The virtues of Texas, some book news, and a new word for the day

 

Downtown Fort Worth, taken from a country road about twenty-two miles away.
Photo by Mason Scott

 
Texas has been getting a bad rap lately, thanks to Ken Paxton and his barbaric handling of the case of Kate Cox, the young Dallas mother of two who was pregnant with a fetus that would not live and would endanger her future fertility and possibly her life. Paxton ruled that she had not shown sufficient evidence of danger to her life to warrant an abortion and threatened any hospitals and physicians who performed the procedure. His horrific judgment, which he was in no way qualified to make, was backed up by the Texas Supreme Court. All this is known not only to most Texans but across the country, where Texas is being scorned as the armpit of the world, a place most would never move, etc.

As someone whose whole career has revolved around the history and literature of Texas, I feel compelled to jump to my state’s defense. Yes, I’m a transplant, but I’ve lived here over fifty-five years and feel pretty much at home, have no desire to go elsewhere. The picture above shows just one fascinating aspect of the Texas landscape—the flat open space. But I thought it spoke of Texas as a special place. Texas people are friendly and good, the history is rich, the landscape varied and sometimes spectacular, and the food terrific, whether you want beans and barbecue or a Michelin-rated upscale experience

We have several new high-end restaurants in Fort Worth, from French to Italian to seafood, and yet we treasure our hole-in-the-wall places where you can get the best chicken-fried steak or chili in the world. Our Stockyards National Historic District attracts tourists from all over the world, and it’s not unusual to hear the babble of foreign voices on the brick-paved streets.

What’s not to love about Texas? The politicians, and we’re working on that.

Kate Cox’s tragic circumstances have held much of my attention in the last days, but today a new bookish threat grabbed my mind. It’s called review-bombing. A debut author, first book, a sci-fi novel, scheduled for release next spring, began leaving one-star reviews of competitors on Goodreads, Amazon’s book review web site. Not only did this author trash other debut others, particularly people of color, but in each review, she praised her own forthcoming book. Dumb, dumber, and dumbest. What a giveaway. The guilty author was found out, of course, and her contract with Penguin/Random House cancelled. So her book will not be coming out in the spring. She did apologize, blaming it all on addiction and now declaring she is sober. I’m not sure that’s enough.

Do you check reviews when considering a book? If you do, I’d advise ignoring one-star reviews. They are most often revenge-motivated or written by someone who has not read the book. Some people delight in being negative and destructive. My philosophy is that if I can’t leave at least three stars, I simply don’t review. Why ruin an author’s hopes? On Goodreads daily emails, I’ve noticed one author who gets on a run of reading a particular author’s works—recently, it was Rex Stout’s Nero Wolfe mysteries—but she almost never gives more than three stars. And I want to scream, “If you don’t like the books any better than that, quit reading them. Choose a new author. Quit damaging this author, though Rex Stout probably won’t suffer much from his posthumous reviews.

Still I wish readers would be a bit more sensitive to the author’s feelings and reputations. If you like a book, say so on Amazon.com or Goodreads.com. A review doesn’t have to be long and deep. Two or three sentences that say, “I liked this book” will thrill most authors. And it doesn’t take that many positive reviews to boost an author’s ratings. If you can’t find much good to say about it, leave it alone. Readers will assess their own and reach their own ratings.

And my new word for the day: elitch, which means ghostly or weird. I read it in a review of a WWI novel titled, The Warm Hands of Ghosts—a very favorable review, by the bye. But I thought it an odd word. It doesn’t even sound like an adjective.

Okay. Lesson over for the day!

Covid, eggs for supper, and a new word

 

Alter eggs elegante
(tastes better than it looks)

Three longtime friends and I have a custom of celebrating birthdays with a restaurant dinner—a custom we sorely missed during quarantine. The birthday girl gets to choose the restaurant, and we treat her to dinner and bring small gifts. Tonight we were to have belatedly celebrated one (only almost a month late—they have busier schedules than I do), but one of them came home from a trip with covid and is not quite over it. So we rescheduled—another whole month. At this rate the celebrant will be another year older before she gets that dinner.

The Burtons are at a birthday party at a distillery—Jordan was vague about the location, but I am anxious to hear details. At any rate, I was on my own for dinner. Frequently, when I’m alone I just scramble a couple of eggs. Tonight I went all out and fixed what I decided to call Alter Eggs Elegante. If you go to Carshon’s deli in Fort Worth for breakfast your choices will include eggs and salami or eggs and lox. When I took daughter-in-law Lisa once, she ordered eggs with salami, expecting sliced salami as a side, and was astounded when the salami was chopped and scrambled into the eggs. And that’s how their eggs with lox are served—sometimes with onion.

Several years ago I decided to fancy them up. I added chopped green onion and chopped tomatoes. Taking a cue from my mom, I added a dollop of cottage cheese, which gives the eggs a lot of body (it does leave a liquid residue which you just have to pour off). So that’s what I ate tonight, with a green salad and a blue cheese/buttermilk dressing. Good eating!

But my friend’s covid plus a visit with my doctor spurred me to investigate getting the new booster. My doctor told us this week that since we have had all Moderna vaccines, we should stick with that. His office only had Pfizer. As I explored today, I found lots of places with Pfizer, not many with the new Moderna booster. The best bet seemed to be a Walgreen’s not too far from the house. But when I tried to pull up the website, I got the dreaded access denied message. This continued all day.

So this evening, I called the pharmacist directly. He told me to call Walgreen’s 1-800 number which I did—and got an automated woman who insisted on scheduling me for a Pfizer shot. No! Tried the website and behold! It was back up. I have an appointment for Tuesday morning.

The run-around with Walgreen’s—honest, it probably ate an hour and a half of my day—reminded me that I want to caution friends against Cigna dental insurance. I paid for insurance for six months, and each month they returned my check to the bank. Each month I called and was given a variety of suggested fixes, including that I had the wrong code and, finally, ridiculously, that I hadn’t put P.O. before the word Box on the envelope. In desperation, week before last, I asked my bank to call. They got the same run-around (all this from representatives who did not seem to have English at their first language). It occurred to me to ask my dentist’s office to check my insurance since I had an appointment the next week. They reported my insurance had been cancelled. And a few days later I received a letter—late September remember—telling me my insurance was cancelled July 31 for non-payment. I am left wondering if they ever looked at the record of my phone calls. It seems inexcusable to me that I was left two months without insurance but ignorant of that fact.

My resolve: business with small agencies and mom-and-pop businesses as much as possible. It’s hard, though. There’s a small, privately owned pharmacy down the street from my house where I send prescriptions as much as possible. Today they told me it would be at least a month before they got boosters, and I gathered they couldn’t assure me it would be Moderna.

My new word for the day: stoush. It means to fight with someone. So I have had a stoush with corporate America.

Fire plugs, walkers, and another new word

 

My friend Carol a the base of the world's largest (tilted) fire plug

Fire plugs don’t enter my consciousness much. I was never one of those kids who opened one on the streets of Chicago in summer to get a cool shower. And nowadays, I don’t think they are found much on city streets, are they? But a fire plug gave me a good laugh last night.

Subie and I went to dinner—a whole different story—and she mentioned that our friend Carol and her husband are in the Carolinas. Subie suggested that the highlight of their trip would be a visit to the world’s biggest fire plug, located in Columbia, SC. I was mildly interested, though I hoped they would have other and better reasons for driving all that distance. I love the Carolinas—having spent summer vacations there for several years when my folks retired to Tryon, NC. But I never went to see a fire plug.

After our supper, I went home, cleaned up details on my desk, and started the new entry in the long-running Murder, She Wrote series. Killing in a Koi Pond is something like fifty-fourth out of fifty-five books in the series, but it is the first one that my virtual friend Terrie Moran wrote. She and I are acquaintances through the Guppies subgroup of Sisters in Crime, and we use the same webmaster. So I feel free to fall her friend even though we’ve never actually met. I wanted to read Killing in a Koi Pond to support Terrie and to see how she handled jumping into a long-running series. I think it’s a coup to be asked to “co-author” with Jessica, and I am, as most cozy writers are, a fan of Jessica Fletcher, Cabot Cover-syndrome aside.

So I started the book, and within the first six pages, Jessica is in Columbia visiting the world’s largest fire plug. I have lived all the long years of my life without hearing of this monument and suddenly I hear of it twice in the space of a couple of hours. Naturally I googled it and discovered it was done in 2001 by an artist who calls himself Blue Sky. He had done a mural in 1985 and placed the fire plug so that it complemented the mural. The monument is forty feet tall and weighs 675,000 pounds. It is deliberately off center, imbalanced, as the Leaning Tower of Pisa—in Columbia, it looks like maybe a truck ran into it. Originally it was meant to be a fountain, but the spigots stopped flowing and repair became too costly. If you’re ever in Columbia, don’t miss it.

In other news of the day, I tried out the upright walker, now that it is assembled. And I am devastated to say that it will have to be returned. The base is much wider and larger than my seated walker, so that it is a clumsy thing to manuever and has the turning radius of an eighteen-wheeler. On my one trial I felt it was unmanageable, and the physical therapist likened it to a huge monster. This is one case where Jordan gets to say, “I told you so.” I’ll  stick with my rolling walker with a seat.

So now, Christian and Jacob must disassemble it, though Christian tells me it really is in four large parts held together by only two screws. That alone gives me pause—sounds like it could easily come apart and drop me on the ground. Amazon has a good returns policy, and we will get it off to them shortly.

And today’s new word is—ta dah!—“sockdolager.” Hats off to retired Fort Worth Star-Telegram columnist Roger Summers who used it in reference to an upcoming local election. Our mayor announced her retirement some weeks ago and has been duly replaced by a young woman who has the support of “establishment Fort Worth.” Then this week, county judge Glenn Whitley announced his looming retirement, and outgoing Mayor Betsy Price immediately announced her candidacy for the judge’s position. And then we hear that the new mayor, Mattie Parker, has political aspirations beyond the mayoralty and will be running for the House of Representatives seat now held (for a long time) by Kay Granger, when Granger retires. I wonder if anyone has told Granger that gleeful hands are rubbing together in anticipation of the retirement she hasn’t yet announced. All of that is a digression from the word sockdolager, which means a forceful blow or an exceptional person or thing. Hmm—hope Mr. Summers tells us which definition he had in mind.

And life goes on in Cowtown, where it is now hot and steamy. Summer has come, and I’m already wishing for the rains of earlier in the week.

Don’t name that baby girl Karen!

Always a good day when you learn a new word. My new word of the day is Karen. If you already know what a Karen is—notice, it is what, not who—I’m sorry for being late to the party. Apparently, the term has been in slang usage for some time. A Karen is a middle-aged, privileged, entitled white woman. You know her, she calls the police on a black family picnicking in the park or a young black girl selling cold drinks on the sidewalk.

I saw the term this morning in an article entitled, “Karen” isn’t going “wild.” She’s just being documented. The article began by comparing the term to the use of the N-word, saying both are offensive. Minutes later, I read an account of a white woman and black man who tangled verbally in Central Park when he, a dedicated bird watcher, asked her to leash her unruly dog. It escalated, she called the police and, according to the report, lunged at him, breaking social distancing. The man was later quoted as saying, “Her inner Karen came out.” Police came, no summonses were issued, but by evening “Karen” had been temporarily furloughed from her job and asked to surrender her dog to the rescue group from which she got it. Now that’s a word I already knew: Karma.

Later today I saw a clip about a middle-aged, overweight white woman, with unkempt hair, yelling at a Mexican family for playing Mexican music in the park. Maybe they should have played “Degüello.”

Don’t name your new baby Karen (with apologies to the only Karen I know who is a really good person).

We resumed our weekly ladies’ happy hour tonight with neighbors Mary Dulle and Prudence Zavala—so good to see these ladies again. We sat distanced, and everyone brought their own drinks. Mary brought individual appetizer plates for each of us, and Pru brought each a canister of piroulines—great dessert tonight. We sent them home with bags of chocolate mints—the good kind you sometimes get on restaurant plates, and a bag of corks for Mary who swears someday she will do something with them. During this quarantine, I’m trying to guilt her into it by supplying lots of corks. Jordan plans an early morning trip to Central Market tomorrow and so asked each of the ladies what they needed. That’s how the world works these days—going to the store? Check with your neighbors. Sitting on the patio was so pleasant—no bugs, though Pru brought her bug zapper—lovely temperature, slight breeze, a perfect evening.

Now Christian is fixing Mongolian beef, and Jordan has put Louella’s rice in my toaster oven. We will have a good dinner—and I’m hungry.

Stay safe and well, everyone.

RAICES, a bit of trivia—and a wonderful neighbors’ potluck supper

Our Geerman dinner

This weekend, independent bookstores across the country raised something like $30,000 by donating a small percentage of their sales to RAICES—Refugee and Immigrant Center for Education and Legal Services, an organization that strives to help immigrants from South and Central America now stuck in our appalling detention camps for asylum seekers. In my horror at conditions in those camps, here’s a fact I didn’t think of: the U. S. policy not only disrupted stable governments in Central American countries as far back as the 1960s, helping to install dictators, but we have more recently been actively deporting hardened criminals back to their country of origin. Which means that we have sent a lot of criminals to countries like Venezuela, where the governments are not stable enough to deal with them. The trauma these criminals inflict on native populations is beyond horrible. There’s another answer to the question of why they persist in coming here. No, they can’t stay and make their own countries better—they are powerless victims. Perhaps we should recite Emma Lazarus’ poem again together in unison—"Give me your huddled masses, yearning to be free.” If you want to donate to RAICES, you can find them online.

Trivia for the day is a new word I just learned: sewist, a combination of the words “sew” and “artist” but definitely not a seamstress, who sews for practical uses and for profit. I think this means fabric artists, which includes artists who create clothes, wall hangings, banners, etc. Sure sounds hard to pronounce to me, and internet definitions are at pains to distinguish the word from sewer which has nothing to do with beauty or sewing.

For some time now Tuesday night happy hour with neighbor Mary Dulle has become a cottage tradition. She brings her own cocktail, knowing I only have wine, and we both provide snacks. A couple of years ago Tuesday night was neighbors’ dinner at a neighborhood grill, but that gradually fell apart, and Mary started coming here. Jordan usually joins us, and conversation ranges over politics and health care but often settles on food. Mary and I both like to cook, though she is much more accomplished and dedicated than I am. Turns out we are both of German ancestry and love German food. So we decided to have a German potluck supper.

Last night was the night. Mary and her husband, Joe, joined us for supper. She brought the makings for Wienerschnitzel, which she cooked on the spot, and I provided hot potato salad, herring salad, and red cabbage. Needless to say Jordan, Christian, and Jacob would not touch the herring salad (which will probably turn up on my Gourmet on a Hot Plate blog) or the red cabbage, but the hot potato salad is one of Christian’s favorite dishes. We had a lovely time at dinner, talking about old friends in common (some ears should have been burning), politics, food, and whatever. Lots of laugher and lots of good food. Chocolate cake with ice cream for dessert. One of the most stimulating dinner conversations I’ve had in a long time, and I thoroughly enjoyed the evening.

Really blessed to have such good neighbors.