What’s on your bucket list?

The view from Stirling Castle in the Scottish Highlands,
with the Wallace memorial seen in the middle

Before I get to bucket lists, I want to say that National Dog Day will certainly tell you who your friends are, although I’m not sure whether it is Sophie or me that has so many friends. But in haste I threw up a handy picture of me holding Sophie—it’s really not a flattering picture of either of us. Sophie was recovering coat after being shaved at the vet, and one skinny leg, all bone, is sticking up with a tuff of fur at the end like a booty. Otherwise, her coat looks like it never met a brush or comb. Sideways from the left is definitely not my best look—so much jowl I look worse than my dear dad. But 124 of you have liked it—and still counting. Sophie and I are both flattered and grateful.

Now about the bucket list. I saw a suggestion that we replace a bucket list with a “cut it” list, so I got to thinking about my list. It’s short. I think of bucket lists as mainly listing travel destinations, and at my age and given the fact that I’m not an easy traveler—don’t like to fly although I will—and I’m now mobility challenged, I have already put several things on a cut-it list. Still on my bucket list: a return to Scotland, where I left my heart in the Highlands, and a return to Chicago, my hometown. It’s no coincidence that I want to go to places I love and find comfortable. I missed the gene that wants to explore every exotic location on the globe. Machu Picchu is simply not for me.

I suppose a few things besides travel destinations go on a bucket list, so there are a couple of new restaurants in Fort Worth I want to go to—Le Margot (French) and Walloon’s (southern seafood). But I really don’t need them on a list.  I’ll get there sooner or later.

That made me think about what I’d do if “The Millionaire” arrived at my front door. My first instinct was that I would donate the money, probably to my church. But then I thought about the various projects we’d like to do around the house. Christian wants to create a master suite in the attic and an ensuite bedroom for me downstairs (no, I’m not ready to leave the cottage). And I am itching to do extensive landscaping, turning our lawn into one big bed of wildflowers. I realize the end of the hottest, driest summer in years is not the time to think about that. Besdies, back in the day when “The Millionaire” was popular, a million would go pretty far. I’m not so sure about today.

So much for dreaming about a bucket list and sudden wealth. What have I already put on my cut-it list? A cruise through the inner passage in Alaska—sure, I’d like to visit Denali and I think Ketchikan would be fun, but Anchorage, Juneau, and Fairbanks aren’t calling my name. I get pretty good salmon at home. I’d also probably like a trip to New England to see the fall foliage and eat fresh lobster. I know the lobster we get in Texas pales before what I’d eat at the shore, but I’ll settle for it. A cruise that we reluctantly cancelled a few years ago should still be on my bucket list—the Great Lakes from Chicago to Toronto. I’m fascinated by the Great Lakes, probably due to my Chicago upbringing. In Oakville, a suburb of Toronto, my grandmother’s house was a block from Lake Ontario. So both ends of the trip appealed, but the summer we were to go I was seriously ill and lost any enthusiasm for travel. I got my health back, but not the travel enthusiasm.

I suppose all our bucket lists reflect who we are, but I find mine shows that I like the familiar and the comfortable. I am not all that interested in exploring new places. Even Paris, London, and Rome don’t call to me. I am most happy in my cottage and at my desk. But my limited list, even my cut-it list, reflects my interest in food. Maybe bucket lists—and cut-it lists—are the new personality indicators.

What’s on your bucket list? Your cut-it list?

What books did you read as a child?

 

Author Susan Witting Albert, writing on her post, “Place & Thyme” in Substack, recalled how she got to be Carolyn Keene, author the Nancy Drew books, for a while. Carolyn Keene was a house name—an imaginary author created by a publisher who then hired various authors to write books anonymously. For Susan, being Carolyn Keene was a dream come true. She recalled a childhood devoted to reading which prepared her for that opportunity, and 143 readers in turn commented on their memories of the books they read as children. Nancy Drew was the clear winner as to be expected.

For me, talking about a reading childhood was a real trip back in time. The summer when I was—oh, probably ten or eleven, around there—I would ride my bike every morning to the Blackstone branch of the Chicago Pubic Library and come home with a stack of six or eight books. It was probably a bike ride of about six blocks, and when I think of it now, I am amazed my parents let me go alone. But that was then, a totally different time.

Once home with my books, I spent the day on the screened-in front porch reading, ignoring the cries of neighbor children who wanted me to come out and play. I was too busy in my fantasy worlds. It was about then that I wrote my first short story, but that’s a tale to be told another day.

But I remember books long before I was able to ride to the library, a few even before I could read. I know my mom read The Wind in the Willows to me, and I remember the Lil Colonel Stories by Annie Fellows Johnson, written around the turn of the century (not this one, the last one). And then there were the tales of Uncle Remus, African American folk tales written by Joel Chandler Harris during Reconstruction. And, of course, there were the Bobbsey Twins, a series of seventy-two books published from 1904 through 1979. These, like the Nancy Drew books, were published by the Stratemeyer syndicate under the house name of Laura Lee Hope.

Another book I loved was Little Black Sambo, also written at the turn of the century, this by a Scottish woman. Sambo was an Indian boy living in the jungle, and the story revolves around his encounter with tigers in the jungle. At first, author Helen Bannerman was hailed for presenting the first black hero, but by the 1950s the books was considered racist. Poet Langston Hughes judged that the illustrations were offensive, done in a “pickaninny style.” Today, many versions of the book, all sanitized I’m sure, are available. Little Black Sambo was so popular at my house that my mom hooked a rug with a tiger on it for one of my children.

My reading tastes moved on, of course, to the Nancy Drew books, although unlike many of Nancy’s fans, I never was equally interested in the Hardy Boys books. But I devoured the tales of Cherry Ames, nurse, and Sue Barton, another nurse. Trixie Belden wasn’t nearly as fascinating as Nancy Drew, but I still read her adventures. And I have fond memories of Alfred Payson Terhune’s books about collies—I desperately wanted a collie, and somewhere in my high school years my parents got me a collie puppy. They did not, however, get me a horse despite my equal fascination with Anna Sewell’s Black Beauty books.

The last series I remember from my school years were the New Orleans novels of Frances Parkinson Keyes. After that, there is a great gap in my memory, due no doubt to years of undergraduate and college work with heavy required reading lists. The wonders of literature that I discovered during those years are too numerous to mention, except I can’t omit Emily Dickinson who was the subject of my master’s thesis. By the time I wrote a dissertation, I was hooked on literature of the American West—the writers and the artists. Those loves have stayed with me through a long lifetime of writing, often about the American West. But I do remember that when I first felt the urge to write a mystery, I sketched out one so baldly derived from Nancy Drew that it was an embarrassment. And it’s no accident that today I write, or have most recently written, cozy mysteries.

As I look back at my reading history, I realize what a rich heritage is available to our children, and then I am angry, sad, you name it, that petty minds are keeping so many American classics from the school and libraries. Classics like To Kill a Mockingbird or The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison, Charlotte’s Web by E. B. White, Mark Twain’s Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn, Catcher in the Rye by Salinger, Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath, and so many more. If children are kept from these books through twelfth grade, they will never again pick them up, and they will miss the wonderful world that waits for them in those pages. They are not likely to be truly educated adults with good reasoning skills, and they surely will miss a lot of cultural references. In some cocktail conversations, they’ll be hopelessly lost.

What is being done to reading curricula is a travesty, and to make it worse, it is done by a few determined, bigoted, narrow-minded people. If they censor their own children, that’s sad but their privilege. But nobody, from the extreme evangelist next door to Ron DeSantis and Greg Abbott, has the right to tell me what my grands can read.

So what books shaped your childhood?

For a list of banned classics, go here: What American classic books have been banned fromschools - Search (bing.com)

 

The uncertainties of friendship

 

Is the garden of your friendships this colorful and varied?

Last night I had supper with a woman I knew fifty years ago when I was a young mother and she was a babysitting teenager. We’d touched base over the years a bit, but last night was our first time to visit and reminisce and laugh and trade stories. And it made me grateful for renewed friendships.

Facebook played a part in bringing us back together, and Facebook is at least partly responsible for other renewed friendships and some that are new in recent years. I am still in close touch with my best friend from high school, mostly through Facebook but occasionally through more personal emails. We know all about each other’s families—she has five children and umpteen greats to my four children and seven grands. We trade recipes and stories of aging—we are right now in that two-month period when I am a year older, and she delights in rubbing it in. It is a treasured relationship.

Similarly I remain close to a couple I knew in the early sixties in graduate school. We have never again lived in the same city, but we have visited over the years, both in Santa Fe and Fort Worth. We can go weeks without talking and then pick up right where we left off. It is a reassuring friendship to me.

But over the years I’ve also lost friends as they seem to drop by the wayside. One friend in the East is always a frequent correspondent, with long emails, just after she’s visited and we’ve had a good catching up on everything from dogs and recipes to our shared political views. But then it drops off gradually, and now I don’t think I’ve heard in a year. I should write—and I will soon.

Recently, talking to Megan, I heard her use the term “ghosted”—her physical therapist had ghosted her and did not return phone calls or emails. It occurred to me that I have been ghosted by some, and a couple of them bother me, because they are like unsolved mysteries. One is a woman I traveled the state of Texas with as we went from writers conference to workshop to lectures. We even performed our “dog and pony show” where she talked of being a fifth generation Texan and I countered with tales of a newcomer. Somehow in recent years I felt a growing distance and had the sense that I had angered or hurt her. I should have asked, but I lacked the nerve. I emailed and she’d answer, but now there’s no word. I understand she is beset by health problems and the like. And I can understand that. Sort of.

Another that bothers me is a man I used to lunch with frequently. We were good friends who shared lots of laughs, family events, etc. His wife used to laugh about “the other woman.” Last time I saw him he joked that retirement meant he’d have to take me to lunch more often. Then I called him one day for a referral, and there was a new distance in his voice, a coldness. And one day at church when his wife said, “Look who’s here!” he said, “Yeah,” and kept walking. Brainwashed female that I am, I assume I did something, but I have no idea what. It’s been at least three years now, and it still bothers me.

Author Ann Lamott, whose wisdom blows me away, says that when someone drops out of your life, it means that their part in your story is over. I can understand that, I guess, but I’d like more graceful exits.

I’m not blameless either. I have let some friendships go, mostly when it became burdensome to maintain them, once over not exactly politics but the moral stance involved. But there again, typical female, I feel guilty. Sometimes though I want to point out that friendship is a two-way street.

Meantime I treasure the many friendships I am blessed with, like a couple of good women I’ve know for forty years. But there are also people who I consider close friends who have newly come into my life. Friendship is an ever-changing thing. My working philosophy is that friendship is like a garden—you have to tend to it, nurture it, show it affection. And it’s always a work in progress.

An outstanding day from my point of view

 

This is Pete the Gecko (I just named him and have no idea why I thought Pete was appropriate). Pete was made by mosaic artist Susan Swaim, an old friend, and is part of my drive to have art in the cottage with some meaning to me—often, because it was done by artists I care about. Suzi used to babysit my kids when they were young, tonight we decided it was pre-school. In recent years I’ve seen her mosaic art online, and when I saw the first few geckos she did I thought vaguely that I wished I could have one. This year, as my birthday approached, I realized there was no good reason I couldn’t give myself one as a birthday present—and I commissioned it. The neat thing is that Suzi incorporated a bit of my jewelry that I sent her—can you find the rose on Pete’s back? Came from a necklace I no longer wear, and a couple of other pieces came from things I had. Pete will hang just to the right of my desk—there’s a nice blank piece of wall waiting for him.

Look at Suzi’s work at Facebook She calls her studio my mosaic mojo.

Suzi delivered Pete in person tonight. I probably haven’t seen her in over thirty years, so it was a great catch-up time. Her mom was a friend of mine way back in TCU days and came from three generations of a family deeply involved with TCU, so we talked a lot about her mom and being in the eighties and TCU and just lots of stuff. Went to Lucile’s, which is a favorite of mine, and I got the lobster roll I’d been wanting. A thoroughly enjoyable evening with lots of laughter.

It was a rare out-of-the-cottage day for me. Christian and I went to church this morning. Russ’ sermon was on the parable of Jesus telling the lame man to pick up his bed and be healed, and the sermon dwelt on the question Jesus asked the man: “Do you really want to be healed?” The point was that a lot of us cling to our problems, imperfections, even illnesses because they are comfortable. Much as we rail against them, we know how to deal with them. Being “healed,” represents a great unknown. Russ finally asked the question, “Do you want to move out of your comfort zone?” and I wanted to say, “I’m here, aren’t i? I’m in church and not watching in the cottage.”

Two outings in one day was a big deal for me, although that makes my life sound constricted, which is not the way I feel about it at all. I am always torn between a conscience that prods me to get out in the world and the lure of the comfort of my cottage. I used to have such an active, busy life, and now I’m so content in my cottage that I have to gear myself up to go out. Once I do, however, I’m glad to have done it. So thanks to Christian and Suzi for getting me out of my comfort zone. I think this whole recluse business crept up on me with pandemic and quarantine. And then I think about how many lives were forever changed by that traumatic period. Not just the illness and death, but the social changes, the work-from-home changes, the stay-at-home dinners instead of patronizing favorite restaurants. I think in many ways we are still reeling from the results of that social upheaval. And now, here comes another onslaught of covid

On the bright side, it is cool tonight, eighty as I write about nine-thirty. There was a good shower to the south of us, but we’ve had no rain so far. Still, the air smells like rain, and I am ever hopeful. I know the nineties is hot but compared to what we’ve had, it will seem pleasant. Let us count our blessings as we sail into a new week.

From good company to Covid and Mac and Cheese

 

Colin taking a break from all my chores.

It’s been an intense two days. My oldest son, Colin, has been here to work on “boy chores,” my financial status and a trust, and cleaning up what he sees as messes on my computer. Okay, yes, I did have three iPads and an email account I haven’t looked at in years and other such eccentricities. Tonight, when I thought he was through, I closed out a bunch of windows so I could place my weekly grocery order with Central Market. Wrong thing to do. It brought forth great groans and moans. So I’m not sure what problems I will be left with when he leaves tomorrow. The work on the trust, however, has been fascinating—an interview with the lawyer who did Colin’s trust and that of his wife opened my eyes to a lot of financial quirks I had never thought about. The business end of the visit has been worthwhile and reassuring.

But I am, as always, overjoyed to have him here and enjoy his company. My way of showing it, of course, is to kill the fatted cat, so I had emailed him to ask if he wanted meatloaf or tamale pie. He chose meatloaf, and I worked hard to get it ready before a scheduled Zoom appointment last night. Timing was perfect, and meatloaf was ready when the call was over. But guess what got the raves? Not my meatloaf but Louella’s rice which Jordan threw together at the last minute. Tonight I fixed tamale pie with polenta. When Colin smelled the sauce, he said, “I’ve had this before,” and I agreed he probably had. Turns out he was not anticipating liking the polenta part but loved it and had a huge second helping. Then Jordan confessed she and Christian don’t really like polenta, but they eat it because I “fix it good.” My cooking ego has taken a bit of a bruising.

Yesterday I read an article that I think was by a faculty member at West Virginia University, where they are considering discontinuing all humanities courses. One line in his writing particularly struck me: “I am angry because we seem to be turning everything that celebrates our shared humanity into a business.” The attitude today is if it doesn’t make a profit, get rid of it. As an English major and occasional classroom teacher, I grieve for this in education. We will lose our common heritage, the ties that bind us together, if we lose art and history and literature and dance. I think it’s particularly scary as AI surges in use and misuse. Magazines are beset by submissions that are AI generated, novels are no doubt being written the same way. And I have read a lot about college faculty taking precautions to weed out AI-generated reports. If the world of Orwell’s 1984 is not to become a reality, we must embrace and support the humanities, not throw them aside.

It's a circuitous route but cutting out the humanities ultimately increases the power of the one percent, because it diminishes those who are more interested in creativity than profit. By eliminating the humanities, the way is left open for “business and entrepreneurship” to sweep the field.

I did not watch the Republican candidates debate this week, but the critiques I heard were all over the board, with some reassuring that we were hearing more traditional conservative voices than MAGA. But I was horrified when a local columnist, with whom I frequently disagree, called Ron DeSantis strong on education. There again, we’re back to wiping out the humanities which he has done in Florida with book banning and censorship. He who claims education is not about indoctrination, has managed to be the most indoctrinaire ever.

And the same concern, that profit overrules everything else, applies to environmental concerns. We need to fight the big corporations that are drilling and mining and shipping in areas that endanger the environment. I saw a meme today that said, “There is no profit on a dead planet.”

Moving right along, we are apparently being visited by a surge in a Covid virus that is a variant of omicron and is particularly resistant to vaccines. A new vaccine is being developed, and I will be among the first in line to get it. But I am aware we will fight the vaccine wars all over again with extremists on the right (led by Robert Kennedy, Jr). Those people with their flagrant disregard of science endanger the health of the rest of us. A friend was coming to dinner last week but emailed that she had been exposed. Reluctantly, I cancelled. If it’s going to take more isolation, I’m ready.

The good news I can think of tonight is that there is a new restaurant chain with a strange but intriguing name: I Heart Mac & Cheese. Yep, they have varieites of Mac & Cheese (lobster always intrigues me) and several kinds of grilled cheese. The menu fascinates me, mostly because I’m a cheese fan, but it presents an old dilemma to someone like me who cooks: why get so excited about a new chain when it features things you can easily fix at home? On the other hand, would you fix a grilled cheese with pulled pork, ham, Swiss cheese, and dill pickle? I don’t think so.

Stay cool everyone, and cross your fingers that relief is in sight.

PS This was my Friday night blog but between Colin, me, and changing default emails, I lost the ability to post to the blog. Another intense computer session, and I'm back. Colin is headed home to Tomball, so if I find more problems, I'm out of luck!

How true does fiction have to be?

I’m reading an interesting book right now—or let’s say the concept behind the book is interesting. I really haven’t gotten far enough into it to be sure about the novel. Titled Mary Coin, it braids a story from the early twentieth century with a contemporary one. The contemporary story seems to be pure fiction, but the historical segment is based on the life of the woman in Dorothea Lange’s iconic Depression photo that she called “Migrant Mother.” A woman, obviously aged beyond her years with work and weather and children, sits on the back of an ancient, broken-down car, surrounded by children with an infant in her lap.

Lange took the photo in 1938 but the woman’s identity was not known until the 1970s. Lange was known for careful record-keeping, but the day she took this she was in a hurry and just happened on the scene accident. The woman was Florence Thompson, although through several marriages she had several last names. Probably at least part Native American, she was a migrant worker, moving from Oklahoma to California. Along the way she had numerous children and several husbands and ended her days living in a mobile park in California, although her children had bought a house for her. None of that, however, relates to my short story or, as far as I can tell, to the novel I’m reading.

Way back when I was inspired by that iconic photo to write a short story titled, “Sue Ellen Learns to Dance.” I was sort of proud of it and gratified when it won a Saddleman (Western Heritage) Award from the National Cowboy Hall of Fame. The award is in the form of a bronze statue depicting a man on horseback. When the emcee handed me the statue, on a glittery awards night, he (It may have been one of President Gerald Ford’s sons—he was there one night), he said, “It’s heavy.” And it was, but it’s one of my prize possessions. I went on to use the story as the lead in my only collection of short stories, Sue Ellen Learns to Dance and Other Stories.

I have not gotten far into the novel, but I can tell that author Marisa Silver sees a far different woman in the photo than I did. Still I am intrigued by the concept of using a piece of art as the springboard for fiction. And the braiding of past and present reminds me of one of my favorite novels, Angle of Repose by Wallace Stegner. Stegner took the journals of artist Mary Halleck Foote as the basis for the novel. Foote left her New York career for the rough life of a miner’s wife in the camps of California. Stegner was roundly criticized for having taken liberties with the facts of Foote’s life and journals, introducing a love affair and the death of a child. But Stegner’s book too braids past and present. And it raises the question of how much leeway novelists—or short story writers—can take with the facts of history.

Some are more devoted to historical accuracy than others—and I admit I have not always been a devotee. In historical novels, if there was a gap, I wove in what I imagined might have happened. And in the first short story I ever wrote, I took extreme liberties with the truth. The story, “That Damn Cowboy!” was inspired by artist and sculptor Rufus Zogbaum, a neighbor and, in his mind, rival of Frederick Remington in upstate New York. When Zogbaum’s son rushed in to report that Mr. Remington had sculpted a perfect bucking cowboy, Zogbaum was, so the story goes, furious. But I turned it into a short story set in the West and told by an old woman, the artist’s son, who has cared for him all these years and nursed his fantasies. For a brief period, I was probably the world’s reigning authority on Zogbaum, except maybe for his grandson who I once met, just because no one else knew anything about him.

So tonight I’m left with a couple of thoughts. One is that I should blatantly advertise my short story collection more, so if you want to check it out, you can do so at Sue Ellen Learns to Dance and Other Stories - Kindle edition by Alter, Judy. Literature & Fiction Kindle eBooks @ Amazon.com. It’s only ninety-nine cents if you read ebooks. But my other thought is that I should revisit my Zogbaum files and maybe do something with them.

Meantime I will forge ahead on Mary Coin.

Political puzzlements

 

Every once in a while, my anger, my indignation gets the best of me, and I feel the need to dip into matters political in this blog. Tonight is such a night. If you want to turn away, I’ll understand. The source of my puzzlement is of course the man some have referred to as the orange buffoon. Now thoroughly disgraced in the eyes of most of us, he is still front and center in the daily news. So I’m throwing out some things that puzzle me, not expecting hard and fast answers, but perhaps some will share their thoughts

We hear constantly about trump’s plans for his next term as president, as though it were a given certainty. Much of what he plans to do is apparently illegal, but he’s good at manipulating, and I have no doubt, back in office, he would consolidate power in the presidency. That’s one of the more scary thoughts, considering the direction he took the country in his term—disease uncontrolled, debt ballooning out of sight, international relationships destroyed, environmental controls ignored and cancelled, infrastructure improvements promised but never delivered.

But so much that indicates that he will never hold office again. For starters, most Americans think he deserves a trial and punishment, and if statistics are right, most of us assume he has done at least half of what he’s accused of. So who’s going to vote for him? (I know—the cult; but how big are their numbers?)

Legal scholars, even conservative ones, are coming forward in recent days to declare that the fourteenth amendment absolutely means trump is ineligible to hold any federal office because instigated a revolution against our country and violated his oath of office. Even though that has not yet (stress yet) been determined in a court of law, most folks agree. But if that’s true, and if the Senate has to vote on his eligibility (I think that’s the way it works), who is going to put that in motion? We can talk about it for two years, but it shouldn’t wait until after an election.

Then there’s the question of his mental stability—just ask his niece, Dr. Mary Trump. Or maybe we don’t have to ask her. Clearly, he is impulsive, uncontrolled, without compassion or intellect or any idea of the social bounds that govern most of us in our daily lives. Does he fit the definition of a psychopath? Sociopath? I’m no expert, but it seems to me experts are testifying, granted at a distance, to his instability. So once again, who puts things in motion? The 25^th amendment is no help now, since it applies to sitting presidents. So who declares a candidate mentally unfit for office? It’s a question not much considered in elections in our long history. But we have never before elected a man like Donald J. trump.

On the other side of these weighty questions are the MAGA folks who are threatening to shut down the government unless the DOJ backs off all charges against trump. I’m not sure the American people would stand for that, let alone elect him. Why would we let a minority dictate that the rule of law be abandoned?

Yet these folks seem convinced of the rightness of their arguments, and I am left puzzled. Do they really believe, in the face of all the evidence and court cases, that the 2020 election was stolen? And do they really believe that President Biden weaponized the DOJ to help him defeat trump in 2024. They have watched trump throw most of his colleagues under the bus—do they not realize they could be next? And do they really believe that they can sway the 2024 election by hounding Hunter Biden for being the president’s son?

How many American voters assess the candidates logically when deciding on their votes? I’m afraid it’s a disappointing number. If people were paying attention to policy, they would see that the Democratic policies, as enacted by President Biden, have put our country on an upward path—economically, internationally, environmentally, etc. Those logical voters will see that the Republicans have no policies, no plans for the American future. They are too busy trying to blame Biden and his family for what they call the disastrous path that America is on.

In some ways, it all comes back to education—and that explains why DeSantis, Abbott, and other Republicans are trying to destroy public education. An educated voter will see through the smokescreen of lies and choose the party and leader who has solid plans for the future of the country.

I sure would welcome some comments.

Want to find the creative creature inside of you?

 

Fredericksburg, Texas

Seems too bad, but I have to say right off the bat that this post is for women only. My apologies to the man who read my blog. Its because I want to tell the ladies who read this blog about a retreat coming up next month—really sooner than you think—and it’s for women only.

On September 25-27, in Fredericksburg, Texas, my good friends Jeanne Guy and Stephanie Raffelock will host a retreat designed to help women answer the question, “Who were you before the world told you who you are?” It’s all about creative strength, courage, and wisdom. Sessions will provide writing prompts, time for personal reflection, and other times for listening to some wise women. In between, you can get to know the other ladies at the retreat and have some truly important conversations on what it means to be a woman in 2023. Even the movie, Barbie, may be relevant.

I know and respect the women who are leading this retreat. Jeanne Guy, an award-winning author, has led many successful retreats, helping women bring out undiscovered energy and creativity in themselves. With an irreverent sense of humor, she may laugh you into self-discovery. One of her big delights in life these days? Officiating at weddings. Texas is about to lose her as she prepares to move to Whidbey Island, so this may be your last chance to share some time with her.

And Stephanie Raffelock has a spiritual side that makes me envious. She is in touch with what goes on in her mind and body in a way that is duplicated by few if any women I know. She is the editor of Art in the Time of Unbearable Crisis, a collection of pandemic writings, and the author of  A Delightful Little Book on Aging and her signature work, Creatrix Rising: Unlocking the Power of Midlife Women. But Stephanie isn’t all ethereal spirituality—she gardens, she walks her dog daily, she cooks, and she loves to shop at Central Market. Someone all of us can relate to.

The retreat is sponsored by Story Circle Network, an international organization founded by celebrated author Susan Wittig Albert in 1997 to encourage women to tell their stories and personal histories. Albert, who once wrote Nancy Drew mysteries under a publishing house name and is now best known for the China Bayles herbal mysteries, recognized that women were often hesitant to share their stores umbrella, they are encouraged to create memoir, poetry, fiction, nonfiction, and drama. SCN offers online writing classes, an awards program, book reviews, and several publications including a journal and a blog. The organization even offers writing trips abroad, led by the outstanding Len Leatherwood. To learn more about SCN, go to About Story Circle — Who We Are, Our History, Our Board of Directors.

I have belonged to the Story Circle Network for several years and have been so glad to connect with women who share my love of writing. It’s like finding a home. But it’s not all about me. I have relished not only the friendship of the women I’ve met but the stories they share.

Nobody needs an excuse to go to Fredericksburg, but it you did, the retreat is the perfect one. There will be time left for long walks and exploration of the historic town. With a deep German history, Fredericksburg offers wineries, excellent food, lots of good beer, and fascinating shops. It is the home of Fleet Admiral Chester Nimitz of World War II fame, and a museum there honors his accomplishments. If you haven’t been before, you’ll want to check out the Sunday houses, small structures where farm families rested after coming into town for church. Who knows, you might learn a few words of the distinctive mix of German and English still spoken by some residents.

A retreat, some time spent in a colorful historical Texas town, and an introduction to an organization that wants you to tell your story. What more could you need? Read more about the retreat here: storycircle.org/2023-retreat/

And tell Jeanne and Stephanie I sent you.

Family and friends--and who we are

 

 

Sophie, because she too, deserves
that moment of consideration from me.

This morning a friend posted a story on Facebook. She went into the bathroom only to find an empty toilet paper roll and a new roll of paper sitting on the windowsill. Obviously, her husband had put the roll there but hadn’t taken time to put it on the dispense. What would your reaction have been? I admit I would probably have been angry, at least briefly. Well, I like to think the me who I am today wouldn’t have been, but I can tell you for sure the me who was married long years ago would have been angry. Ranting that he couldn’t even take time to install the paper on the holder. But Brandy, my friend, said she thought to herself, “He’s so busy, and he has so much on his mind, how thoughtful of him to make sure I had a new roll.” Wow! Learning lesson there.

I’ve been thinking all week about how we live with each other and how we treat each other. About being on autopilot with knee jerk reactions or stopping for that brief second before we speak to think through a situation. I fall down a lot of the time. Although I am not married any longer, I live in close proximity to my daughter and her husband, And there are lots of times I should keep my mouth shut or investigate before I speak. Tonight, me: “I never did get my dishwasher detergent back after it went into your house.”

Jordan: “I put it back. Did you look?”

Me: “Not for a few days.” I was acting on old information. At the very least I could have framed it as a question: “Did you ever bring my dish detergent back?”

This morning in church the sermon was about the sinful woman who washed Jesus’ feet with her tears and dried them with her hair. A difficult scene for us today to understand, believers or not, but it has nothing to do with washing feet and everything to do with how we perceive people. The Pharisee, in whose home Jesus was at the time, saw only a sinner. Jesus saw a woman who repented of her sins and who grieved. He saw an individual, not a stereotype.

I know from my own life how easy it is to look at a person but not see them—the difficult spouse, the impatient child, the cranky colleague, the annoying neighbor. We just don’t want to take time to find out who they really are, why they are annoying or cranky or difficult. In a surprise ending, after urging us to really look at others in his sermon this morning, Dr. Peterman urged us to take a deep to take a deep look at ourselves. Are we really who we like to think we are—or is there room for change.

I think a lot of it comes down to how we treat other people. Consideration means many things—It means checking our reactions before acting impulsively, it mean thinking about the other person and not just ourselves. It even means accepting help gratefully rather than resenting what is not done. It means putting others first at times—not all the time. Nobody is that perfect and self-sacrificing, but if you watch, you’ll find the instances when you should put that difficult spouse, the impatient child, the cranky colleague, the annoying neighbor first, at least for a minute or two.

One of my favorites of Jordan’s friends is the mom of a lovely, seventeen-year-old daughter, sweet, polite, accomplished. But the mom says sometimes she wants to say,
“Get over yourself.” It’s become one of my favorite pieces of advice, for me, and for those to whom I am close enough to say it.

Another family milestone, a cooking day, and the heat goes on

 

The Tomball Alters: Lisa, standing behind her mom,
who is seated next to Morgan, then Colin, and high school junior Kegan.
A fine family.

Morgan Helene Alter of Tomball celebrated her eighteenth birthday by going off to college, which strikes me as particularly appropriate. Specifically, she and her parents drove to Lubbock where she will be a freshman at Texas Tech and where a special guy was waiting for her to join him. Morgan is the third and last of my granddaughters—the other two are Maddie, who has graduated and is working at a genius bar in Denver and Eden who begins her junior year at UCLA. I’m so proud of these girls, and so sure their boy cousins will catch up soon. To show how much things have changed since my day: Morgan’s parents, Colin and Lisa, drove her in Morgan’s car. They’ll fly back home tomorrow.

We had a visitor just now—a possum. All summer I’ve known there is a possum who likes our property. If a garbage bag gets left out overnight, it’s chewed and its contents scattered. Sophie has occasionally let loose with her “There’s a critter bark.” Tonight, she gave two little yelps, but then I saw Jordan bustling around on the deck. She sent me pictures of our guy, who looks cautious but not particularly scared. I am delighted to have him as a resident because he eats ticks and fleas and mosquitoes and other worrisome insects. I think he needs a name, and for no good reason Charlie comes to mind.

Charlie, the possum.

Today was again a cooking Saturday, but I may have bitten off more than I wanted to chew. I’d been prowling through old recipes—a file I’d stuck away in a cabinet in my closet when I downsized. This was a recipe for a chicken casserole with tomatillo sauce—and the sauce nearly did me in. Cooking two lbs. tomatillos in chicken broth was no problem, nor was chopping two cups green onions and two cups cilantro. Or even peeling ten garlic cloves. All tedious but easily done. But when it came to putting that whole mess in the processor, I stumbled.

By trial and error and mistake, I realized I couldn’t put ingredients in the processor bowl and then add the blade—it wouldn’t go down to be properly seated. Duh! Should have taken me half a minute to figure that out. I did realize that I would have to process the sauce in two batches, so I used a fork to pitch half the tortillas in. But then I had to add half the liquid and other ingredients, which meany standing up to dump them in and risking losing my balance because I need one hand to steady myself on something—or sitting and raising the bowl far over my head, which was a pain. I finally got it done, with only one major spill. I call that a triumph, but my arms are sore from stretching and lifting.

The casserole was delicious, and we have enough left for at least one more meal, which is a good thing because I warned the Burtons I would not be making it soon again. The good thing is there was a lot of tomatillo sauce left which is now hardening in my freezer, and we can use it on chicken breasts.

I have always been a believer in the extreme threat posed to our earth by climate change, and in this summer, which is unbearably hot even for Texas, I think the danger signs are clear. We must act yesterday—I applaud President Biden’s efforts in that direction and decry idiots like Senator Tommy Tubervlle who said he’s seen it hot on the football field and this is just summer. That’s what you get when you elected a  coach to the Senate. (Don’t get me started on Tuberville and his hold on military promotions—what a grandstanding idiot.)

Eastern Canada had huge fires earlier in the summer, and now British Columbia is fighting large wildfires. The world is still stunned by the destruction of Lahaina on Maui. Granted, the investigation of that fire is not complete and won’t be for a while, but it may well turn out that human error and mismanagement were part of the cause, if not for igniting it then for the inability to control it. That certainly has been the case with some destructive fires in California. I saw a meme today that said in effect while the earth burns, we may thank these people: and it listed, with pictures, millionaire CEOs of fossil fuel industries. Reading that, it struck me that the world really may disappear by fire. And so, tonight, I leave you with Robert Frost’s poem, “Fire and Ice.”

“Some say the world will end in fire,
Some say in ice.
From what I've tasted of desire,
I hold with those who favor fire.
But if it had to perish twice
I think I know enough of hate
To say that for destruction ice
Is also great
And would suffice.”

 

In celebration of Julia--an odd recipe

 

Today is Julia Child’s birthday. The legendary chef would be 111, probably still drinking wine and dropping chickens on the floor. In celebration of her birthday, the Kitchn website asked fifteen home cooks for their favorite Child’s recipes. Responses included the expected: French dressing, upside down martini, crepes, coq au vin, chicken liver mousse, and, of course, the classic boeuf bourguignon.

By contrast, I thought I’d share one of the most unusual recipes I’ve ever heard of. Let me stress I have not tried this, but I trust Texas author Cindy Bonner who sent me this recipe for Water Pie. You’ve heard of other Depression-era pies with simple, inexpensive ingredients—vinegar pie is a classic. Then there’s Ritz cracker pie, often called mock apple pie, for when apples aren’t available—it is said to taste remarkably like apple pie. Chess pie and buttermilk pie, rich with butter and cream or milk, may not be money-saving Depression pies, but they are classic, southern favorites and have the same custard texture that Cindy found in water pie. My Mississippi daughter-in-law makes chess pie for us at holidays, and it is one of my favorites.

So what is water pie? Sounds … well, watery. This goes together like nothing I’ve ever heard of before, so if you try it, be sure to follow the directions

Water Pie

 

Ingredients:

1 - 9” pie shell, unbaked

1 1/2 cup water

4 TBL all purpose flour

1 cup sugar

2 tsp vanilla

5 TBL butter cut in pieces

 

Preheat oven to 400 degrees. Pour the water into the prepared 9” unbaked pie shell. In small bowl, combine flour and sugar together. Sprinkle the sugar mixture evenly over the water in the crust. Do not stir. Drizzle the vanilla over the water and top with pieces of butter. Bake pie for 30 minutes. Lower heat to 375 degrees and cover edges of crust if necessary to prevent excessive browning. Bake for 25-30 more minutes. The pie will be watery when you take it out of the oven but will thicken as it cools. Once completely cool, chill in the fridge. 

Cindy served this with a dollop of whipping cream but says her partner, Wayne, didn’t think it needed it. For Cindy, the texture reminded her of chess pie. It was, she said, surprisingly flavorful with a unique texture. She advises a couple of cautions: put the pie plate on a cookie sheet for baking, to catch drips; also the crust stuck to the bottom—I suppose either greasing or flouring the pie pan would help that.

 

If you don’t know Cindy’s work, you might want to investigate. As she says, her heroes are most often women and her soldiers drive supply trucks rather than tanks. Her newest title is For Love and Glory, a WWII saga about a Texas boy who joined the Royal Air Force to fly against the Germans when he didn’t quality for the fledgling US air force. Of course, there’s a strong romantic element. The Passion of Dellie O’Barr and Looking after Lily are classics, and Right from Wrong won a Texas PEN Award. She blogs at http://cindybonner.blogspot.com and more about her can be found at https://www.cindybonner.com.

Let me know if  you try water pie. I’ll pass the word along to C indy.

 

 

An interrupted blog

Superman became a senior in high school today..

This is the blog I was writing last night when news about the Georgia indictments broke, and of course then I was glued to the TV. The blog isn’t anything that meaningful—it won’t make you day or improve your life. Mostly, it’s just a chance for me to show off how adorable my grandson was at three and whine about my awful computer problem yesterday morning, with a grateful nod to my son, Colin for this patience with me. But what happened in Georgia may change all our lives. It may, probably will lead to difficult days, perhaps even the oft-threatened violence, but I am convinced we will come out better on the other side, and that the tensions and divisions that have beleaguered our nation since 2016 will begin to heal. I think as a country, a democracy, we had no choice but to prosecute our former president and his colleagues to the full extent of the law. And as Fani Willis emphasized, they are presumed innocent by the courts, something that they would deny others. Today is a day to be proud of America.

Hard for me to believe that the kid who ran around my kitchen in a Superman cape is now a senior in high school, but he is, all concerned with which class he should drop and which class he should sign up for. Wish I understood the process—if he didn’t want the class and didn’t need it for credits, how did he get signed up in the first place? He regaled us at supper with tales of the first day, and it sounded as expected—pretty much chaos.

Jacob headed out.

I put out a call on our neighborhood email list for back-to-school pictures of neighborhood children for the next issue of the newsletter, which as you may know I edit. I have been inundated with pictures—which is a good thing. Mostly I get pictures of elementary school children, but I have a few middle and high school. I know, however, there are a lot more high school students in our neighborhood. Perhaps, like Jacob, they don’t want their pictures published. Jacob will be chagrined to be the oldest one in the next newsletter—shh! Don’t tell him. I never intended to tell him about the Superman picture, but his mom couldn’t resist.

I was the one who needed to go back to school today. I had just barely begun work at my computer, when the cursor froze—and then disappeared. Totally. Gone. In a panic, I called my Colin. He spent an hour and a half on the phone with me, saying scroll here with the number key, hit this key, tab there. Do you have any idea how hard it is to naviage a computer without a cursor. Poor Colin was supposed to be preparing for two business phone calls this afternoon and instead he was helping his idiot mother. There would be gaps in our conversation, silences so long that I sometimes asked if he was still there. Other times I could hear the clack of his keyboard as he searched for a solution, I presume. I finally suggested we give it up, he prepare for and take his afternoon phone calls, and we’d reconnect in the evening.

He agreed but emailed a few minutes later with one more instruction. I tried it and eureka! The cursor reappeared. I cannot tell you how devastated I was at the prospect of a day without a computer. Call it an unhealthy addiction if you will, but I had no idea what I’d do all day—even the book I am reading is on my computer. By the by, airplane mode was the culprit and turning it off for half an hour or more part of the solution. Just turning it off and on again apparently doesn’t work. I have always said computers, like people, need time to collect themselves after a crisis.

North Texas is basking in a cool front. Tonight at ten o’clock, when it has been in the upper nineties most evenings, it is eighty-five—and a low of the mid-seventies is predicted. It’s not supposed to last long—a couple of days—and it apparently brings none of the rain we so badly need. But this brief cool front, like the indictments, is so welcome.

Have a great day everyone. Be proud that we live in America.

Back-to-school Sunday

Our country—or the advertising industry—seems to have a special name for every day: Chocolate Chip Cookie Day, Love Your Dog Day, Eat More Vegetables Day, and so on. Churches have special days too, besides holy holidays, like Youth Sunday and Reformation Sunday, but I recognized one today and wondered if churches consciously name the last Sunday before school Back-to-School Sunday. The whole service had a different feel about it, an anticipatory vibrancy.

In my family I’m very aware of what our minister called the energy and buzz that surrounds the opening of school. Jacob heads into his senior year in high school, Morgan begins college at Texas Tech, and the rest continue their educational path without milestones. I am so proud of each of them and so excited to watch their progress this year. But a part of me is a bit frightened, and I pray for my family. The church service this morning brought that home to me.

At our church after summer absences, we had most ministers back and an almost full choir, a sure sign that the new year begins. The service was highlighted by dozens of youngsters, maybe pre-K to third grade, who crowded the chancel steps and the floor in front, most with their backpacks, to be blessed. Perhaps this should be called Backpack Sunday.

There they were, with a few anxious parents hovering about.  Be still my heart! It has been ten or twelve years since Jacob was in that crowd, but it seems like yesterday. And those children looked so young and innocent and vulnerable.

It suddenly hit me about those sweet youngsters—and my grands. They may not only be nervous, which the minister acknowledged, but they may be downright scared. Is this the year a shooter will visit their school? Will they survive the year? Texas has done nothing significant to protect them or control guns since the massacre at Uvalde. You can stil buy an assault rifle at eighteen with no license, no training, and only a cursory background check. Schools will have armed personnel, which may well lead to more deaths, not fewer. I suspect more than a few schools, desperate to conform to the law, are hiring untrained personnel. And more guns just mean more shooting and more chance of accidents.

There has been one special session of the legislature, at Abbott’s call, to deal with taxes, and apparently, he will call another to try once more to push through his pet idea of school vouchers, which will render public education more ineffective than ever. But no special session on guns. Legislators were busy during regular session banning books and outlawing drag queens. The argument, of course, is that we must protect our precious children. But don’t dare come for the parents’ guns! Somehow too many Texans don’t feel their children are threatened by guns, despite the numerous school shootings our state has seen under Abbott’s governance.

Abbott, whose firm hand controls what goes on in this state, is not a man known for his compassion. And he makes no exception for children. In addition to nearly turning a blind eye to school shootings, he is allowing children to be killed at the border by razor wire and by neglect on buses illegally transporting asylum seekers to “safe” cities. He has issued not one word of regret about the child’s body found floating in the Rio Grande nor about the infant that died on a bus to Chicago. He may, however, have gotten too big for his britches: assaulting asylum seekers violates the Geneva Convention, which theoretically could leave him liable for charges from the World Court at The Hague. And now, Texas twin politician brothers, the Castros, are asking President Joe Biden to halt Abbott’s forced bus trips. Abbott’s entire handling of the border violates Federal law and is now in the courts, but for asylum-seeking parents with young children, the courts move way too slowly.

You may think it’s a leap from those earnest little kids on the chancel steps this morning—some did look a bit bored—to immigrant children dying at Texas’ hands, but it’s really not. Those deaths—and pray there are not more—speak to what kind of state we live in, what kind of people we are, because we tolerate them. We elect the men and women who pass harsh laws without a trace of humanitarianism, who tolerate the far-right demands for guns, including assault rifles which no civilian needs. If we want to protect the kids at my church, where my grandson was not too many years ago, we have to protect all children. We have to extend our love.

“Three things remain: faith, hope, and love, and of these love is the greatest.”

Feeling domestic

 

Our trout dinner.

I had all sorts of grand plans for the day—investigate the bookshelves that are always hidden by the couch, now that the couch has gone out to be cleaned. First time in seven years I can even see those shelves, and I have no idea what all those papers are. And I was going to make notes on a new idea I’ve had--I know, I’m always having new ideas lately and rarely following through. But I have good intentions.

All that went out the window. I slept late and was slow to get going when I did get up. Poor Sophie was most patient waiting for her second breakfast. When I got to my desk, I found I had an extraordinary amount of email for a Saturday, including articles that I wanted to read slowly and absorb—one about Kamala Harris, another about E. Jean Carroll, something about launching a new scene in a novel.

But lingering in my mind was the notion that I had promised to make a corn salad for supper. Christian and I make a great team—tonight he grilled ruby red trout (after first being alarmed at the color) and green beans. I made the corn salad and a peach galette for dessert. But that menu—and the idea that we were having a special dinner—led me down the recipe path.

I figured Christian would decide how he wanted to do the trout, but I had promised to look up directions for grilling green beans in a basket. And then I realized I had to do something with those two gorgeous peaches—once rock-hard, they were now getting too close to soft. So that meant looking up recipes for peach cobbler and peach galette. (More about that on Thursday’s Gourmet on a Hot Plate Column, but I will say the galette was delicious). Of all things I didn’t need in my recipe prowling, I came across a recipe for a taco casserole—it will be great in the dark of winter but sounds way too heavy on an 108 day. That’s the trouble—I always get side-tracked by recipes I don’t need. My “never tried” file bulges, but show me an article that say, “Our thirty most  popular recipes,” or “Our fifteen most loved salad lunches” and I’m hooked.

Then of course I had to make the corn salad—I find that almost any recipe takes me an hour from start to clean-up. Perhaps it’s because I cook from my seated walker, which I also blame for the many spots on my pants. When you stand, things that drip and drop don’t get on your pants, but it’s a totally different story when you’re seated. I gathered things for the galette because I was a little uncertain about that but, after an afternoon nap, putting it together went well. Galettes are not necessarily meant to be pretty and mine wasn’t, but it tasted good. And somewhere along the way I washed fresh green beans and snapped the ends. When Christian was ready to grill them in his new round grill basket, I seasoned them with olive oil, salt and pepper and a bit of garlic powder. He added lemon before he grilled them—that boy just can’t help improving on a recipe—and we dusted them with pecorino before serving. Christian announced it was his new favorite way to eat green beans.

So that was an elegant Saturday supper—grilled trout, grilled green beans, corn salad, and a peach galette. And none of us felt too full after dinner. I call that a success.

My lopsided galette
made with puff pastry.

In other bits of domesticity, I hung up the clothes that had accumulated on the chair in my bedroom—don’t judge! It’s one of the perks of living alone. And I sorted through a basket of things Jacob had brought me from in the house, mostly packages that arrived from Amazon. A couple of books I looked forward to—one on recipes of the Fifties (look out, family, we’re about to have pineapple upside down cake—I wonder if Christian’s mom ever made that) and the other a memoir by Abigail Thomas titled Still Life at Eighty. Isn’t that a great title? You can take it any of several ways. Since I’m eighty, plus some, I’m eager to read what she has to say.

But the thing that excited me about that basket was that it included two things I had ordered for Christmas gifts. It’s August, and I’ve already got two people on my list taken care of. Do you realize how exciting that is? I saw something the other day about how far away Christmas is—not as far as you’d think. Whatever I saw was meant to encourage us that this hot weather too shall pass. And the Farmer’s Almanac says we’re due a hard winter. No, thanks. We’ve had a hard summer, and we don’t need a hard winter.

Know what? My day of domesticity wore me out. I think I’ll go back to writing. It’s easier.