If you grew up in the Fifties, you probably ate Spam

 

The 1950s were an interesting time for America—and for American women. The men were home from the war, and Rosie the Riveter and her sisters who had filled in for the absent men were now expected to go home, have babies, and care for their families. Ladies’ magazines were full of images of happy housewives wearing cheery little aprons and serving delicious meals—including lots of jellied salads, even jellied meats. Families moved to the suburbs, the economy boomed, there were pesky wars in places like Korea but the big one was over, and optimism was in the air. Or was it? And was that housewife really happy?

I grew up in one of those stereotypically happy homes. Not the suburbs, but inner-city Chicago. We were a family of four—my brother being some seven-plus years older than me. Dad went to work every morning as president of the Chicago College of Osteopathy, and Mom stayed home, saw us children off to school, grocery shopped, kept the house, fixed dinner. And always, before she fixed dinner, she showered and changed into a fresh dress or a peasant blouse and long skirt, to look nice for Dad when he came home. She handed him his Scotch and water, visited for a minute, and then produced a dinner of meat and potatoes to suit his Anglophile tastes.

But I know in her heart Mom yearned to be part of the wider world beyond our home. She did not act on that, because it would have embarrassed Dad if people thought that he couldn’t support his family. Still, she had a degree from the University of Chicago and had been secretary to the university’s chancellor, Robert Maynard Hutchins, founder of the Great Books Program. She exercised her abilities through volunteer work at the hospital associated with the osteopathic college. Among her responsibilities, she managed the hospital gift shop. Except that she was almost always a happy person, she might have been the perfect model for Betty Freidan’s unhappy housewife.

Mom also managed to steer a course between good, old-fashioned cooking and the wave of convenience and prepared foods that swept America in the 1950s. Social change in a society is often mirrored by change in its culinary world, and so it was with post-war America. The food industry that had been supplying military needs suddenly needed a new audience—they turned to the housewife. The Fifties saw the rapid rise of convenience food—canned goods, cake mixes, TV dinners, frozen foods, instant foods, even junk food, anything that could cut down on the housewife’s time in the kitchen and give her more control over her own life. Frozen foods were a particularly significant advance for the food industry, even though few American homes had freezers. The futuristic dream was a kitchen stocked with frozen and prepared goods that the housewife could bring to table in something under fifteen minutes.

The food industry, whose goal was more to make a profit than it was to feed America, was quick to spot trends—and exploit them. Companies’ advertising departments were almost as large as their production centers and accounted for all those pictures of happy housewives in cheery aprons. One popular trend promoted in magazines involved gelatin. Jell-O molded salads containing everything from hot dogs to olives to fruit suddenly appeared on dining tables. We had our share of Jell-O salads. One in particular, if I remember correctly, used dark cherry Jell-O, drained dark cherries, and maybe a touch of port wine. I don’t remember that Mom made many other such salads and certainly never the jellied pickle horrors that we now see pictures of.

The company that produced Hellman’s mayonnaise saw the trend and introduced, “Party Potato Salad”—potato salad in a jellied chicken broth base and molded into a loaf shape by a bread pan. Made a great centerpiece. [Kate Prince, “Trends that Have Impacted the Food Industry throughout the Years, investor.com, Feb. 2022] Other even less appetizing examples were a tuna/olive/onion/vinegar dish in a lime Jell-O ring mold or the ubiquitous orange Jell-O with grated carrots. We had that one a lot about my childhood home. Years later I hosted a retro potluck dinner party, and one guest brought that salad—I was rather glad to taste it again. The makers of Jell-O advertised that anything could go in their new lime product by showing a drawing of a dead fish, a shrimp, a chicken leg, a cucumber, a bell pepper, cabbage, one lonely walnut, an olive (also ubiquitous in those salads), celery, and a tomato slice. Presumably the cook was to choose among the items, but there were some weird combinations.

Spam and hot dogs, leftovers from military meals, were frequently twisted into something approximating elegance: a crown roast of hot dogs, stuffed with mashed potatoes. Creamed chipped beef, once the despair of enlisted men and women, became a staple on dinner tables. I fix it and enjoy it today, but there are still many people who scorn “shit on a shingle.” And, of course, there was Spam. Mom would slice and fry, or, trying to make it a dinner dish, score it like a ham, stud with cloves, top with brown sugar, and bake. While I’m not fond of it today, I don’t have bad memories of it.

This decade also saw the introduction of canned soup-based casseroles and TV dinners. The TV dinners usually consisted of a meat, two vegetables, and a fruit or dessert, all in its little tin tray which the busy housewife could simply discard. There was no waste management in the fifties. Typical dinners might offer turkey, gravy, mashed potatoes, green peas, and a slice of pie. Or meatloaf, potatoes au gratin, green beans, and a brownie. To take advantage of TV dinners, households had to own two of the new innovations: a TV set and a freezer. We had a giant, chest-type freezer in our basement but never that I can recall had a TV dinner.

Canned soup casseroles also appeared in the Fifties. These relied primarily on Campbell’s cream of mushroom soup. The classic, developed by Campbell’s, was a tuna casserole with topped with French fried onions or crushed potato chips. Other casseroles might feature ham and Swiss cheese, sausage, any of countless ways of including chicken, a Mexican beef casserole. Church and Junior League cookbooks offered endless ideas for using soup. Some purist cooks, decrying canned soups, devised ways to make faux canned soup, avoiding they said the preservatives and fat of the original. The trouble with these imitations was that they went counter to the idea of convenience and were much more trouble to make than opening a can. Mom was happy to use canned soup in casseroles, and it was one of the many things she taught me. Despite many rather harsh critics, not all food of the Fifties was disgusting. Jell-O molds have pretty much phased out, but canned-soup casseroles are still served in many households across the country, including mine. Grocery stores still sell TV dinners and frozen pizza, so there is a market somewhere.

 

I am embarking on a new project, a cookbook probably titled Mom and Me in the Kitchen. I plan to explore the food of the Fifties, as I learned it from my mom, and look at how it impacted how many of us who cook today. I’d love to hear suggestions,  comments, questions. Email me  at judyltr@gmail.com. I will post excerpts from time to time on the blog.

 

 

A long night

 

My brother, home and in the wheelchair.
I think he looks great considering all he's been through
I am so grateful.

Was there a spot on the moon last night? From my cottage, I heard all kinds of spooky things and had some wild dreams. I went to bed late, maybe just before midnight, and immediately fell deep asleep (yes, I am blessed that way). But after about twenty minutes, I came awake suddenly because I heard voices, men shouting and hollering. And Sophie barked. I jumped out of bed and grabbed my walker so fast that I ignored the medical wisdom I’d heard about sitting on the edge of the bed and collecting yourself for a minute before you stand up—good advice, I think, for the elderly. Except I didn’t do it and felt almost woozy. Now in the cold light of day I don’t know if those voices were in my dream or real. I pulled the kitchen shade aside, but all looked peaceful. I heard nothing. But if there was nothing out there, why did Sophie bark? This morning, Jordan told me she heard nothing.

After prowling around the cottage a bit, with Soph at my heels, I went to bed—and then I began to hear the police helicopter circling. Not directly overhead but probably a bit to the north. It seemed to come close when it circled and then fade off into the distance. And it circled for almost forty-five minutes—by now I was wide awake and watching the clock. Finally it disappeared, and eventually I went back to sleep.

Only to have something on my bedside table beep loudly to tell me it was out of batteries. So I waited, hoping it wasn’t like the alarm system which keeps beeping until you do something. Apparently two beeps was enough. I tried to take a mental inventory of what it could be: not the hearing aid charger, not the remote control for the lamp, not the digital clock, not the remote for the security system (yes, my beside table is a bit crowded). Either the automatic control to my Sleep Numbers bed or the remote for the HVAC unit that hangs from the ceiling and was not in use. I have not investigated yet, but writing this reminds me I must.

As for wild dreams, eighteen hours later I can’t remember them, but at the time they were crystal clear and in my mind I wrote about them in detail. I’m not sure now how much was dream and how much reality. I often remember dreams at least for a few hours and should have written these down. There were two separate dream stories. Wish I knew.

I also in my mind (you can see I was busy) wrote a preface to what I’m calling the cottage memoir. And I remembered that, because this morning I wrote a rough draft of about eleven hundred words. I have had what I call memoir angst—all around me women are writing their memoirs, yet I never felt I had enough to say. I guess I never felt my life was interesting enough, though I will say the one big thing I have done in this life is to adopt four children and raise them, after twelve years, as a single parent. But then I began to learn about the difference between autobiography and memoir, and I began to imagine a memoir about my seven years, so far, in the cottage. There is a story there, but then comes the question of why I feel compelled to share it. Perhaps I’ll share bits of that preface in another blog.

This morning, Jordan, probably aware I’d had a sort of lonely weekend, assured me Christian would grill tonight. That has fallen apart to the point that we are debating what to do with leftovers. Christian brought home some taco meat with bell peppers—that rules it out for me. So he and Jacob will have tacos, and Jordan and I will eat the two salmon patties I have left. She will toast hers; I will make a sandwich spread with lemon and mayonnaise out of mine. Not exactly a coordinated, bountiful Memorial Day picnic! Not it’s almost eight, and no one has appeared. The kind of evening when I wish I had planned a big meal ahead of time.

I just found a message from Jordan that said she was “Kirkegaard delayed.” Puzzling, especially since she is not given to an interest in philosophers, and I’m not sure she even knows who Kirkegaard is/was. I assume autocorrect got her. She was telling me just this evening about autocorrect changing Virginia to virginity and how you have to be careful these days because when you send a message to some one with one of the new cars, the phone system reads the text aloud, no matter who is in the car with the driver. She had texted a message to a friend about meeting at Colonial with Virginia, and it made the change—she cancelled it because she knew the friend had his young daughters in the car with him. Technology isn’t always that great.

My week is off to a good start. I hope yours is too.

The elusive memoir

 

For some time now, as in years not months, I’ve been stewing over writing a memoir. There are several memoirists in my favorite small, online writing group, and I think if they can do it, so can I. Some friends tell me I’ve had such an interesting life, that I should chronicle it.

A couple of roadblocks: one is the distinction between memoir and autobiography. The latter covers your entire life, from birth to the moment of writing and, as someone said, is like an unfinished symphony. How will it end? Unfortunately you (or I) won’t be around to add that ending. And unless you’re a brilliant stylist, autobiography can get boring.

Memoir on the other hand either recounts a specific time or event in your life or traces a theme that has been present for your whole life. I’ve toyed with all those ideas and come up empty. Sometimes I think these blogs will provide material—and they might if, for instance, I ever took the time to weed out all the ones about writing. Or all the ones about family. I’ve started several times and gotten bogged down each time.

Today, I happened across a review of a book titled Fast-Draft Your Memoir. At this point in my life, with over a hundred books on my list, both fiction and nonfiction for adults and young adults, and with several nice awards won, I have long ago left “how-to” write books behind. If I don’t know how to do it by this point, I better quit—and there are days I feel that way. But today it was the fast draft part of the title that caught my attention—the book was cheap, so I ordered it.

And the author’s captivating style drew me in. She clarified that distinction between autobiography and memoir. Clearly, she favors the latter (and teaches courses on it at Stanford, not a tiny recommendation). I devoured her examples and then sat at thought about my life and what theme I would craft a memoir around.

I’ve often thought of writing a book about dogs I have loved, and that still might work, but is that really the part of my life I want folks to remember? If you ask me what the most important thing I have done in my life is, I would without hesitation answer raising four beautiful, wonderful people as a single parent. But another theme that grows increasingly important in my life is cooking.

That’s when it hit me: I have already written a memoir. Wrote it back in 2009. Title? Cooking My Way through Life with Kids and Books. It’s a cookbook/memoir, not an unusual combination these days. I divided my life into four periods (I’d add a fifth now, but that’s another story):  A Meat-and-Potatoes Household; Marriage and Two New Worlds of Food; The Casserole Years; Living Alone and Liking It—Well, Most of the Time.

The first section chronicles my Chicago childhood in a meat-and-potatoes household, where my dad’s British tastes set the tone for the daily menus, though Mom slipped in some of her German heritage (she hated sauerkraut and I never tasted it until I was grown). That section is also a tribute to Mom who was a patient guide in the kitchen and let me make messes because she saw that as part of the learning process. To this day I clean the kitchen as I go along. I can’t stand a messy kitchen with piles of dirty dishes. Whatever joy my cooking brings me and others is due to my mom.

When I married and moved to Texas, I was introduced to two new food cultures: the Jewish food of my new husband’s background and the Mexican foods and barbecue of Texas. For this section and the next one, I queried my four children for dishes that they particularly remembered and got responses of everything from green noodles to my signature recipe for Doris’ Casserole. The casserole years were when the kids were teens with voracious appetites and the budget was short. But all four knew that if you weren’t working (and they all had after-school jobs by the time they were sixteen), you’d better be home and at the dinner table by six. And you never missed Sunday dinner when there were often fifteen or more at the table. And finally there were the years of living alone, when I entertained with frequent dinner parties and an annual big Christmas parties for seventy or more and loved every minute of it.

The book was published by State House Press. When it came out, it had a picture of Jacob on the cover, because his nursery school had put him in a chef’s toque and jacket for some occasion, and it was too cute to resist. It caused a furor among the parents of my other grands and had an unfortunate marketing consequence—people thought it was a children’s cookbook—it is not. Want to check it out? It’s on Amazon: Cooking My Way through Life with Kids and Books (Stars of Texas Series): Alter PhD, Dr. Judy: 9781933337333: Amazon.com: Books

So there you have it: the memoir I forgot I’d written. It’s about cooking, but it’s also so much about raising my family. Should I do another? I don’t know. I’m debating about themes. Any suggestions are welcome.

 

Not much of anything and a whole lot of nothing

 

You may have missed it when I posted earlier, but Story Circle Network published a short piece of mine on their blog today. (For those who didn't know him, this is a picture of my ex, Joel Alter, after he finished a marathon, around 1980; I should mention that I was in the picture but got cropped out--perhaps a metaphor). Written some ten years ago, the piece is about my feelings the night Joel died. It was a piece that I found when I was scrabbling through notes and bits and pieces for a memoir. I posted a link to the piece on Facebook this morning and was highly flattered by the responses.  (https://www.storycircle.org/december-12-numb-and-puzzling-grief/) I’m thinking there is indeed a memoir in my future. Two projects remain between me and a memoir—Irene Deep in Texas Trouble—I’m almost at the end of the first draft now—and then my Helen Corbitt project. I have no idea how long it will take me, but it’s nice to have projects lined up before me.

Before I retired, I used to worry a lot about retirement, afraid that I would wake up in the morning and think, “What in the world will I do today?” So far, that has been far from the truth. I often wake up with my mind whirling with the things I have to get done. This week, it’s finish the Irene adventure and wrap Christmas gifts—two totally unrelated activities. Any Christmas cooking that can be done ahead is already done, though I may decide at the last minute to do something for extra gifts.

Blog writing is hard these days. My mind wants to be filled with Christmas trivia and goodies and music and all that goes with the season. But for this child of the Midwest, it’s just not looking a lot like Christmas. Today the yard guys came with mowers and blowers and when they finished the thick carpet of leaves was gone from the driveway and yard. But it took them forever to do it, with Sophie barking her displeasure all the time. Although we’ve had just occasional rain, it’s been so damp—and the leaves so wet—that there is mold growing on the patio. I hesitate to use bleach because of the dogs. Storms are predicted for tonight and a freeze highly possible for this weekend. A little snow would sure make it feel a lot more like Christmas.

Another blog problem: I don’t for right now feel the intensity of the political atmosphere that finally really culminated in Raphael Warnock’s re-election to the Senate. Fund-raisers are already pointing us toward 2024 with dire warnings that the Democrats need big war chests (I suppose the Republicans do too, but I don’t get those emails except in rare instances of misdirected mail—I do not want to hear from the likes of Newt Gingrich, thank you).

A few issues do spark my interest. The return home of Brittainy Griner is one of them (who knew she’s a Baylor alum?). I am continually incensed at columns and comments to the effect that she hates America. She proudly brought home two gold medals for her country—funny kind of hate. Even more objectionable are comments that she should have been left behind and Paul Whelan brought home. As several have pointed out, our country suddenly has a wealth of armchair hostage negotiators who know exactly what should have been done. They completely overlook the fact that Whelan’s freedom wasn’t offered, was never on the table. They think it makes a good story to embarrass President Biden who, to his everlasting credit, seems beyond embarrassment as he quietly goes about his job of doing good for the country.

Another issue that interests me is the fight for leadership in the Republican House caucus. I think McCarthy’s days are numbered, and I’m not at all sorry. He apparently has a poor grasp of government issues, and his lust for the speakership overrides any good sense he may once have had. I am afraid, though if he is defeated, someone really awful will take over—like MTG who once again this weekend, at  national Republican youth gala, demonstrated that she has not an ounce of decorum about her. Just don’t ask her about what she saw for sale at Target.

Today was a blah day for me, not that I regret it. I slept late, worked all morning and part of the afternoon, had leftovers for supper (who can quarrel with steak and a twice-baked potato filled with cream cheese?), worked some more in the evening, wrapped some packages. I’ll read a bit and go to bed. But above you see where my mind goes when I have nothing else to offer for the day. If I miss a few days of blogging in the upcoming days, please forgive me. I don’t want to take your time with, “And then I did this, and then I did that.”

Thanks to all who have expressed concern about my cold. I know I whine like a baby but I’m not often sick, and so I take it seriously when I am. Maybe that’s another blog topic. Meantime, it is getting better, and I feel okay—not sure however that my cough would be acceptable in a restaurant or a party, so social plans are on hold.

Night all. I’m going to quit babbling.

Some thoughts on memoir

Being a foodie, 
I enjoyed this memoir

From time to time, I think of writing a memoir. I’ve even made sporadic attempts, to the point that I have a fairly good-sized collection of sketches, but they don’t hang together (I’m not sure they have to). The small online group of women writers I belong to counts several memoirists among our ten or twelve active voices, so I always feel a bit lacking because I’m not in that club. A friend in that group and I have been having an email conversation about what memoir is and isn’t and whether it’s wise to dig up every bit of your past.

Memoir is not autobiography, as I’ve only recently figured out. One woman has written her memoir and then announced she’s writing another. I thought, “Wait! Is is going to be repetitious?” But it’s not. You can write several, totally different memoirs. Autobiography is your full life story; memoir takes one thread from your life—career, family, a hobby—and tells that story. So you can indeed have several biographies. Turns out I’ve already written one, a memoir/cookbook titled Cooking My Way through Life with Kids and books (I’ve hawked it here before).

The friend I’m corresponding with wrote what she thought was a memoir many years ago and asked an editor friend to read it and tell her if what she had was any good. The editor told her, “Nobody’s life is 800 pages worth of interesting.” Since then, my friend has been picking threads out of that gargantuan work and using them in countless different ways. For her, the advantage is she has the material all written and ready to use.

There’s the question of audience. Who is interested? Who will read your memoir? Perhaps it’s a mistake to throw it out there and expect thousands of readers to clamor for a copy. No rule says everything one writes has to be published. Maybe it’s something for family or a few selected friends. Maybe it’s for a niche audience—I should, for instance, have done more to push my cookbook memoir on foodie sites (my plea: I was too busy at the time, still working). If I write a memoir, I’ll consider audience carefully and may still publish on Kindle with the expectation it will interest a limited audience.

For me, the question is what thread do I want to pull out of my life? I’ve considered many—my life as an adoptive parent, my career in Texas letters, the shaping influence of my parents and my ancestry. One Idea I’ve about abandoned is to explore my lifelong fight with anxiety. My anxiety is fairly low these days, and I’m of the philosophy that says let sleeping dogs lie. As mystery author Susan Wittig Albert said to me, “Working through past problems is valley work. If you’re on a hill, and you have a fairly good view, you don’t need to do it.”

My blogs may provide the material of memoir. Last night in my prowling, I found that six years ago when I was recovering from surgery to repair a disintegrated hip joint (not just broken, but gone), I blogged every night—about recovery. Just before the surgery I was in a bad place—exhausting pain, over medicated, not at all myself. I didn’t realize until last night that my kids seriously entertained the possibility that I could be dying. That’s a subject for another night, but it’s also a memoir thread, perhaps part of my life as an adoptive parent.

There are other blog entries—a chronicle of my wonderful trip to Scotland with two of my children, much about cooking and even more about the craft of writing, some accounts of special people, including a couple of special     men who came along after my divorce. I’ve had a full and most happy life, and it may be time to capture it on paper.

Interested in memoir? Here are a few titles you might look into: My Kitchen Year: 136 Recipes that Saved My Life: A Cookbook, by Ruth Reichl, her account of the year following the devasting shutdown of Gourmet Magazine where she was editor—the text is all handwritten and charming; Bless the Birds: Living with Love in a Time of Dying, by Susan Tweit, a chronicle of the last year of her husband’s life as a glioblastoma slowly killed him; The Year of Magical Thinking, by Joan Didion—an honest and compelling account of a marriage; A Year in Provence, by Peter Mayle, an account of living in a small town in the Rhộne Valley and particularly of the cuisine; The Liars Club, by Mary Carr, her account of a wild Texas childhood; Good Smoke, Bad Smoke, by John Erickson, a Texan’s view of wildfire; and Eat, Pray, Love: One Woman’s Search for Everything Across Italy, India, and Indonesia, by Elizabeth Gilbert, one woman’s exploration of her own nature.

Fiction as disguised memoir

 

Georgia Arbuckle Fix (and Mattie) did not consider herself attractive.

“Write what you know” is classic advice to beginning writers. Sometimes it’s true. I probably shouldn’t write about traveling to Antarctica because I’ve never done it, and no amount of research will make me warm to the subject (okay, bad pun). The flip side of that advice though is the general belief that creative writers pour some of themselves into everything they write. I’ve had a strong lesson in both these truths this week.

I’ve been reading proof of Mattie, my 1988 novel that will be reprinted by Two Dot in coming months. First published by Doubleday in 1988, it tells of the life, career, and loves of Mattie Armstrong, pioneer woman physician on the vast and bare prairies of western Nebraska in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The novel is loosely based on the life of Dr. Georgia Arbuckle Fix, who was the first woman physician in Nebraska and who really did leave Omaha to heal the widely scattered settlers in sod huts on the prairie. But don’t attribute everything in the novel to Dr. Fix. That the novel won a Spur Award from Western Writers of America as the best novel of the year, was high praise, especially in a category one man angrily declared was for the men’s action adventure novel.  The funny news about the original Doubleday hardback is that it was in their Double D Western line, which sold mostly, I’m told, by subscription to prison libraries. The digital edition, indie published by me at something like ninety-nine cents, sold well for years, making it the bestseller of any book I’ve written. Now it will be in a hardback again.

If you can’t attribute the fictional story to the real Dr. Arbuckle, you can attribute a lot of Mattie’s story to the real Judy Alter. Re-reading it, after all these years, I realized that in some ways I had written the memoir that I was always reluctant to attempt. When she was first settles on the prairie, Mattie meets a charming, charismatic man with a sad story about being disowned by his wealthy family back in St. Louis. Against the advice of her brother and stepfather, Mattie marries Em Jones, who turns out to be, as we would say in Texas, all hat and no cattle. In 1964, against the advice of my family, I married a medical student and followed him to Texas (the Texas part worked out well). The two stories are variations on a theme, but it’s all there—the sweep-you-off-your-feet joy, the domesticity, the quarrels over money and child-raising (I had a few more children than Mattie’s lone daughter), the growing estrangement, and the final betrayal. My ex and I divorced in 1982; the book was published in 1988. I had had time to process, but I don’t think at the time that I realized that I was writing my own experiences into Mattie’s life.

In her forties, Mattie Armstrong developed an unlikely relationship with the uneducated but skilled workman who single-handedly built her a two-story sanitarium on the prairie. Here’s a spoiler: the relationship was never meant to last, and he rides away, both of them filled with regret for what could not have worked on a permanent basis. As I was writing the last pages of this book, I was in the midst of the one serious relationship I had after my divorce. I clearly remember sitting at my desk and pecking out the scene where he leaves—and the realization came like a load of bricks that the man I thought loved me—and who I thought I loved—was going to leave. As it was for Mattie, so it was for me—decisions turned out to be right, and a more than satisfactory life followed.

I have talked before about my reluctance to write a memoir. Oh, I wrote Cooking My Way Through Life with Kids and Books, but it was a surface memoir, hung on a peg of cooking. I don’t think in it I came to grips with the emotions involved on my journey. And I have since shied away from memoir.  With minor variations, this novel is the memoir of two significant periods in my life. I’m still processing that realization.

My children may say this is TMI, as they put it, but it’s something I felt I needed to say. And one other thing: Mattie’s husband was Em, short for Emory; the builder was Eli (okay I hadn’t yet learned the lesson not to give two characters names starting with the same letter). The original dedication to the book was “For Em and Eli/They know who they are.” Em is dead now, and I suspect Eli maybe too. But I have asked the editors to restore the original dedication, replacing the one now that says it is for my daughters. They have enough books dedicated to them. I want them to know how close this story hits to home.

 

 

 

 

 

Not my finest day

 

When by late morning the only thing you can say you accomplished is refilling soap dispensers, you have a pretty good indication that this isn’t going to be your finest day. Actually, it did get better for a bit, but there was discouraging news too. The press that I had hoped would jump at the idea of my Helen Corbitt manuscript rejected it—kindly but firmly. The director wrote that he didn’t see a market for it since the updated cookbook is available and people are more interested in recipes than her life. I know you’re not supposed to protest, but I did gently, telling him the point was not her life but her importance in the culinary and retail history of our country. But a no is a no, and I must move on.

The question is what my next project will be. Seems to me I have two options: researching presses that are interested in women’s studies and/or culinary history or writing that memoir I keep babbling about but doing little on. Today I decided it would not be a cohesive narrative but rather a series of connected essays. For a start, I labeled a section, “A Life with Dogs,” and listed all the dogs I’ve had in my life. Quite a list, but I’m afraid I’ve forgotten some. And then I did a bit on the overall picture—but just a bit. Maybe I’ll work on that tomorrow, though I managed to fritter away much of today—you know, filling soap dispenser and the like.

On a more positive note, Carol, my favorite historical consultant, sent back my Sue McCafferty sketch for the Handbook of Texas with just a few suggestions—that lady knows how to ferret out long-buried facts that I never can find. As always, she improved the profile a lot, and I have now sent it off to the editors. Carol still has the profile of Charlie McCafferty, but I expect it in a few days.

We had leftovers for dinner—always welcome when they’re good, and these were—Doris’ casserole, our family favorite, and a big, tossed salad. So that was another bright spot. And so was menu planning with Jordan, a process I always enjoy. We even settled on a Mother’s Day menu, since they will host Christian’s family which means ten people of varying gastronomic tastes. Shhh! I won’t divulge the menu, lest someone object with “I don’t eat that!” But I will say I have committed to make a big potato salad. When I was a kid, cold turkey and potato salad were always my requests for my July birthday.  

The weather has not exactly brightened the day. It’s been dull and overcast all day, although so far the rain has held off. Still, we expect storms tonight, with more likelihood tomorrow. Temperature is warm, but happy hour plans are on hold. Our usual Tuesday night guests both cancelled, which led me to wonder if I had offended them.

I’ve been trying to track down my good friend Betty, who fell, broke her hip, and had surgery last Thursday. The only reports I’ve gotten are from ministers at the church, where she was music director for over forty years. Phone calls went unanswered, and then I found out I had the wrong cell phone number. No one responded to repeat messages left on the landline at their house, but I know Betty’s husband does not like to talk on the phone. Tonight, I finally learned that she was transferred yesterday from the hospital to a rehab facility, and I’ve gotten the correct (I think) phone number. So perhaps tomorrow I can talk with her. When I told a friend I’d heard Betty had considerable pain, she said, “Hips are bad things.” I couldn’t help but chuckle and say, “Tell me about it.” It has been slightly over four years now since my hip revision surgery (that’s different from replacement). So I hope I can be encouraging to Betty. And I’m glad to be past the frustration of wondering where she is, what’s going on.

I’m going to go to sleep and wake up with more ambition. One rejection won’t stop me on a story I feel needs to be told.

Trees, flowers, and memoirs

    

My flowers and Jordan's Little Red Riding Hood basket

The neighbors behind my cottage are adding a screened porch to their house, a pool, and a cabana/guest house. Behind me is close—the cabana will maybe be ten or twelve feet from the wall of my cottage. These neighbors are good, responsible citizens, and they have bent over backwards to assure I am not disturbed. I am not. The only time noise would bother me is when I want to sleep in the afternoon, and my bedroom is pretty much like a cave.

 But there is one noise that sounds worse than scratching on a blackboard to me, and that’s the saw that tree trimmers use. So this afternoon, just as I lay down to nap, someone started to take out a whole tree. Have you ever tried to sleep with that high-pitched whining? I closed the bedroom doors, confining Sophie with me. That worked for about two seconds, and then she protested. I think she must be claustrophobic, because when I opened the sliding door into the kitchen and told her she could do what she wanted, she settled down and slept next to my bed. Serendipitously, the whining noise stopped, and I did get a nap.

Jordan made up for my interrupted nap by bringing me flowers. She stopped at Central Market for the feta I need tomorrow. After declaring she didn’t want to run around looking for a lot of things, she confessed she overbought—including flowers, Cotswald cheddar, a new flavor of yogurt, and other delicacies.

She was cooking dinner tonight since I wanted to attend a six o’clock Zoom meeting, but all the ingredients for supper—chicken/pesto pasta—were in my fridge. So she loaded up a basket and announced, “I am Little Red Riding Hood.” The picture above combines her basket and the flowers she brought me.

The Zoom meeting tonight, sponsored by Story Circle Network, featured two authors—one a novelist, the other a memoirist, talking about the requirements, advantages, and drawbacks of each genre. I have, as I’ve mentioned, been interested in memoir in a sort of distant way. I always thought a memoir was the story of your life. My first novel, After Pa Was Shot, was fiction based on a memoir by the mother of a friend. The woman, probably in her eighties in the fifties or sixties, sat down at a typewriter, wrote “The Story of My Life,” and created a fascinating manuscript. But these days some people are writing several memoirs. The thought today is that memoir covers one episode, say three to five years. I can’t wrap my head about that. I want to look at the whole of my life put together. One author tonight said if you write about your life, as Michele Obama has done, it’s biography—I would correct that to autobiography. But the difference to me is that autobiography recites the facts; memoir invests those facts with emotion.

Both authors have written books about adoption, which should have hit home to me—but didn’t, because their experiences were so different. Julie McGue’s memoir, Twice a Daughter, is about her experience as an adoptee seeking information about her birth family so that she might have some family health history. The Sound Between the Notes, by Barbara Lynn Probst, is a novel based on her experiences with her adopted daughter and the daughter’s affinity for music and the health history that intervened. One great line: “You can’t create music when you are angry.”

But both are about searches for birth parents, and that’s foreign to me. My four children have never expressed any desire to search, even in the face of such health concerns as epilepsy, Crohn’s disease, and possible effects of maternal drug use. I suppose the two authors wouldn’t understand my feelings—Probst, for instance, knows her daughter’s birth mother. For me, I am more than content that my children are mine. I am grateful to their birth parents, aware of the sacrifice they made for the child’s sake, but I see no need to share them. We are an unusually close and happy family—no small trick with four adopted children and a mostly single mom.

Memoir to me would involve what one author tonight called “working through stuff.” I would want to recall my life, to figure out its patterns. I’m not fooling myself that the world is waiting breathlessly for this story. If I write it, it would be for me—and perhaps for my children.

Enough. I’m going to read a mystery and forget the thornier problems of life in general or writing in particular.

Texas, Chicago, and Me

 

The house of my growing years

Last night I was reading the opening of Jacqueline Winspear’s memoir, This Time Next Year We’ll Be Laughing, when I came across the passage where she talks of the land of our growing and how it is filled with meaning for each of us. Place, she writes, gives our lives meaning. For me, the place of my growing was Chicago, and for many years I thought I’d put it behind me. After all, I reasoned, everyone I knew there had either left or died. But it turns out I had not put it away from me.

I have lived in Texas fifty-six years, long enough I always feel to be considered a native. My careers as author and publisher have been inextricably entwined with Texas, and yet real Texas natives, those born on the soil, have not-so-subtle ways of reminding one that you are an outsider. In the seventies, there was a Born in Texas movement. You could sign up at booths in shopping malls and, for a fee, get a certificate and a T-shirt. While registering my four children, I felt a pang of jealousy. And there were other T-shirts that said, “I wasn’t born in Texas, but I got here as soon as I could.” Folklorist and award-winning author Joyce Gibson Roach and I used to do a dog-and-pony show where she talked about how being a fifth-generation Texan impacted her work, and I followed with “Notes from a Newcomer.” I wish today I had those notes, but they are buried in an archive somewhere.

Aside from fleeting thoughts, Chicago only came into my consciousness a few years ago. After five or more years writing and rewriting, I published a longish historical novel, The Gilded Cage, about Cissie Palmer (wife of hotelier Potter Palmer) who was one of if not the first woman to combine great wealth with philanthropy. The subject came to me first as an assignment for a children’s book. As I wrote, Chicago’s colorful history of the late nineteenth century came tumbling back into my mind—the Great Fire, the Civil War, the Haymarket Riot, Marshall Field and his store, the stockyards and the meat packers, Pullmantown, and, of course, the Columbian Exposition. I was wrapped again in my love for and familiarity with Chicago’s South Side.

And then, in 2016, my four grown children and I spent several days in the city so that I could show them where I grew up. Their reaction filled my heart with love—they exclaimed over my childhood home (sort of a red-brick brownstone that they, expecting poverty, estimated at over a million in worth), the elegant nineteenth-century houses of Hyde Park, the gray grandeur of Rockefeller Chapel and the other buildings of the University of Chicago. We dined at Berghoff’s and Rick Steves’ La Fontera, took the historical tour of the Palmer House, stayed in a suite overlooking Lake Michigan and the North Shore—I could gaze at the lake and fill something inside me that had too long missed that lake. It was, though short, perhaps the most memorable trip of my life.

In 2019, some unknown spark prompted me to move beyond Texas and write about Chicago in an entirely different vein—a contemporary cozy mystery set in Hyde Park, the neighborhood of my growing. And now I am, slowly, working on a sequel to Saving Irene, to be titled Irene in Danger. And I know, though a Texan most of the time, a part of me never left Chicago, and I carry that magnificent city in my heart.

Maybe Winspear’s insight will spur me to get serious about that memoir that I keep in the back of my mind. “Memories,” she wrote, “appear in flashes of light,” and I think that is what my memoir would be—not a connected, continuous narrative, but flashes of memory as they came to me.

Creativity at three o’clock in the morning

One of the blessings of my life is that I usually sleep well at night—and frequently in the daytime too. But last night about three o’clock, I woke and then my busy mind kept me from falling back to sleep. I’ve been known to write great fiction at such times, but the story line either disappears or falls apart when I try to reconstruct it in the morning. Last night I wanted to remember everything.

For years I’ve toyed with the idea of writing a memoir, but I never could wrap my mind around it. The closest I came was my first cookbook, Cooking My Way through Life with Kids and Books. I divided my life into four cooking phases, although now I’d add a fifth. But ten years ago, the phases were childhood in Chicago with a British menu of meat and potatoes, Texas and two new foods—Mexican and Jewish, the casserole years when I raised four children as a single parent with little money to spare, and the years of the empty nest, when cooking really became prominent in my life as I experimented and entertained often. Today I’d add the years of the hot plate, because as most know, I cook on a hot plate or in a toaster oven these days. But that really was a book about food, not my life.

I’m not convinced my life is interesting enough to recount, though others seem to think it is, with raising those four children alone as the central adventure. And maybe it was interesting, and I just didn’t recognize it as I lived it day to day. There were of course gray days but there were many more filled with laughter and even silliness. Warm memories. 

I’m in a small, close-knit online writers’ group where the women mostly write memoir, and one thing I’ve noticed is that most memoirs deal with overcoming a serious problem—frequently addiction or the addiction of a child. We have one woman writing about losing her husband too early to a brain tumor, and another whose ex-husband stole her children. I look forward to those books, both of which are headed to print. But my life pales in comparison. I just haven’t had any big major problems.

So last night I hit on an idea: My Life with Dogs. For too long I lay awake, creating a list in order of the dogs who have meant something in my life. I came up with close to twenty—a pretty good record for eighty years. Oops, I just thought of one more and added him to the list, a dog I had less than a month but one I will never forget. And then I had to memorize the list, so it didn’t get away from me in the morning. That of course might well end up a book more about dogs than me, but it’s worth exploring.

My mind progressed to blog topics and came up with two—you’re reading one now, and the Lord willing you’ll read the second tomorrow night. There was a list of emails I should make today, and again I had to memorize it so that it didn’t get away from me. I am pleased to report that I have committed the list of dogs to a computer file, put the blog topics on my calendar, and sent the emails.

All of this deep thinking took until well after four, but I have a trick for those rare nights when sleep eludes me. I get up and go to the bathroom, whether I need to or not, come back and take two Tylenol. That somehow seems to break the cycle of sleeplessness. True enough, this morning it was 6:40 before I knew it and then I only knew it because Sophie wanted to go out. I got her safely back in the cottage, and next thing I knew it was 8:15—more than time to get up and write down all my three o’clock thoughts.

Excuse me—I think I’ll go take a nap.

Patio and book day

Jordan and Christian worked on the yard this afternoon. It’s that time of year when the pecan tress drops those “worms” all over. You can blow them off in the morning and by mid-afternoon, the patio is covered again. Sophie, with her woolly coat, brings dozens of them into the house—this morning I could follow a trail where she went from French doors, down the hall, and into the bedroom to get into my still-unmade bed, where she dropped more “worms.”

Jordan was so proud that she cleaned the patio while I napped, but by the time I got up, it was littered again. She spray-painted our two metal flamingoes. The paint had been the subject of great controversy. Jacob painted the small one a year or so ago, with a Pepto-Bismol spray paint that was way too pink. I insisted we go to the hardware for a better shade, but that was all they had. So our big flamingo is now an unnatural pink.

I am reminded of my friend, Carol, a purist about many things who once complained, “Why are all my friends’ gardens sprouting this tacky Mexican tin art?” Guilty!

We sat on the patio tonight for a pre-dinner glass of wine. Lovely, peaceful, and green—but those worms dropped all around us. Luckily, none landed in the wine.

Sometimes I feel Sunday is a good day to dedicate to a book, and that’s what I did today, reading most of Ruth Reichl’s Save Me the Plums, the title taken from that marvelously intimate poem by William Carlos Williams. This is Reichl’s memoir of her tenure as editor-in-chief of Gourmet magazine. I wouldn’t call it charming, but I would call it mesmerizing. She is honest and frank about her own insecurities as she ventured into the corporate world, one where she was never completely at home. She admits to anxiety attacks, feelings of inadequacy, guilt about her mothering skills—all this makes her so human.

The memoir is in a way an exposé about corporate America, the kind of revelation that makes me grateful for my small-time, no-pressure, no-big-success writing and publishing career. But it is also a book about food, and Reichl is a skilled food writer, one who can talk unselfconsciously about carousels or explosions of flavor in her mouth, bread that makes you think of a forest on a sunny day, flavors that reverberate. I think I’m a fairly adventuresome eater, but she relishes things I would never try, like squid guts and cod sperm.

A few recipes are scattered throughout the text. In spite of the exotic food she eats and her extensive knowledge, the recipes for such things as jeweled chocolate cake or spicy noodles are easily accessible for the average home cook, a thing she kept in mind during her years at Gourmet.

As in most of her books, the shadow of Reichl’s mother hangs over this one. A troubled woman who suffered from grandiose desires and frequent depression. As Reichl enters the Four Seasons restaurant, she remembers how her mother loved going there for a martini and wished they could afford to go for dinner. It made me realize I under-appreciated the one time in my life that I dined in that hallowed spot.

But there was also Reichl’s father—a quiet, gentle man, a book designer with a marvelous understanding of typography and the importance of the interior of a book (or magazine) but also a clear recognition that cover art was not his forté.

Reichl’s style is casual, chatty, friendly. Reading her memoir is like reading a novel, only you know the end—and it’s not good. I haven’t quite gotten there yet, but the handwriting is on the wall.

Me? I wish in another life, I could have a career like Reichl’s, only without the corporate pressure. If wishes were horses, beggars would ride.

Do I want to write a memoir?

Me and my kids--aren't they lovely?

I have grappled with the question posed by memoir and me before, but it came to mind again today when I read an essay on the current popularity of memoir. To the delight of booksellers, readers are lapping up life accounts by everyone from Michelle Obama to your neighbor down the street who, it seems, had a hidden life in her background.

I belong to a small but close-knit online group of women writers, many of whom are writing their memoirs. In fact, I sometimes feel like an outsider because I so carefully avoid the question of a memoir. But those who write them seem to have had some great trauma in their lives. One woman’s ex-husband kidnapped their children, still very young, and sent the mother a chilling note saying, “You’ll never find us.” Others have dealt with addiction—their own or a family member’s—and for one, an inherited, disabling disease in her children.

I on the other hand, tend to view my life as Pollyanna. Oh, there were a few rough patches—a heartbreaking end to my first true love, forced on us by circumstance but something that neither of us wanted; a family disruption when I married out of my faith (seems old-fashioned now, fifty some years later); a bitter divorce; more recently, a patch where one illness followed another. But in each case, I moved on to what I see as a life in the sunshine—four wonderful children that I raised mostly as a single parent, a rewarding and mostly successful professional life both as a publisher and an author; a busy, productive and independent retirement; and, a host of good friends, some newish, some dating back to elementary school.

Regrets? Maybe a couple: one is that I fought an almost lifelong battle with anxiety, but it is mostly tamed now, and I have learned to avoid the few situations that can trigger it—no, I will not drive over that high bridge! The other is only a maybe—being single for half my adult life was a disappointment—I always thought I would live out Browning’s “Rabbi Ben Ezra” with its lines, “Grow old along with me/The best is yet to be/The last of life/For which the first was made.” Didn’t happen. But, as I reflect, singleness has been a genuine benefit, giving me a great, selfish freedom. If I were childless, I probably wouldn’t like my single state so much, but as it is, I get lots of love and hugs, and there are people who listen to me when I need an ear.

The essay I read says that in memoir the writer is essentially telling the reader, “This is where my life went amuck. This is where I lost the plot, and here’s how I got it back together again.” My trouble is that I don’t think I ever really lost the plot. Just as I like linear storytelling, I view my life in linear terms, always curving upward.

Sometimes I think of this almost-daily blog as my memoir. I have even culled a few posts that I think reflect who I am and what matters to me. I keep them in a file titled “Memoir.” Maybe I’ll revisit that file, see if I can add to it.

But back to the essay I read. The most important point it made was that we don’t have to be rich and famous to write our memoirs. One of my goals was to leave the world a teensy bit better than I found it. I think my children are a contribution to that goal—and maybe my books are too. And maybe that’s the stuff of memoir.

Cooking, Cookbooks, and Writing

I am a firm believer that the Lord works in mysterious ways to make his will known. I’m beginning to believe he wants my writing to turn more toward food writing, just when I have several mysteries in mind to write.

My reading choices make me think this for one thing. I am reading Ruth Reichl’s My Kitchen Year: 136 Recipes, that Saved My Life. It’s a chronicle of her life the year after Gourmet Magazine, of which she was editor, abruptly went out of publication. When your career is pretty much the source of your identity, as hers was, that’s one of life’s major blows. She dealt with it by cooking. Only Ruth Reichl can get away with prose recipes, but she does and makes them so appealing and generally simple that the reader is drawn in, as though to a novel.

Next on my list is Give a Girl a Knife! by cookbook author and James Beard winner Amy Thielen. It starts with her life in the kitchens of upscale New York restaurants, with dishes I’ve never imagined let alone heard of, and follows her move back to the basic food of her Midwestern roots. I’m looking forward to reading it.

And then there’s the fact that I’ve been cooking more and more lately, sometimes for myself—scallops for supper last night the way I like them, sautéed in butter, nothing fancy—and figs stuffed with blue cheese and wrapped in prosciutto for company. I’ve made Welsh Rarebit, fettucine with smoked salmon, guacamole with feta, southwestern tuna with cumin and chilies, beans on toast (an old dish now elevated to trendy status and new to me), lamb chops with garlic, capers and anchovy, from scratch tomato sauces, orzo with spinach and feta, a new cucumber and avocado salad with a tang to it (and the feta I added), stuffed zucchini, a sardine pate,

The list of things I want to cook is as long as that of the dishes I’ve made in recent weeks. So maybe the Lord is telling me something about that memoir I keep talking about writing. Maybe food, along with writing and child-rearing, has been a staple of my life. Witness Judy’s Stew which was designed to be a mix of writing, cooking, and grandmothering—and that was eleven years ago.

I’ve done one memoir cooking, Cooking My Way Through Life With Kids and Books, but that was eight years ago. Perhaps today I would bring more depth and insight to such a project, making it less a chronicle of what happened when and more a memoir that explores, if you’ll pardon a dramatic phrase, the depths of my soul. I have lots of new recipes from those eight years to share.

The idea is rolling around in my mind. I had intended to write about my year out of life, due to deteriorating physical and mental things, but maybe one of the most significant things is that I didn’t cook during that year. And now I’m cooking again—with gusto.

Bologna sandwiches and corporate mazes

Did your kids crave bologna sandwiches? I think one of mine did, and I was scornful, even though they’re a standard on the local deli menu. To me, bologna was scraps of leftover meat pressed into a roll and sliced. Guess what I had for lunch today? A bologna club sandwich on a kolache bun.

Fixture, a local trendy restaurant (translate: lots of kale), has offered the sandwich since its opening, and I routinely passed it by. But today the qualifier, “all beef bologna,” got me, and I ordered it. The sandwich was bologna-heavy to say the least—a generous portion. But it was good—Havarti, thinly sliced turkey, lettuce and tomato, no bacon. I was over-served and so full after lunch.

We ate on the patio and I enjoyed it thoroughly. Windy today but pleasant. The gravel path about did me in. At one point, I thought I was going to pitch forward on my walker because the wheels caught in the gravel, but I caught myself. Carol, who was with me, said she thought she hadn’t been watching carefully, but at this point I can’t expect my friends to watch my back every minute. Still, I may not try gravel again. Jordan’s comment, “I don’t think that was very smart.”

I fought the corporate bear today and would like to give a shout-out to the corporations who were easy to deal with, their telephone reps pleasant and polite: Van’s shoes (they will track down the pair I returned and see about getting me a refund); Target (they sent me a new gift certificate for the one that went astray); OpenSky promised to track down my order and get back to me; same thing with Heathen’s Hoard (don’t you love the name?) where I ordered a “perfect” gift for a grandson whose birthday is coming up; Frost Bank helped me figure out why South Side Rotary hadn’t gotten my check for the flags they put at the driveway on national holidays. The kinds of phone calls that usually take hours and involve lots of “Please hold” didn’t happen. What a great day.

And I wrote over 800 words on the revised novella—not much but baby steps; read 100 pages in the novel I’ve been avoiding; had a lively email discussion with my writing group and got lots of advice about memoir. I discovered I was again doing something I do too often—apologizing for myself. Some of those ladies have written memoirs about the death of a loved one, a bitter divorce, and other traumatic events—I thought my surgery paled in comparison, but they assured me that surviving severe pain is in itself an accomplishment, and many women my age will want to hear about my journey through pain, hallucinations, and surgery plus my lifelong battle with anxiety. The other bit of repeated advice was a memoir takes time. It needs to simmer and sit in your brain, and your understanding of events changes as you write and gain distance So I’m making notes and going on with other projects.

A good day. I’ll forgive the friend who completely messed up her calendar and our dinner plans.

Something Old, Something New—Something FREE!

Everyone loves something free—or at least I hope so. My web page was redesigned several weeks ago, with an eye to making it fresh. But recently I realized that some of the content was out of date. My webmaster, a wonderful woman named Lisa (I love her email because it begins with TabbyCat), suggested that old news wasn’t always bad because it shows readers what I’ve been doing. You judge.

But we added two features that I am wildly enthusiastic about: a list of free offerings. I hadn’t realized it until Lisa organized the material, but I offer no less than five either complete short stories or excerpts of novels. So please—download, read to your heart’s content, and maybe you’ll like my historical work or my mysteries or both. The whole idea, dear reader, is to connect with you

And there’s another addition—a list of what’s to come. I may enlarge it with descriptions of the work in progress, but for now I want you to know that I am writing again, after almost a year of very little activity.

On the web page you can read about recent—and not so recent—activities, subscribe to my “only occasional” newsletter, follow my Tweets, check the blog, and read about me and my work. I’d love comments, suggestions, things you’d like to see on the page. Check it out at http://judyalter.com .

What it doesn’t say is that today I’m proofreading, one more time, the second Blue Plate Café Mystery, Murder at the Tremont House. I’ll post It to a site that provides digital books to such platforms as Barnes & Noble, Sony, Kobo and others, some I’d never heard of. And then I’ll be able to say all my mysteries and most of my historical work is (are?) available in digital form. It’s a project that kept being put on the back burner, but this week I moved it forward. Believe me, when it’s done, I’ll crow about it.

And while I’m sharing secrets about my writing life, here’s another: novelist Susan Wittig Albert published a year-long journal, An Extraordinary Year of Ordinary Days, and when she mentioned it on a list today I had a thought: I should write a memoir of my recent year-long journey through debilitating pain, surgery, and now recovery. Separate friends have said to me on a few occasions, “You’re back. I’m so glad.” I really didn’t realize I’d been away, but in retrospect I know I did some things and made some decisions that weren’t me. I did blog fairly consistently during that period, and I may mine that material for a memoir. Interested?

You know how I know I’m back? I’m writing again, I’m cooking, and I’m wearing makeup. What more does one need to know.

I invite you to my revised web page: http://judyalter.com