What does the Fourth mean to you?

I’ve got my days all mixed up, and I know that Thursday is my cooking blog day, but I guess it will have to wait until tomorrow, because the Fourth is on my mind. I hope you’re celebrating with hamburgers and hot dogs and potato salad and sparklers for the kids (okay, I know they’re dangerous, but we always had them when I was young). I hope you’re not doing a private firework show where someone could get hurt. Read something this morning that said by tonight, a certain number of people would no longer have ten fingers. Please be safe.

Sophie and I are spending the day home alone, me working and she mostly sleeping though right now she’s chewing on a treat. Fireworks don’t much bother her as much as thunder doe—we listen every night to the sounds from the Concerts in the Garden, and I leave the French doors open specifically to hear them. Okay, also to get the evening breeze. Nice cool day here today, wit a high of only 92.

I experimented tonight and made myself some spring pea soup. Got it too thick, so will add more chicken broth and then top it with a dollop of Greek yogurt. That and a big salad will be my dinner.

I don’t need a celebration tonight, because I had an elegant dinner last night with three good friends. Three of us have June and July birthdays, and so we were celebrating. Had dinner at Trinity Terrace—for non-local folks, that’s an upscale, high-rise retirement complex. We dined in the “fancy’ restaurant in the newest tower, and I had Caesar salad, lobster thermidor with scallops, and flourless chocolate cake. So good, so rich. And so good to catch up with the others.

Today I wrote almost my requisite thousand words, fiddled some, read some, napped—a nice quiet holiday. But a part of my mind is on Fourth of July celebrations and the huge elephant in our national room—the ostentatious trump military parade. My neighborhood had a parade, with kids in costume and decked-out trikes and bikes, even strollers and wagons. Mounted police escorted the marchers, and neighbors lined the streets, sitting on front steps and lawn chairs and curbs, waving American flags.. The parade ended at the elementary school with refreshments for all. That’s what the Fourth should be about.

Erma Bombeck, beloved comedic writer, said it best of all years ago: “You have to love a nation that celebrates its independence every July 4, not with a parade of guns, tanks, and soldiers who file by the White House in a show of strength and muscle, but with family picnics where kids throw Frisbees, the potato salad gets iffy, and the flies die from happiness.  You may think you have overeaten, but it is patriotism.”

It is not about a parade of military might. As the Navy Seal who brought down Osama Bin Laden said, “That’s third world stuff.” It is indeed what military dictators do in countries like Russia and North Korea. I haven’t yet figured out why France seems obliged to have a military parade—seems out of character.

In our country such a parade is another desperate gesture, albeit on a large scale, by a wannabe dictator who is a draft-dodger and is uncertain, to the point of desperation, about his own masculinity. The funniest gifs I saw showed trump riding a tank with a limp cannon. And he displayed his ignorance of all things military by claiming the parade would showcase the latest Sherman tanks. Sherman tanks went out of use in the 1950s.

Cadet Bone Spurs once again did not think of consequences, such as the havoc tanks would create on streets and, God forbid, the mall. Nor did he ever acknowledge the gosh-awful mess his follows left in Orlando after the rally when he announced he will run for a second term (heaven help us1). I dread seeing the desecration of the Lincoln Memorial tomorrow.

It isn’t the worst thing trump has done—one is hard put to choose that worst, though I would probably cite the concentration camps—but this parade was surely another big log on the egotistical bonfire that could destroy America.

God bless thunderstorms! May they rage long and hard in D.C. tonight.

Erma Bombeck Lives On!

            Erma Bombeck’s classic lines stay in my mind forever. For years I saved a clipping of her column about never wanting to lose the child in her at Christmas. But perhaps her line most memorable to me was her confession that faced with a blank piece of paper in her typewriter (dates her, doesn’t it?), she’d rather go scrub floors. I felt that way this morning.

I have the climactic scene in my novel-in-progress to write, and it’s pretty well mapped out in my head; I have an article I’m fiddling with for a writers’ publication; and I have a brief essay I’m editing. So what did I do this morning?

I tackled the two big drawers in my kitchen, a chore that needs to be done with discouraging frequency. One is designed to hold pots and pans, but because it is commodious, everything get put in there—crackers in baggies, small bottles of wine, vinegars and oils because it’s close to the hot plate. It’s sort of like my closet which, because it’s large, ends up as the repository for everything we don’t know what to do with. I need a good closet redo.

Back to the kitchen: I moved the crackers—we tend to forget about them in there anyway. And I took everything out and put it back in neat order—well, as much as I could. I culled out a disposable icebox container for which I had no lid—Jordan later found the lid in her kitchen and slipped the whole thing into a small space in the drawer.

Then I moved on to the drawer that serves as my pantry. You know things have come to a sad pass when a drawer is all the pantry space I have. Once again, I took everything out, which was good because it reminded me of some things I forgot I had. I’m a hoarder of sorts—well, let’s say I don’t like to be caught unprepared. So there’s some bulgur wheat tucked away and lentils—aha, I’ll make soup this week! —and four kinds of pasta, plus countless cans of tuna, some canned chili I bought in a fit and may never eat, enough cans of anchovies that I don’t need to ever buy again—but I do love them. Now it’s all neatly arranged.

The problem, of course, is that all that neatness will disappear with daily living, and I’ll have to do it again.

But there’s more to my domesticity. When Jacob was selling cookie dough for band, I ended with two boxes. I was down to the bottom of the chocolate chip box, so I baked those cookies. My daughter-in-law Lisa reps for a line of organic products called Wildtree, and I especially liked the ranch dressing mix, so I made up one of the packets she gave me for Christmas. So tonight, I’ll have left-over shepherd’s pie, salad with ranch, and a chocolate chip cookie (and then I may hide them from Jacob).

Nice outing at noon today. Christian was puzzled when Jordan told him we were going to the hardware for onions—why not the grocery? —but when I said starter onions, he understood they were for my garden. I got basil, a trap to catch food in the sink (one of mine disappeared into thin air), and dishes to sit under plants when I water them. Then we went to Carshon’s for a good deli lunch—I had lox and they each had designer sandwiches, the Rebecca and the Ruthie.

Good news of the day: the sight in my right eye was markedly improved this morning. I could distinguish each piece of furniture in the living room. Tonight, after a day of movement that stirs things up, I can still see the furniture, but it’s pretty blurry. Still, I am so grateful for progress!

Happy weekend, everyone.

Some things that made me happy today

Here’s something that made me happy today: did you know there is a fellowship in the name of Erma Bombeck and Anna Lefler? It annually awards two recipients with a two-week retreat at the hotel of the University of Dayton and a slot at the Erma Bombeck Writers Workshop. The university sponsors the program. Dayton is the late humorist’s hometown.

It’s particularly fitting to remember Bombeck at this time of year because of her essay, “Where did Christmas go?” The humorist, who once said only a thin line separates laughter and pain, began that piece with, “There is nothing sadder in this world than to awake Christmas morning and not be a child,” and ended it with, “Time, self-pity, apathy, bitterness and exhaustion can take the Christmas out of the child, but you cannot take the child out of Christmas.”

In these troubled times in our country, we need all we can get of Erma Bombeck—and of he spirit of Christmas, no matter the faith you follow.

Something else that made me happy today: lunch with an old friend. I can’t tell you how long I’ve known Jim Lee, but it’s a long time. When he was chair of English at the University of North Texas, he’d call me to announce he’d had a million-dollar idea, and I’d cringe because I knew it meant work for me. Later, he moved to Fort Worth and became a regular volunteer at TCU Press, serving, as the provost so clearly specified, “without compensation.” We worked together, we edited books together (Literary Fort Worth, Elmer Kelton: Essays and Memories, and probably others), he wrote at least one book under my tenure (Adventures of a Texas Humanist). We were partners in crime, frequent guests together at literary events, and constant lunch companions. When I retired and he tired of his unpaid position, we drifted apart, and I hadn’t seen him in several years

We do email occasionally, and recently I wrote and told him I didn’t like to let people who’d mattered to me slip out of my life. Would he come to lunch at the cottage? He would and did. We had a good time, catching up on people (how neat that he remembers all my kids and asked about them) and sharing stories old and new, commiserating about age and friends now gone. I hope we do it again.

And more happiness: Betty and I went to Pacific Table for our weekly dinner and split Trout Amandine. It came with a choice of zucchini or root vegetables. She wanted the root vegetables, but I hesitated when I heard parsnips, turnips, and rutabaga. Then I threw caution to the winds and deferred to her taste. The vegetables were good, the trout was wonderful, and it was a pleasant if quick dinner.

Too much happiness in my world to let Roy Moore and the likes dim it, though I will continue to speak out That’s how outraged I am about what is being done to our country. Oops, I forgot—happiness is the word of the day.

Procrastinating

Erma Bombeck, one of my heroines, once wrote that she'd rather scrub floors than look at a blank piece of paper in her typewriter. Poor Erma, I think she did all her writing before the age of the computer, but I fully understand and agree with her sentiment. I hate that blank screen.
In January, feeling big and bold, I wrote about 4500 words on a new novel--oh, good, only 64,500 to go! I was off to a gangbusters start on my 1,000 words-a-day goal. But then a manuscript I'd committed to edit came across my desk; then a manuscript of my own flew back and I dealt with edits, proofreading two more times (I am almost but not quite tired of the story--good thing I think it's worthwhile), and I got lost in the machinations of preparing to self-publish that one. And then the manuscript with first edits came back. My 4,500 words lay untouched.
Every weekend I said to myself, "This is the week I get back to that manuscript." But it didn't happen. I am fully capable of spending a morning with email, Facebook, the newspaper (skinny as it is these days), and yoga. Then, oops!, it's time for lunch with a friend. Then home for a bit more FB and it's time for a nap. I go pick Jacob up, we do homework, and who can revisit a novel in progress in the time left between five and six at night? And evenings, either I went out to dinner or I had that compelling book I was reading. Even tonight, I'm reading a book I've agreed to review.
But this morning I said to myself firmly, "Today is the day." I'm actually a pretty organized person and compulsive about what's on my desk, but when Jacob was here today I found myself making grocery lists, prowling through recipes, fiddling. I was procrastinating.
Tonight I finally read that 4500 words over, appalled at the typos--like different words, "next" for "night" and so on. I went through it and slowly began to feel myself drawn into the story. I wrote about 600 new words--not a great record for a day, but I figure it's a good start.  Tomorrow I'll get back into the groove--of course, there's the grocery store (that list, you know) and Jacob's last day of school before spring break. But next week, with school out, wash my dust...maybe!