Sausage for breakfast

With my mom gone, I am having to learn meal prep all over again.

She ate the same thing for breakfast every day: oatmeal with coffee. I tried to get her to eat other things for breakfast, but that was all she wanted. She would prepare the oatmeal by herself, mostly, though in the last few months she found the half-gallon jug of milk too heavy to handle when she would add about two tablespoons of it to her microwave-cooked oatmeal. For a while I was pouring smaller, easier-to-handle portions of milk into jelly and relish jars so she could pour it herself, but in the end I was pouring the milk for her every morning.

My goal with her for dinner was always to serve her a varied diet of things she liked. One day she might get smoked sausage with eggs, another spaghetti or lasagna, another fried sausage, another chili. Sometimes she had meatless meals, pierogies or macaroni and cheese or fried fish. She would take breakfast around 10:00 AM and dinner around 4:00 PM and - that was it. Usually just two meals a day. What she ate, I ate. I would generally have dinner prepared by noon, so sometimes I could persuade her to eat a smaller portion for lunch, but most of the time she preferred just having her two meals.

(I was put to shame by the generous and balanced meals she was served while in the rehab center, and I tried to replicate them during her brief time back at home with yogurt and Jell-o and salads and meals three times a day.)

Now she's not here anymore, and I only have myself (and the cats) to worry about feeding.

When we were kids, we had a Sunday morning tradition: go across town to 9:00 AM Mass, then go to my grandmother's with all my cousins and my uncle and aunt for a breakfast of kielbasa, Polish sausage. Sausage needs to be boiled at least an hour before it can be eaten, and we developed a taste for it being fried after it was boiled. My grandmother would walk up the hill from her house for 7:00 Mass, come home, and prepare the sausage while we were at church so it would be almost ready by the time we tumbled in around 10:00. We devoured it greedily and then retreated to another room to watch Sunday morning TV - Sesame Street, The Electric Company, later 3-2-1 Contact and Big Blue Marble, Marlo and the Magic Movie Machine, sometimes retro showings of The Lone Ranger on the local PBS channel* - while the adults sat around the kitchen table and shared news and gossip from the previous week. 

One Sunday morning we all gathered at that table for the last time and didn't realize it.

I still enjoy sausage from time to time, and so did my mom. A trip to Jerry & Son market in West Nanticoke three or four times a year was sufficient to keep us supplied. While the Sunday morning feasts featured rings and rings of sausage, a single ring for the two of us would supply four or five meals. We would have sausage every three or four weeks. I would start it boiling around 11:00 AM or so, get it on the frying pan around noon, and when it was ready I would take my pre-work shower.

Today I decided to have a Sunday morning sausage breakfast for myself. I got the sausage in a pot of boiling water a little after 9:00 AM. The water started to boil out after about 45 minutes, so I added more and let the pot boil a little longer. Around 10:15 AM I got it out of the pot and into the frying pan, set on medium with water from the pot added to the pan. Frying sausage is a delicate operation: too low and it never browns, too high and it burns. The trick is to let the water boil away and let the sausage almost burn, then add water to start the process over, turning it once it begins to visibly brown. It was ready for eating around 10:45 AM.

It was a total pain in the ass for someone used to having yogurt or eggs for breakfast.

Nostalgia is fine. But I think as long as it is just me doing the cooking and eating, I will stick to having sausage as a dinner item.

*There was also a Jewish-themed children's TV show whose name escapes me. I don't think it was "The Magic Door." It was hosted by a jolly fellow with a big mustache whose voice reminded me of Gene Shalit.

Updates

Another late one. Going to bed soon.

Today is the twentieth anniversary of my grandmother's death. I tried to stop at the cemetery after work today, but it was already far too dark to go in. The cemetery officially closes at sunset, which was at 4:36 PM locally. I didn't get there until after 5:00. By then the darkness was nearly full, and traffic was unusually heavy on Middle Road. I drove past the cemetery and saw the gate was still open. Our family plot (which I decorated for Christmas this past Sunday, incorporating real holly and holly berries along with the plastic greenery) is just inside the gate. Surely no one would object to me slipping in there for just a minute or two? But I was going too fast and could not safely make the turn into the entrance. I pulled into a housing development a hundred feet or so down the road, and waited a good five minutes until traffic allowed me to pull out. But I just drove past the entrance again, since it was clearly too late and too dark to safely enter or attempt to exit the cemetery. I silently said a prayer and promised to visit this weekend.

Third week of training is nearly over. We do an exercise each Friday at the start of class - an icebreaker / team-building / getting-to-know-you exercise. Each member of the class submits a song and artist to our instructor, who plays the first thirty seconds or so for the class. We then try to figure out the song, the artist, and - most importantly - who chose the song. In this way we get a sense of the diversity of tastes in the group, and also start to get a better understanding of each member of the class. So far my picks have been "Christmas at the Zoo" by Flaming Lips and "Just Like Heaven" by The Cure. For tomorrow I have three different choices in mind. We'll see which one I pick.

Thor is still maintaining. He's eating lots, but I don't know how much he's absorbing. We'll see if he's put on any weight when I take him to the vet Saturday morning. I'll be giving him his second hydration tomorrow night.

Summer on the downswing

It's been a weird summer, and the weirdness isn't showing any signs of ending. But the summer is.

When I was a kid, my grandmother's birthday was always the point where it became obvious that summer was coming to an end. We would gather at her house, all the family that lived in the area, and have a coconut-iced cake and ice cream that always tasted strangely off and we would sing "Sto Lat," a traditional Polish birthday song that means "May you live 100 years." (She only made it to 88, three years older than my mother will be in a few weeks.) The following weekend - the final weekend of July - was the weekend of the St.Mary's church bazaar, another milepost in the ending of the season.

From that point on it was probably the same as for most kids growing up then. August was one last chance to squeeze some fun out of the summer, and to hell with the back-to-school sales. Despite the last-minute family trips, and no matter how fast we rode our bikes up and down the street, soon the smell of new school supplies, crayons and pencils and tablets and binders, would let us know that summer was ending for good.

The Jerry Lewis Labor Day Telethon was the end of the ending. Staying up late to see current celebrities and bands, mixed in with lots of people we didn't know and didn't care about, was our last gasp. In a day or two we would be back in school, sitting through classes, feeling like it was all a bad joke, like if we wished for it hard enough, we could be outside again and free to play all day.

So this is it. Not the end, but the beginning of the end.

Are we prepared for what comes next?

Nanticoke: The Card Shoppe

Last week, as I took my mom on her weekly trip to the supermarket, we stopped at the card section.  A cousin's son was turning sixteen, and we wanted to get birthday cards.  Despite having a fairly extensive selection of cards at the supermarket, we were provided with exactly two options specific to a sixteen-year-old boy.  This seemed fine, until I pointed out that lots of other relatives and friends would probably be looking for cards there too, and he might end up with numerous copies of the same two cards.

At another birthday party the next day, I talked with my cousin's husband about this, and he agreed that even at large stores, the selection of cards is limited to either the same two or three major lines, or a random assortment of cards with inside text that appears to have been written by lobotomized non-English speakers trying to crank out cleverness using Babelfish. "It's too bad Al Bohinski isn't still around," I said, and he agreed.  "Yeah, then you'd have fifty or sixty years worth of cards to choose from."

Al Bohinski seemed like an old man the first time I met him.  He was from my grandmother's generation, maybe half a generation earlier, and always and forever he had been the owner and proprietor of The Card Shoppe.  It was a dark and odd place, with the floorboards blackened by years of heavy use.  Mr. Bohinski would sit behind the counter near the front and greet you as you came in, WNAK playing from a small radio next to him.  You could tell him exactly what you were looking for, and he would rise up wheezily from his stool and walk along the creaking floor on bandy legs, his pants held up with black suspenders, and tell you precisely where the selection of cards you were looking for would be.  And what a selection:  cards reaching back at least into the 1960's, maybe earlier.  And not just cards, but little statuettes and other knicknacks.  Prayer books, bibles, crucifixes, stickers of the sort teachers would use at school. I picked up a golden-eyed white porcelain Triceratops there, ostensibly for my mother or grandmother, and later got the matching Brontosaurus and Brachiosaurus.


(What, you thought I was making this up?)

Mr. Bohinski would always discount whatever he was selling you.  If a card was marked 35 cents, he would charge you 30.  It didn't matter to him that a similar card elsewhere would cost five times as much.

I could never leave the store without Mr. Bohinski telling me some story.  How, back before they were even courting, my grandfather would point to my grandmother as she passed by and tell his friends "That's the girl I'm going to marry!"  How in-store design-a-card kiosks were killing the card business. (Such things turned out to be a passing fad, themselves done in by design-at-home programs.) He delightedly showed me a self-tying bow manufactured by a ribbon factory in Berwick. Those moments were priceless.

He died a year or so before my grandmother.  He had been dying for some time, and had had to give up working at The Card Shoppe a few years earlier.  I remember walking in there one weekend to see someone else sitting at the counter, someone unfamiliar with the layout of the cards.  And instead of WNAK playing on the radio, one of the local college radio stations was tuned in.  Letters to Cleo's cover of Fleetwood Mac's "Dreams" was playing.  It was...odd.  Disconcerting.

Eventually the store changed hands, but it's still open.  It's now known as Maria-Anna's Card and Gift Shoppe.  Mari-Anna has kept much of the store the way it was, though it seems a bit brighter, and the floorboards may be a bit less grimy.  I stopped in today to pick up a confirmation card for a friend's son.  She led me right to them, to a selection of cards that looked to be at least forty years old.  I selected one with a stained-glass image on the front, which I thought would be a nicely personal touch.  It didn't have a price marked that I could see, but she charged only 85 cents for it.  It would have cost three or four times that much anywhere else.

After I gave her my dollar and got a shiny nickel and dime back in change I looked at the stuff around the counter and under the glass display case.  Like the rest of the store, it was filled with artifacts of bygone eras - artifacts that might command high prices from interested buyers.  Could my eighty-five cents have been all that she made for the day?  How many eighty-five cent cards does she have to sell each day just to keep the place open?

I don't know how much longer a store such as this can continue to exist, even a store nestled in a pocket of unreality like Nanticoke.  If you're interested in buying cards from decades past, or strange statues and trinkets from a time long gone, stop in and visit the place.  It's located at 129 South Market Street in Nanticoke, Pennsylvania.

24-hour Pickles

One of the more shocking revelations of the internet era - for me, anyway - has been that many of my grandmother's delicious and ancient recipes were actually just things she picked up from magazines and cookbooks, or things that were passed on to her from other people who cribbed them from these sources.

One favorite childhood memory was of her 24-hour Pickles. These weren't an every-year treat, but were something we enjoyed once in a while. I got the recipe from her before I headed off to grad school in Delaware (a nasty, brutish, and short experience) so that I might be able to recreate a favorite taste during my far-off exile.

I modified the recipe slightly from her original, based on my observations of the stuff at the bottom of a jar of Claussen dill pickles. (After these pickles, Claussen dill pickles are my favorites.)


24-hour Pickles

(Makes about 4 one-quart jars)

2 quarts (4 cups) water
1 cup vinegar
1/3 cup salt (most recipes call for non-iodized salt or even special pickling salt, but this recipe works fine with regular iodized table salt)
1/2 cup sugar

Cucumbers, quartered

Fresh dill (2-3 4" sprigs per jar, favor feathery leaves over seeds)
Garlic (1-2 cloves per jar)
Peppercorns
Allspice
Red pepper (USE SPARINGLY)


Boil water, vinegar, salt, and sugar and allow to cool. I experimented with boiling the water first, then adding the other ingredients and returning to a boil. This way less of the vinegar boils off.

While that stuff cools:

I don't boil or sterilize the jars and lids, just wash them thoroughly. Any glass jars will do, preferably with metal lids. Naturally, pickle jars work best! But I've also used peanut butter, mayonnaise, and spaghetti sauce jars. As these jars are now mostly plastic, you may need to actually purchase appropriate jars.

Quarter cucumbers and stuff them into jars. I usually cut them into eighths. You could also probably just slice them into pickle chips - I'm going to try that next time.

Add some dill to each jar. 2-3 sprigs, each about 4" long, should be adequate for each jar, but you can add more. While the flavor comes from all parts of the plant, I prefer the feathery leaves and little round buds and avoid using any dill seeds.

Chop garlic into tiny pieces and add to each jar, at least 1-2 cloves per jar. More if you like garlic. (After handling the garlic and dill, your hands will smell delicious for days.)

Add black peppercorns, maybe 6 - 12 per jar. Not sure what these do to the flavor, but if they're not there, they're missed.

Add cloves of allspice, maybe 2 - 3 per jar. I'm not sure when I started doing this - maybe this year. Damn, the pickles I made this year are good.

Add red pepper flakes - SPARINGLY. This year I used EXACTLY three flakes per jar, and that's what I'm recommending. I've ruined batches of pickles by adding too much red pepper. The hot peppery flavor came to dominate all the other flavors in the pickles. To get the same effect, take a cucumber slice, dip it in pickle juice for five seconds, rinse it off thoroughly, and then add a few dashes of Tabasco. Without red pepper the pickles taste bland, but too much and they don't taste like pickles.


Once the liquid, or "brine", has cooled add it to the jars stuffed with cucumbers and spices. The more tightly packed the jars are, the farther the brine will go.


Let the pickles sit in the refrigerator a minimum of 24 hours. (I admit I have stolen a few before the full 24 hours.) Eat and enjoy.

I make no claims about how long these will keep, or if you will die of botulism or something from not sterilizing the jars and lids. Also, The Joy of Cooking insists that you should remove the garlic after the first 24 hours to avoid bacterial growth. So, do that if you feel you must.


Note: If you prefer, you can make a half-batch. For your convenience, here are the half-sized ingredient measures:

1 quart (2 cups) water
1/2 cup vinegar
1/6 cup salt = 2 tablespoons + 2 teaspoons
1/4 cup sugar = 4 tablespoons

It's All in the Game

The number of #1 pop hits co-written by Vice-Presidents of the United States is currently exactly one.



From Wikipedia:

"It's All in the Game" was a 1958 hit for Tommy Edwards. Carl Sigman composed the lyrics in 1951 to a wordless 1911 composition entitled "Melody in A Major," written by Charles Dawes, later Vice President of the United States under Calvin Coolidge.

In addition to scoring a popular hit - something he never lived to see, though the melody was a popular violin piece in his day, which eventually came to annoy him greatly - Charles Dawes also was a co-recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize. Al Gore has some catching up to do.

In researching this, I also found that Tommy Edwards was responsible for popularising a song my grandmother was fond of singing:



I know my grandmother was canny enough to get the meaning of "I Really Don't Want to Know," which could be politely retitled "I Know You're a Floozy, but Let's Pretend You're Not."

When I was a kid I always liked this Tommy Edwards song, which was frequently played on WNAK:

Treasure trove in the shed

I mowed the lawn at my house today. And today I decided to remove something from my shed and share it with you, and attempt to preserve it, and in preserving it, hasten its destruction.

Inside the shed are various items. Old tools. Old electrical projects that probably belonged to my uncle who tinkered with that sort of thing. An old DeSoto - missing, among other things, the engine. My garden tools and cement mixing stuff. And a few old papers serving as drop cloths for everything else.

One of those old papers was the New York Sunday News (20 cents, Country Edition) comics section from August 8, 1971.

The Sunday News was the Sunday version of the New York Daily News. Part of our Sunday ritual was for most of the members of the family who lived in Nanticoke - my mom, my brother and sister, me, my aunt and her six children, my uncle and his wife and (eventually) their two children - to gather at the house of my grandmother and grandfather after 9:00 Mass for a breakfast of sausage and bread and coffee. How we were able to fit so many people into what seems now like such a small kitchen is beyond me. My uncle, the organist at our church, would detour on his way from church and stop a McDonald's Newsstand to pick up copies of the Sunday News and the Wilkes-Barre Sunday Independent, and we would divvy up the various sections among the gathered family and read and eat and drink coffee and talk and talk. Eventually the kids would move into the next room to watch TV or play Lava Land (the floor is LAVA! Jump from chair to chair to couch, touching only the pillow boulders floating in the lava, or die!) while the adults discussed work or politics or the news or whatever it was that adults discussed.

Gradually things drifted apart. My grandfather died of a heart attack at the top of the steps to the second floor one morning while my grandmother was at church. The kids grew up. The weekly gatherings dwindled away and eventually stopped.

One of those Sunday funny papers found its way into the shed.

It's from August 8, 1971. I was about three and a half, probably not quite old enough to be reading the Sunday funnies, I'm not sure. Maybe I did look this one over. Maybe my grandfather put it in the shed, or maybe my uncle. I don't know, and I don't know what the purpose was - other than the effects of being printed on acidic newsprint, the paper is in good shape, free of grease or paint stains.

It has been in that shed for nearly thirty-nine years. I have debated for nearly four years whether I should leave it in place, or remove it and do what I have done today. By removing it from that environment and exposing it to levels of ultraviolet radiation it hasn't seen in nearly four decades, I'm afraid I have hastened its decomposition. Already it seems that there are more tears in the edges than there were a few hours ago.

I tried to do a simple photographic capture, placing the newspaper on a flat surface and taking photos of each page, with mixed results. As a test I tried to do a scan of one comic, Dick Tracy. The comics were so enormous back in those days that it took two separate scans to capture the whole thing.

Here is the list of the comics that appeared in this paper.

Page 1: Dick Tracy. Also, a promise of a Peter Max Gemini Zodiac Poster (in color), which appears to be missing.
Page 2: Little Orphan Annie
Page 3: Terry and the Pirates
Page 4: Brenda Starr - Reporter
Page 5: Louie (a pantomime strip), Junior Jumble, and a Wrigley's Spearmint Gum ad that doubles as "Fun Facts - Fun Things to Know and Tell"
Page 6: Broom-Hilda and Gasoline Alley
Page 7: Dark Shadows and Rex Morgan, M.D.
Page 8: Friday Foster and Coloring College, a color-by-numbers feature
Page 9: Li'l Abner
Page 10: Smokey Stover and "Super" Duper
Page 11: Laugh-In's Mod Mod World and Winnie Winkle
Page 12: Blondie
Page 13: Mary Perkins On Stage
Page 14: Moon Mullins and Teen-Wise!
Page 15: True Classroom Flubs & Fluffs and Beetle Bailey
Page 16: Dondi

Yep. Sixteen pages of comics. Twenty-four comics in all, counting Coloring College and Junior Jumble, not counting the "Fun Facts" - which was in fact the only ad, and occupied only about one-fourth of one page. Eight of these strips each covered most or all of the fifteen inch tall by eleven inch wide page. (Dick Tracy shared the cover with the masthead and the Zodiac poster announcement.) Fourteen others had half a page each, and two shared part of the page with an ad. Of those twenty-four, at least eight are still running.

I don't know how many more times I will be able to handle this paper before it crumbles into fibers. When that time comes, I may return it to the shed, where perhaps it will heal, drinking in the balance of temperature and humidity to which it has become accustomed.

And now I present to you Dick Tracy from Sunday, August 8, 1971. In this episode, a character has met a gruesome end at the hands of a grotesque, deformed villain. Some things never change.

Tapestry

Note: Some of these blog posts have been composed long before they are written. This is one of them. It - well, the thinking that went into it - dates from before the events of Tuesday, August 12, 2009. If I were to be initiating these thoughts now, I might have a different answer. But...well, see the Afterword.

If you knew then what you know now, what would you do differently?

In other words, if you could change some action, some decision, some direction in your life, what would it be?

For the longest time, my answer to this has been the same: Nothing. Each action, each decision, each direction chosen was done, made, or taken for very good reasons - or what I believed at the time were very good reasons. Have I done stupid, regrettable things? Sure. Am I happy with where my life has taken me? Not entirely. Is this the best I could have done? Probably not.

One of my favorite episodes of Star Trek: The Next Generation is the sixth season episode called "Tapestry." It's A Q episode, which probably should have disqualified it from consideration - having a mischievous deus ex machina hanging around in the series, beginning with the first episode and ending with the (excellent) final episode, was just annoying to me, and a potentially fatal flaw. (What is the point of anything if this guy could pop in at any time and change everything?) And while the presence of Q is necessary to the story of "Tapestry," it also undermines the theme of actions having consequences.

But I'm getting ahead of myself.

In the episode, Captain Picard receives a fatal wound - more precisely, fatal damage to his artificial heart, a prosthetic necessitated by the fact that his original heart was damaged in a bar brawl when Picard was a young Starfleet officer. (Or cadet. Whatever.) The bar brawl was actually a fight with three Nausicaans, large, belligerent aliens who...well, let's just say they had it coming. Picard fought them, got stabbed in the back, his heart was destroyed, he got an artificial one. Decades later, his artificial heart was fatally damaged by an energy discharge.

Picard is given the opportunity to change the past - to avoid the event that led to him needing the artificial heart. (The energy discharge that damaged his artificial heart would not have been lethal to a flesh-and-blood organ.) He takes this path, and then gets to witness his life unmade: that single change leads to a series of different actions, different choices, different directions. Returned to his present time, he is now a subordinate officer who plays a menial role in the functioning of the ship he had once captained, running reports to his superiors. One thread of his life has been pulled, and the tapestry of his life has unwoven.

In the end, he gets a chance to put it all back the way it was before, with a knife through his heart in the past, and a damaged artificial heart in the present - and finds that the surgeons operating on him after the energy discharge were able to save his life. The series continues, with Picard as captain of the Enterprise.

A few months ago (well, eleven months and four days ago, to be exact) a blogfriend was having a crisis of faith, wondering if perhaps academia was not the right path for her, if maybe she should just stop being a scientist at a major research university. More specifically, she was starting to feel a case of Impostor Syndrome. I left a comment for her:

Ooooh. Impostor syndrome. Fight it. That's like doubt to a Mentat. Let it get a hold and next thing you'll know is that you've been working in a factory for seventeen years, and it will suddenly occur to you to wonder why you didn't re-apply to your first choice of grad schools (which wasn't accepting ANY grad students the year you graduated from college) after you washed out of your soulless second choice after one semester.

And as I left that comment, I realized that there was something I might have changed in the past.

I've told this story before - I think. Brief overview: I was in my final year as an undergrad at the University of Scranton, double-majoring in Physics and Philosophy. I had applied and been accepted to several graduate programs, including Bryn Mawr and the University of Delaware. Both of these schools had programs in Non-Linear Dynamics, which was the field I wanted to specialize in. Bryn Mawr was a better fit, much more closely resembling the University of Scranton: small Liberal Arts University with a small Physics program and a fantastic student/teacher ratio. The University of Delaware was a much larger state University with a much larger Physics program and only a single professor specializing in my chosen area.

But Bryn Mawr suddenly stopped taking graduate students for the Fall 1989 semester - after I had been accepted. I knew this before the head of the Physics department did. He only received official confirmation minutes before I was supposed to head down for my first face-to-face meeting.

Suddenly I was heading to my second choice school, the University of Delaware.

Delaware ate me up and spit me out. The experience, as I have said before, was like being mugged while drowning. I felt incompetent in every way possible. I washed out after a single semester.

There's no guarantee this wouldn't have happened at Bryn Mawr, of course.

And what did I do afterwards? Did I jump right on the Internet, check out the current status of the Bryn Mawr grad program, maybe see if they were accepting students for the Spring semester? Drop an e-mail to the head of the department to see if I could get on a waiting list, or an announcement list for when the program was back on track? Try to bounce right back, get on the horse, take this as a blessing in disguise?

No. None of that. Partly because the Internet, and email, and computers as we know them didn't exist back in early 1990, not in a form any of us would find useful. Contact Bryn Mawr? I'd have to go hunting for an address or a phone number, maybe do some digging in the library. Maybe type out a letter on my electric typewriter - on carbon paper, so I could have a copy.

Partly because I had decided, stoically, stupidly, to play the hand I had been dealt. I had no car - back then, Newark, Delaware was a pretty bike-friendly area. I was less than halfway through a one-year lease. There were employers in the area. I decided to find a job (now that I had lost my teaching assistanceship) and try to earn at least enough money to pay the rent and my living expenses for a while.

And partly because, until I wrote that comment, it had never occurred to me that that was exactly what I should have done.

Would it have worked out? Would I have continued along on my life plan, gotten my Ph.D. by age 27? Would I now be writing popular science books for laymen?

I have no idea.

I stayed in Delaware for another year, working at the solar cell manufacturer to which a kindly University of Delaware Physics professor had pointed me. At the end of that year I went back to Rockville - well, Nanticoke.

A few months after I came home my 81-year-old grandmother was felled by a severe, crippling case of sciatica. She needed a round-the-clock nurse to watch over her.

I took that position.

Several months later she was well enough to return to her home. By then I had found a job at a CD manufacturer. The rest, as they say, is history.

So if I had bounced back after Delaware and somehow gotten right into some hypothetically rebooted program at Bryn Mawr in the Spring or Fall of 1990, how would my life after that point have been different?

Well, in most major respects that's unanswerable. There are too many points of divergence to make any statement. But one thing is for sure: I would not have been there when my grandmother needed me. Her life, and my life with respect to her, might have played out completely differently. Would she have spent the rest of her days in a nursing home, rather than first entering one in early 1996? Would she have had a stroke in - when was it, 1992, 1993? Would she have lived beyond 1998, or maybe died before then?

I don't know. Our lives are a tapestry of actions we have taken, decisions we have made, directions we have gone, people we have known, places we have been. Pluck one thread and the whole fabric begins to unravel.


Afterword:

A few weeks ago, I took my mom for an outpatient procedure - the same procedure for which I had taken her the day I believe I accidentally killed the kitten Gretchen by crushing her under an electric-powered recliner/lift chair. The day that we discovered her decomposing body under the chair, I wanted to cut the plug off to stop it from ever being used again. But my mom stopped me, because she knows there may soon come a day when someone actually needs such a chair. But from that day the chair has been unplugged, and I have allowed no one to use it.

Until the day of this recent procedure, when my mom insisted she needed to sit and put up her legs. I assented, but only on the condition that I check under the chair before she put down the leg lift, the mechanism that I think broke Gretchen's neck.

In her post-procedure stupor she didn't entirely adhere to the plan. When my mother tired of sitting in the chair she decided to get out out of it without putting the leg lift down. This required some acrobatics on her part, and could have undone the effects of the procedure she had just undergone. But once out of the chair, she looked under it to see if it was safe to put down the leg lift.

And there was Amber, curled up almost exactly where Gretchen had been. If my mom had lowered the leg lift, Amber might have died as silently and horribly as Gretchen.

So because Gretchen died, Amber lived.

The chair is once again unplugged and off-limits.

Let me tell you what I've done. (part 3)

In Part 1 I covered my work history from my High School days until I got a job offer at Specialty Records in the Spring of 1992.

In Part 2 I covered my time at Specialty Records from my hiring through my years as a Statistical Process Control Coordinator.

In this installment I will cover the transitional period from the CD / DVD split in 1995 to my acceptance of the role of DVD Asset Manager in 1998.


Things had actually begun to change at Specialty Records before I got there in early 1992. As a relative newcomer I am not as well-versed in the saga as some of the old-timers, but I believe the story goes something like this: Several years before I came on board Specialty Records had formed a business partnership with WEA Manufacturing, where the WEA stood for Warner, Elektra, and Atlantic. Collectively these three companies were a part of Warner Brothers, which merged with Time, Inc. to form a megacorporation called Time Warner in the early 1990s. This megacorporation had a controlling interest in Specialty Records, but had agreed to let the president of the company - the son of its founder - run it as he saw fit.

That changed a few years after I signed on. Gradually Specialty Records lost its identity. In time the entire company was rechristened under a new name: we were all WEA Manufacturing. But that wasn't the only change brewing.

New technologies were emerging. Research was being done, in our facility and elsewhere, to determine how to put full-length movies on CD. Most of the early tests that I saw were of low quality images, worse than a cell phone video uploaded to YouTube. But in time things improved. Things got more serious. The guy in charge of CD Pre-Production was leading the charge towards this new technology, whatever it would be. It went through several versions, and then one day it was finished. It was ready.

It was SD, the SuperDisc.

Around this same time other things happened. The guy in charge of Pre-Production became a Vice President. The President of the company, the son of its founder, suddenly retired - and was replaced by an outsider appointed by Time Warner.

A competing digital video format arose and went toe-to-toe with SD. In time the two sides, remembering the destructive battle between VHS and Betamax, drew up a compromise. Everybody pulled out their patents and slapped them onto the table to determine how much say the various members of the competing alliances would have in the design of the final product. The two formats merged, combining - mostly - the best features of each format into a new digital disc format that would be known as Digital Versatile Disc - or DVD.

A new sub-company formed, Warner Advanced Media Operations. WAMO. The guy in charge of Pre-Production became its lead. WAMO would focus on DVD production, to the exclusion of all else.

A team was chosen. About half of existing Pre-Production staff would join the new group. The rest would remain where they were.

I was not chosen. My partner was. Later, my former boss, now the VP in charge of WAMO, confided to me that it was because he had an Electronics Engineering degree, and I did not.

"I have a degree in Physics, you know," I said.

"Oh," he responded, taken aback. He had apparently overlooked this. I don't know if he reconsidered his decision in that moment, but in the end I remained behind with CD Pre-Production.

Things changed in CD Pre-Production, of course. The departure of our top manager meant a rearrangement of the management structure and a reconfiguration of the department itself. In the end most sub-managers remained where they were, and managers from other parts of the company were reassigned to the top positions.

The scope of my responsibilities changed, too. No longer focusing solely on Pre-Production, I was now responsible for keeping track of the performance of CD Stampers at Press throughout the facility - thousands of stampers running multiple tests with dozens of measured characteristics in each test in over a hundred presses scattered across a large factory.

The new corporate management was making changes, too. Statistical Process Control fell out of vogue. Instead a group called Andersen Consulting was brought in to redesign the factory. They knew what they were doing, no need to hear any comments from the bottom up.

I wasn't comfortable with the changes, for the most part. Not just because I am naturally suspicious of any change, which I am, but because I didn't like where my projections said things were going. Not just as a result of these changes, either. The whole music industry was in trouble. Sales were down, way down. Alternative Rock had mostly played itself out. Used CD sellers were no longer our biggest threat; now people were learning to copy CD's digitally onto CD-R's using their home computers. CD Piracy wasn't just for pirate factories in China and Bulgaria anymore. And there were rumblings that some people were simply creating digital files of songs and trading them over the Internet. Soon, some people feared, nobody would bother to even buy CDs anymore. I argued that people would always want to own things - that you couldn't hold and feel and smell a digital download, that you couldn't display them on a rack in your house to impress friends and burglars alike.

Then a naughty schoolgirl started dancing around while singing "Hit Me, Baby, One More Time", and the music industry was saved. For a little while.

But I knew it would soon be time to get out.

In the years that followed the CD/DVD split in 1995 CD Pre-Production, and Production as well, had suffered through several Reductions in Force. Personnel were shuffled, duties were rearranged. An attempt to revive Statistical Process Control through a select team of five people chosen from throughout the facility - including me, and the head of CD QC who had come with me to the SPC Seminar in Knoxville - had fizzled. New management strategies came in an endless procession. My duties veered more from conducting data collection and analysis to the nitty-gritty of keeping things running. I had done a few cool things along the way, automating the data collection system by having the testers reprogrammed to write their test results directly to a 3.5" floppy disk that I changed out once a week, reducing CD identification data entry errors by installing barcode readers on each tester and revising the stamper tickets to carry identifying information that could be scanned directly into the testers. The collected data was uploaded to two computers with 500 MB hard drives and analyzed using dBase III+. But now I was just as likely to be changing an ink ribbon on a barcode printer as I was to be analyzing the performance of a related group of stampers across the production floor. I was increasingly unhappy where I was, and increasingly hoping to get out.

The opportunity came towards the end of 1998. I had maintained good relationships with everyone in the DVD Pre-Production group since they had split away, and when an opportunity was going to be opening up in the group that they knew would be a good fit for my talents they gave me advance warning. The job would be DVD Asset Management. I would be in charge of keeping track of all of the physical assets that would be transformed into the digital content of the DVD. I would also be responsible for determining how those assets would fit together on the DVD once they were converted to digital files. Training would be provided; the person currently doing the job would work with me during a transitional period. The hours would be long, the work would be hard, and I would be working with some amazingly talented people. Was I interested?

I told them I had to think about it.

My grandmother had had a stroke not long after I started my job in 1992. She was hospitalized for several weeks, and was eventually rehabilitated to the point that she was able to come back to my mother's house. But there was no question of her living on her own, and I was no longer available to be a full-time nurse. But I was on a 4x4 schedule, which meant I was available for half of the time, four days out of every eight. Days that I was not available she would stay with one of my two aunts who lived up the street, unless it was a weekend, and then she would stay with my mom. Or my aunts or my brother could sit with her at my mom's house, some of the time.

In 1995 my father had a stroke, and the home care problem compounded itself. His stroke did not affect him as much physically, but left him with general weakness and some aphasia.

In 1996 my grandmother entered the first of a series of nursing homes. Her condition gradually began to deteriorate.

By late 1998 her condition had worsened dramatically. She had been receiving her nutrition through a Peg tube directly into her stomach for over a year. A series of urinary tract infections had weakened her considerably. I did not expect her to live through October that year. But she rallied, only to get another UTI in early December. She came back stronger than ever from that one.

I had been spending all of my free time with her during her time in the nursing homes. I would come home from work and go directly to the nursing home and sit with her until visiting hours ended. Weekends, too. Every Sunday we went to church together in the chapel at the nursing home. Could I really take on a job that would put tremendous new demands on my time?

On December 13, 1998 my grandmother died.

I told WAMO that yes, I would be their new Asset Manager.


Next: I become the WAMO Asset Manager. And then things change, and change again, and change some more.

Let me tell you what I've done. (part 1)

A few months ago this was going around the blogosphere as an honest-to-goodness meme: people were spontaneously writing out their work histories, like resumés in essay form. Nobody seemed to be saying "I saw so-and-so do this, so I thought I would, too." The odd thing was, I had been planning to do the same thing myself for some time.

Yesterday I had an opportunity to review my resumé and I found myself thinking, "Dammit, I've had some great jobs." It was depressing, really. But maybe I should take hope knowing where I've been.

So here it is. It turned out to be so long that I've had to break it up into multiple parts.


I didn't have very many jobs in High School. I really wasn't working towards buying a car or having beer money, so I tended to focus on my schoolwork all through the school year and play all Summer long. My only significant job was in the Summer after my (I think) Junior* Sophomore year and consisted of dogsitting for a neighbor family while they were away on a multi-week vacation. They kept the dog cooped up in a small room in their basement, lined with papers, and they wanted me to let the dog out and clean the papers twice a day. But Skippy was a young, energetic dog, and it seemed cruel to keep him cooped up in a stuffy room for so long. So I visited him multiple times each day, and took him out for extended romps. He and I developed a bond that Summer. They moved away later that year, and I heard that Skippy was hit by a car and killed soon after.

The only other jobs I had in High School were actually after graduation and before the start of college. One was an inventory job at a store at the Wyoming Valley Mall. It was me and about two dozen other temporary employees, hired specifically for a big inventory count. Each of us was assigned to an area, and we were paid something around minimum wage for our efforts. I completed my count quickly, efficiently, and accurately, turned in my numbers, and was paid for the time I had worked. Other people who were working more slowly and less efficiently were still on the job, earning money, when I was sent on my way. I learned a lesson about doing a timely and efficient job that day.

I searched the mall for other job opportunities and found one as a stock boy at a women's clothing store. That was interesting, for the few weeks that it lasted.

In college my main job was maintaining my GPA to maintain the merit-based scholarships that were paying for my education. Without them I would not have been able to attend college, or would have had to go into debt so deeply that I might still be trying to pay off my loans.

Between semesters I worked at Owens-Illinois, later OI-NEG, later Techneglas. This was a glass factory that manufactured TV faceplates. (The NEG stood for "Nippon Electric Glass", a Japanese manufacturer that bought, and eventually closed, the factory.) For three summers I worked there, handling heavy faceplates for eight hours at a time. My fingers are still curled from the carpal tunnel I developed there, and I have learned to ignore the hisssss of tinnitus that came from being exposed to the industrial sounds all day.

During my time in grad school I was a "teaching assistant" in Introduction to Physics labs at the University of Delaware. What this meant was that I was the teacher for the lab, responsible for introducing upwards of eighty non-science students to the wonders of Physics in action, and designing, administering, and grading exams. This lasted as long as my graduate career, one semester.

After I left grad school I made the decision to stick it out in Delaware for at least the rest of the term of my lease and find employment somewhere in the area. Newark, Delaware is an area full of industry of all sorts, so this didn't seem like such an unlikely proposition. With the guidance of one of my former graduate professors I was able to get a job at a solar cell manufacturer called AstroPower. I started off assisting in the testing and evaluation of incoming silicon substrates that would be turned into solar cells. I took to the work, and was fascinated by the place, and at the end of the first year of my lease I signed on for a second. Changes came to the place, including my first experience with a Reduction In Force, or RIF; I survived it, but my supervisor did not. I assumed his job while maintaining my current pay, which was barely above minimum wage. As the second year of my lease began to draw to a close I observed that I had taken on more and more responsibilities, including the management of several employees, but was barely making enough money to pay the rent. With some regret, I informed my manager that I would be leaving when August rolled around. And I did, with a heavy heart.

I came back to Nanticoke feeling like a failure. I began a half-hearted job search, but shortly thereafter my grandmother was felled by sciatica. She needed around-the clock assistance just to get around the house - my mom's house, since it was the only house of a local family member where my grandmother would be able to get around without needing to climb stairs. Getting a nurse to watch over her would be prohibitively expensive. Since I wasn't doing anything else at that moment, I was the obvious choice to be her caretaker.

She gradually regained her strength and mobility. I took her out on the occasional outings, including shopping trips. By the Spring of 1992 she was able to live on her own again. Which was fortunate, because shortly after that I received a call that there was a job available for me at a place I had been trying repeatedly to get into - Specialty Records, a local record, tape, and CD manufacturer.


To be continued. Part 2 will cover the various jobs I have held at Specialty Records and its successor companies.

*The Summer after my Junior year I was at Pennsylvania Governor's School for the Sciences.

Back to work

After three weeks of being idled, I went back to work today to begin a slightly abbreviated three-day rotation. With the holiday pay from Presidents Day, that will be a decent paycheck. For this week, anyway.

That means I have to be in bed soon. I just ate dinner, put together my lunch, and caught up on my reading list of blogs - some of it, anyway.

Before I go to bed I should look around a bit for my cat's favorite toy, Dolly, a Fluppy plush toy that my grandmother won at bingo at the nursing home back in 1997. It became our new kitten's crib companion, and he has carried it around ever since. It went missing earlier this week, and he has been tearing the house apart looking for it.

Ten years ago today

Ten years ago today my grandmother died.

It was a Sunday. She died in the early hours of the morning, in bed, in her nursing home. I was the last member of our family to see her alive, and the first one to see her dead.

The next day I went into work for part of the day, ostensibly to wrap some stuff up before taking bereavement leave, but mainly to write this e-mail to a pen pal who had become a friend:

Dec. 14, 1998

My grandmother died on Sunday morning.

I think I forgot to tell you in my last letter how well my grandmother was doing. Let me rectify that omission now. My grandmother began getting treatment for her urinary tract infection early last week - Sunday or Monday - and immediately responded very positively. Her eyes brightened, she stayed awake and alert for hours at a time, she stopped alternating fever and chills, she spoke in complete sentences or longer-than-usual fragments. When I came to see her on - Thursday? Friday? - she was in bed; as I approached, she said, "Don't wake me up. I'm sleeping." This was followed by "What time is it, anyway?" When I told her it was 7:15 at night, not in the morning, she decided to wake up all the way and sit up with me for a while.

On Saturday afternoon she was better than she has been for months. She was bright and alert, sitting in her chair, watching an Andre Rieu Christmas Concert on television. She loved the music, and loved being able to name some of the songs, like "O Come, All Ye Faithful" ("Adeste Fideles".) When I told her that my mother was coming home from my sister's place in Maryland the next day, she simply said, "When?"

My uncle was there when I came in that day. After he commented on how well she looked, he mentioned to me that my grandmother's first long-term roommate in the nursing home, Eleanor Wallace, had died on Friday. My grandmother showed no reaction. I made a note to look up the obituary and go to the viewing - we had developed quite a rapport with Eleanor's family.

That afternoon, before I took my pre-Tink's nap (or was it after I had napped, worked out, showered, and dressed? Details are so confused right now), I called my mother at my sister's house. I tried to break the news about Eleanor's death gently, and suggested that she might want to come home a little early, to be able to make the viewing.

Tink's was relatively uneventful. I came home at the usual time, around 3:00 AM, and had a before-bedtime meal. I went to sleep at 4:00 with Mazzy Star's "Among My Swan" playing, planning to get up in five hours to go to 10:45 mass at the nursing home with my grandmother.

My father woke me at 5:50, not two hours after I had lay down. My cousin was on the phone. She said, "Babki was rushed to the hospital this morning. When they went to check her at five, she wasn't breathing and didn't have a pulse." I think I responded with "That's not good" and immediately began getting dressed. I called my mother, told her that my grandmother had been taken to the hospital in "bad shape" (read "dead") and suggested that she call my uncle, who had been contacted by the nursing home as the events transpired.

I rushed to the hospital, after verifying which hospital it was. I assigned a high probability to her being dead on arrival - dead since before 5:00 that morning. I assigned a much lower probability to her having been successfully resuscitated, but then assigned a high probability that, if this were the case, she would die again anyway in a very short time. Everything else was assigned a vanishingly small probability.

Mercy Hospital in Wilkes-Barre was not built according to any one plan. You go in the main entrance, up a flight of stairs to the main lobby, and down a series of corridors to the Emergency Room. (Patients, of course, have a direct entrance.) But the doors do not lead to the Emergency Room waiting room, or admissions - you go directly into the ER. As I entered, I was overwhelmed by the calm and silence. There was a single nurse at the desk. There was no activity in the room, no beeps or pings of monitors on patients. All was quiet.

I assigned a high probability to my grandmother being dead. A much lower probability was assigned to her being alive but not in the ER. A very small probability was given to her having not yet arrived at the ER.

I confronted the nurse. "I was told that my grandmother was being brought here. Her name is Anna ____."

She stammered momentarily. "Have you spoken with anyone about this?" she said. I knew what she meant.

"It is very likely that she was dead when she came here," I countered. (That's the way I talk. It sounds really artificial when I read it now, but I think those were my exact words.)

"Yes," she said. She led me to one of the ER berths and drew back the curtain. There was my grandmother's body. Her skin was still pink. I touched her cheek - still warm. Very warm. I commented to the nurse, and then I realized that my hands were still cold from the drop in body temperature all humans experience during sleep, and from my two-minute walk through near-freezing temperatures from the parkade across the street to the main entrance to the hospital. She just seemed warm to me. Her skin was pink - not the darker color I would expect if she had choked to death on mucus or otherwise suffocated. She looked asleep - well, not exactly, since she never slept with her mouth open like that.

I got on the phone, tried to tell my mother that there was no need to hurry. I crossed connections with her - she was trying to call her brother in Georgia. I called my uncle, the father of the cousin who had told me about what had happened, and he said that he had tried to call me to let me know that she was dead, but I had already left. I was glad I missed that call. I might have decided not to go to the hospital.

As it was, I was the last member of our family to see her alive, and the first one to see her dead.

I came into work late this afternoon nominally to take care of some problems that came up over the weekend, but really just to write this letter.

There is another letter I must write, to the people who work here. I'll try to get that one out tonight.

The ten year anniversary makes me think about the ways my life has changed since then. Some things have gotten better, some worse, some have remained the same.

Ten years ago I was a thirty-year-old working his way up the corporate ladder at a well-established company. I had just committed to take a job in a new, exciting branch of our facility - but who knew if this "DVD" thing would take off? Still, I was willing to take the risk of leaving my job as Statistical Process Control Coordinator for our large CD manufacturing section and take on the role of DVD Asset Manager, coordinating the receipt of the DVD content for each project we would be Authoring and determining the precise way in which all of the elements would fit together into an Authored project.

Today I am a forty-year-old who has slipped quite far back down that ladder, smashing his chin off the rungs along the way. I almost said "that same corporate ladder," but in fact the ladder has changed ownership several times since then. I now work as a DVD Molding operator in a moribund industry in a collapsing global economy. No longer am I patiently accepting deferred rewards with the promise of something better to come; now I am scraping along as best I can, looking and working and hoping for something better to come along - just like everybody else.

There is music that I associate with that time. The songs I mentioned here were all songs that I listened to on the last night of my grandmother's life, after I had gotten back from dancing at Tink's. But there is another song, a favorite of my grandmother's. She was the sort of person who loved to sing. She would sing while she worked around the house, old standards like "Old Joe Clark" and religious songs like "Were You There?" But when I was a child there was a song she would sing to me - and, contradicting the song's lyrics, my brother and sister as well. We would sometimes sing it together in her later years, and for one of her last birthdays I bought her a music box that played it. Coincidentally, she was as old when the song first came out as I was when she died, give or take a few months.

The song is this. "You Are My Sunshine" by Jimmy Davis and Charles Mitchell, here performed by Elizabeth Mitchell:

You are my sunshine, my only sunshine
You make me happy when skies are gray
You'll never know, dear, how much I love you
Please don't take my sunshine away.

The other night, dear, as I lay sleeping
I dreamt I held you in my arms
When I awoke, dear, I was mistaken
So I laid my head down and cried.

You are my sunshine, my only sunshine
You make me happy when skies are gray
You'll never know, dear, how much I love you
Please don't take my sunshine away.

Ednaswap: Torn

This song has been intruding into my thoughts a lot lately - not the Natalie Imbruglia cover version which was ubiquitous on pop rock stations back in 1997, but the original version by Ednaswap that I was listening to on a CMJ New Music Monthly disc back in December of 1998.

(Dammit, embedding of this video is disabled. The video is actually just the Natalie Imbruglia one with the Ednaswap music laid over it, so you would be just as well off opening it in another tab or window and experiencing the audio only.)

Other songs from back then will also start to figure in my memory soon, including R.L. Burnside's dance version of Rollin' Tumblin' and several songs from Mazzy Starr's Among My Swan. The music I was listening to back then. The music I was listening to on that day.


Ten years soon. And it's all coming back to me.

Babki's Drop Cookies

These are a soft, puffy cookie made with sour milk. I have found very good versions of them in the bakery sections of stores called "Sour Cream Cookies," but there are lots of recipes for Sour Cream Cookies that are completely different from this recipe from my grandmother.

• 1/2 cup shortening (I used butter)
• 1 cup sugar
• 1 egg, beaten
• 2 cups flour
• 1 teaspoon baking powder
• 1/4 teaspoon baking soda
• 1/2 teaspoon salt
• 3/4 cup sour milk*
• 1 teaspoon vanilla
• Flaked coconut
  

*To sour milk, add drops of vinegar to milk until it curdles. I recommend using whole milk - that was what my grandmother used.

• Preheat oven to 350 degrees.
• Cream shortening with butter in large bowl.
• Add beaten egg.
• In separate bowl, Mix together dry ingredients. Add gradually to egg/butter/sugar mixture.
• Blend in sour milk and vanilla.
• Drop by rounded tablespoons onto cookie sheet. Sprinkle with coconut.
• Bake at 350 degrees for 12 minutes.
  

The goal is to make a uniformly soft cookie, lightly browned on the edges but not crisp. Cookies should form flattened domes. For best results, I recommend using ungreased non-stick pans.

The beginning of the end

Throughout my childhood today marked an important turnover point. This is my grandmother's birthday. Every year on this day as much of the extended family as could manage would head over to her house for a party. She would make a cake for everyone, a two-layer version of her Marigold Glory cake with vanilla-coconut icing, and we would all sing "Happy Birthday to You" and "Sto lat" and then sit in the kitchen - around the kitchen table, in chairs scattered along the walls, on the piano bench pressed into service as seating for a group of kids, my grandfather enthroned in his rocker with his pipe - and have cake and ice cream and coffee. Then someone would start playing the piano, or my uncle would break out his accordion, and all the older folks would drink coffee and beer and sing Polish songs while the kids gathered around the TV in the next room to watch reruns of Star Trek or the John Pertwee-era Doctor Who.

A week later our Parish would have its annual Church Bazaar in the church parking lot just up the hill, but by then Summer would be well along its downward slide to the beginning of school. My grandmother's birthday was that turnover point where Summer began to end. It always snuck up on us unexpectedly; the days had been getting shorter for over a month, but at the same time they had been getting hotter. Suddenly we noticed the ripening grapes, the later sunrises and earlier sunsets, and the profusion of Back-to-School sales. September was on its way.

My grandmother died ten years ago this December. She fell a dozen years short of the hundred wished for in "Sto lat", but the parties had become more subdued events well before that. My grandfather, with his deep but raspy laugh, had passed on decades before her, and I'm not sure what happened to his original rocker. The piano has not been played as part of a gathering in many long years. I last heard my uncle play the accordion at his 25th wedding anniversary in 1997, eight years before he died. My aunt, his wife, now has the old kitchen table and chairs.

I have the house. And the piano, and the piano bench. And my grandfather's rocker, if it's still in the house. I put one of my own in the vacant spot it had once occupied several years ago, and I replaced the kitchen table and chairs and even the "extra" chairs.

The grapes are having a bad year. Partly that's my fault - I wasn't aggressive enough about pruning them, or weeding below them, or spraying them with fungicide early enough in the season. Partly it's due to the hot, wet summer we've had, which has produced ideal conditions for black rot on grapes. Still, a few may make it through to Labor Day this year, just like they did last.

Purple grapes, rear arbor, August 31, 2007

Our Parish will have its Church Bazaar next weekend, though not in the usual location. Someone sold off all of our heavy-duty cooking gear some years ago, or relocated it to some location where it is shared with other Parishes in the city. The 2008 St. Mary's Church Bazaar will be held on the grounds of the Holy Family center August 1-3. This may be the last year for this Church Bazaar, as this may be the last year that St. Mary's exists as a Parish.

The days will continue to get shorter, and the nights will get cooler, and school will begin before Summer has a chance to truly end. And we will be able to look back on this day and say, "There. That was where it all started to go wrong. That is where Summer began to end!"

Happy Birthday, Babki.

Sto lat, sto lat,
Niech żyje, żyje nam.
Sto lat, sto lat,
Niech żyje, żyje nam,
Jeszcze raz, jeszcze raz, niech żyje, żyje nam,
Niech żyje nam!

Pineapple Upside-Down cake

This is a specialty of my mom. It's in a lot of demand at family gatherings - including, too often these days, funerals. She's making a few for my cousin's bridal shower tomorrow, and I wanted to throw the recipe up on the Internet for safe keeping.

The base of the recipe is another recipe, the Marigold Glory Cake, which was one of my grandmother's favorites. This is a pretty basic and versatile white cake, great for eating by itself, making layer cakes, or with the addition of other ingredients a whole host of other cakes.

Marigold Glory Cake (from my grandmother)

Preheat oven to 350 degrees Fahrenheit.

Ingredients:

3/4 cup vegetable shortening (oleo and part butter)*
1 and 3/4 cup sugar
3 eggs
2 and 1/2 cups flour
3 teaspoons baking powder
1/4 or 1/2 teaspoon salt (lesser amount if using butter)
1 and 1/3 cup milk
1 teaspoon vanilla

Put all ingredients in mixing bowl and mix until smooth.

*My grandmother's note: I prefer to cream sugar and shortening and mix in balance of ingredients alternating flour and milk and ending with flour and baking powder mixture.

To make basic Marigold Glory Cake, pour into greased cake pan and bake in oven for 45-50 minutes.

To make a Maple Walnut Cake, add chopped walnuts and maple flavoring to the batter and bake as above.

To make Pineapple Upside-Down Cake, mix the batter as for Marigold Glory Cake, but prepare the cake pan in this manner:

- Grease the cake pan bottom and sides (I always use the residual butter on the butter wrappers, but you can also use shortening on a paper towel),
- Coat the bottom and sides of the pan with brown sugar.
- Dab with butter (apply pats of butter about one every four square inches.)
- Put cake pan in oven to melt butter.
- Remove cake pan and let cool.
- When cooled, pour one 20 ounce can of crushed pineapple on top of brown sugar.
- Add batter to prepared cake pan.

Bake as for Marigold Glory Cake, above.

When done, immediately turn out onto a cookie sheet or other platform. With enough practice, you'll be able to do this without having the cake tear itself apart!

The Best Things in Life, Part 1

So I'm finally sitting down to make up my version of Francesco Marciuliano's How to Truly, Deeply Enjoy Life on a Severely Restrictive Budget list. I've decided that there's no way in hell I'm going to get this all out in one shot, so I'll do as much as I can now and add more later.

Here's the premise, as set forth by Ces:

...I am firmly of the opinion that we were given life for a reason, and that reason is not to see what's behind Door Number Two. That reason is to experience the thrill of life while we still have not just the chance but the cashews to follow our dreams. So with that in mind I created a succinct list of activities everyone should engage in, not only for the amusing anecdotes but also to know what it truly means to be human. And because of a crippling economy, paralyzing oil prices and myelopathic job market I made certain that each of the following life-affirming pursuits would cost no more than five dollars, tops...

I don't know if my list truly meets these criteria. But what the hell. Here goes.

1. Become a backyard naturalist. I've been doing this for quite a while. (That's naturalist, dammit, not naturist, which is something different, and something I have never done in my back yard.) Assuming you have a back yard, or have access to any area of land, you can rest assured that it is jammed full of living things of every size and shape: microorganisms, lichen, fungi, mosses, algae, ferns, worms, insects, spiders, snakes, frogs, birds, bats, rabbits, cats, and even the occasional coyote, not to mention grass, flowers, plants of all sorts, and trees. Push aside a big rock and see what's lurking under it! The world around us is teeming with living things, and most of the time we don't even notice them. Paying attention costs nothing.

Now, this may not be an option for people in urban environments like Todd in Hell's Kitchen, who has to travel to see the sort of backyard wildlife most of us take for granted. Even if your indigenous wildlife is restricted to pigeons, rats, and cockroaches, you can still spend quite a bit of time observing them . . . but you might not want to. In that case, why not try this?

2. Become an urban anthropologist. Also known as "people watching." Humans are animals who behave according to their nature, their will, and the dictates and restrictions of society. Observe how people behave as individuals. Observe how they behave as groups. Observe how they behave according to the rules of probability and statistics - crowds observed over the course of time frequently form three-dimensional representations of the Normal Curve.

3. Be still and silent, and listen. This isn't too hard. I'm not suggesting trying to achieve a level of Zen meditation (envision a blank wall; clear your mind of all distractions; now, take away the wall). Just set yourself up somewhere where you can sit and listen. Shut off all distractions. Make your environment as quiet as possible. Now...listen. Deeper, closer. What do you hear? The hum of distant traffic? The thrum of your air conditioning? Birds outside, or cats inside?

I once did this exercise involuntarily when there was a power failure at my grandmother's nursing home. I walked in and heard . . . nothing. No ventilation system pumping air through the building. No hum of vending machines or fluorescent lights. Nothing but myself, walking down a corridor.Very weird.

This is also very interesting to do outside. Especially at night.

4. Extract the instruments in a song. While some music is a carefully blended combination of musical voices added together with an almost mathematical structure, modern music tends to have a more complex, intertwined form. But even when listening to this music through a single mono speaker, it is possible to mentally disentangle the various elements that make up the song and focus on each one individually. You can focus on, say, just the bass, or just the drums, or just the keyboard, or just the guitar. You can also shift your focus from instrument to instrument. (NOTE: This might not work with mp3s or other highly compressed formats. I have actually heard instruments that should have slipped into the background vanish entirely from the musical picture after being compressed onto an mp3. )

5. Become a naked-eye astronomer. Your eyes are really fantastic tools when it comes to observing, and they're great for looking at the stars, too. Find yourself a dark enough location, or dark-adapt your eyes long enough to open up your pupils wide, and you'll be amazed at the amount of stuff you can see. If you're very, very lucky, you might see an Aurora!

Observing the sky during the daytime is very cool too - and it's free.

6. Watch the Moon through an entire lunar cycle. This may not be possible due to weather conditions, but it's a great way to make you aware of the rhythms of nature. From the youngest Moon, a thin sliver bathed in reflected Earthshine visible just after sunset, through the Cylon Moon of the afternoon, through the Full Moon rising as the Sun sets, to the "Astronomer's Moons" of the late night and early morning, you'll develop an awareness of the Moon's changing appearance that most people have forgotten.

OK. None of these are as much fun as swimming with ducks or enjoying the hell out of an apple. But they are definitely under five bucks!

Shoo Fly Cake

I'm giving blood on Saturday, so I need to make sure I have adequate Iron in my system. I've been eating a lot more red meat than usual (usual is "none at all"). I've been taking Iron supplements. And now I'm about to get my Iron from the most delicious source: Shoo Fly Cake.

Shoo Fly Cake was always a special treat when my grandmother made it. It looked like chocolate, but it didn't taste like chocolate. Still, it was delicious. I hadn't had Shoo Fly Cake in decades when someone at the Red Cross suggested molasses as a source of Iron. She specified Blackstrap molasses, which is higher in Iron, but I used up all my Blackstrap on my last cake a few weeks ago. So I'm making do with what I have.

There are a lot of recipes for Shoo Fly Cake on the internet, but the one I'm using today is from Recipezaar.com. In the interest of proliferating this delicious cake, I'm reprinting it here.

The recipe was originally posted by a Recipezaar.com member named kzmom. Here is the recipe she posted, which is indexed as Recipezaar recipe #110423 :


Shoofly Crumb Cake Recipe
If you like molasses, you will love this rich, moist cake. The recipe comes from a Pennsylvania Dutch restauranteur named Betty Groff and is published in an old book by her called Good Earth and Country Cooking.
by kzmom

1¼ hours 10 min prep SERVES 15

Preheat oven to 350 degrees F

4 cups flour
1 cup granulated sugar
1 cup light brown sugar
1 teaspoon salt
1 cup butter
1 cup table molasses
2 cups boiling water
1 1/4 teaspoons baking soda

In a large bowl, mix the flour, sugars, salt and butter to crumbs using a pastry blender or your fingers.

Reserve one cup of the crumbs for topping.

Mix the molasses, boiling water, and baking soda and gradually add to the major part of the crumbs until well blended.

Pour this mixture into a greased 9 x 13 inch baking pan.

Sprinkle the reserved 1 cup of crumbs on top.

Bake in a 350 F oven for 55 minutes.


I made mine in two non-stick loaf pans. I recommend reducing the heat to 300 degrees after the first 40 minutes or so. But ovens will vary, so my oven may run hotter than yours.

My cakes are out of the oven now. If you'll excuse me, I have to go get ready for Saturday's blood donation.

Note: With its crumb topping, this might make a nice base for a Poop Cake. Just add Tootsie Rolls!

Memorial. Day.

When my grandmother was in the nursing home I visited her every day, if I could help it. Just brief visits after work, mostly, and longer stopovers on Saturdays. But every Sunday we would get together and go to Mass at the chapel that used to be in the nursing home. Afterwards I would linger for a while, taking her to lunch at the dining hall and then maybe going outside for a while if the weather was nice.

A lot of the time it was just me and a handful of other regulars making their visits. Occasionally a new face would show up, looking confused and embarrassed as they tried to figure out what was where in the corridors of the nursing home. But most of the time most of the residents were alone, attended to only by the staff.

Most of the time.

Mother's Day, Easter, Christmas, and other major holidays, you couldn't find a parking space in the lot. The halls were crammed with visitors there to do their duty and assuage their guilty consciences for abandoning their relatives to the care of strangers the other 364 (or 363, or 362, depending on the visitor) days of the year.

Yesterday the "special intention" of the 11:30 Mass was for my uncle who died three years ago this week. I took my Mom there. Afterwards we decided we would go to the cemetery, as we have been doing after Mass every week since my aunt died. We made a few stops, before and after the cemetery, and maybe I'll tell you about those later.*

At the cemetery we could barely make it down the narrow roads that thread through the gravesites. Cars, cars, and more cars were everywhere. Graves that had been neglected all year were being tended to by people who probably had a hard time locating them. Traffic through the cemetery was suddenly a major issue.

OK. I'm not complaining about the fact that these people were there. It's a wonderful thing, going out to pay respect to your beloved dead, particularly those who gave their lives in service to their country. It's a wonderful thing to remember your Mother one day each year. Your Father. Veterans. To give thanks once a year.

But what about the rest of the year? Is it such an effort to acknowledge these things one day each year that we spend the rest of the year recovering?

Yes, I know. Busy. Things to do, places to go, people to see. What's the profit in stopping at a gravesite, visiting some senile old codger in a nursing home, acknowledging the sacrifices made by Veterans both living and deceased?

Today is Memorial Day. Today give a thought to those who gave their lives because the United States of America told them to, and they said "yes." Today remember those who made that ultimate sacrifice to keep our nation free. To keep America from collapsing from the chaos and anarchy that would rise if they were to turn their backs and say "I know I pledged to serve, but I choose not to." Remember them today.

And try not to forget them the other 364 days of the year.


*How the hell does one gas station justify charging $4.05 for gas when the place across the street is selling it for $3.95 and the two places a mile down the road are selling it for $3.89?

Listen now, before it's too late

I bought a camcorder in 1997. It was a crappy oversized VHS-C job that always got wobbly on sound after the midpoint of each cassette and set me back about $500. I bought it for one reason: I was heading down to Florida to see a Space Shuttle launch and I wanted to get it on video. This was to be a night launch, so it promised to be even more spectacular.

It worked out well. I got the launch, which was an amazing thing to see, and hear, and smell. I was lucky with that, because the two other times I went to see a launch, I believe one was postponed by a day, and the other by a week or more. So I only got to see one other launch, and that was a daytime launch - which, while spectacular, is less spectacular than a night launch.

So there I was with a camcorder whose purpose had been served. What to do with it now? I turned it on other things: my pets, my family, my friends. The audio issue was pretty annoying, and effectively limited me to about 15 minutes worth of good audio and video per VHS-C cassette.

I got lots of video of my dog Kitty. She died in the Summer of 1997.

My grandmother - who was in her late eighties and had had at least one stroke - had a fall at her nursing home later that year. As with all accidents, it was the result of either an unsafe act, an unsafe condition, or both. In this case she had been left unattended in a shower on a shower chair. She fell and bruised her arm and her face, and looked like she had been mugged.

I took my camcorder with me when I went to see her that weekend. I had had an idea brewing, but now it was cast aside. I wanted to get evidence. I was furious.

"You look like they beat you and left you for dead!" I said as I set up my gear. I wanted to get a video of her, showing close-ups of the damage, and record in her own words what had happened.

Finally I was ready. I switched on the camera and said to her, "Tell me what happened. How did you get that black eye?"

"They beat me and left me for dead," she responded.

I had to turn the camera off, 'cause I was laughing so hard.

* * * * * * * *

My idea was one that I had kicked around for years. The memories of the elderly provide a largely untapped storehouse of oral history - stories, songs, poems, and memories that have never been written down anywhere. They have been passed on to children, grandchildren, friends, strangers - but how many people really bother to listen to these stories when they are told? Eventually there comes a time when these stories are gone, and the person who knows them is no longer able to tell them, due to death, encroaching memory loss, or the loss of the ability to communicate.

So my idea was to set up a project to capture these stories. Videotaped interviews would probably be the best way to go. Videocameras were everywhere back then. It seemed like it would be no big deal to have thousands of people with thousands of camcorders go out and capture the memories of tens or hundreds of thousands of old people, before those stories were gone forever.

I got a few from my grandmother. Her stroke and her Alzheimer's progression had limited what she could say, though. I remember other stories, and other songs, and I'm doing my best to preserve those. She died in December 1998.

Many if not most of the members of her generation are gone now. People who were children during the Great War, who entered their twenties during the Great Depression, who started families of their own just before the outbreak of a second World War. Perhaps someone has captured some of their stories, some of their memories. But so many more stories and memories have been taken to the grave to feed the worms.

Now another generation is in its late 80's and early 90's. Their memories are different: they were born in the aftermath of the Great War, grew up in the Great Depression, and were just the right age to be shipped off to fight in the Second World War. And after them are the children who grew up during that war, members of my parents' generation. And then those who were born in the hopeful but terrifying years following WWII, born to McCarthyism and the Cold War.

Everybody has their own unique experiences. Everybody has a story to tell. So many of these stories are going unheard.

There are efforts to capture these oral histories. StoryCorps is one such effort. Their mission, as stated on their website:

Our mission is to honor and celebrate one another’s lives through listening.

Since 2003, almost 30,000 everyday people have shared life stories with family and friends in our StoryBooths. Each conversation is recorded on a free CD to share, and is preserved at the Library of Congress. Millions listen to our broadcasts on public radio and the web. StoryCorps is one of the largest oral history projects of its kind.

Everybody’s story matters. Every life counts. Help us reach out to record our history, hopes, and common humanity—and illuminate the true character of this nation.

StoryCorps isn't just aimed at the old, but at everyone. I've heard some of the stories on NPR's Morning Edition. They range from the mundane and trivial to the profound and touching - often all at the same time.

I'm thinking I'd like to do something like that locally. Capture the stories of the old folks of Nanticoke, their memories of what things were like seventy or eighty years ago. I would say "Maybe someday", but with each passing day more and more of these voices are silenced forever.

* * * * * * * *

Last summer I dropped by my house one sunny Sunday afternoon to ladle buckets of water out of my rain barrels onto my blueberries and cherry trees. My next-door neighbor, who was ancient in my grandmother's time but was probably really ten years her junior, was out in his yard. We got to talking, not like two people separated by a gulf of fifty years, but like two old neighbors in a Rockwellian vision of America. And he started telling me stories of the Nanticoke he had grown up in, of riding sleds from the highest hills to the creek that once ran parallel to Main Street, of having his own personal coal mine and coal shanty where he sold coal to passers-by, in competition with his brother, who was doing exactly the same thing. Stories of a time long gone, in a place right under our feet.

How much longer does he have to tell those stories? How much longer does his wife have to tell hers? And has anyone been listening?


REM: Try Not to Breathe

...I have seen things you will never see.
I want you to remember...