Birthdays, Turkeys and Thanks for Giving

Birthdays, Turkeys and Thanks for Giving

          I love the holidays, the celebrations, and the wonders that seem to be part of that time of the year.  As my husband’s birthday approaches (my younger than me husband), I love listening to the story of his birth at Thanksgiving, his mom in the hospital being asked by the doctor if she wanted to be home for the Thanksgiving holiday with the rest of her family, three children and a husband, her reply to the doctor, No.  I am sure that she was thinking of the joyous holiday with all of the food that Thanksgiving entails as well as the work involved in cooking, serving and cleaning up with three small children and a husband who was fairly helpless in the kitchen except for the carving of the perfectly baked bird, the great symbol of family, togetherness and thankfulness. It was easier to stay in the hospital with her new baby while her husband took everyone out for dinner. 

I will admit that I have lost my burning desire of preparing for the spread of a bountiful feast upon my table with family gathered all around. It stems from the lost of my husband’s father and our son who no longer comes home for this holiday as he is so far away and the added expense of traveling home for him.

However, I do gaze over the magazines with their tips for cooking the perfect bird.  Over the years, I have gained many tips which have proven quite useful in making the bird moist, the drippings flavorful, which in turn has helped the gravy to be quite tasty when it is resting on the mashed potatoes that my husband’s mother has prepared.

          Ah, for those days of plenty on the table.  Now, I don’t even bake a cake for my husband’s birthday.  It is per his request or maybe it is the memory of the one that I made so many years ago that keeps him from asking.  Our son was about three years old when I made the cake.  I had worked very carefully looking for just the right recipe, the prefect ingredients, borrowing the cake pans from my sweetheart’s mother.  I measured, sifted, stirred and mixed, pouring everything into the greased and floured round cake pans and wait for the minutes to tick away. I was confident as I was a baker of fine breads, cookies, etc. How hard could a layer cake be?

          I rehearsed my son in saying “Happy Birthday, Dad” while we waited for the chocolate cake to come out of the oven.  The frosting was waiting in the refrigerator.  All was well.  Well, almost perfect.  The chocolate cake rose in the pans and looked lovely when I took it out of the oven. After removing the cake from the pans and letting the two layers cool on the racks, I carefully placed one layer on a large pink plate and sliced the round top off and sampled the moist, tender chocolate cake.  It was yummy.  Success was just a couple of minutes away.

          Our son sat in his highchair so he could be part of the miracle of making a birthday cake for his daddy.  One layer on the plate, frosting was out of the refrigerator and with my spatula in hand I began to frost the first layer. I took the second cool layer and placed it on the bottom layer.  I turned to pick up the bowl with the frosting then moved back around to the cake and froze in place.

          My second layer had broken in two as it sat on the other layer.  “Oh, no,” I told my son. What was I to do?  I could not put toothpicks in the cake to hold it in place. It would never do for someone to bite into a wooden toothpick, ouch.  I used my hands to try and move the cake layer back into place and decrease the ever widening gap.  Nope, it was not working.  Okay, it was too late to bake another cake as I had to drop our son off at his grandmother’s with the cake until his dad came home.  So how much frosting does it take to fill in the Grand Canyon?  Apparently on a cake that is moving away from itself quite a bit.

          I decided to have our son practice saying something new. “It is a sad looking cake but it is the thought that counts.”

          The cake was taken to Grandma’s to wait for his dad to stop by to pick up our son.  Because I was working that day, my husband was to have dinner at his mom’s with my contribution being the cake. Our son did manage to tell his dad about the cake but as always with children it will come out differently, “Are you going to eat the sad looking cake”, our nearly three year old asked his father.  

          Now twenty-seven years later on this Thanksgiving Day, I am thankful for many things.  My life has had its ups and downs, primarily with the passing of loved ones, both the two legged and foot legged kind but isn’t that a part of the passing of our days. There is a comfort in believing that all is well with the cycle of the world. 

 As I work on this piece, there is a siren howling with the wind outside our house and as always I try and take a moment to pray for the safety of all those concerned.  May all find peace on this day of giving thanks for all that we have and let us hold peace for those who have no shelter, food or family in the storm of the world, give thanks for giving.

For myself, I am even thankful for cakes that did not quite turn out as it truly is the thought that counts.  That seems to go for everything that we do in our daily lives if we allow ourselves to breath.  I will have to remember that.   

         

         

November, Novel Writing and Guilt

November, Novel Writing and Guilt

          As I sit here and wait for inspiration to hit me as most writers do, I am reminded of the first time that I participated in the great National November Novel Writing Month event which is called NaNoWriMo for short.  Once again, I was roped into something new by the man in my life. He suggested that we try it and I asked if it was a way to get me back to writing, and he said yes.  So we were off and running trying to reach our goal of 50,000 words by the end of the month. The daily goal was to write 1667 words.  Easy for some days but often there was a lot of staring at the keyboard going on, or heading off for a cup of tea, chocolate or someone else’s good book to read.  The staring at the keyboard, the pen and the notebook continued for the month as we persevered in our new mission.

          We were hampered in our daily pursuit of writing by our working 40 hours a week (a writer friend told me once never quit your day job) as well as my husband being in a play that year but somehow we managed to keep on writing.  We met our goal for 50,000 words, met some people we didn’t know, shared more time with people we did know at the little write in get-together that was organized by our fabulous group leader who was and still is full of energy and had just the right amount of craziness to inspire, prod and show others that it could be done.

          We had double the work as neither one of us had a laptop computer while we participated at the group write in. So among the tables filled with laptops and frantic writers, we would find a spot to sit, to join in, to be part of the event of others trying to achieve a similar goal of writing 50,000 words with our pens and tablets (the paper kind).  We would have lunch, tea and write with a curious hope in our hearts as we watched the ink flow onto our papers until we could go home and transcribe everything into the computer and onto the flash drive.

Fortunately for us, in the void (our son’s abandoned bedroom) was an old computer that my husband would enter his work fatefully from the day of writing out in the world.   I worked on our home computer, entering whatever I had written, adding more to this scene or plumping out characters that I had in the story.  The first year was filled with various characters on the pages that I would argue with, telling one or another, you can’t do that or say that to which they would blithely reply, “Oh, yes, I can.” Then they would go off to do whatever was most interesting to them.  

I will admit that my husband was more driven than I was after all, I was willing to quit even if I had not written all of my words for day.  Sometimes, your body just refuses to let you do things.  My eyes would grow tired, feeling as if all of the sand in the world was resting on them, I would stumble on the way to the bathroom to prepare for bed and fall exhausted into bed.  Often this was after a day at work depending on how busy the clinic had been.

I have an issue with my writing at times.  I feel guilty.  I feel guilty about not wanting to watch a movie or television show that my husband is interested in at the time.  I want to write, I need to write but still I feel that glimmer of guilt living on the edge of my mind. I feel the same way when I am tired and I just can’t stay awake long enough to finish watching some show that we have started.  Why? I think that it stems from a desire to please, keep others happy and enable someone else to achieve their goal.  Yet, in the case of my husband, he is always encouraging me to write.  You can laugh at the amount of work that he does to help our house to keep going, with the dish washing, vacuuming, putting away the laundry that I have started.  No guilt from me on that matter.  Do I think that he is doing too much? I would hope that he would let me know.

On Facebook the other day, I posted a Dear Abby letter which went something like this:

Dear Abby,

My husband has let the fire go out.  He was washing dishes at the time.

Should I forgive him?

One of my friends wrote, “Poor Cinderfella.”

          What was I doing at the time?  Well, besides being on Facebook, I was working on this particular blog, trying to read for five minutes and resting my body and mind from a full day at work.  Certainly, I did not feel guilty at that moment, with my husband slaving in the kitchen, washing our dishes, heating up left over chicken soup for us to eat.  It was no wonder that he forgot about the fire in our woodstove.  I am sure that we would have not frozen despite the extreme cold spell from the polar vortex that was affecting most of the US.  We have electric heat, both baseboard and a heat pump, plus we had electricity unlike so many.

          My guilt wanders but this year as we have both bypassed the Novel writing in November, I find that I have a peculiar lack of guilt around not participating with NaNoWriMo. Perhaps it is because I have now found myself writing more though I sometimes feel a thread of resentment towards the blog which drives me to do something each week. It is a self imposed, of course.    

          Writing is a gift. But it also is a curse, a stone hanging on a cord about your neck that continues to drag you out of bed in the middle of the night to fumble for your glasses, a pen and a notebook all the while trying to stay warm in the chilly air of your bedroom.  For me, it is right up there with a recipe for improving my roasted vegetables for pizza, or an idea for a Halloween costume for our son. These gifts of creativity all seem to flow into my mind in the wee hours of the morning when I should be sleeping.  In the end, you either get out of bed, grab the pen, paper, and your glasses turning on the light while you complain about how cold it is but not too loudly otherwise, it might drown out the ideas running into your mind which seemed to have no care for your comfort.

          Sometimes because it is November, and you have stopped caring about NaNoWriMo, you just accept the guilt, roll over and go to sleep telling yourself, I’ll remember that in the morning.  Believe me you are going to be wrong, so kiss that Novella award goodbye.

         

The Pink Purse and the Mystery Dimension

The Pink Purse and the Mystery Dimension

            Rule number one:  Never ask your husband to find whatever you need out of your purse.  It frightens, daunts him and frustrates this sweet soul and companion of your life.

            I have a favorite pink purse with leopard print on the inside. It has a long pink shoulder strap that helps the purse to hug my form, freeing my hands for picking up items of desire, delight and beauty when I am shopping.  It is a simple purse with two large zippered areas and a side zipper on the front of the purse.  It is the bane of my husband’s existence. However, true to his kind nature and great devotion to the happiness of his spouse, he has on occasion fought with the intricacy of the pink purse while seeking lost keys for the panicked wife who is in a rush to get out the door or even the cell phone that is ringing on and on somewhere in the depths of my purse.  So he searches with his very large hands holding this symbol of femininity looking like an elephant perched upon a nail head hoping that no one is around to see him least he fall off of the nail.  It is the same for my husband with the pink item, I can number the times that he has actually refused to hold my purse on one hand.  It is generally in a large department store but sometimes he just sits across from another man who has been dragged along with his significant person. He will have exchanged looks with the poor soul who is also holding a purse and possibly a number of womanly garments while sharing the look that all men seem to share while shopping. It is a look of deep resignation to the task of dutiful waiting as most pack mules do. Generally, what gets them out the door and driving in the rain, snow and sleet is the promise of food somewhere along the way. At least, that works with my husband.  Food has always been a great motivator.

            While I was walking and talking with one of the nurses on a break from work and the constant rain we had been having, she mentioned a friend with a baby who had a diaper bag in which she asked her husband to get something that she needed.  He was lost with no idea where to search despite her instructions.  The nurse friend that I was walking with said that she knew instantly where to find whatever had been needed.  We sighed and laughed about the helplessness of our mates and some men in general as we continued walking, gazing out at the horizon of the gray ocean while wandering back to the clinic.

          Perhaps the mystery dimension of the purse is akin to my mind as when I start midway in a paragraph in the conversation that I am often having with my man. He is at a completely lost in the conversation despite his loose attentiveness to what I might be saying.

But I can truthfully say that he is a marvel to me as he sets about putting together the new television and its stand, the cables, the various cords that are involved.  Perhaps, I could do it, I know that I could, but really it just does not interest me very much beyond the extent of holding the flashlight, giving words of encouragement so he decides not to throw the new item out the door in somewhat frustration.  He swears at inanimate objects, he comes by it naturally, the swearing, it has been inherited from his father according to his mother.  My husband said all men do this, he said that our contractor was doing a great job of word usage while under my house working on the remodel of my small bathroom.  I am not able to say as the contractor was always very polite when talking to me and I never heard it.  It must come easier to men but I don’t know for I am a throw back and tend to use milder words when frustrated.

As for my husband, when it comes to dealing with the needs and wants of others, he is a saint though he tells me that,” He ain’t no saint.”  For example, I try and have a picture of something that relates to whatever I happen to be writing about at the time.  Hence the photo of the back of my husband with the pink purse, originally, I had thought to photograph the purse by itself, then possibly having it draped on my body but as the direction of what of I was writing continued, it became more apparent that my sweetheart should be included in the picture.  Mild protests came from him as I explained what I wanted handing the pink purse over to him.

 “But they will know that it is me,” he said, “by the T-shirt that I am wearing.”

“No, they won’t.” I replied. “I will be just taking a picture of the purse.”

After a big sigh, he flung the pink purse over his shoulders and turned his back to me.

“That is perfect, it is just what I want and I don’t even need another picture.” I voiced after clicking my shot.

So many things in our life comes to us by what seems to be an accident but as I look at my life, my husband with the pink purse resting on his broad back I am quite taken aback at the perfection of the world.  Perhaps, it would be easier if we could just look in the pink purse with the mystery dimension and find the answers?

         

Bittersweet Memories of Peanut M & M's

There is the pasting of another

Magnificent soul

Bittersweet Memories of Peanut M & M’s

            I have a confession.  I love Peanut M & M’s.  If there were dark chocolate ones, I would be a goner.  Even now as I type this, I can hear them calling me from the cupboard where they sit happily in their bag, waiting for the big occasion of Halloween night.  Patience, patience, tomorrow is your day.  Sigh, I need a cup of tea to help my mind wander back from the insistent voices of chocolate whispering, softly, quietly. I will be right back.

            Well, that was helpful.  Oh, yes chocolate, Peanut M & M’s.  Years ago when my son was quite young I was called home as my father David was in the last stage of his life.  My younger sister lived on the West coast at that time as I did so after many phone calls it was decided that we would met in a town halfway between us in order to continue the journey home together.  After bidding my husband and our young son farewell, I crawled into the cab of the small truck to head out with my sister to say good bye with my siblings to our dying father.

            It was a long journey filled with laughter, sorrow and the catching up regarding our lives, families but when I had crawled into the pickup there was the largest bag of Peanut M & M’s that I had ever seen.  In the back of my mind raised the evil, ugly head of desire and want. Its voice whispered all mine. Really, there is something called sharing, I whispered back.  Nope, all mine, replied the desire and want.   Only common sense kept me from stuffing myself with the nearly full bag of the chocolate. After all, my sister had bought the chocolate and she was sharing with me.

            I think of that trip back home now and then mostly at Halloween when we buy candy for the Trick or Treat hordes that show up at the doorways of candy enablers.  I always get the Peanut M & M’s. I keep some back for myself for after the night of sugary handouts.  The memories of going home seem always bittersweet when I think of the chocolate that my sister and I shared on the trip home.

We made it home in time to say farewell, our father knew who we were.  In his moments of wakefulness, we shared our love for him.  He smiled, told us that he loved us. He shared that his mom was in the room with his brother, Shane and one of his sisters, our Aunt Beaulah.  He said that they were waiting for him.  We believed him.  I wished that I could have seen them, too.

Death seems to bring everyone together as we waited in the hospital. My Aunt Joy our father’s sister asked if there was anything that she could bring us.  I asked for cucumber sandwiches just the way she used to make them for me when I was a child. I got them.

            It seems that this week is filled up of memories as I walk about in my life.  I ran into a gentle memory yesterday during my lunch.  We were doing a flu clinic in a small town and staggering our lunches.  I walked down Main Street and back looking for somewhere to eat.  There were several places that had closed up and I was beginning to despair of anything except what I had packed in my bag.  Finally, my luck found the only place to eat on my return trip to City Hall where our clinic was. I chose a cup of bean and bacon soup to eat as I sat at the counter upon a green stool. It did not occur to me until I had eaten half of my soup, which was delicious, that the little restaurant was similar to what I remembered in a small town that my father used to take me to for a special treat.  I would always order a grilled cheese sandwich.  I was allowed coffee to drink, which was a cup of hot milk that my father would put in a bit of his coffee.  It wasn’t really much coffee, but it was the color of a light brown and I thought it was the most wonderful thing in the world. I never did become a coffee drinker. Now as an adult, I drink one cup of coffee on Saturday only because I heard that a little bit of coffee is good for you.  I drink it black and I drink it fast as I have discovered that it is really nasty when it is not hot.  But back then, my father was everything to me and some of his coffee was wonderful because I knew after I drank it all down I could have pie.

            My father said that there were only two kinds of pie that he liked: hot and cold. I am in agreement though I don’t eat pie much anymore.  At my age, I am beginning to realize that I really can’t eat much of anything anymore unless I want to avoid mirrors at every turn and start investing in a whole new closet.  Currently, I restrict my buying to shoes and socks because they always fit.

            I am not sure where the expression of “Pie in the sky” came from but I am sure that my father is enjoying his pie if heaven is in the sky. I hope that he is saving a slice for our Aunt Claire who left on the day before Halloween this year. I am sure that he is with a nice hot cup of coffee with lots of milk.          

            For the most part, I like memories because I was so lucky to have had wonderful moments in my life.  Sometimes, you have to have the bittersweet memories and Peanut M & M’s.