined up to catch the Greyhound at the convenience store. The bus was due to pull in at 7:12 a.m. but as luck would have it at about ten after seven Windy’s stomach took to gripin’ and he had to run for the restroom in the gas station and they missed the bus. There wasn’t much sense in Bunny going without him so she just kept setting on the bench there by the gas pumps until he came out.

Bo said she forgave him, (Bunny has a foregivin’ nature) thinkin’ that he had most likely been lookin' at the pictures on the mechanical dispensary on the bathroom wall. Everyone in town knows about the dispensary at the gas station because it’s a uni-sex bathroom (that means everyone goes in there..old ladies, little kids, truckdrivers..) and the only public one in town.

Mabel Baxter who runs the store says that, other than its most obvious and most practical intent, the dispensary is a “monument of education to the young and an encouragement to the more mature.”

“Besides,” says Mabel, “It goes to show there is more to life than waitin’ on the Greyhound and fillin’ the ice machine every morning.”

The second time Bunny almost got married she had a big do planned at the Elk’s Lodge. Jimmy and Odetta Barnett was gonna play their guitar and base fiddle and Pete Gifford was practicin’ his mime act. Beulah Marshall was going to be there twistin’ balloons into freaky lookin’ animals for little kids while her daughter, Jeanine plastered washable tattoos all over their poor little hands and faces.

Everyone was lookin’ forward to it but then word went around town that the intended groom had got a letter from the state requirin’ him to make an appearance at the unemployment office that very day so they could evaluate him to see what kind of work might suit him. He had to go as he had missed two appointments and they were threatening to cut off his unemployment.

He did have good reasons for the missed appointments.

The first time his hound was in a bad way. He had to take it to the vet and come to find out it had a pop tab stuck in its windpipe. That hound chewed on the weirdest stuff. The second time he just forgot. It was the first of a whole string of the prettiest days you would ever want to see in this part of the country and he had forgot about the unemployment thing and gone off to the river with Bo to do some noodling.

Anyway, Bo said he didn’t think the state wanted to hear a third excuse and he thought Windy, havin’ a choice between getting’ married and lookin’ at possible job opportunities, most likely felt the time spent lookin’ for job opportunities was less stressful. Windy never holds up good under stress.

Bo left about nine. I hope he remembers to bring back the pop can.

Who Isn't Paying Taxes?

2011-07-08T14:15:00.000-07:00

Republicans (eg: Sen. John Cornyn R Texas) like to declare that 51% of Americans pay no taxes. This is figured in “units” so whether it’s households or individuals ..who knows?

How did we get to this point?

Largely through tax breaks, which are sometimes called "tax expenditures."

These tax breaks are estimated to total more than a trillion dollars a year in reduced taxes, but the fact is that the bulk of those go to the top end of the income distribution."

High earners have so much income liability, that even these lop-sided breaks don’t lower their taxes to zero while lower and middle-income breaks such as child credits, mortgage interest deductions and Earned Income Credits can get lower wage earners off the hook.

The Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center projects that for 2011, 46.4 percent of households won’t have any income tax liability. However, 28.3 percent of this number will pay payroll taxes. Payroll taxes consist of Social Security Insurance and Medicare.

Of the remaining 18.1 percent with neither income nor payroll tax liability, 10.3 percent are elderly and 6.9 percent are not elderly but have incomes lower than $20,000.

In other words, all but a tiny sliver of Americans without either income tax or payroll tax liability are either elderly or poor.

If you feel that payroll taxes are insignificant it is helpful to remember that minimum wage workers earn $288.00 per week for a 40-hr week. Their tax withheld per week is $25-$30 a week. Relatively speaking, that’s a pretty healthy chunk. The elderly still in the workforce, generally at minimum wage, continue to pay into Social Security, which they may well already be qualified to draw. They continue to pay into Medicare which they also may be qualified to use.

I suppose one can fault these old people and the poor for not taking better care of their selves financially but I just can’t do that with a straight face.

Bug On the Lam

2011-07-07T11:36:00.000-07:00

I specifically remember the lady at the Animal Rescue place CLEARLY stating that Bug had been raised with goats and poultry and other livestock and that she KNEW boundaries. I wish I had asked her if Bug's boundary knowledge was acquired from a Missouri road map?

Bug’s first evening unchained did not go too well. She immediately dismissed as inadequate this mere 36 acre lot, heard the call of far places and departed as swiftly as four long white legs can carry one dog, becoming little more than a pale blur against the blacktop and heading due north. My hopes of the great fox eliminator and protector of all things feathered crumbled to dust at my feet. Well, they would have been dust if the grass hadn’t still been wet.

Never having a really strong grasp on my temper at the best of times, my initial reaction of disappointment was immediately replaced with a sincere hope that a big truck (it would have to be a big one) would wipe her out and nobody would ever know who she belonged to, her being new to the neighborhood.

Fortunately for Bug AND me, my neighbors always seem to be a little confused about the exact date of the Fourth of July and want to do fireworks for as long as possible and Bug was just barely out of sight when their celebratory barrage against anyone daring to doubt their patriotism commenced. I never saw a dog backtrack so fast. She was fireballing back down the blacktop so fast she almost missed the place completely and if I hadn’t hollered at her she would probably have wound up in Cameron. Well, I chained her again.

This morning turned cool and lovely with a nice, grumbly little thunder shower working its way across DeKalb County and I unchained her hoping to coax her into following me through chores. Remember the orientation thing all week long? With me bottle feeding bucket calves, baby goat, watering doelings, chicks, hens etc with a 75 pound dog attached at the wrist? Well evidently Bug didn’t. This time she lit out down the gravel to the east, loping low and fast and within seconds nothing was visible but the sway of a white tail plume and then that was gone.

“Damn”..this time, before I could exercise any reasonable restraint, my temper was totally gone and in my degeneracy, I envisioned a bear chewing her up and spitting her out! I had just read that they are CONSCIENTIOUSLY propagating the Black Bear down in South Missouri. I relished the thought! Nothing to be left but a pink collar with a few white hairs clinging to it and the tiny tag saying she was most likely not rabid tinkling against the leash loop!

Before any doubts had time to rise regarding the existence of a bear on demand on my part a low rumbling, followed by a louder crash of thunder, was THEN followed by a fast traveling streak of white heading back in my direction. Bug outdid herself this time. Barely sparing a glance for me, the crazy lady standing in the rain fantasizing about Bear-On-Dog scenarios, she raced for the barn, wheeling at the last second and backing in so nothing could be seen in the dimness of the barn door except a white muzzle and two black ears.

As I debated whether to chain her again, patting my self on the back for the fact that she DID know where home was,..(remember the orientation thing?) the rain shifted to a light drizzle and the grumbly thunder seemed to have crossed over into Daviess County. More power to ‘em.

Bug also noticed the altered circumstances and stalked out of the barn like she personally had driven the thunder away. Meeting no audible threat she lunged into gear and was off down the gravel again in a nano-second only to be met by a repeat of the rumble and thunder, followed by an even faster retreat to the barn.

I figured this was enough dog training for one day and, not having enough faith in either my neighbors’ patriotism or the Good Lord’s willingness to intercede in my dog’s training by stepping in with loud noises as needed, I lunged for the chain and Bug at the same time..no small task.. and by some miracle had them connected once again. I’ll try again tonight.

P.S. I haven't seen a fox since Bug and her big mouth and mobile nature arrived.

Big Bug

2011-07-04T10:16:00.000-07:00

BIG BUG

'Entre the new farm employee!

Designated Fox Destroyer..Skunk Chaser..'coon Fighter and Monitor of All Points of Defense.

Her name is Bug. Originally June Bug, according to the Rescue Haven..but I was never fond of the name June so she is just "Bug". Bug is somewhat euphonic with Benny (The Terrible Terrier) and also I think I can remember it.

She had two orientation sessions this a.m. following the drill through chicken chores, calf bottles and goat feeding with a little boundry work thrown in. She is learning to "Sit down" and not kill us inadvertantly by jumping on us (she probably weighs 75 pounds) and walking on a leash without dragging me all over. She was chained at each chore point so I have both hands free for the job and she was pretty good about the whole process and not malignantly interested in poultry or very small goats.

Her first interview with Benny last night did not go well but better luck this morning. Benny's circle of admirers seems to be a limited one. Sarah says he 's down to one. I guess that one is me. I really like the little dude.

I want all to understand that I do not like dogs generally and have known many that I thought should never have made the cut that propelled them into my world. But some are really remarkable people who just happen to be dressed in fur with sappy tongues that hang out on hot days. I hope Big Bug is one of those.

For the time being she looks good lying under the pear tree and if I was a fox I would not want to rile her!

Just For Fun Friends

2011-06-25T08:42:00.001-07:00

Any Comparison of today's BLOG to Any Real Person or Event is Accidental and Very Unlikely.

My friend, Bo stopped by last night. He was short on money and had a baby goat with one eye and the carbureter off an old Pontiac he was trying to find buyers for. I didn’t need a one-eyed goat and had my fill of old Pontiacs a long time ago so we just sat and drank Coke and talked about hard times and what we would do when they got better.

Bo’s family is in “straits” right now as his Mom, Pauletta Dean Ray, was laid off at the truck stop on account of the business had fallen off so. His dad, Joe is still working at the feed store but they cut his hours. I guess even livestock is on short feed these days.

According to Bo his dad, Joe, is getting mighty testy being the only one in the family working anymore.

“He is almost succotic sometimes,” says Bo. “He even took the cover off of Pauletta Dean Ray’s favorite Roy Orbison record, (it was a collector’s item), and drew a skull right on the top of Roy’s guitar with a Magic Marker.” Bo said Pauletta Dean Ray was fit to be tied.

Bo said he figured she would get back at him though because she is a “Passionate Aggressive” personality. (Bo had to take some behavior modification classes after the lawnmower-on-fire-in-the-bedroom thing last winter. He said they talked on and on about succotics and hostile and passionate aggressors and such. He learned a lot.)

I asked Bo how his sister, Bunny, was getting along. We were in the same class in school and I always kind of liked her. He said her psoriasis was better and she always wore her hair long now so a person hardly wouldn’t ever notice her bad ear. I was glad to hear it.

That ear thing was a real worry there for awhile. Bunny wasn’t satisfied with just getting something pierced. Oh, no. Not Bunny. When we were all still in school Bunny took a notion to have one of those disk things in the bottom part of her ear. She wasn’t sure how to do it and couldn’t afford a gold disk so she cut circles out of a plastic milk jug and worried with it and kept making the hole bigger until finally even Pauletta Dean Ray, never known to be a smothery mother type, noticed that her ear was all red and swolled up and poked the plastic milk jug plug right out and screamed at Bunny and Joe even hollered at Bunny and so that was the end of it except for the weird looking ear lobe.

Well it got on pretty late and finally Bo asked me if I would help him start his pick-up and I said “Sure, Bo” and we pushed it out onto the blacktop and he jumped in and I ran along behind pushing as well I could until he yanked it in gear and I almost went smashing into where the tail gate would be on most peoples’ trucks..and it started right up and off he went.

I forgot to tell Bo to be sure and bring the pop can back because pop cans are 45cents a pound right now but heck.. I’ll catch him next time. He generally just tosses his cans behind the seat anyway and it’s not like he’s going right home and clean out that truck!

Kill Order!!

2011-05-05T09:13:00.000-07:00

Criticism and further reporting on this issue is unwarranted and does not serve the interests of the people of the United States. If ever an action should remain classified and withheld from the public..including photos..this is it. Surely we can agree to be adult enough for this.

The President said simply, “We have killed him. Period. He is gone.”

This must be put aside for two reasons.

1: All precautions must be taken that the identities of these Seals NEVER be made public. We must understand that these kind of people..this enemy..has a very long memory unpurged for generations. Religious vendetta’s are what their culture is all about. Not only the Seals themselves are at high risk of exposure but their families will be at risk for generations. We must stop this ridiculous appetite for tittilating details. For those who get off on blood and gore..look somewhere else. These men and their families MUST be shielded.

2: I believe President Barrack Obama is a gentle man. Many in our culture equate gentleness with weakness and have repeatedly reviled him as weak and indecisive. Of course he is not. We saw that in the high-jacking incident, his operation of the Afghan war and now the “Kill Order” of Osama Bin Laden. I believe it was not easy for him to issue the final “Kill Order”. Like all Presidents in time of war the knowledge of sending troops to fight and maybe die or have parts of their bodies blown off is a heavy and unforgettable responsibility. But it is a known one..one with precedent.

But this act was unique to these times and this President. For a Christian raised in an American culture, the knowledge that he ordered the killing of another human being..an unarmed man..no matter how heinous a man.. is a heartrendingly disturbing aspect of this responsibility.

But the responsibility was his and he met it. Such an act should not be repeatedly questioned and criticized or used in an effort to minimize the accomplishment of the President who gave the order and the Seals who performed this duty so extraordinarily.

Cooking Again!!

2011-05-05T08:10:00.000-07:00

The house is filled with smoke again this morning and I have set out candles..both floral and spice..to overcome the stench. I burned my breakfast cheese toast. Burnt cheese is a real appetite squelcher. But it was not my fault. (So few things are.)

Benny, the Terrible Terrier has been particularly bad this morning . He pooped upstairs, ate a pencil, tumped over his water bowl, chewed up a plastic cigarette tip and while I am groveling on my stomach to search under the couch for his bone that he’s SUPPOSED to be chewing, he is jumping up and down on my back, pulling my hair. He has long toe nails. He barks loud and long if I neglect the morning playtime with tossing the knotted up jeans legs and I was particularly hoping to by-pass this session today. He barked loud and long.

But the encouraging thing is that I have taught him a new trick. He has learned, (with rapid speed I must say) when on the leash and we approach the open lot or the garden and I drop the leash and shout “Go..Go..Benny” he is off like a bullet. Well, yes he did kind of tend to do this BEFORE the training session, and yes, I still have yet to get him to come back..but every little step counts.

Spring Has Come to the Chicken Yard..kinda!

2011-03-17T10:05:00.000-07:00

Spring has come to the chicken yard..kinda! I have nursed my remaining eleven pullets and two roosters through a harsh North Missouri winter, fought mightily against their propensity for suicide by accident as fledglings, grieved repentantly over the one I dropped the gate on, struggled through snow drifts to ensure plenteous food and a perpetual water supply..and my reward has been what I call extremely minimal.

Only one small hen, of the ancient Dominecker breed if anyone is interested, has shown enough gratitude to produce anything. Of her I will say that she is conscientiously committed and surprisingly productive. But she can’t carry the load alone. I have explained this in terms I thought ANYONE could understand to the flock on several occasions with no result. I have given explicit instructions, provided all necessary supplies..yet the underperformance is…well it’s disappointing.

I’m beginning to think it is the fault of Marlboro, the White Wyandotte Rooster that somehow wormed his way into the order I received for fifty day-old pullets(females) last October.

Marlboro is an extremely aggressive but lovely specimen of chicken manhood and already shows every indication of excessive testosterone. He totally consumes all the spare time the little hens have by running them around the pen and doing what roosters do when they have the slightest opportunity. He is equipped with a fierce, yellow eye, a strong projectile of a beak and large and very sharp spurs. His hostility is magnified by a large, red comb that stands upright and waggles threateningly when he is irritated. He is a man to be reckoned with.

Winston, another chick of the male persuasion, also missed the cut when they were shipped. Winston has a fierce visage, and sharp spurs too. He is as big as Marlboro and as strong. But Winston lacks commitment! At some point Marlboro got his bluff in and Winston now makes no advances toward the hen flock. His comb droops in a rather depressing manner and his gaze tends to wander to the feed pan and to the chicken picture on the feed sack.. This is rather sad because it leaves him with no romantic outlet other than the feed sack chicken.

Winston has taken to dancing with the feed sack in the way of roosters and if ever there was an exercise in futility this has to be it. But, if he gets anything out of it who am I to interfere. Marlboro doesn’t seem to care about the feed sack pin-up chicken girl so Winston has her all to himself and spends considerable time doing the little chicken dance of roosters. ..hop..hop..scratchy scratchy..hop hop hop..one wing down and trailing like a feathered toreador cape..more hop hop..stretch the neck..fluff out the neck feathers..well I’m sure you know what I mean. It all seems more than a little pointless to me but then I’m not a chicken.

Anyway, people who know “all about chickens” tell me that the hens will begin to lay soon and all will lay at once. Won’t that be nice?

I Can't Believe We're Still Talking About This!

2011-01-31T06:56:00.000-08:00

Death Panels Some More?? Too many waivers in the Health Bill?

It might be worthwhile to check out who demanded the waivers for which lobby group. It might surprise you. Legislation is not easy and never "pure". As for death panels..oh crap!! We've been living with death panels for ever.

Twenty-five years ago when my mother-in-law was nearing the end of her medicare benefits after living in a coma-like existence for several months benefiting no one but the hospital, (the knee replacement surgery on a comatose patient seemed a little over the top to me,) we received a letter that when her benefits ran out we would be responsible for her care fees. I was wisely told by an older person familiar with health care procedure, and whom I trusted, "not to worry" that she would not outlast her medicare by a week. She passed away five days after the expiration date. Coincidence? I don't think so. I believe she was allowed to pass..

I don't ask to live for ever. I ask not to be put in an unheated hallway or room to hasten pneumonia. I ask not to have food withheld if my stomach spasms or water withheld if my mouth is parched. I ask to be able to remain dry and in a minimum of pain. If you think these things have not and do not happen your dream world is one to be envied.

I simply ask to have the options explained to me by someone who does not have a dog in the fight over the length and quality of my life..and to have that choice.

Incidentally, medicare guidelines have included almost the exact same wording for years as it pertains to Dr reimbursement for taking the time to sit with a patient and explain their end of life options. Now it's called death panels? Good Lord!

My Friend Bo

2011-01-01T11:22:00.000-08:00

My Friend Bo

Morphias Orbison Bogarden was a friend of mine but like most people around here, I just called him Bo. I think even his mother, Pauletta Deen Ray Bogarden, had a hard time spitting out the Morpias Orbison in a pinch. And Bo was always getting into pinches.

They say he was named after his Great Great Grandfather Morphias Esther Bogarden, who was a kind of cultural icon of the family, him having fought in the War of the Rebellion and all. Most of us called that mix up The Civil War but the Bogardens referred to it as The War of the Rebellion. I think it had something to do with them being Vermonters.

The Orbison was stuck on him from that more current cultural icon, the singer Roy Orbison. Pauletta Deen Ray was a real strong fan of his and even if he was dead she played a lot of old tapes of him singing and would sigh and dab at her eyes every now and then when Bo’s Dad, Joe was looking just to make him mad.

Like I say, Bo was a friend of mine and no matter what he did I always took up for him and stood by him for the most part. And he generally stood by me whenever fate hit me hard in the unnatural vicissitudes of life.

That’s why it bothered me so when the whole neighborhood got all up in arms over such a tiddly little old thing as happened to Bo last winter. They were all hollering about Bo “was a threat to the neighborhood” and a calling him a “dangerous lunatic” and ..well I don’t know what all.

Bo’s hauling his lawn mower into the bedroom in the middle of December to work it over and lighting one little old cigarette and setting the house on fire wouldn’t have mattered so much if Bo hadn’t moved into that new apartment complex with his girlfriend for the winter. Now Bo and his girlfriend, May, would be out on the street if it wasn’t for Joe and Pauletta Deen Ray taking them in. The people were all screaming at him and shaking their fists at him right there on TV.

People just have no patience anymore. Just the least little thing riles them up. I think it’s just politics myself.

Sports and Politics

2010-12-21T09:09:00.000-08:00

Polling conducted by Scarborough USA, a joint project of Nielsen and Arbitron, showed that Republicans hold the edge among die-hard sports fans with only minor exceptions. NASCAR fans, like fans of the PGA and NFL, were broadly skewed to vote Republican and WWE fans tended to vote with the Democrats. I guess one mindless endeavor for each party is only fair.

Thankfully however, according to the same poll, fans of both of these culturally inspiring sports are less likely to vote than fans of the more cerebral and complicated competitions like college football and PGA tournaments. I guess there is some solace in that.

Another Day Another Dollar

2010-12-19T02:55:00.001-08:00

It's 4:00a.m. I am wakened by Brian going in and out of the house. There is two inches of snow and cold. The furnace runs and runs. I must get up to make sure he closed the door. He didn't.

On his return from his smoke shed..(he doesn't stay long because of the cold)..he confronts me and says .."There's a dead mouse upstairs." Like it's personally my fault.

I say, "Yes, I can tell. And wander back to my bed."

The downstairs door slams again. I get up..go down to make sure the door is shut. It is not. I say.."Brian, Quit this damn running in and out. I have to work today." He says, "There is a dead mouse upstairs." at which time I loose my temper and tell him to "get his %$# up there and find it and do something about it."

He gets a huge wad of paper towel. (He is very fastidious about THAT sort of thing.) It doesn't take long for him to find the dead creature. I think it had tripped and broke its neck over one of the piles of rubble in his room. He nearly runs down the stairs and out the back to dispose of it.

He wants to know how long will it smell bad in his room. I have lost patience and I want to go back to bed.

"Probably forever," I say, "but light a candle anyway. If nothing else it will appease the spirits."

He looks at me like I'm nuts and I am always nuts at 4:oo a.m. so I wander back to my bed.

The Phantasy Called the Middle Class

2010-12-11T04:56:00.001-08:00

The distribution of income in the United States forty years ago was not significantly different from that of other developed countries. The power and stability of our middle class was the envy of business communities and governments worldwide.

The opportunity for an individual, through their own effort, to enter the middle-class was better than any other country in the world.

The facts today are far bleaker. To find societies as unequal as the United States currently, you must forget about all the developed nations’ economies and look to Latin America.

In addition, today a hard worker motivated to acquire middle class economic security for his family, has a better chance in almost all other developed countries including Canada and Great Britain.

In 1967 as a single mom with three kids I had a factory job that paid $5.75 an hour (I cleared about $875 a month) with monthly bonuses and full health care. My house payment was $211 a month for a reasonably nice three bedroom ranch on a three acre lot. My utility bills ran less than $100 a month and $100 a month fed my kids, who were all big eaters. House maintenance, car payments, car maintenance and insurance, medicine, school supplies and clothing pretty much ate up the rest.

Our vacations were spent camping at one of the many Federal parks les than a day’s drive away. The fee was $2.00 a night with all the swimming, boating, hiking etc. free ..bathrooms, showers and water supplied free.

My budget was tight..and it was close..

But I didn’t know how lucky I was!

In 2007 factory jobs were gone..replaced by jobs offered by Walmart, McDonald’s, QuickTrip, truck stops, etc. and the local nursing home. Office workers’ and service workers’salaries had quickly dropped in direct correlation with the destruction of the unions in the 1980’s. Although not heavily unionized themselves, they had benefited from the wage floor gained by the unions for their own workers. Office workers and service workers now joined the ranks of the minimum wage worker.

A worker, with or without a family, was looking at the same $5.75 an hour, (minimum wage had stagnated through the Bush W era), health insurance costs of $500-$700 a month, minimal housing at $500 amonth, $500 a month to keep a car to get to work, $2-$3 a gallon gas, $200 a month utility bills.. Even a two-wage earner household bringing home $1800 a month..or the lucky individual who had escaped the minimum wage trap and earned $10-$12 an hour..(they would be clearing about $1400 a month) would still be having an impossible struggle.

And that vacation at the Lake? Forget that! Camping rental the last time I checked was $15 a night. Water, shower and toilet services had been suspended at many locations and fees instated for some services formerly provided. Fifteen dollars plus a night may still sound cheap if you are retired on a 1970’s retirement benefit or in the top earner bracket but when you’re living on $1400 a month with a family it’s not so cheap.

Something is terribly wrong here. When workers no longer have any hope of attaining the security of the middle class..when the wealth of our country no longer goes to those who work.. something is terribly wrong.

Christmas-The Hope and Light of the World

2010-12-10T05:45:00.000-08:00

And she brought forth her firstborn son, and wrapped him in swaddling clothes and laid him in a manger; because there was no room for them in the inn. Luke2:7

2010 years ago this winter a teenage mother, watched over by her middle-aged husband and warmed by the breath of the cattle of the fields, gave the world Christianity.

To a world where slavery, poverty, suffering and ignorance were the norm, a small, a very small, glimpse of light..a glimmer of hope, pulsated in the heart of humanity.

Rumors concerning this particular child had been circulating long before the humble birth. Men long distances away from that miserable little barn, who had spent their lives studying the prophesies of the world’s great religions of the day and the configurations of the heavenly bodies they believed to be set in motion by “the creator of all”, were convinced that something momentous had happened and set out to observe and record the event. Heads of state surreptitiously made their way to the grass-filled manger and knelt by the tiny child.

It is said that a sword pierced the young mother’s heart upon his birth as the knowledge of his true life and purpose had been revealed to her.

Christianity, cursed by the viciousness, greed and intolerance within the human family and blessed by the undying belief in the possibility of goodness, changed the world.

The new religion, made only stronger by the persecutions of those whose interests were immeasurably threatened by its existence, spread west and north across Europe and east into Central Asia, constantly changing yet ever the same. Great battles were fought..many suffered and died..over seemingly small and insignificant theological points that we now accept without question.

Although not a military one, the first and most significant battle within the church, well chronicled in the New Testament, is Paul’s assertion that salvation was for ALL people. The failure of Paul to win his case would have strangled the new religion and delegated it to just another sect, among many sects, within the Jewish community.

Western Medieval Europe, ravaged by war and famine,settled into a few tenuously organized and fragilely constructed governmental bodies that found they had far less need for expensively maintained standing armies that had been in place for generations. Not to mention the depredations and pillaging committed by a bored and rapacious population of young men with very narrow skills. Thus was born the Crusades. They served two purposes. The troublesome armies were let loose in other neighborhoods and much wealth and loot was brought home.

And so, through the years, man’s interpretation of Christianity has swayed and morphed between sanctity and savagery. The world was flat. The world revolved around the sun. Fire at the stake purged unbelievers. Women were ordained by law to “suffer” child birth and die if necessary without interference from the ungodly measures of science. Disabilities were the result of sin. Poverty was an affliction placed there by a loving God and not to be tampered with. Were the poor not well beloved by the Lord and therefore more blessed than the pitiful wealthy?

War is waged. Populations are ravaged and destroyed. Bodies desecrated, children exploited. In the name of Peace and Love.

Slavery and its degradations was embraced and upheld by the church for centuries. Birth control is still anathema within some Christian communities. Even here, in this multi-blessed country that we live in, a large segment of the Christian population truly and genuinely believes that the rewards of the world should only rightly be held by those of the same race or gender or sexual orientation or religion as themselves.

Yet that small light brought forth in those meager circumstances 2010 years ago, often dim, flickering frighteningly, smudged by the excrement of evil alive and well, still glows. It ebbs and flows, waxes and wanes. Its devotees struggle and stumble. Yet it glows.

Who has not stood alone in some dark hour and cried out. “I believe. Oh Lord help Thou my unbelief.” ?

And the breath from that crying out causes that feeble glimmer to leap into light again and we are sustained for another hour..another day.

Because of that child.. The Christ

LR/12-2009

McCain, Please go home.

2010-12-02T11:17:00.000-08:00

Today Senator McCain (R-AZ), the same who blessed us all with the Palin Family, roused again from senatorial stupor to attack Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Adm. Mike Mullen, regarding his position on DADT and his acceptance of a lengthy study by the Army suggesting that most service personnel couldn't care less about whether the guy or gal on a mission with them was gay.

Now it's the study itself that is flawed?

Why are we still listening to this aged one-issue Senator who consistently proclaims his love for all things military and claims the right to speak for them?

I have tremendous respect and admiration for the Senator's service, which consisted of completing Navy Jet Flight Training and surviving years of torture and isolation in a POW camp. He was retired from the Navy as a Captain, a good deal less rank than that of Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Adm. Mike Mullen, whose military credentials he was questioning.

For the life of me I cannot see how McCain's experiences make him competent to set military policy or order military affairs, or even to order men.

This is all just too ridiculous. We have so many real problems And McCain is still wringing the last shred of juice he has out of this rag??

I just wish McCain would go home. Other people go to Arizona and retire, why can't he? I also wish he could put Sarah Palin and her family back into what ever box he found them. I wish we could hear from real people, and there are some, with relevant ideas to listen to.

Memoirs-A Family in Luck

2010-11-28T06:20:00.000-08:00

A Family In Luck

Even in those postwar 1940’s and ‘50s years posthumously stamped with the imprimatur of “the good old days” and the “true period of American family values” our family was not a storybook family. Well into late adulthood we, the get of the strange pairing that became our parents, railed at the Scot's harshness of our mother while holding the gentle amiableness of our father in utter contempt.

Like most ungrateful children, and all children are ungrateful, our every failure and disappointment was laid at their feet.

But then none of my friends had a story book family either and even within the tensions and failures of our own family I knew that we were luckier than a lot of other people.

Our neighborhood, in those years, was a quiet one with every third house being inhabited by a single woman or women. The three Ostertag sisters never married. Beaulah Rittermeyer never married. Mrs. Faucett was a widow, as was Mrs. Mathews, Mrs. Rientschler, Mrs. KirkPatrick, Mrs. O’Dell, Mrs. Crabtree and poor Mrs. Gallup whose husband, driven mad, it was said, by the death of their infant son, lived out his life at the St. Joe Asylum for the Insane. Shieldsy, a family friend, and Poppy lived quietly with Poppy’s damaged lungs..he was gassed in France during WWI… and visits from their daughter and occasionally one of their sons.

It was not a particularly bad neighborhood nor was it a particularly good one. Just a conglomeration of people whose generation, scarred and manipulated by two world wars, an influenza pandemic, (a 1918 global disaster in which 28% of the U.S. population suffered, and 500,000 to 675,000 died), a depression, a land killing drought, and in some instances, the struggle to figure out the ground rules in a new country or how to live after losing everything, lived their lives.

Three of my peers ..in the neighborhood… were victims of habitual incest, two of my closest friends lived on dirt floors, one of whose mother was severely mentally challenged, childhood entertainment at the home of another friend consisted of hiding behind the sofa and watching her mother entertain her men friends and the one friend I had whose family came closest to belonging to a storybook family..because they were catholic and attended church en masse.. lived, as did her mother and siblings, in real fear of her Irish father who liked to use his fists on them.

Three of my friends were raised in what was then referred to as basement houses, one of which had no partitions and one bed for a family of ten. These were simply basements upon which a house had never been built.

The boy that I was later to marry grew up, with his five brothers, in a basement. Stacked at night on pole beds to keep dry when it rained because the basement leaked so badly. They could tell you about wading through inches of water, carrying their shoes, to reach the door and starting for school without breakfast and with lunch (which was called dinner back then) just a fantasy someone else dreamed up.

But the biggest difference in the lives of my family and that of my peers was in the matter of entertainment.

We went places. We did things.

Wound together like a snarled ball of scratchy wool yarn harassed by an ill-tempered cat..we went places and did things.

Every summer we made our pilgrimage to Swope Park, home of The Kansas City Zoo and the infamous Swope Lookout. Often caravanning …the washtub with the watermelon, a jug of tea and a couple dozen bottles of Coca Cola and Nehi pop (orange for me, grape for my brother, Merle and Crème Soda for sister, Marion, with tea and Coke for the older people) in someone's trunk and the packed food boxes in another, we always made one stop on the highway at Leimkuhler’s Gas Station and Ice-house to buy a 25 pound block of ice to be chipped over the watermelon and pop and covered snugly with a gunny sack.

We went to the show at the Armour regularly, partly for the movie and more importantly for the newsreels. We went to Nelson’s, the neighborhood tavern/dance hall. We were regulars at the skating rink.

In the summer we would not have missed going to Winnwood Lake each weekend with it’s free show, outside dance floor and the multicolored juke-box that blared boogie woogie until mid-night, not to mention the on-grounds carnival. Occasionally we swam in the man-made lake but only when one of my sisters had a swimsuit to show off.

In the autumn and through the winter we were regulars at The Brush Creek Follies, a country music show that appeared regularly at the Shriners Temple Auditorium in Kansas City. We saw the young Minnie Pearl and Tex Ritter and Red Foley, Tiny Tim (who wasn’t tiny at all) and Herb Kratoska and Tex Owens and his daughter Laura Lee whom I was named after. Many of these entertainers became friends of the family and were guests in our home.

My parents knew personally members of the The Texas Rangers, a western harmony group franchised to KMBC Radio in Kansas City during that time. Among other things they did a noon-time music and news thing that we never missed. One of my earliest memories is being held high in Mother’s arms so I could listen to the little plastic radio on the shelf on the kitchen wall while the Texas Rangers sang Pony Boy (my favorite song) and dedicated it to me, little Nanie Stock.

There was a lot of spur-of-the-moment stuff. Someone would have an idea and off we would go! Like the time they installed the searchlight at the waterworks in North Town!

One night all of a sudden, off to the South West, a huge shaft of light, inspired by the great search lights over London during the War, swept the night sky. It was awesome..nothing short of miraculous. We all jumped in the car and off we went to see the actual item. There it stood. A huge beam of light seemingly coming right out of the ground there in front of the Water Works building! Piercing the sky farther than even the mind could see! Standing there in that family, dressed in varying degrees of shabby, we were one in our awe, connected like no other family.

It seems to me that this was our real story..…we ran and flew and crashed and rose to run again....like a kite with long tails, everyone clutching..no one allowed to let go. It's true, you don't choose your family. It is the luck of the draw.

But in many ways that mattered we were a family in luck!

The Influenza Pandemic of 1918

2010-11-26T04:41:00.000-08:00

The life and times of my Mother and Fathers’ generation was filled with so many stupendous life-changing disasters that the Influenza Pandemic of 1918 has become less than a blip on the radar.

The speed of this pandemic, so deadly, striking so quickly and disappearing as quickly (it lasted about 18 months), made it easier to forget the proportions of the tragedy it inflicted.

But the shortest stroll through any cemetery of that day reveals the flotsam of family tragedies marked by the headstones of young adults. “Rebecca Morris..1895-1918 “Mother and Wife.” “Jerome Patterson… Beloved Son..1902-1918” and on and on.

In the United States about 28% of the population suffered, and 500,000 to 675,000 died.

Kansas City and St.Louis, Missouri were particularly hard hit.

State officials first reported on the presence of influenza in Missouri on October 11, 1918. However, influenza had appeared in the state long before that date. By the third week of October, 3,765 influenza cases and 90 deaths had been reported from St. Louis, with 558 cases and 13 deaths being reported for October 16th alone. State officials, however, rarely had access to accurate figures and the actual number of cases and deaths was probably higher than that.

On October 24th, state officials maintained that "conditions are either stationary or improving" in the state. But on October 25th, the situation took a turn for the worse. Influenza began spreading into rural districts. Between October 26th and 28th, the situation continued to be dire, with rural and urban areas across the state reporting high numbers of cases and deaths.

This Pandemic, targeting the future of populations by striking hardest in the young adult age group, is seldom even regarded when considering the devastations of a worldwide drought, the worldwide economic collapse and two world wars.

Yet the loss of so many in their most productive years must have left a gap. So many orphans, so many unformed families, so many crippled lives, so many losses. And as in all losses, the true cost is never known because it IS lost..not to be regained.

I have spoken to adults left orphaned by this disaster. Their lives, and the lives of those who took them in, were altered and invariably diminished. Being an orphan in the first half of the 20^th century was not an easy thing.

If a Pandemic of this proportion struck today the world would be in an uproar.

*************************

Great Resistance From Troops Against Vaccinations:

"Camp Dodge, Iowa, May 1.—Elmer N. Olson, of Goodrich, Minn., a soldier in training here, refused to submit to vaccination. He was tried by general court-martial and sentenced to fifteen years in the disciplinary barracks at Fort Leavenworth."

1918-19 Influeza in Great Britain: survivor statement as an adult.

In early 1919 my father, not yet demobilized, came on one of his regular, probably irregular, furloughs to Carisbrook Street to find both my mother and sister dead. The Spanish Influenza pandemic had struck Harpurhey. There was no doubt of the existence of a God: only the supreme being could contrive so brilliant an afterpiece to four years of unprecedented suffering and devastation. I apparently, was chuckling in my cot while my mother and sister lay dead on a bed in the same room.

Winston Churchill:

on the Influenza Epidemic of 1890

“For though it ravaged far and wide

Both village, town and countryside,

Its power to kill was o’er;

And with the favouring winds of Spring

(Blest is the time of which I sing)

It left our native shore.”

The Day Bud Killed the Goose

2010-11-23T10:21:00.000-08:00

On the Sundays of my childhood the table was always stretched to the limit with extra plates and extra people, neighbors, stray relatives, kids kicked out by their more discerning parents, friends and often the unsuspecting prey of one of my older siblings.

On these occasions the menu was expanded to surpass the ordinary weekly suppers of meatloaf, beans and ham, tuna and noodles, goulash etc. This added Sunday touch usually meant a trip to the back yard for somebody, hatchet in hand, to do in a chicken or two or even on rare occasions a duck. They were quickly scalded, plucked had a little cold water run over them and popped into the skillet if young enough and if not, sentenced to serve considerable time in the oven. This kind of menu, with Mom’s biscuits and gravy and anything scrounged from our ill-cared-for garden, could be stretched a long way and always was.

Not a member of our family reached adulthood without acquiring the skill to look at a platter of chicken, mathematically determine the number of pieces divided by the members of the board, so to speak, and know without asking how many pieces or what piece would be their lot. The old saying ”I get the neck of the chicken..” did not come out of thin air. Merle and I generally got the wings.

The day Bud, the newest and, on this occasion most unfortunate, member of our coterie of friends, was charged with killing the goose, I was very uneasy. In the first place I was sorry to kill the goose, even if we had worked our way through all the chickens for the year. He was not a bad old goose and liked to follow me and my brother around. I would miss him.

And then Bud was a novice at goose killing. That worried me a little. To me, even with his sleeves rolled up, Bud looked awfully dressed up for goose killing. He was not and never became, a country boy. He came courting in the dress of the day, that is a white dress shirt, neat grey slack pants and shiny brown oxford’s. I sure hoped he wouldn’t get goose blood on his good shoes.

But what I should have been worrying about was my brother, Merle. Merle was what you might call accident prone.

The goose was easy to catch. Like everything else in the backyard in hopes of handouts better than their regular fair of dried up grass hoppers, half cracked walnuts and June bug grubs, he followed anyone who made the mistake of going out there. He never seemed to catch on to the Sunday dinner thing.

With Merle in the lead and the goose under his arm we angled down the path, through the weeds, to the spot where the chickens were generally killed. There past the cinder pile and under the walnut tree was a big rock.

The general run of things was that someone would hold the victims legs while someone else stretched the neck out over the rock and someone else swung and whacked. Miraculously on rare occasions, if pressed for time, Mother was able to single handedly do the deed and be scalding and plucking in half the time. But for the rest of us it took three people. It was not a pretty sight and I don’t think any of the victims liked it.

I know Bud didn’t. I don’t think Bud had ever killed anything in his life and I’m sure he never did again. His mistake was he was just not forceful enough! His first whack missed completely causing Merle’s hand to slip on the goose’s squirming neck. Just as he was taking a second swing Merle let go to get a better grip, just in time to get his thumb in the way.

Missed the goose again..got the thumb. Blood spurted..not goose blood..all over the shiny shoes. I forgot I wasn’t supposed to cuss and said “Damn, Bud.”

I glanced up to see if he was mad about the blood thing or the cussing thing and he didn’t look mad but his face was whiter than the goose. I think he would have passed out if he hadn’t been afraid of falling on top of the goose and Merle’s bloody thumb.

Merle sucked on his thumb and hollered, “Hit him again” and Bud did and the goose was dead, or at least trying to be. He was harder to catch dead than he had been alive..flopping around in the tall grass.

Merle finally got hold of him and we hung him up to bleed out before taking him in to Mom. Merle stayed with the goose but I felt like Bud needed someone worse than the goose did at that point. Anyway, he let me hold his hand all the way to the house.

He continued to date my sister and turned out to be a great brother-in-law. We loved him dearly. After all, you can't hold one little accident against a person.

Airport Patdowns

2010-11-22T07:55:00.000-08:00

Maybe because I don't have a dog in this fight and seldom fly I am thinking we are feeling sorry for the wrong people for the wrong reasons here! There are two people involved in these little docudramas, the "pattor" and the "pattee"!

The next time you find yourself in the boarding call waiting area look around at your fellow travelers and pick at least three whom you would like to stand face-to-face with and whose armpit, cleavage and crotch you would be willing to stick your hand into, even if it was gloved.

I'm not surprised that some travelers, finding this procedure embarrassing and degrading, are in revolt. I'm also not surprised that the pattors are not. They cannot afford to revolt. They need the job.

So I guess my sympathy leans toward the pattor charged with conducting the pat downs in the face of crappy verbal abuse, jokes that would make you cringe and the contempt of people who ought to know better...or at least behave better.

Ski Season

2010-11-18T08:16:00.000-08:00

I hear it’s skiing weather again and I am all for it! True, here in the glacier scraped flatlands of North Missouri skiers are a rather insignificant part of the sporting population..unlike deer slayers, turkey hunters, rodent trappers, cat-fish snaggers and such..but I have fond memories of the skiing world.

Yes, I have skied. At one point in my life, in those insanity driven days of somewhat youthful motherhood, thinking it would serve to prepare them for “life beyond”, I often bombarded my suffering children and grandchildren with experiences over which I had no control. (Other than the ordinary day to day stuff over which I also had no control.)

The Great Ski Trip was on the list and I remember it well……we were living in Henry County back then and…

**************

The planning stage of this trip had gone well, I thought. Kathy, at Clinton’s “Going Places” travel agency had done a great job for us. Also there was a lot of communication beforehand. I remember a conversation with my oldest son, Les, calling from his home in Kansas City.

“Well, Hi, Son. What’s up?”

“Nothing much. I just called to see what you were wearing to ski.”

“Oh, something warm I guess. You know how I hate to be cold. Something warm and lots of it.”

“Well, why don’t you let me pick you up something up here in Kansas City? How about ski bibs? (snowpants for big people)

“Well, I kind of thought I might wear my snowsuit. You know. The one I got the winter we kept the hogs.”

A long silence here. I think he was trying to remember what my snowsuit looked like.

“Mom, I don’t think they are wearing too many snowsuits on the slopes. Why don’t you let me pick you up some bibs? What color is your jacket?”

“I don’t know. Just a minute.” I had to lay the phone down to get to the side of the house where the window by the basketball hoop was.

“John, what color is that coat you said I could borrow?”

He said it was brown.

“It’s brown,” I tell Les, “Brown with tan arms. I remember now.”

Another silence. This conversation was beginning to drag.

“Mom, I don’t think they’re wearing too much brown anymore.”

By now I was getting bored and changed the subject. I hate conversations that don’t seem to be going anywhere.

Later, I had to admit, the kid was right. We didn’t see too many people in shiny-blue snowsuits. Mostly they wore matching mauve, pink, blue, yellow or gray ski suits with little square bottle warmers velcroed to their backsides.

My son turned out matched up like an advertisement for Johnny Walker, with gray ski bibs and matching jacket, gray and mauve-rimmed goggles and mauve and gray eiderdown gloves. The kid had turned into a yuppy!

At ski school my youngest son, John, and three of my nine grandchildren, Sean, 13, Stephanie, eight..(or maybe nine), Chris, nine..(or maybe eight,) and I struggled with “pies”, (that’s keeping the front of the skis in a pigeon-toed position), stopping, (anyway you can,) and “getting up off the ground.”

According to ski types there is an acceptable way and a disgusting way to get up. I tried to master the first, which involves tucking your knees under you and raising yourself with your arms. During this process I noticed that a disproportionate amount of body weight had recently and mysteriously settled below my waistline.

I opted for the disgusting way and you don’t want to hear about it.

We survived ski school and by afternoon were on Schoolmarm Trail a gentle trail designed for grandmothers in blue snowsuits and small children.

I only fell four times! I was ecstatic! What did it matter that I took the slope in the pie position? I could ski!

We stood in line to buy lunch and another to get a table to eat at. The only time we had a table to ourselves the whole weekend was when Chris threw up during a rest period the first day. I guess it was the altitude.

The next day, still beaming over my accomplishment on Schoolmarm Trail, I scrambled up the shuttle-bus steps in my overstuffed snow suit expecting another day of success on skis.

But it was not to be. This mountain was different. This mountain was not kind. My “pies” did not hold. My skis kept crossing, sending me somersaulting downwards and crossways.! If they didn’t cross I built up too much speed and bounced from snow bank to snow bank!

I was miserable.

At this point my son, the Yuppy, turned into a cross between the Nordic Ski Patrol and Ghengis Kahn.

“Use your downhill ski! Turn! Turn! Don’t lay in the trail! Get up! Use your downhill ski! Turn! Turn! Don’t lay in the trail!”

Like Erma Bombeck, I tried to remember those days before he was born and why I had wanted a child. There must have been a reason but I couldn’t think of any.

I fell seventeen times before I stopped counting. It was getting very tiresome. I was getting very angry. My son was beginning to exhibit signs of embarrassment I hadn’t seen since he was a teenager.

I tried to look at things from his point of view.

Yes, it must be embarrassing to look down at your fat little mother, in her out-dated snowsuit, groveling in the snow. Yes, I could understand that. Thinking of his problems helped me put the whole thing in perspective.

Calmly removing my skis I announced that I would walk to the next spot on which I felt competent to ski. “When pigs fly,” I muttered into the zipper tab of my snow suit.

By the look on my sons face you would have thought I had suggested trussing up my grandchildren and using them for snowshoes!

“Nobody walks on the mountain,” he says.

“I walk on mountains,” say I.

“Nobody walks on the mountain,” he says.

“You said that, Boy. You’re wrong. I walk on mountains,” I said.

“It’s against the rules,” he says. “Nobody walks on the mountain.”

“You know what they can do with that rule?” I say.

He looked at me and started to say something but didn’t. I think he was remembering the time I threw the chair at him for torturing his sister.

I walked down the mountain.

…But I DID SKI! For one day..I DID SKI!

Can We Do It?

2010-10-29T06:11:00.000-07:00

As George Washington lay dying, strangling on his own phlegm and unable to swallow, he agonized over the future of the new country he was so instrumental in creating. The week or two prior to his sudden illness was spent thoughtfully preparing a statement to the nation on the danger the new country faced. It was never to be completed.

Not for the first time, and certainly not the last, the new government, imperfect and embryonic as it was, stood ready to crumble and slide back into the old European mold of violence and privilege.

It was, of course, a matter of money. Of who had access to it and who did not. Bankrupt and debt ridden, the new government had turned to the genius of Alexander Hamilton, a bastard son of a Scots, West Indian planter and whose claim to financial aptitude was as bookkeeper of a West Indian Island store. Within weeks Hamilton had hammered out a financial system that, with the help of Salomen and other financiers, allowed the new government to stay afloat.

A glaring problem with Hamilton’s system was that it pretty much invalidated the continental scrip in which the men who had actually fought the war had been paid,, therefore leaving them penniless, while the men who had benefited greatly by the money changing hands, as it always does in war time, gained exponentially. In short it was paid for by the poor who had already been robbed of most of their livelihood for the years it took to win the war.

Tom Jefferson, that radical dreamer, and the stubborn genius of the little James Madison weighed in hard against this usurpation of the wealth of the “common man” with limited success.

And thus the new government fell into two factions, The Federalists, who believed only those with access to capital had the intelligence and no-how to govern and the Democrats, who had great faith in “the common man.”

Upon hearing of a plot by the Federalists to wrest the control of government from the people who had fought for it by instigating an electoral tie, and forcing an appointment of one of their own, Andy Jackson, out in Tennessee, called up 100 of his militia followers and prepared to march. The governors of both Virginia and Pennsylvania threatened to take similar action.

Compromises were made, deals were cut, the fragile new government survived.

Down through the years the two-party system has continued its ebb and flow, the struggle between privilege and poverty, the powerful and the disenfranchised.

The adversaries names and their agendas have altered and clouded at different points in history but the basic questions have remained the same. Can we do it? Can ordinary people govern themselves?

And secondary but of supreme importance is the question; Is the purpose of government to protect the material wealth and opportunity in the hands of the few, the strong, the quick? Or is it to maximize the welfare and the opportunity of the many?

Time after time in our history this country has been torn down the middle, seemingly hopelessly divided.

The question of slavery threatened to strangle the new government in its crib. Only by kicking the can down the road to the next century did the founding fathers reach agreement.

News of the French Revolution and its excesses set neighbor against neighbor once again. Thugs roamed the streets of our port cities filling the taverns, threatening private businesses, ready to club and annihilate those of opposing views.

The Indian question, later settled so violently and illegally by Jackson who, defying the order of the U.S. Supreme Court, drove the Indians from their rich Georgia farms, split the country once again. The Louisianna purchase was derided and railed against as being an irresponsible assumption of debt the new nation could not afford. The purchase of Alaska, known as Seward’s folly, after the Senator who accomplished the acquisition of that distant and frozen wealth, divided Congress and the country.

And when the chickens came home to roost on the question of slavery and the right of a state to override the laws of the federal government finally had to be settled, our worst nightmare as a nation came to pass in the Civil War, leaving scars still apparent in our political and social system 150 years later.

In both World Wars this country argued the question of "Who's Side Are We On?" In both wars the reaction of our large German immigrant populations and the capitalists who made deals with German munitions companies had to be considered.

In 1940 FDR was fighting to resist tremendous Congressional and industrial pressure to get into the war ON THE SIDE OF THE GERMANS. Henry Ford personally demanded that the President plunge the country into support of the AXIS.

Desegregation rewrote the political landscape and set up a social and political division that has lasted for decades.

We have always been divided. We have always suffered fools. Greed always corrupts. Mediocrity and ignorance have always been celebrated in segments of our population. Good has not always triumphed. Justice is often delayed. Do these current divisions and celebrations of ignorance and crippled vision exceed our capacity to sort things out?

I don’t know. I do know that the question is, as it always has been;

Can we do it? Can ordinary people govern themselves? Is the purpose of government to protect the material wealth and opportunity in the hands of the few, the strong, the quick?

Or is it to maximize the welfare and the opportunity of the many?

Pay Back Time!!

2010-09-29T09:50:00.000-07:00

MY adorable granddaughter locked her mother and her big sister out on the deck last night and they had to call 911. She stretched out on the couch with the remote and Louie the dog, totally ignoring their frantic efforts to get her to unlock and let them in. The fireman had to crawl up a ladder and in the kitchen window to gain access.

She will be two years old next week.

She has a wonderful mother and all her friends are telling her what a great story this will be for when she gets older. Ha! I am the mother of her father and I can tell her...but won't..it's just the beginning.

We pulled John out of lakes, off of crick banks, from beneath tractors and chicken coops, down from tall trees..barn rafters..porch roofs.. and all this before he was four.

Then he became harder to track..the woods called..the creek wandered..people kept going off and leaving him because he was "too little" and his only recourse was to follow. Well, he did grow up.

And now he's got Ainsley. Hahahahahah!!!!

The Polish, the Revolution and That Danged Troublemaker Archibald Campbell

2010-09-25T08:46:00.000-07:00

Casimir Pulaski was a Polish nobleman by birth and a military commander who fought against Russian domination of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. When this uprising failed, he emigrated to North America as a soldier of fortune. During the American Revolution, he saved the life of George Washington and became a general in the Continental Army. He was a cavalryman. He died of wounds suffered in the Battle of Savannah. Pulaski is one of only seven people to be awarded honorary membership in the United States.

The Seige of Savannah was an encounter of the American Revolutionary War in 1779. The year before, the city of Savannah, Georgia had been captured by a British expeditionary corps under Lieutenant-Colonel Archibald Campbell. The siege itself consisted of a joint Franco-American attempt to retake Savannah from September 16, 1779 to October 18, 1779. On October 9, 1779, a major assault against the British siege works failed. During the attack, Polish Count Kazimierz Pułaski, fighting on the American side, was mortally wounded. With the failure of the joint American-French attack, the siege failed, and the British remained in control of Georgia until July 1782, close to the end of the war.

The battle is much remembered in Haitian history; the Fontages Legion, consisting of over 500 gens de couleur—free men of color from Saint-Domingue—fought on the French/American side. Henri Christophe, who later became king of independent Haiti, is thought to have been among these troops.

In 2005 archaeologists with the Coastal Heritage Society and the LAMAR Institute discovered portions of the British fortifications at Spring Hill. The brunt of the combined French and American attack on October 9, 1779, was focused at that point. The find represents the first tangible remains of the battlefield. In 2008 the CHS/LAMAR Institute archaeology team discovered another segment of the British fortifications in Madison Square.

A Color Blind Revolution

2010-09-24T16:39:00.000-07:00

The following piece is totally plagiarized, mostly from Wikipedia which plagiarized various Colonial source documents.)

Crispus Attucks, a Free Black American, was the first American martyr in an event prior to the Revolutionary War itself. The son of a native African and a Native American of the Natick tribe, Attucks ran away from his slave owner and became a sailor and whaler. He learned to read and write and to understand the basic principles of different types of government.

Attucks attended meetings with other patriots to discuss taxes levied by Britain, and wrote a letter of protest to Governor Thomas Hutchinson, the Tory governor of Massachusetts. On March 5, 1770, at Dock Square in Boston, Attucks was with a group of men who were defying the British Red Coats. He was the first man to die in the ensuing skirmish, later called the Boston Massacre.

As the first to die for the American cause, he was buried with honor, and a monument on the Boston Common was erected to immortalize his sacrifice.

*********

Salem Poor, a Free Black-American, married, and twenty-eight years old, enlisted in a Massachusetts militia company commanded by Benjamin Ames. Poor was also engaged at the Battle of Bunker Hill.

He has been described as having been among the most prominent and meritorious characters at the battle of Bunker's Hill. Indeed, the historical painting of that scene, by Col. Trumbull, an eyewitness, done in 1785, gives Peter Salem , with other black patriots, a conspicuous place.

That he distinguished himself is certain; six months after the battle, fourteen Massachusetts officers, all of whom had taken part in the battle, petitioned the Massachusetts General Court to reward Salem Poor as follows.

"To the Honorable General Court of the Massachusetts Bay: The subscribers beg leave to report to your Honorable House (which we do in justice to the character of so brave a man), that, under our own observation, we declare that a negro man, called Salem Poor, of Col. Frye's regiment, Capt. Ames' company, in the late battle at Charlestown, behaved like an experienced officer, as well as an excellent soldier. To set forth particulars of his conduct would be tedious. We would beg leave to say, in the person of this said negro, centres a brave and gallant soldier. The reward due to so great and distinguished a character, we submit to the Congress."
Cambridge, Dec. 5, 1755.

Was Benjamin Franklin a Socialist?

2010-09-23T16:41:00.000-07:00

I am now hearing that the mandating of health insurance of individuals so that the more responsible no longer pay for the irresponsible who can pay but don't is "Un-American and a Socialistic blasphemy".

I wonder what Benjamin Franklin would have to say about this attitude toward mandating individuals to meet a common need. HHHMmmmmmm!!

****************************************

Under (Benjamin) Franklin's goading, a group of thirty men of Philadelphia came together to form the Union Fire Company on December 7, 1736. Their equipment included "leather buckets, with strong bags and baskets (for packing and transporting goods), which were to be brought to every fire. The blaze battlers met monthly to talk about fire prevention and fire-fighting methods.

Homeowner's were mandated to have leather fire-fighting buckets in their houses.

Incidentally, the one thing that Franklin said gave him the most satisfaction of all his accomplishments was his co-founding, by a combination of public funding from the city of Philadelphia and private donors, of Pennsylvania Hospital, the first hospital in the Colonies, "to care for the sick, poor and insane who were wandering the streets of Philadelphia".

Well, Today IS Another Day

2010-09-22T09:34:00.000-07:00

The baby chicks my friend brought for me to chick-sit yesterday, (just before the power outage, and only those who have nurtured newly hatched chickens know how upsetting that was) are doing well.

I am working on this artsy-crafty thing for the reunion and on Reunion Day I want all smart alecky comments on the results held at a minimum please!

Let’s just say it involved wallpaper scraps, spray-on glue and Styrofoam..

Now, in addition to all my socks being brown from the newly applied floor stain that all but one experts polled say will NEVER dry, (I’m betting on the one) and the seat of all my jeans sticking to everything I sit on, my fingers are now semi-permanently webbed with an “industrial strength” tacky glue! And the wallpaper scraps never scrapped out right to my measurements (nothing ever does) so it looks a little like a Home Depot decoupage thing..

I think I’ll go out and watch the baby chickens and relax.

Cleaning Glitch in Clean Land!!

2010-09-17T16:29:00.001-07:00

The cleaning and refurbishing bug has hit a wall. What can I say?? Something is wrong with the stain I applied to the floor day before yesterday. It still isn't dry! What can the matter be? Who knows?? Surely it will dry eventually and let me slather on the other stuff that's supposed to make it hard and impervious to slops, spills, hammers and other domestic tools dropped by accident!

And did I mention that we inadverdantly cut the TV cable in two? What nut bag ran it under the carpet like that anyway? (Just call me Nutbag.) And we were so proud of remembering to get new blades for the box cutter to cut the carpet with.

It took a quick but necessary trip into town to Radio Shack to sustain my TV addiction.

The Radio Shack guy spent a good deal of time explaining how the ends were to be bared, poked in to the little brass gizmos and crimped with an ingenious hand tool which he loaned me. I only messed up one end and I thought that was pretty good for someone as unmechanical as myself but the fact remains that BOTH ends had to be workable.

However my mother didn't raise any dummies so I finally figured it out and with only a yard and a half of duct tape, the connection is working perfectly!

I would write more but I need to start working at getting the Red Walnut (whoever saw a red walnut?) stain off the bottom of my feet.

Winter is Coming

2010-09-16T13:34:00.000-07:00

Winter is coming and I have the cleanup-paint-up, fix-up bug.

Don't ask me why. I never get the Spring Cleaning thing but this time of year I have an urgent need to not spend a long winter in dismal dirt and disaray.. (I love alliteration.)

Last week Brian and I tore up and drug out the old carpet.

That left us looking at 100 year old oak floors. There were three options. Lay new carpet. (I can't afford it.) Hire someone to lovingly refinish the old wood (I can't afford it) and freeze our butts off this winter, ...or compromise. Well I compromised. We are staining the old floor a deep red something or other kind of imitation wood juice and covering it with polyurethane stuff.

We will still freeze our butts off this winter but we will do it beautifully as the floor is a great surprise! It really looks good if I do say so! And the old woodwork matches so closely that it just needs a light rub of stain to pull it all together. I am so pleased with us.. I hope I will remember all this exuberance this January.

I am tired of the living room. I did it in the old Lizzy Borden colors..(mustardy yellow walls to go with the dark 100-year-old woodwork)thinking it was just sooo Victorian, as is the house, but Lizzy has had her day and the mustardy yellow walls suck!!@

Besides that nobody extant understood when I said it was the "Lizzy Bordon style". So a nice, calm cream-white stuff is going on the walls.

Can't wait to get it done.

Where Have All the Heroes Gone?

2010-09-09T18:25:00.000-07:00

I wrote this piece nine years ago and it continues to reflect what I believe to be the truth about our country, The United States of America, and what I consider to be the greatest metropolis in the world, New York City.

**************************************

Where Have All the Heroes Gone?

On Tuesday, September 11, 2001, we found out. With absolute clarity, under profound and indelibly imprinted experience it was revealed to us. In the indisputable and universal language of disaster and despair we met our heroes..... and they are us.

Somewhere on the way to the bank...while making this the richest nation ever, during our passionate discussion of life and the value of it, during our playful moments at ballgames and on vacations, in our moments of art....sharing with our children and the world our joy of life and appreciation for the past, and in our creative moments.. as we developed the most amazing technology intended to save lives, to communicate with each other and to create and entertain....we became our own heros.

We became the people we saw in New York City, Virginia, Pennsylvania and in the skies last Tuesday.

We became firefighters that set out to climb 90 flights of stairs laden with 120 pounds of equipment needed to do their jobs and to save lives. We became priests who did not hesitate to follow them in. We became the kind of people who would not leave a man in a wheel chair behind in fear for their own lives. We became men and women who stood in line for six hours to give blood to strangers who needed that blood.

We have reared children who spent their day making peanut butter sandwiches for those waiting to hear from their lost ones. We reared children who grew up to be young men who recognized that they were to be used as part of an incredibly horrible weapon launched against the most precious symbol of our nation and decided to not let it happen.

We have become a people who may anoint any kind of leader they choose. Rich or poor, intelligent or less so, moral or immoral, sick or well, ...because in bad times, in HARD times, we lead ourselves and each other.

I do not say this with arrogance or pride. I certainly take no personal credit for this phenomenon. But I have recognized it, as many others surely have in these past few days, with the most awesome humility and gratitude.

And we in calmer ports,...in gentler mid-west, west and southern climes..............have often held New Yorkers in very low esteem. We have asked ourselves why they have to be so loud and move so fast and act so gregariously. Many of us had let ourselves become convinced that these New Yorkers were all a hard and uncaring people capable of great meanness.

Last Tuesday, September 11, 2001, we saw the heart of New Yorkers....bloodied and hurt beyond knowing....with perfect discipline and order...performing incredible feats of courage, love and faith. We have seen the value of their character, and I for one will never forget them.

September

2010-09-05T10:56:00.000-07:00

North Missouri is very pleased with itself.

For spectacular clarity of color and perfect temperatures and humidity there is nothing better than a September North Missouri day. My wandering self has always wallowed in these days, allowing a little piece of my mind to float aimlessly in their easing balm, storing up the equilibrium of September to defend against North Missouri’s harsh winters.

In September in North Missouri you do not need sunglasses. There is a natural softness to the air. Not a smudging but just a gentleness to the eye kind of thing.

And the breeze is light..kissing the cheek as it blows gently, ushering in at the end of each day a still and glowing moonlight, so very different from those maniacal wild storms of deep summer.

North Missouri is very pleased with itself in September. And so am I.

Will the Real American Please Stand Up?

2010-08-31T07:42:00.000-07:00

If George Washington had had a personal banker his name would have been Haym Salomen.

It became a regular practice -- the Revolutionary leaders' diaries testify to this- "that when money was needed for the Revolutionary War, you went to Haym Salomon."

But Salomen was more than a banker. He was a gambler and he gambled his life and his fortune on a new country based on a new idea.

Sympathizing with the patriot cause, Solomon joined the New York branch of The Sons of Liberty. In September 1776, he was arrested as a spy but the British pardoned him in order to use his abilities as an interpreter for their Hession Mercenaries.

Solomon used his position to help prisoners of the British escape and encouraged the Hessians to desert the war effort. In 1778 Solomon was arrested again and sentenced to death, but he managed to escape, whereupon he made his way with his family to the rebel capital in Philadelphia.

Tortured and imprisoned by the British more than once., Haym Salomon negotiated many loans for the Colonies from France and Holland, but never took a commission for himself.

According to legend, General Washington's appeal for funds with which to maintain his ragged army at Valley Forge came to Salomon on Yom Kippur. Salomen reportedly turned to the congregation and suspended services to secure pledges for what Washington asked of him.

Washington, in August of 1781, struggling constantly with Congress and the individual states to raise money for his army, saw a chance that should not be missed. Washington with his main army and the Count de Rochambeau with his French army could take Yorktown if they could just get there.
(Ever heard of Yorktown? It was that little battle that won the war and created the new United States of America.)

Washington needed $20,000 for food and forage and wagons and clothing but Congress turned him down.

Congress had no powers of direct taxation and had to rely on requests for money directed to the states, which habitually refused.

When told there were no funds and no credit available, Washington gave a simple but eloquent order: "Send for Haym Salomon".

Haym again came through, and the $20,000 was raised. Washington conducted the Yorktown campaign, which proved to be the final battle of the Revolution.

The Treaty of Paris was signed on September 3rd, 1783, and ended the Revolutionary War, but the financial problems of the newly established Country were not over. It was Haym Salomon who managed, time-after-time, to raise the money to bailout the debt ridden government.

In 1893, a bill was presented before the 52nd United States Congress ordering a gold medal be struck in recognition of Solomon's contributions to the United States.

The Congressional Record of March 25, 1975 reads:
When Robert Morris was appointed Superintendent of Finance, he turned to Solomon for help in raising the money needed to carry on the (Rev) war and later to save the emerging nation from financial collapse. Solomon advanced direct loans to the government and also gave generously of his own resources to pay the salaries of government officials and army officers. With frequent entries of "I sent for Haym Solomon", Morris' diary for the years 1781–84 records some 75 transactions between the two men.

Will the Real American Please Stand Up??

2010-08-31T07:39:00.000-07:00

If like me, you are a proud and patriotic white Christian American that’s great. But whatever would make us think that we were the only “real” Americans? The facts just don’t support that.

The current crop of radio talk show hosts, (almost all of whose ancestors were late-comers to “the American Experience” having arrived with the 19^th century influx of German and European immigration,) have mysteriously convinced many United States citizens that they are the “special” ones who carry the “white man’s burden” and are under constant threat from foreigners of other races, religions and complexions who have “stolen their country”.

They pledge, with copious tears and hoarse shouts, their intention of “taking it back”.. They propound the idea that “their America” and that of their listeners, was thought up, fought for, financed and otherwise earned by none other than white, mostly protestant Christians.

You don’t have to know a LOT of history to see how wrong…and how dangerous… this concept is.

Although most of our Northern European ancestors have been spared our American denigration, old Europe’s mindset continued alive and well in regard to Jews, Blacks, Hispanics, Asians, Scots, the Irish and French. In spite of their enormous contributions these groups have, in their turn, suffered the hatred and condescension of their fellow Americans.

But this was and is wrong headedness, and anathema to what America really is.

********************************

Separation of Church and State is Dead?

2010-08-30T06:35:00.000-07:00

In 1791 Thomas Jefferson led the fight for religious freedom and separation of church and state in his native Virginia. After a long and bitter debate, Jefferson's statute for religious freedom passed the Virginia state legislature.

In Jefferson's words, there was now "freedom for the Jew and the Gentile, the Christian and the Mohammedan, the Hindu and infidel of every denomination." The bill guaranteed, in Jefferson's own words, "that no man shall be compelled to frequent or support any religious worship, place or ministry whatsoever."

It also guaranteed, as was the intent as stated in Jefferson's personal correspondence, that no one should suffer in any way for his "religious opinions or belief." When the First Amendment to the Constitution went into effect in 1791, Jefferson's principle of separation of church and state became part of the supreme law of the land.

Earliest legislation and several treaties entered into by the United States in those early years reflected and vigorously reinforced this position and should make very clear the intention of the founding fathers.

The following treaty seems the most apropo for these times.

In 1797 the Treaty of Tripole in Article 11 reads:

Article 11. As the government of the United States of America is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion; as it has in itself no character of enmity against the laws, religion, or tranquility, of Musselmen; and, as the said States never entered into any war, or act of hostility against any Mahometan nation, it is declared by the parties, that no pretext arising from religious opinions, shall ever produce an interruption of the harmony existing between the two countries.

The treaty was signed at Tripoli on November 4, 1796 and at Algiers on January 3, 1797, finally receiving ratification from the U.S. Senate on June 7, 1797 and signed by President John Adams on June 10, 1797.

I Believe Roger Clemens

2010-08-23T18:14:00.000-07:00

I believe Roger Clemens. I believe Roger because I heard him testify before Congress last year or whenever it was and he sounded so sincere!

As a total needle-coward myself I can understand perfectly and believe absolutely in the ability of a person to block out all needle experiences. It is my habit to go off in a mental La La land any time I am confronted with a needle..thus rendering my memory of it totally void.

Even if 12 good men (or women) and true decide that he is a total prick (is this a pun?) and has needle tracks a mile wide up both arms I believe Roger because I have always liked the game of baseball and because I want to believe him.

My belief in Roger stems from a devotion similar to that of the religious faithful who believe Franklin Graham when he says he “loves Muslims”… or the Republican faithful who were willing to believe Sen. Larry Craig when he explained to the world about his “naturally wide stance”… or the Clinton devotees who took the old “I did not have sex with that woman..” thing totally to heart.

Sometimes the truth, no matter how incredulous, is just easier to take if you truly BELIEVE.

And so I believe Roger Clemens. I hope they publish the address of his new and upcoming federally funded residence so I can send him goody bags of goat cheese and homemade fudge. He might need a friend when the muscle starts to drop off and his athletic body resumes its former ordinariness. He may feel quite vulnerable there with all those long-timers who have had nothing else to do but pump iron for the last few years.

Washers, Dryers and Bubbles Galore

2010-08-21T08:00:00.000-07:00

(The model in this photo and her location are unidentified for fear some one may come and steal her laundry off the line.)

Dishwashers are nice and I would like to have one even though, although I hate to cook, I do not hate to do dishes in the sink the old fashioned way.

Even if I can’t actually remember being present when fire was first used by man I am old enough to still fervently appreciate hot water at the sink with bubbly grease-resistant soap in a bottle. Like washers and dryers, they are wonders not to be taken lightly.

Until I was nine years old the water in the house came only to the kitchen sink and was piped from a cistern at the back of the house. The 20^th century had advanced slowly at our house, as at our neighbors’, but at one point the small hand pump at the sink had been replaced with an honest to goodness modern faucet. It was yet another six or eight years before the bathroom arrived and with it hot water. That was followed later by a shower in the tub and after that there was no stopping us.

Before all this scientific progress, doing laundry was a day long-process done in the basement where the wringer -washer and two tubs of rinse water were set up.

The basement was a wet and dreary place lighted by a bare 60 watt bulb suspended from the ceiling with a pull string to switch it on and off. A family of toads lived year round in the northwest corner and spider webs were so thick overhead I used to think they held the house up. The redeeming features of the basement were the water spigot above the washing machine and the drain in the southeast corner.

In the early years the water was heated in a great oblong pot that covered completely the double-burnered electric plate on the wooden bench in the corner. I remember Mom emptying the steaming water into the washer. How she even lifted it is a wonder. Later, the hot water heater made the job a lot easier.

The first step was to sort everything by color into piles; whites, colored, bedding, denim/work clothes etc.. equal to load capacity. We had a large family so there were generally 10-12 loads.

Then powdered soap and bleach was put in the wash water. The first rinse tub was left plain but “bluing” was put in the second rinse tub. Bluing was just that..a blueish dye that made white things really white.

The first load into the washer was generally bed linen then dishcloths, washcloths, white shirts, underwear and everything that needed a strong bleaching. The washer was turned on and the load was left to wash for about 20 minutes.

During this first wash a large pan of starch was set to cook on the stove. Almost all of the colored things: shirts, blouses, work clothes etc. were starched so there had to be quite a lot of it made up. The powdered starch came in a box, had to be mixed and cooked to a thick paste separately.

At our house a pot of beans, having spent the night soaking in the double boiler on the kitchen stove, was set to cook while the wash was going on. With cornbread, that made a ready supper after a grueling day running up and down the basement stairs lugging baskets of wet laundry.

Each load had to be run through the wringer from washer to first tub to second tub and again to starch. The things to be starched were dipped in a dishpan piece by piece after the last rinse and run through the wringer again.

After each load was finished it was taken to the side-yard. Small white things, dish cloths, washcloths etc. were spread on clean grass to bleach further in the sun. Everything else was hung. The clothesline was a set of four heavily wired lines stretched from poles about 30 feet apart. The weight of the wet laundry made the lines sag almost to the ground so 2x2 poles or just very long, trimmed branches from the woods were used at intervals to prop the lines up.

When the clothes were dry they were brought in and the things to be ironed, which was pretty much everything except the towels and wash cloths and underwear, were spread in a pile, sprinkled with water, either with your hand or with a pop bottle with a sprinkler attachment stuck into it, rolled up tightly and put into a laundry basket. Like most people’s laundry baskets, ours were used wooden bushel fruit baskets. After sitting in the basket for a couple of hours or sometimes all night they were uniformly but slightly moist and just right for ironing.

Our ironings were generally at least two baskets of tightly rolled and packed shirts, blouses, slacks, skirts, dresses, tablecloths, hankerchiefs, work clothes and blue jeans.

This was a lot of work.

Doing dishes was also a job to be remembered. Before we had climbed that last rung of the social ladder to hot water in the house and got our very own hot water heater, dish water had to be heated on the kitchen stove. This was done in a very large, heavy teakettle designed for tasks like this that far exceeded simple tea making.

Our kettle contained four steel balls, about the size of large marbles, that rattled around inside the kettle and served to keep the lime build up off the inside of the kettle.

The kettle was very heavy and for a long while, after the task of dishwashing fell to me, someone bigger had to lift the kettle and pour the steaming water into the dishpan in the sink. Even for an adult two hands with potholders were used to carry and pour the kettle of scalding water.

The modern version of dishwashing soap at the time was an all purpose powdered detergent, (we used Oxydol) that was also used as laundry soap. The fantasy of dishwater that actually had bubbles and did not immediately produce an itchy slime on your arms was just that, a fantasy.

But even more important than the actual washing of the dishes was the “scalding” In our house this was a never-to-be-neglected or carelessly done process. Mother was a great believer in the axiom Dirty Dishes Kill People. Unscalded dishes spread diseases like the plague, typhoid, cholera, tuberculosis, dysentery etc. It must be true because we ALWAYS scalded and not one of us caught the plague, typhoid, cholera, TB or any serious dysentery! We often got scalded ourselves but we never caught the plague, typhoid, cholera, etc..etc..

The scalding was done by propping the dishes up in a second dishpan, pouring the water from the kettle, then stacking to drain on a tea towel on the counter top. Dish drainers came much later. They are a wonderful invention. Every inch of every item had to be scalded. If you got lazy and missed an inch that could have been the very inch wherein lurked the germ that could have wiped out the whole family! No one wanted that responsibility.

I don’t know which is the bigger luxury: my automatic washer and dryer..or my bottle of Dawn Liquid Dish Soap with its lovely ungreasy sink full of bubbles.

Ernie Pyle-War Correspondent

2010-08-15T18:37:00.000-07:00

Ernie Pyle Aug 3, 1900-April 18, 1945

Ernie Pyle is and will remain one of my most profoundly inspiring heroes. Pyle was no warrior, no strategist, no great thinker.

Pyle was a writer.

He was a WWII war correspondent that forced America to see and feel and understand what war really was and what it did to men who had to fight it and to people in far away places with strange names whose lives were overwhelmed by it.

His telling of the war and the stories of the soldiers who fought it did not come out of some warm and cozy press room.

Pyle's reports were born in muddy ditches and fire bombed streets and bloody roadways and were the awful truths lived by exhausted, heart-sick, home-sick men.

The words he wrote, the truths he told and the soldiers' stories, which he shared and so conscientiously reported, are still profoundly gut wrenching. LR

Excerpts from Ernie Pyle's War as he wrote it:

....to the fighting soldier that phase of the war is behind. It was left behind after his first battle. His blood is up. He is fighting for his life, and killing now for him is as much a profession as writing is for me.
Ernie Pyle

Swinging first and swinging to kill is all that matters now.
Ernie Pyle

The men are walking. They are fifty feet apart, for dispersal. Their walk is slow, for they are dead weary, as you can tell even when looking at them from behind. Every line and sag of their bodies speaks their inhuman exhaustion.
Ernie Pyle

In their eyes as they pass is not hatred, not excitement, not despair, not the tonic of their victory - there is just the simple expression of being here as though they had been here doing this forever, and nothing else.
Ernie Pyle

The front-line soldier wants it to be got over by the physical process of his destroying enough Germans to end it. He is truly at war. The rest of us, no matter how hard we work, are not.
Ernie Pyle

War makes strange giant creatures out of us little routine men who inhabit the earth.
Ernie Pyle

I've been immersed in it too long. My spirit is wobbly and my mind is confused. The hurt has become too great.
Ernie Pyle

It was a night when London was ringed and stabbed with fire.....
The closest fires were near enough for us to hear the crackling flames and the yells of firemen. Little fires grew into big ones even as we watched. Big ones died down under the firemen's valor only to break out again later.
Ernie Pyle

Someday when peace has returned to this odd world I want to come to London again and stand on a certain balcony on a moonlit night and look down upon the peaceful silver curve of the Thames with its dark bridges.
Ernie Pyle

He never did.

Pyle died at 45 years of age, killed by sniper fire on the tiny island of Ie Shima, off the coast of Okinawa in the Pacific, April 18, 1945, only four months before Allied Victory over Japan was declared on August 14.

A Great Day!

2010-08-11T01:00:00.000-07:00

Well, today is a great day!

My mind wasn’t much made up on the subject for the first half of the day, (it is now 12:00pm AKA noon.)

But after thinking on it, I can come up with quite the little list of positives that keep me keeping on.

#1: It has now been 162 days since I last dropped my cell phone in the pot!

Hey! High tech stuff is hard for my generation! But I think I have truly mastered the cell-phone-in-the-pot thing.

#2: I have not fallen out of bed since September 21, 2004

(that’s when I first moved to the new house and being totally disoriented in the middle of the night, rolled over the wrong way. It could happen to anyone.)

#3 I am pretty sure I don’t have worms.

I don’t seem to have any of the symptoms of that guy on Medical Mysteries that wound up with a 30-ft long tape worm. And besides, I never travel below the Mason/Dixon line just for that reason. I understand parasites really only love places that don’t freeze your monkey shut at least four times a year.

#4 My last bank statement shows that there were 19 days last month wherein (whereat?) I was not overdrawn!!

This is a great confidence builder. Of course if you’ve never BEEN overdrawn at the bank you will obviously just have to go through life feeling inferior on the subject. Sorry about that.

#5 My sore toe doesn’t hurt anymore.

You know, (if you don’t I’ll be happy to tell you about it) the one I broke five years ago kicking that goat.

AND:

#6 That itchy spot on my head wasn't lice after all but just that gash healing where the stapler fell on me last week.

Yes, today is a Great Day!!

Eat Better and Cheaper

2010-08-10T12:02:00.000-07:00

Save Money-Eat Better-Stress Less

“Oh Lord!,” I can just hear my grown kids groaning now.

I'm always giving advice that nobody wants and NEVER takes but for what it's worth....

Grandma’s Rules Are as Follows:

1: Quit Eating Junk

2: Treat Your Kids Like They’re Important

3: Keep Your Eye on the Goal

Just to clear the deck I will admit, and assume that everyone knows, that I was a lousy mother, my children were often starved for junk food and were forced to wear homemade clothes well into the mid-years of elementary school. My oldest son spent his first hard-earned paycheck on a store bought haircut. Of course these aren’t the only examples of my lousy motherhood but they are the ones I can bear to share publicly and the only ones pertinent here.

I was also blessed with kids that were notorious for eating three times the amount the children of my friends and relatives did and challenged with having to care for them on about a quarter of the resources.

But from all that deprivation and struggle I did learn a few things just in case anyone is interested.

Quit Eating Junk

Feed Your Family Real Food:

First of all let me suggest that you only use those fancy cookbooks that you bought at all those garage sales or got as birthday gifts, anniversary gifts etc. for night reading. About all they are good for is to make a person set such high standards for cooking that they never get any real cooking done. On top of that they make a person feel so inadequate. I have a whole shelf full and a drawer full to boot and I am totally inadequate.!!

To feed your family real food you must buy real food not what ADM (Archer Daniels Midland) and the American Cardboard and Plastic Industries want you to think is food. Don’t go up any center aisle of the store except the baking and condiment aisle. (Flour, Sugar, Lard, Tea, Coffee, Ketchup, Mustard..well you get my drift) and the canned food aisle.

The periphery of almost all stores is where everything you really need is located. That’s meat, milk, cheese, bread, vegetables and fruit. If it’s in a box, bag, or frozen it should be a small addition to any meal and/or a rare treat. Treat it like a treat and don’t do it often.

Treat Your Kids Like They’re Important

Your Children Are Not Family Pets.

Expect Them to Help. They will surprise you if they think what they’re doing is important.

Keep Your Eye on the Goal:

Don’t rob Your Family of Good Meals or Your Precious Time

The goal is to provide a fast, pleasant, nutritious meal with the time to enjoy it. For good or ill, if there are children, the home is a training ground. Good food is better food. Less stress is better than more stress.

If you work outside the home, (and who doesn’t?) don’t cook more than an hour or two a week. Here’s how: Crock Pot, Crock Pot, Crock Pot. Grill, Grill, Grill. Bake, Bake Bake.

Sample Weekly Shopping:

Buy two whole chickens, one five-pound roast, five pork chops, ten pounds of hamburger and a package of either short ribs, spare ribs or pork steak for BBQ. One pack of meatloaf seasoning (McCormicks or store brand), 5 pound bag of small red potatoes, a two pound bag of carrots, four cans green beans, four cans carrots, four cans creamed or whole kernel corn, a stalk of celery and a bag of salad greens, the darker the better, (Iceberg lettuce has little food value.) four boxes mac and cheese, one pack of spaghetti, four boxes instant brown rice, one package frozen noodles, 3 packages of pre-baked hot rolls, a big package of frozen french fries, two cans of your favorite beans, a dozen eggs and a couple of jars of Ragu.

This will give you…

2 chicken dinners

1 beef roast dinner

1 meatloaf dinner

1 grilled hamburger dinner

1 spaghetti and meatball dinner

1 Grilled Pork Chop dinner

1 Barbecue (pork or beef)

None of the above will take any more time to fix than you would spend waiting in a fast food line or waiting for the Pizza delivery boy.

This list allows for a couple of throw-out recipes (AKA My-family-wouldn't-touch-that-with a- 10-foot-pole) and one night of carry-out or eating out. They should even each other out.

In The Kitchen

The following should take about ten minutes.

Well, you've made it home from the store. Divide hamburger into five two-pound portions, put each of three portions in separate zip lock bags and freeze. These you can use to grill. Take them out the night before to thaw in the frig or..remember..the nuker does have a “thaw” thingy on it.

Take one portion and toss into a bowl with a handful of oatmeal, an egg, (be sure and break the egg) salt and pepper, and a dollop of milk. A dollop is what you get if you start to pour milk and catch yourself just in time when you meant to pour beer. Roll into little meatballs, put back into a quart freezer bag. Now I know you can buy little plastic bags of little plastic meatballs but they are about four times the cost and four times the added chemicals besides being frozen in plastic for a month or two. This process will take you about four minutes if you don’t have to hunt for the salt and pepper, or the egg etc..

Freeze meatballs, chickens, pork or beef for BBQ and beef roast.

Sample Fast Meals

Weekend Day One.

This should take about 7 minutes max.

Meat loaf, potatoes, salad and hot rolls

Mix one unfrozen portion of hamburger with meatloaf seasoning mix, a handful of oatmeal, an egg and a blob of salsa, taco sauce, ketchup..whatever. Place in loaf pan or round casserole. Drizzle catsup on top and put in 350 degree oven.

Take four potatoes, grease with any grease but motor oil, poke holes in the top with fork and put in oven with meatloaf.

Cook about an hour until meatloaf is no longer bleeding. Serve with some WASHED salad and encourage eating the skin of the potato. Potato skin is loaded with good stuff.

Toss a half dozen store bought hot rolls in to heat for about the three minutes it’s going to take you to throw the salad into a bowl. I don’t care what you put on the potato or the salad. You have already worked off any fat you might get from sour cream, Ranch Dressing etc. poking holes in the potatoes.

Weekend Day 2:

This Should Take About 7 minutes actual work and another 20 to sit and contemplate the grill and listen to the neighbor’s dog bark.

Grilled pork chops, grilled potatoes, green beans and bread and butter

Slice and boil (do not peel) five red potatoes for about ten minutes. Pour off water and put potatoes on a piece of tinfoil that you have greased with oleo. Drop a blob of oleo on top of them, salt and pepper, fold the foil around them and stick on grill.

Take pork chops and do anything fancy you want to with them..dip in dressing..season with lemon pepper..lay a slice of pineapple on top after they’ve been turned once or just grill the dang things with salt and pepper. Don’t overcook but make sure they are done. Raw pork is a real no no.

Put a blob of oleo in a sauce pan and dump in a can of green beans.

Serve with bread and butter.

Any Weekday:

Before leaving for work put whatever meat you bought for BBQ in crock pot and pour BBQ sauce over it, set crock pot on low.

Serve with your favorite canned beans and baked fries.

Any Weekday:

15 minutes

Stewed chicken. Brown rice, salad and corn or green beans.

Put frozen chicken in crock pot on low before leaving for work. Add salt and pepper,

and a branch of celery. (You can take the bag of guts out of the chicken right before serving when it is all cooked and juicy and no one will ever know the difference. In fact in later years your children will think people are crazy who don't do it like that.)

As a safety measure set crock pot on metal surface such as your stove or a cookie sheet across one side of the sink. Remember do not run water with a plugged in crock pot in the sink. If you're really paranoid put the dang thing in the garage on concrete. When you get home, ladle off about a cup of broth into a sauce pan and bring to a boil. Add some instant brown rice (follow the box direction here.) Serve with salad, corn green beans or whatever.

Any Weekday:

About 7 minutes

Roast beef, red potatoes and carrots.

Put frozen beef roast into crock pot in the morning. Peel an onion and put in whole. Peel three carrots and put in whole. Wash and put in four or five red potatoes, unpeeled and whole. Do crock pot on low as you did with the chicken.

Serve with anything else you want to.

Any Weekday:

About 15 minutes

Grill Hamburgers with mac and cheese, pork and beans etc.

If you forgot to take the hamburger out of the freezer thaw it in micro wave for grilling. Serve with cheese, cheap iceberg lettuce, sliced tomatoes etc…Mac and cheese from box per directions takes about ten minutes so start it before you put the hamburgers on. Pork and Beans..Applesauce..whatever..

Any Weekday:

About 20 Minutes

Roast chicken and Noodles, corn, salad and/or fresh celery

Plop a whole frozen chicken, salt and pepper, a branch of celery and a chunk of onion in crock pot before going to work. Set on low. When you get home remove chicken to bowl or platter and cover to keep warm. Dig out the slimy cooked celery, onions etc and do whatever you want with them. Dump a bag of frozen noodles in broth in crock pot and cook on high ‘til noodles are done. (My crock pot will come to a boil on high and the noodles cook quickly. If yours doesn’t, dump noodles and broth into large pan and boil until done.)

While noodles are cooking put a blob of oleo into a sauce pan and dump in a can of corn.

Serve chicken and noodles with corn and salad or raw celery.

Any Weekday:

15 minutes

Spaghetti and meatballs.

Set a package of spaghetti to cooking. (Just break in half and put in a large pan of water. Poke periodically to keep it from glomming together. Brown hamburger balls, (remember you made the little suckers the day you bought groceries?) turning occasionally, in a fairly large skillet. Turn skillet on low and cook with lid for a few minutes. Ad Ragu and heat until hot. Serve with Italian bread and salad or broccoli or something green.

Well, I got that off my chest!!

The Catalogue People

2010-08-09T03:11:00.000-07:00

I was born in the dining room before the upstairs was finished on a swelteringly hot day and I was very fat.

Being my mother’s seventh child there really was no need for a doctor as she had done it six times before but he was called anyway and his contribution to the event was to tell Dad, “Well, Mike, maybe this will be the lucky one as she is “seven come eleven.”

You have to know a little bit about the game of Craps, to understand his thinking on this. Craps is a dice game played by gamblers and Dad was famous for his love of the game. In the game of Craps sevens and elevens are game changers and I was the seventh child born in the seventh month on the eleventh day. (July 11)

Shieldsy, our neighbor and Mom’s friend, assisted at my birth and tried hard to keep me cool and happy but the cooler I got the unhappier I became. As soon as Shieldsy left to fix supper for Poppy Shields and her own family Mom got me out of the basket and wrapped me up tight. She said as soon as I started to sweat she never hard another peep out of me.

I guess that’s why winters always seemed so darned cold to me. That big old house only had two zones, frigid and sweltering. Even with the huge basement furnace (as big as a modern day bathroom) that ate up the sooty coal that cost Mom $15 a ton load, the chill in winter never left and a draft always blew around our ankles and knees.

And often, on winter nights..the waiting nights..between Thanksgiving and Christmas..and then through a long January..it was just me, Mom’s sewing scissors and the last year’s Sears and Roebuck Catalogue.

Sitting at the dining room table with my legs tucked up under me and my sweater pulled down over my fingers to keep warm, I spent long, miraculous hours with the Catalogue People.

The Catalogue People were incredibly clever. They spoke, sang, played and danced with each other in an endless variety of dress, carefully selected and cut from the Men’s, Women’s and Children’s Section and played with the most marvelous toys from the Toy Section.

They pushed the baby, chosen form the Infants Section, in the most adorable baby carriage of the season. (after cutting a slit in the buggy top the baby could be slipped right in.)

The children, selected from the underwear page of the Children’s Section, wore every wonderful item of dress that I had ever desired or imagined. With their charming clothing held in place with small tabs cut at the shoulder and waist, they slept in the most exquisite nighties, swam in the most cunning swim garb and played in the brightest, most casual play clothes. For winter only the furriest, most elegant coat and hat would do.

The mother, chosen for her gentle expression and whether her arms stuck out far enough to bend the tabs in at the waist, wore incredible combinations of glamour and servitude from the Women’s Section. She always carried beautiful “Genuine Morocan Leather” purses and wore perky hats with feathers.

The father, a stalwart fellow, wore handsome hats and always faced to the right. I haven’t a clue as to why this requirement was so important but it was and I adhered to it.

All You Need to Know About Cows

2010-08-08T03:30:00.000-07:00

The Argus (Melbourne, Vic. : 1848-1954), Saturday 7 July 1945, page 23
National Library of Australia http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article972861

TIE cow is a mamal. It has six sides, left, right, and upper and
below. At the back it has a tail on which hangs a brush. With
this it sends the flies away so that they will not fall in the milk. The
head is for the purpose of growing horns, and so that the mouth can be
somewhere. The horns are to butt with. The mouth is to moo with.
Under the cow hangs the milk. It is arranged for milking.
When people milk, the milk comes, and there is never an end to
the supply. How the cow does it I have not yet realised, but it makes
more and more. The cow has a fine sense of smell; one can smell it
far away. This is the reason for the fresh air in the country.
The cow does not eat much, but what it eats it eats twice, so
that it gets enough. When it is hungry it moos, and when it says
nothing it is because all its inside is full up of grass.

-Essay by t. 10-year-old boy at Klttybrewster School, Aberdeen.

Rand Paul Thinks This is a Good Idea??

2010-08-07T04:37:00.000-07:00

Photos by Vivian Stockman

Oct. 11, 2001 marks the one-year anniversary of the nation's worst "blackwater" spill. That day, over 300 million gallons (first reports said 250 million) of sludge broke through from a coal waste slurry impoundment at Kentucky's largest mountaintop removal operation, a site owned by Martin County Coal Co., a subsidiary of Massey Energy.

The black goo, (laden with heavy metals present in coal and coal cleaning chemicals and who-know what-they-dump-in-those-impoundments) poured into Coldwater and Wolf Creeks and oozed down the Tug Fork and Big Sandy Rivers, into the Ohio, traveling 100 miles, closing down community water supplies and devastating aquatic life. The disaster "helped" place the Big Sandy on American Rivers' Most Endangered Rivers list.

Residents are upset about the slow pace of the clean-up. Some still can't drink their well water. Septic systems are not working. What's left of stream bank vegetation isn't healthy. People are worried about their health.

Still, Massey Energy insists they are a good corporate neighbor.

But the headlines the sludge disaster generates represent just one aspect of Massey's poor corporate record: Miner fatalities. Aggressive anti-union tactics. Overweight coal trucks. Deadly accident involving overweight coal trucks. Frequent blackwater "spills." Dodged worker's comp taxes.

Bring Your Own Dirt

2010-08-06T10:44:00.000-07:00

I like the story about the Scientist who became so enamored of the great strides in the scientific body of knowledge that he knew that with a few tweaks here and there man could create life from the very elements of the earth.

He was so confident that he challenged God saying, “I, too can create life. Meet me at a certain place at a certain hour and we will compete.

And God being a patient God, agreed and when they both appeared at the certain place at the certain time the exuberant scientist began immediately by scooping up a handful of earth to extract the necessary elements.

But God objected, raised his great hand and said, “My dear boy, you must bring your own dirt.”

The Art of Doing Nothing

2010-08-06T06:08:00.000-07:00

"How do you do Nothing?" asked Pooh.

"Well, it's when people call out at you just as you're going off to do it, `What are you going to do, Christopher Robin?' and you say, `Oh, nothing' and then you go and do it. It means just going along, listening to all the things you can't hear, and not bothering."

--Winnie the Pooh

2010-08-05T05:44:00.000-07:00

...when Rand Paul, who is the Republican Senate candidate for Kentucky, is asked what Harlan County (Kentucky) is famous for, this is far from the best possible response:

"I don't know," he says in an elusive accent that's not quite southern and not quite not-southern. The town of Hazard is nearby, he notes: "It's famous for, like, The Dukes of Hazzard."

The Dukes of Hazzard?!?!

(Thanks to Acrentropy for the above.)

The Harlan County War that occurred in the early 1930's during the depression occurred when the mining companies hauled in strike breakers from out of state to crush the unions and the mine workers attempted to fight back. They lost, of course. Trust me, no mine worker or his progeny is ignorant of the history, and the consequences, of the Harlan County Wars.

The significance of these events, to the rational mind, seems to supercede the TV sitcom The Dukes of Hazard.

I Think I have the Colic!!

2010-08-03T18:05:00.001-07:00

I feel like I have the colic. There is a lump of something pushing my left lower rib cage out. It feels like a big blob of air. Could it be fat?? It could possibly have been there forever just waiting for me to get fat enough and bored enough to find it! I think it is that rubbery steak I fixed for lunch. Cooking is not my best thing and I am not much of a meat eater so I think it is the steak. Just sitting there all gommed up waiting for me to notice it.

But when I turn the other way it kind of disappears! Is that normal?? I don't see how hypochondriacs can stand being one. Worrying about this air bubble is just eating up my time.

I think I will go drink another Coke and burp.

The View From the 12th Floor

2010-07-29T08:33:00.000-07:00

The View From the 12th. Floor

The view from the 12^th floor office window of my recent new best friend, the bone and joint doctor by the name of Ligenfelter, in the Pavilion Section of the sprawling North Kansas City Hospital, stretched below and away to the south and east and west like an artful diorama of industry.

The scene before me, the distant Kansas City skyline, a broad and winding river, acres of flat-topped warehouses edged in by miles of busy streets and more acres of railroad tracks and their slowly moving cargos lent a lazy somnolence to the scene that tended to lull the senses.

But as I looked out across that river-bottom land, seeking out things and buildings and places familiar in my memories, it came to me that I was looking at the history of my family. What we were and what we had become had its inception in this small strip of flat land bounded by great rivers and their bridges, tall Loess bluffs and fields of fertile loam and yellow clay. It lay before me as an opened book lies upon a nightstand, waiting to be read.

To the east, just left of Harrah’s, the new (relatively speaking) gambling boat, the swift current of the Missouri pushed and rippled in orderly rows of roiling motion on to the east and a little bit north at this point, only to turn east and south again to continue it’s rolling, pushing advance to the even mightier Mississippi at the northern edge of St Louis, clear over on the Eastern edge of the state.

But in 1844 it was here and upon this river, up from the Mississippi, in its turn up from the Port of New Orleans, and on to St. Joseph, that Margaret Mary and Joseph Whiskerchen, our Great-Great Grandparents, and their children, newly from Rheinborg, Germany, brought everything they owned to find and farm a new home. Our Great Grandmother Mary Margaret Whiskerchen, the first of this family to be born in this country, married John Lewis and raised 14 children, one of whom was our grandmother, Eliza Lewis Stock.

And to the west the traffic of Burlington Street, that is actually Oak Street to the north and Oak Street to the south and becomes 71 Highway even further south, can be seen in patches between tall buildings and a few tall trees. This is a very old thoroughfare and although unpaved in 1908, it did go clear to the river where the ferry shuttled back and forth.

In that year it was a ferry that brought my mother’s mother, a pregnant-but-unwed, college educated, Missouri farm girl to the South bank of the Missouri where she was provided a carriage to take her up the hill to The Willows, a sanctuary for girls like her, and a well known baby mill, at 20^th and Main. By raising my eyes just a little and there to the center of the Kansas City skyline and a little beyond I knew that that was where my mother was born.

Adopted by a North Missouri farm family, she told me of riding her pony on the loess bluff on this north side of the river overlooking what is now 210 hwy and of sitting her pony and looking out across at the limestone bluffs of Cliff Drive on the opposite side and down upon the hayfields that stretched from the foot of the bluff upon which she sat into what became Armour Road.

In 1912 the Armour-Swift-Burlington (ASB) Bridge at the end of Burlington Street was finally finished. By 1927 the bridge had suffered a fire at one section and needed other repairs and Dad was one of the fortunate who was employed, on that project.

Almost directly down and in front of my high window stands the tall square towers of what is left of the old mills where for over a hundred years cereal grains were ground, stored and shipped. Perhaps they still are. Dad worked at Corn Products, just east of the mills, and always came home wrapped in the North Town scent of warm ground grain.

And I know that the street that I look down upon goes to the west to the corner of Swift and Armour and the old Crown Drug Store where after school my sister served malts and grilled hamburgers and cold Coca Cola’s. And there on Armour was the hardware store where my brother worked after school and Saturdays and the huge, stark National Belles Hess building, the garment factory where my other sister, after her marriage, worked until she was too far pregnant to climb the stairs or stand the heat. And on that street my cousin’s filling station was the only chance to fill up until you got “over the river” or back north several miles.

And the Armour Theater, where my very first date and I, (we were 12 years old and he had walked five miles to escort me to the bus stop into Northtown,) shivered and screamed through the bleakness of The Hunchback of Notre Dame in black and white.

And 12 floors below me, in the single-floor three-wing infancy of this very hospital, my youngest daughter was born.

That small, sterile room so empty of all but myself just a few minutes ago had somehow become full to bursting, thanks to the view from the 12^th floor office window of my recent new best friend, the bone and joint doctor.

Captured: America in Color from 1939-1943 – Plog Photo Blog

2010-07-28T18:13:00.000-07:00

Captured: America in Color from 1939-1943 – Plog Photo Blog

2010-07-25T17:23:00.000-07:00

Memoirs Chapter 2:

A Different Kind of Mother

Our mother was not like other mothers. She was hard to love and harder to like. Independent and unbending, she had few friends and regarded most of the world, including her children, who mostly reciprocated her lack of natural affection, as unworthy of her interest.

She was meticulous about her person and of a late evening, winter and summer, in those days before indoor plumbing, we were all ordered to bed and she began her bath.

The night I, having slipped quietly downstairs on some forgotten errand, saw Mother at her bath changed her forever for me.

Pale and naked in the moonlight from the window above the sink and its small pan of hot water, her body gleamed like the inside of a sea shell, cool and incandescent. The flesh of her breasts, flattened by the needs of seven infants, was only a shadow against her upper body and the smooth roundness of her abdomen shone starkly white in the silverness of the window’s moonlight.

The scent of her bath soap and the vinegar she used to rinse her once-red hair filled the room.

Her very luminescence, in the dark kitchen of our home that night, seemed out of place and time,..a visitor from some powerful other world that valued more a stricter code..a cooler hand and heart..that did not belong here with us and certainly not to us. The hot winds and dry suns of the Midwest were anathema to such a one.

Before me was a person meant for harsh and vicious winters and the pale meagerly glint of a Celtic summer. Such a one required friends more fast and foes more ferocious than the weak genetic pool she was stuck with.

Of course I could not come anywhere near verbalizing these thoughts at the time, even to myself, but the experience was a powerful one and it stayed with me to be pondered upon and sorted out as facts came later, drifting into my life as our lives unfolded.

The Art of Pig Watching

2010-07-25T08:00:00.000-07:00

Perhaps you spurn the art of pig-watching and consider it a waste of time. Perhaps you have never had the opportunity to watch too many pigs and are ignorant on the subject. And perhaps you have just never been so lucky.

But those of us lucky enough to have had the opportunity and taken the time to spend an hour or two on a good day pig-watching are permanently blessed with a deep knowledge of what life appreciation is all about. If you have never watched a 300 pound sow in a 6-inch deep mud puddle you have no yardstick to determine what real contentment looks like.

It doesn’t take much to maintain a pig’s ordinary, run of the mill daily happiness factor. Typically jolly fellows and girls, they live and let live and require little emotional support. I have never seen a depressed pig.

But it takes a good puddle to send a pig into the kind of ecstasy that stays with you.

My first pig venture with Gretchen and Gertrude and the inimitable Festus (described in an earlier Blog) were eventually followed by a couple I referred to as Ma and Pa Kettle.

Beautiful black Hamps with a white band completely around their middles, their naming was somewhat of a misnomer in that unlike the original Hollywood Kettles whose cleanliness and personal habits supposedly left a lot to be desired, MY Kettles were very tidy people.

Their bathroom habits were discreet and their bedding area was moved, at intervals chosen by them, to different pasture spots almost every night resulting in a clean bed.

However, due to the odiferousness of the pig reputation in general I chose a spot for the pig lot down in the northeast corner of the main pasture. (closer to my neighbor’s place than mine.) This made pig-watching a little inconvenient but we’re kind of short on entertainment here in North Missouri so I didn’t mind making the trip down the gravel to the pig pasture.

Whenever company came the entertainment agenda always included a jaunt “down to see the pigs” and we would lean on the fence posts and discuss stuff and watch the Kettles in their pursuit of the maximum pleasure derivable from three acres of grass and the mud from a small spring that ran along the side of their yard.

Sometimes in the summer when the spring dried up, being a true spring and only wet when it was actually spring, I would try to fill the trough with water at least once a day just for the show. It took the Kettles about 45 seconds to upend the trough , scoot it out of the way and plop into their very own self-made mud hole. Little eyes blinking in rapture, snouts whiff-whiffing and smurfing in the muddy ripples, squirming contendedly on one side, only getting up to drop with a splat onto the other side like a Brooklynite in Miami taking the sun…their pleasure was downright contagious and kind of inspiring.

In no time, because of the shallowness of the mud, they would begin to look like Oreos in reverse..soft gooey on the two outsides with a strip of dry and bristly in between. Often they would drift off to sleep on the wet bed of their cool and pleasant spa and not wake until the sun had dried the mud on their sides and turned them into what would then look like Navajo bake ovens.

But generally I did my pig watching at days end, when after work I would stop at the barn, fill the bucket with feed and head on down to the pig lot and spend a relaxing half hour watching the Kettles enjoy life.

Pigs are not all that dumb, (although not as smart as some people would have you believe) and the Kettles soon came to recognize the sound of my truck turning the corner a quarter of a mile up the gravel as I turned off the blacktop. Heck, maybe they heard the truck before that. Who knows how far pigs can hear when they are thinking about food?

I might never have known about there ability to anticipate my arrival at all but one night they, being just too clever by half, had managed to get under the fence and decided to come to meet me. The sight of the Kettles trotting up the road, in happy silhouette just there where the gravel of the road to the east met sky, was a sight to see. They were so pleased with themselves it was impossible not to be happy with them.

Sorry to say, this was the end of pig farming for me. That one taste of freedom was too much for the Kettles and their desire to see the world was beyond my pig fencing skills. But I do miss the pig watching at the end of the day.

Inspection Time

2010-07-24T01:00:00.000-07:00

Oh Boy, Oh Boy Oh Boy…this is really good news. I know I whine and complain a lot but this is REALLY good news.

I just this morning, this very morning, had my 15-year-old Buick inspected and retagged for two years and it is not only not even the end of the month but it only cost me $85!

This may seem like a minimal boon to those unaware of my relationship with Steve, my mechanic, or his capacity to hold my fate in his hands but around here it is a big %$@@**&$ deal?

For 15 years I have, at the very last minute, thrown myself upon his mercy and he has always managed to save me from pedestrian life by simply adding a few sets of brakes, new mufflers, a new tire or two etc. And I, whipped and beaten by the State and my own procrastination, slumping across his greasy counter, would commence to write a check that he and I both knew might bounce at least once.

Strangely enough these checks began to assume a terrible similarity in that they all exceeded $100! Over the years even our conversations on this matter have begun to be a little redundant.

“See these little wiry things sticking out of the side of your tires here, Laura?” says Steve, my mechanic. “Well, yes I noticed that.” say I, “What do you suppose the matter is?”

And Steve would say, “Well, the matter is Laura that this car won’t pass with these tires.”

And I would try not to let Steve see how rattled I was at the possibility of the cost of a new set of tires but he must be a good guesser because he would say, “I might have some used ones around here good enough to pass and other than that it’s just a few replacement bulbs and a new wiper blade on the passenger side…(I never replace that one..my passengers are better off not seeing anything.) ..and that should get you by.”

And I say “How much will that be all together, Steve?” and he would get out his greasy little receipt book and figure on it with his Independent Farmer’s Bank ball point pen and it would always come out to “…can’t say exactly Laura but it looks like about $100 or maybe a little more.” And that’s what it would be including the “little more.”

Or he might say, “See how that bungy cord you have holding the hood down allows the hood to flop up and down, Laura?” (That was on the old pick-up)..And I would say, “I plan to get a new bungy cord the very next time I’m in town, Steve.” But he says, “You been saying that for awhile, Laura but you really need to get that latch fixed. It won’t pass with a bungy cord.” And I would say, “Well, can you do it?” and he would say “I think so, but I’ll have to order a spring…(thingy)” and I say, “Well, how much do you think it will be all together?”

And out would come the little receipt book and the Independent Farmer’s Bank ball point pen and it would always come out to “…can’t say exactly Laura but it looks like about $100 or maybe a little more.” And that’s what it would be plus a little more.

And that’s why this is such REALLY good news. I know there’s not that much difference between $85 and $100. Yes, I know that. But it’s the TREND that’s encouraging.

Maggie, an Honorable Partner

2010-07-23T07:21:00.000-07:00

As one of a large litter of pups left in a dog kennel to starve following the removal of their mother, Maggie, the only survivor, managed to squirm under the chain link fence and get rescued by a horrified neighbor. The lady happened to have a friend willing to care for her and when she was about six months old, a teenager in dog years, I answered the ad that read: “Blue Heeler needs a home” and Maggie came to the farm.

It didn’t take long for Maggie to become an integral part of the farm and within a year she was what you might call a full partner. My only requirements of her in the beginning were that she not leave the place and not to kill poultry.

Her only requirements of me were that she be allowed to stay as near me as possible as much as possible and that I would listen to “dog reason” occasionally.

She learned immediately that her boundary was the fence line and the open gate at the gravel road but the chicken killing thing was a hard lesson to learn and cost a lot of poor hens their lives that first year.

I learned immediately that she was a companion worth having and that I could depend on her. I also learned to listen to dog reason.

She was an extremely happy dog in those busy years and confident in her own importance and ability to hold up her end. Her favorite entertainment was walking the pasture, for whatever purpose, 15 feet ahead of me, tail brush wagging, pretending that she was the leader and I was the follower. Maybe she was. I never could figure out how she knew where we were going. If the plan was to check the gully off to the east for a missing heifer she struck off in that direction. If the idea was to run the south fence line checking for downed wire she headed straight for it.

I learned very soon that she had a few strong hatreds. She passionately hated pigs and her aversion to large sticks in my presence turned her into a totally different dog that you really would not like to meet. And she had a primeval hatred of guns.

We were both young then, in those years when my own strength and determination would be tested to the max, and the work was hard. In the beginning there were disagreements, as in any partnership, mostly regarding what Maggie thought was in my best interest.

She was determined to keep a safe zone between me and anything larger than me and at first this made caring for the stock a little difficult. However, as my hard-earned herd of sale barn heifers grew and the danger of being smashed or trampled as the individuals in the herd fought for the first bite increased, I learned to appreciate Maggie’s wisdom and depend on her protection. She never failed me.

She hated to see me climb and this battle, which I finally won because of the necessity of the thing, caused me a few bumps and scrapes. The cattle were separated from the hay storage side of the barn by an ancient stanchion topped by woven wire fencing and I had to stand on the stanchion and shove the hay bales over the wire fencing. To Maggie this was double jeopardy. I was not only three feet off the ground but at some risk of falling into the pen with the cows.

Her whimpering pleas ignored, she would brace her feet in the dirt of the barn floor, grab the cuff of my cover-alls and hang on with all her might while I did the haying as best I could with a 40-pound dog attached to my leg. More than once I lost patience and kicked out at her, cussing a blue streak, winding up flat on my back on the floor. This had to stop so I did win this one.

Maggie was a perfect mimic. She was like a canine mocking bird. I guess you would call her a mocking dog. More than once I jumped from my bed thinking I had coyotes right under my bedroom window only to see Maggie sitting there answering the yip yips of some far off coyote pack just for the fun of it.

Or I would hear the tinny bark of a very small dog by the barn and go out to see her sitting in the drive answering the neighbor’s terrier or a deep full bark of what I was sure had to be a St. Bernard in the neighborhood and it would just be Maggie woof woofing away.

I don’t know how she did it and am not sure why she did it but I think she just thought it was fun.

She did, however take her responsibilities very seriously. In fact she was a dedicated worrier. Beneath my bedroom window, guarding through the night, she could not keep her worries to herself and would often, when the coyotes were running or stray people were out and about, trouble my sleep with her pitiful grumbling, mumbling whimpers and this would go on and on only to be silenced by my loud shouts to “shut up that damn whining” and my banging on the outside wall by the window beneath which she slept.

Our only disagreement that seriously threatened our arrangement and Maggie's place at the farm involved a gun. Like I said she hated guns. The merest glimpse of a gun, or any facsimile of one, resulted in the morphing of a very gay, amenable, hard working companion into a rigidly intense, deadly serious canine stranger.

I kept a gun. It was a rifle and kept for the purpose of some emergency that might arise for a woman living alone in a rather isolated area. Of course and fortunately, no such emergency ever did arise and hasn't to this day.

The gun's actual use, with a few rare exceptions, had been confined to the two occasions when I, fortified with three or four ounces of Vodka mixed with a tablespoon of orange juice, performed necessary mercy killings. It had also been waved wildly at stray dogs and one errant fox seen carrying off a fat Peking duck five mornings in a row.

But a neighbor's dog, having made friends with Maggie, who was a total push over in that regard, had persistently ravaged and killed throughout the poultry population and was arrogant enough to come into the yard in broad daylight while I was standing there to repeat his acts of destruction right in front of me.

I looked at the bodies strewn across the yard and I had had enough. I got the rifle and standing in the driveway with the intention of either scaring the be jesus out of him or killing him dead which ever my aim served, was banging away while Maggie's wildly piteous pleadings and whimperings fell on deaf ears. As a last resort, from her way of thinking, she stood on her hind legs and clamped down on my left hand that supported the gun while my right worked away at the trigger.

I was stunned. First by the pain of it and then by the fact that she would actually do this to me. She did not bite, or tear..just clamped down hard and hung on, her whimperings and whining, louder and louder, ascending to a frantic pitch going up and down the scale while her grip stayed firm. I dropped the gun. She dropped to the ground and rolled belly up in one motion, crying so loud I could hardly hear anything else. Her despair was total. It was obvious that every instinct bred into her told her that this was a death warrant.

My hand hurt where one of her long canine teeth had met the lower teeth in the web of my thumb and forefinger. I stared at the fat puncture wound seeping blood. But I had had enough of killing.

"That's alright Maggie." I told her. "You were right, girl," I said, "We'll never use the gun again, but don't ever do that again either." and because she knew I had forgiven this unforgivable act, (which after all is what forgiveness is all about), and after at least thirty seconds of subdued body language..the head hanging the drooped tail..and so on, she became her old self again and was happy to go on with chores.

I never used the gun again and was eventually happy to find a home for it with one of the boys..I can't remember which one. As for Maggie, she kept her end of the bargain and never in eighteen years ever met a human being with anything other than friendliness and love.

Maggie was a fine, fine dog and an honorable partner.

Maggie's Gone

2010-07-22T17:15:00.000-07:00

Well, Maggie’s gone. She was eighteen years old and a fine, fine dog. If ever a dog deserved rest it was Maggie. But humans are a complex sort and being no exception I find myself angered by her leaving. Not at her..just mad in general. Eighteen years is a long time to have someone sitting by your porch door or under your bedroom window. Maggie always had my back.

Last Wednesday at the morning feeding time she was very bad, wobbly and wouldn’t leave her spot beneath the shade of the elm tree ten feet from the back door. I spoke to her and took her water and a handful of food which she ignored. She was impatient with my hand upon her head and rose stiffly to turn her back to me. It didn’t take a rocket scientist to know that her mind was now on other things.

Sometime during the day she left the elm tree and I thought she probably went to the cellar, which is left open for her and Pansy the Pyr in this heat but when she was not at the back door Thursday morning of course I knew why. I checked the cellar, both sheds and the barn without finding her. I checked the edge of the pasture for any sign of a fresh dog path in the tall grass. I found it but did not follow. I couldn’t believe she chose to do this thing alone.

In my humanness I wanted it different for her. I wanted to do better by her. But she wanted the privacy of the tall grass whispering and the cool brown earth and sky to look at and I didn’t follow.

To me dogs are of two kinds. There are the face watchers and the hand watchers. Hand watchers are the terriers and hunters motivated by games, food and directions for the hunt. Face watchers are the herders, the nurturers, the lovers of humans in all their folly.

Hand watchers are tons of fun and full of energy and are often extremely loyal and protective.

But I believe it’s the face watchers that can see into the human heart….every brave or cowardly smile, every tear that never falls… is reflected in the eyes of a face watcher.

Maggie was a face watcher.

2010-07-22T14:03:00.000-07:00

Can good really come from evil after all?

If this is at all possible is there a clearer demonstration of it than in the unfolding events surrounding the personal and professional assassination of Ms. Shirley Sherrod, and her subsequent rejection by the very people who should have defended her most vociferously.

By now it is clearly evident that the original attack on Ms. Sherrod was not only blatantly fraudulent but orchestrated and manipulated by those whose sole objective is to cripple and embarrass all minorities including and most particularly the current president and this administration.

In this case, the administration’s commitment of zero tolerance regarding racism and scandal resulted in a careless over-reaction and neglect of inquiry. The instigators of this event and their FOX friends could hardly hide their glee!

However, Ms Sherrod’s personal story of life as it was in Baker County, Georgia in the 1960s, (and it could have been any one of many other southern counties in several other southern states,) retelling the horrific details of the conditions under which Black Americans strove to survive and raise families is a powerful one and worth hearing again. Her story reminds us that civil rights is much more than the right to strap a gun onto our leg or avoid paying taxes.

The opportunity thus granted her by this debacle to speak to a national audience, whose members may still be young enough to have no clear perception as to what civil-rights is all about or how vigorously they must be defended, is priceless. They now are reminded that IN THEIR PARENTS’ lifetime a sheriff could murder and rape with impunity, hooded men could rob and plunder and the poor and/or black had no recourse whatsoever.

Just when they thought we had forgotten what really went on in those enclaves of “social superiority”, Ms. Sherrod, a lady who has heretofore lived quietly and serviceably, in her community, has been given the opportunity and the grace to retell the story..to remind us..to make us remember…

I think this one is going to bite the perpetrators of this little saga in the backside.

..a Godly Maid..

2010-07-21T08:03:00.000-07:00

Remember the recent PP account of family history in which it was necessary, for reasons of historical purity, to mention the wayward daughter of one of our first immigrants, Thomas Lewis? The irrascible Mary Lewis whose husband spent his fame and a lot of fortune defending her sullied honor in New England's Puritan courts?

Well, thankfully, our family escutcheon has been unbesmirched by our Lamb ancestors, also residents of New England in the 1600s.

(To those of you unfamiliar with the word escutcheon used in this sense it has multiple meanings, according to Wikopedia's wiktionary: One being a shield displaying a coat of arms representing a family's honor and two: ..the distribution of pubic hair. You may have only been using it in the latter definition while in this instance I use it in the former.)

Anyway, as indicated by the record from Early New England Migrations below, we are vindicated.

MARRIAGE: (1) By 1624 Elizabeth _____ ; "Elizabeth the wife of Thomas Lamb" was buried at Roxbury 28 November 1639 [NEHGR 6:183].

(2) "He afterwards married Dorothy Harbitle, a godly maid,

Recent family history aside, I choose to believe we are descended from "the Godly Maid".. So there!!

Brave New Word for Today!!

2010-07-19T08:23:00.000-07:00

Pantisocracy

(meaning "government by all") was an utopian scheme devised in 1794 by the poets Robert Southey and Samuel Taylor Coleridge for an egalitarian community. They originally intended to establish such a community on the banks of the Susquehanna River in the United States but by 1795 Southey had doubts about the viability off this and proposed moving the project to Wales.

Ironically, the two men were unable to agree on the location and the project collapsed.

This inability to agree probably explains so many of our currently collapsing projects. Either the "government by all" concept is flawed or we just have too many darn poets.

Both options are painful to me, an admittedly bad poet and an unreformable utopian dreamer.

In Memory of a Goat Named Zeptha

2010-07-18T16:43:00.000-07:00

These hot, hot July days always remind me of Zeptha, an honorable goat and a fine lady. She died on such a day..a hot golden day..and a sad one.

Farming is always hard work and not always fun and the death of Zeptha was a low, low point in farm history. The piece below is a repeat in memory of a great goat lady.

In Memory of a Goat Named Zeptha

In full sunlight, full of new babies and a loving steady heart she strangled her last breath against the toe of my boot.

With absolute and total disbelief I watched Dr. Rainey pocket his stethoscope and disappear up the path toward his truck.

I thought she would live for ever and of course she couldn't.

It took forty-five minutes. He had said it was a shame. He had said she evidently had some kind of allergic reaction to a new grass that closed her throat. He had said, meaning to be kind, that he knew she had a "cared for life" by the way she leaned into me even at the last and "turned her head toward me" and was so "obviously glad I was there for her". He meant to be kind but he might as well have stabbed me with a hundred knives.

She depended on me and I let her die.

I walked the field for awhile sobbing like something out of Shakespeare until, stricken with a panicky thought that the problem might have been not enough available water buckets, I spent the next half hour refilling all the buckets I could find and spacing them around for everyone but Zeptha..

I bought Zeptha at the sale barn five years ago. She was old then according to her teeth, but was a loving, gentle old thing and had the most beautiful doe kids. She never picked on the weaker and newer, as many others did. She was patient and steady. She was as good a goat as she knew how to be. And she liked me.

Well maybe not JUST me… she liked.period. She liked her feed and hay and visitors, (even at very private kidding moments) and hard toast and soda crackers. She liked sunny mornings and misty evenings and gentle twilights.

She did absolutely despise and abhor rain, snow, sleet and mud. She was very beautiful.

Goats are extremely familial and I had always suspected that Rachel and Zeptha were related. Rachel, the pampered darling of a two-goat family and Zeptha, my sale-barn reject, were close companions here at High Faith Farm. Their markings and breed traits were so similar. But even more telling, Zeptha and Rachel always bedded together and Rachel's children, and Zeptha's, also bedded together.

Any doubt I had had about the relationship between Zeptha and Rachel, my prize Nubian, disappeared today, when Zeptha died.

Because of Zeptha's imminent birthing I had gone for hay, ten bales. Five bales of last-year's first cut brome/alfalfa and five bales of the better, second-cut brome/alfalfa. Because of her unknown, but obviously advanced, age I was planning on bringing Zeptha into a small pen and hand feeding her for the last week of her "troubles".

There is no way I can ever sneak around, in or out, without the herd knowing, and today as usual, when I turned in the drive, a herd of goats flew to the barn, hoping for some attention. I watched and named to myself each one. But I did not see Zeptha..or Rachel...or Hero, the buck.

When the engine of the truck died another sound was higher and louder. It was Zeptha, still at the fenceline 100 feet from the barn, making the most awful strangling noise. Rachel was "mothering" and "smurfing" her and Hero, male that he is, was attempting to offer the only life-giving thing he knew.. Half her size and several years younger he moved from nose to tail in an effort to motivate her to life. Rachel moved from side to side, supporting Zeptha as she stretched her neck and strangled and cried out to me and for air. I ran to her, ran back to the barn for grain to coax the others away from her..all but Rachel went easily..I had to drag Rachel away and literally push her into the barn.

I called the vet and he promised to come A.S.A.P. , which he did do,.

But Zeptha died today.

And I don't think I want to talk about it anymore.

Therapy

2010-07-17T06:06:00.000-07:00

Dear Sister,

I did mention didn’t I that they are doing therapy on my shoulder and knee injured in that run-a-way shopping cart attack in May?

I was pretty nervous about it but found the first session very reassuring. The therapist was just the cutest thing. After being tenderly analyzed and gently led into the least painful manipulations possible by this really cute therapist, I decided therapy wasn’t so bad. Except for his being married and the 40-year age difference I think we could have developed a relationship but I decided against it.

During the process Chris, (the really cute therapist) chatted away about me and my torn rotator cuff and me and my tendons and me and my pain and suffering and (well, you can see why it was of such interest to ME). And like I said, he was very cute.

I soon took my cue from the other therapy recipients sprinkled in among the mechanical contraptions that crowded the room and learned not to shriek and by the end of the first session had the pitiful face contortions and mumbly groans down pat. Chris said I was “great” and “doing very well” and it was perfectly obvious that no other patient had EVER been so great or done so well.

So far so good.

The second session was disappointing at first in that Chris had abandoned me and put me in the care of Barbara, a plump, friendly person who was very good to talk to. We continued the conversation about me and my torn rotator cuff and me and my tendons and me and my pain and suffering and (well, you can see why it was so interesting).

Over the next three weeks two more therapists continued to monitor my walk toward total rotator cuff health and kept up the chit chat about..you guessed it.. me and my torn rotator cuff and me and my tendons and me and my pain and suffering and by now I am sick and tired of my torn rotator cuff and tired of not being able to do what I want to do and totally tired of therapy eating up all that time..it was taking entirely too much time..so changed my appointments to 8:00 am instead of the original 10:30 that seemed to just eat up a whole morning.

Thursday was my first 8:00 am and I felt unwell. I remembered why the original 10:30 was decided upon. Although I am still at my best early in the day, my best is not what it used to be and early in the day is not as early as it used to be. 10 a.m. seems to be the high-water mark anymore.

On top of that I had a totally new therapist and she was very brisk, studied my chart, held the little right angle yard stick up to my shoulder and announced that I “was not doing well” and that I “had not improved much at all bilaterally” etc. I was filled with dismay. I was stunned. She never mentioned a thing about how great I was or how well I was doing.

She kept talking about Dr. Lingenfelter, the bone and joint man who ordered the therapy, and how he was “not going to be happy” . Didn’t she know we weren’t supposed to be talking about Dr. Lingenfelter and whether he was happy or not? Didn’t she know we were supposed to be talking about me and my torn rotator cuff and me and my tendons and…well you remember..

Anyway, she wound up devising this torture exercize that was supposed to make up for my earlier dereliction and while I was laying on their little hard couch doing my best to get my left hand behind my head and back ten times, my peripheral vision caught a glimpse of some very nice man legs, smooth and tanned, just hairy enough to be interesting with a medical boot on one foot.

I rested from my behind-the-head thing long enough to check out this really slim guy with beautiful white hair. Except for the medical boot he looked perfectly healthy and mighty fine. It was his first therapy session so Chris took him through the same procedure he had with me. That Traitor. He asked him all about his stupid foot injury and talked about how well he had done and so on. It sounded very familiar if you know what I mean.

I listened to the guy’s story and how he had been injured and what his life style was. A retired Geography professor, he had a place at Lake Viking and a place at Orlando and a small farm somewhere. He had almost fell off the roof of his place in Orlando two months ago while trying to fix some kind of communication device up there.

The only thing that saved him was catching his foot on a rung of the ladder and although this was hard on the cartussel bone in his foot, (I’m not too good at medical terms) it did spare his head and I thought he should have been grateful enough to leave it at that but here he was, eating up my therapists time.

Chris asked him how active he was and he talked far too long about his swimming pool and his boat at the lake and scuba diving at Orlando and his golf game and the small business he ran to “keep busy”.. I hated his guts.

Yes, I hated his guts. How in the world could anyone compete with a tale like that? Getting run down by a shopping cart is in no way comparable to dangling dangerously from the roof of an Orlando mansion. The closest thing I get to scuba diving is when I can’t get the shower to turn off. My version of golf is the stray rocks that careen off the mower blade.

Yes, I hated his guts and therapy is not going well.

All My Relatives

2010-07-16T12:58:00.000-07:00

All My Relatives Are Crazy So How Did I Escape?

It was a close call, let me tell you, but being the youngest of the family gave me tremendous advantages. No matter what trouble I was in they had already been there.

If I came down with a disease they had already had it. Winning a prize, getting a concussion, losing my virginity… all had been done by some member of the family and was therefore, of no consequence. If this sounds discouraging it was not. It was a constant declaration of the fact that I too would likely survive. I learned most of what I know from their experiences.

One of my brothers, discouraged I guess by the chaos of our full-to-bursting house, “swore and be damned” (that was a common utterance in our family) that he would never have a houseful of kids and he had eight!

Even though they all grew up to be very nice people and reasonably sane I took the lesson to heart and learned never to say “never”!

Another brother, experimenting one day with the new shotgun, blew a hole in the boys’ dresser. I learned that day that guns, in a small space, could be very loud and that I did not like them! This lesson was a freebie also as I was not the one that had to meet with Mother regarding the hole in the dresser.

And my older sister! She actually married a man that refused to eat pickles out of a jar someone else had stuck there fingers in! What kind of husband material is that?

What if you were in a hurry for a pickle? What if you were on a picnic and forgot the fork? What if you just needed the jar and had to get the last two pickles out and every time you stabbed them they scooted over to the other side of the jar like little green twin torpedoes and you were getting mad and.. well you see what I mean. She probably spent a lot of time guarding the pickle jar just to make sure no one stuck their fingers in it.

So I stored that away in my mind and determined that I would never marry a man who objected to fingers in the pickle jar.

The people in my circle of friends, one of whom told me once that having supper at my house always made her sweat, found the members of my family downright awe inspiring. And so do I.

I would never have made it without them.

'Possum Patch

Cooking Ugghh!!

Cooking..Ugh!!

My Friend, Bo Stopped by Today.

Bunny's Getting Married

Who Isn't Paying Taxes?

Bug On the Lam

Big Bug

Just For Fun Friends

Kill Order!!

Cooking Again!!

Spring Has Come to the Chicken Yard..kinda!

I Can't Believe We're Still Talking About This!

My Friend Bo

Sports and Politics

Another Day Another Dollar

The Phantasy Called the Middle Class

Christmas-The Hope and Light of the World

McCain, Please go home.

Memoirs-A Family in Luck

The Influenza Pandemic of 1918

The Day Bud Killed the Goose

Airport Patdowns

Ski Season

Can We Do It?

Pay Back Time!!

The Polish, the Revolution and That Danged Troublemaker Archibald Campbell

A Color Blind Revolution

Was Benjamin Franklin a Socialist?

Well, Today IS Another Day

Cleaning Glitch in Clean Land!!

Winter is Coming

Where Have All the Heroes Gone?

September

Will the Real American Please Stand Up?

If George Washington had had a personal banker his name would have been Haym Salomen.

Will the Real American Please Stand Up??

Separation of Church and State is Dead?

I Believe Roger Clemens

Washers, Dryers and Bubbles Galore

Ernie Pyle-War Correspondent

A Great Day!

Eat Better and Cheaper

The Catalogue People

All You Need to Know About Cows

Rand Paul Thinks This is a Good Idea??

Bring Your Own Dirt

The Art of Doing Nothing

I Think I have the Colic!!

The View From the 12th Floor

Captured: America in Color from 1939-1943 – Plog Photo Blog

Blog Archive

The Art of Pig Watching

Inspection Time

Maggie, an Honorable Partner

Maggie's Gone

..a Godly Maid..

Brave New Word for Today!!

In Memory of a Goat Named Zeptha

Therapy

All My Relatives