Fall Notes and Quotes

“Autumn is a season followed immediately by…looking forward to spring.”

Doug Larson 

That pretty much captures my beloved stepmother’s view of the season at hand, portent that it is of “winter, with its bitin’, whinin’ wind” (Roy Bean); “winter, when every mile is two” (George Herbert).  I’m  fascinated by how strongly – and diversely – we respond to the inevitable pressing on of days that delivers us from one quarterly astronomical period to the next. 

I have two cherished long-time friends, one who detests the cold and could never be lured away from her temperate Florida existence, and the other, who would dearly miss the distinct seasonal phases built into her northern Illinois locale.  I myself may rant a bit in the midst of a particularly frigid winter’s darkest, shortest day, but I am also flooded with inspiration at the sight of a bronze-leafed tree or the pristine glimmer of newly deposited snow.  

“Delicious autumn!  My very soul is wedded to it,

and if I were a bird I would fly about the earth seeking the successive autumns.”

George Eliot a.k.a. Mary Ann Evans 

Thus far autumn’s eve is being ushered in by cold, damp winds and darkened skies – this, of course, following a 90 degree day succeeded closely by the first frost warning – but we still hope to be treated to a spell of classically mild, clear, sunny-crisp days in the weeks ahead.  As the local ducks rehearse formations for their mission of seeking eternal summer somewhere other than cruelly fickle Minnesota, neighborhood squirrels are aflutter with home-bound activity, as if to say, “You can’t fool me with this ‘Indian summer-not’ routine.”   

While I won’t go so far as the pseudonymous George Eliot, whose fervor over the movement of the sun across the celestial equator betrays her gender in a single phrase, I do find joy in the favorable jogging weather and the chameleon-like display as plain green leaves take on rich hues of goldenrod and fire-red, virtually over night.  But then a certain French philosopher says it better than I: 

“Autumn is a second spring when every leaf’s a flower.”

Albert Camus 

A fleeting flower, to be sure, but glorious nonetheless – and valued all the more for its transience.  I, for one, can’t wait for the spectacle to begin. 

Throughout it all – suspense; anticipation; spine-tingling exhibitions of God’s incredible artistry; the challenge of bearing up under the harsher conditions to follow – we must, of course, keep up our strength.  As you may have noticed, the stoking of the human furnace is a mission this writer does not take lightly, warm weather or cold.  And since it’s been a while, I have a collection of enticing dishes to share with you, held together by no particular thematic thread, but poised to chase the chill from the most blustery autumn day. 

For that purpose, may I suggest Baked Chicken with Black Beans and Rice served with a simple tossed greens salad, Homemade Whole Wheat Flat Bread, and Ginger Snap Ice Cream Sandwiches or perhaps a menu of Crock Pot Pulled Beef with Dr. Pepper Barbecue Sauce served on toasted Homemade Ciabatta Buns, and along side Cole Slaw Lite, Oven Baked Sweet Potato Fries, a melon basket, and Brownie Hot Fudge Ice Cream Bombé.    

For the final note and the last quote, non-foodies may jump to the last two paragraphs.

The Day Jill Fell Down and Broke Her Crown: On the Best Laid Plans of Mowers and Munchers

At the risk of sounding like I’m channeling Rod Serling…Imagine, if you will, the following scenario:  A respectably fit “woman of a certain age” returns home from church on a beautiful Sunday morning in August.  She walks the dog, changes into work clothes, and heads outside to mow the lawn before lunch.  She makes a dozen passes over the rough back yard terrain, then stops to empty the clippings from the mower-mounted collection bag into a large, molded plastic yard waste container with its hinged lid already open to receive deposits. 

As she wheels the 90 gallon cart toward the gentle slope leading to the spot where the mower sits, something goes horribly, freakishly wrong.  Her hands resting on the hinged edge of the open bin, she nudges it forward.  Then, in a flash of lost control, the slant of the hill pulls everything off balance:  The bin is ripped out of her grasp as it falls flat on its back, splaying out the hinged lid and inserting it under her right, forward-marching foot, which pins the bin in place, bringing it to a sudden stop and hurtling her forward at whiplash speed.  Her head whacks with incredible force into the far rim of the open bin. 

The perfect storm of body weight, momentum, and gravity work together to impose lethal power on even that rounded plastic edge, as it peels a five inch swath of flesh away from the underlying skull. 

——-

So there I stood, or rather sprawled.  My reflexive instinct was to raise my hand to my head and measure the damage.  I wish I hadn’t.  To my inexperienced touch, the two ridges of flesh separated by my fall left a divot so deep that I was absolutely certain what I was feeling was a dent in the skull itself.  “Dear God, dear God, dear God,” I heard a voice ringing out from somewhere.  As it turns out, it was my own, but if ever I could aptly apply the overused expression “surreal” to personal experience, this would have been the moment.  Talk about spontaneous prayer. 

Crazy things flash though your head – no pun intended – when you are propelled by terror through the back door into your own kitchen, gushing the enormous amounts of blood that a scalp injury can produce.  “Stupid, stupid, stupid,” I scolded myself aloud.  “Now I’ve done it,” I thought.  “A dent in my skull.  How are they gonna’ fix that?  And will I live to see them attempt the repair?”  Images of prominent people who’ve succumbed to head trauma whirled through my brain like a newsreel on hyper-speed as I simultaneously bemoaned having messed up the day’s itinerary:  tidy up the yard before toddling off to Taco Bell for our ritual summer-Sunday midday meal with my husband, whose name really is Jack, then run our weekly errands. 

I am not hysterical by nature.  This was probably as close to that state as I have ever been.  But I managed to stay collected enough to hold my hemorrhaging pate under cold running water from the kitchen tap, my poor husband not knowing whether to grab his car keys or the smelling salts.  His first sight of me had been as I stood in the middle of the tiled floor, Lady McBeth-like, my hands dripping with blood and screaming that I needed him, now.  By the time he got to my side, my heart was pounding so dramatically that I had trouble explaining what had happened.  Heck; it took me three opening paragraphs to try to put it into words here, twenty-four hours after-the-fact. 

And Jack Came Trodding Calmly After 

Once he has determined that this is not a pet-involved tragedy, level-headed spouse gathers cold wet compresses for the patient to press against the injury, and off we go in the little green Saturn, with its bad muffler announcing our urgency all the way to the emergency room entrance – a blessedly mere two-mile trip.  I have the shakes.  I look at my free hand and see no tremor, so the sensation must be entirely visceral.  “They’re going to have to shave my head,” I whine, finally convinced that I am not, in fact, going to die on the spot. 

Surely all this blood will get me to the front of the line, I tell myself as I trudge toward the swooshing automatic door, but the waiting room at Emergency is completely empty.  Aside from a testy Front Desk clerk who insists that my employed husband must actually be unemployed because, “That’s what the internet says,” everyone is wonderful.  The triage nurses are gentle, comforting, and calm.  They remove the two layers of blood-soaked washcloths and re-wrap my head with the high tech equivalent of vinegar and brown paper; reassure me that head-shaving will probably not occur, since often staples can be used to close the scalp; ask about prescription medications and if I am abused at home.  “Absolutely not,” I say; “Only by me,” I think. 

Ushered efficiently into an exam room, I haul my Jack in with me, and prepare for a lost afternoon.  After all, this is where the tedious wait usually begins in earnest.  But a nurse soon appears, asking, “How are you?”  “Dumb,” I respond.  She sweetly assures me that if anything could have been done to avoid the accident, I would have done it; that these things happen, and are not the fault of the victim.  I soak up her kind reassurance like the thirsty, quivering sponge I seem to be at the moment, but I question, in my heart, the veracity of her words.   “What if I had just…” 

On the Blessed Silence of Holding One’s Tongue

I come from a family of readers, talkers, and opinion-sharers – a heritage which goes back at least two generations on my father’s side alone.  Growing up in a household of verbally expressive types, it’s been a life-long struggle for me to learn when to keep my thoughts to myself.  There may be earlier examples, but I vividly recall the third grade trauma of being sent to the principal’s office for being the only one in a gaggle of eight-year-olds dumb enough to blurt out an explanation for how the stall door in the girl’s bathroom got pushed in the wrong direction, to the fatal detriment of its hinge mechanism.

Not favored with innate control over such outbursts of honesty, I rationalize that the incessant proffering of informed sentiments is somehow a more exotic species of rhetoric than garden-variety, cliché-ridden blusterings about “kids today” or the chronically sorry state of politics.  The truth is that being reared in the midst of lively conversationalists may train a person to be uncomfortable with interpersonal silences.  In my case, there was also the need to compete with a vociferous older brother who made himself the center of everyone’s amused attentions with outrageous practical jokes and designed-for-shock-effect proclamations.

Whatever, I somehow ended up being That Person – the pedestrian who calls out a warning to speeders racing madly through residential areas; the viewer who scolds television “reporters” spewing out views instead of news; the disagreeable sort who argues out loud with every pharmaceutical commercial that suggests the answer to any ailment is to pop a pill, never mind the two-page list of dreadful side-effects; the pursed-lip priss, hissing and sputtering as the woman in front of me at Walgreens buys ice cream, potato chips, and energy drinks at inflated drugstore prices with her food stamp card so that she can free up her own cash to purchase multiple packs of cigarettes.

In short, the boor who simply must comment on every aspect of coarse society as it passes by, as in lamenting teenage Walmart shoppers who don’t have the sense not to wear profane tee-shirts at literal eye-level to the cart-sitting toddler they gave birth to at 15. (Wonder what that little one’s first words will be.)  It’s not as if enumerating media lies and social ills does anything in itself to resolve them, but when no one else is speaking up, my ego compels me to provide some kind of narrative.

There are advantages to being mouthy, of course, as when that trait combines with moral outrage to take on a customer service injustice like a dog tackles a chunk of rawhide.  I have a grateful niece who was pressured by a local fitness club rep to sign a contract she hadn’t the experience, at 18, to fully understand.  I took that fight, via telephone, all the way to a top executive in a plush New York office building.  She got her $388.00 back.

I also got my own $10,000.00 surgery covered by taking good notes, doing solid research, standing firm, and threatening to involve local government agencies when the insurer tried to shove me through the “preexisting conditions” loophole in my policy.

But hearing myself drone on day-to-day can be wearisome.  If it wears me out, what must its effect be on those around me?  I don’t want to become the tiresome great aunt whom everybody avoids at family gatherings, although that ship may have already left the harbor.

Like screaming “Idiot!” at every lame-brained driver one encounters, breaking the constant commenting habit remains a challenge, decades after a kindly principal lifted this tearful little blabbermouth onto her lap to sort out  the details of the Reverse-Swinging Stall Door Caper.

This brings me to a book which has sat in my collection for years – nurturing, osmosis-like, dreams of a writing career that got waylaid by eight-to-five job demands and family obligations.  What does Becoming a Writer, by Dorothea Brande, possibly have to do with being a bit too talkative?  Let me explain; I’ll try to keep it brief.

Summer’s Picks and Pans

Welcome to another edition of The Curmudgeon’s Corner, as I furrow my brow in distasteful contemplation of yet another beloved American pastime.  Today I’m talkin’ Fourth of July pyrotechnics:  firecrackers; Roman candles; aerial repeaters; Catherine wheels; flying spinners; fountains; ground spinners; parachutes.  Large-scale or small, I just don’t get fireworks.  All that noise and expense, just for the opportunity to “ooh” and “ahh” over a handful of colorful sparks cascading across the sky, and then fading away into disappointing nothingness. 

Of course, huddling in a corner of the bedroom cradling my petrified pooch as she quakes and shivers through 90 minutes of taxpayer-sponsored pre-blast whines and climactic booms does nothing to help me warm to the notion of explosives as entertainment.  Even on an Independence Day hot enough for closed windows and cranked up air conditioning, my little Papillhuahua is one terrified Pupetta by the time the overhead threat subsides. 

And it has been hot here, at least by Midwest standards.  That wasn’t the case in late June of 2009, according to my journal entry from that date:  “Tuesday, extended-family dinner night on another cool, damp ‘summer’ evening.  A simmering pot of old-fashioned beef stew calls for some giant, hot-from-the-oven whole-wheat Parmesan basil biscuits, and the contrast of a cool, crisp bowl of homemade coleslaw on the side.  Egg custard with a dusting of nutmeg provides a creamy, comforting finish to this traditional fare, while it’s kept healthful by the use of reduced fat milk.  Mmmmm,” I wrote back then.  But with temperatures in the mid-90s, I have no plans to let anything bubble for long on my stove-top or to offer up anything “hot from the oven” this first week of July, 2011. 

On Sunday I decide I can put off mowing the lawn not one day longer, in spite of temps hovering just above 100.  I do pretty well with the heat, since I’m well acclimated by daily, year-round outdoor walks, but our challenging landscape produces consternation at every turn-around.  I huff and puff my way up  45° inclines; wrestle the stubborn, bulky Toro over fifty-year-old tree roots; get mired in huge dusty divots marking the sites of trees long since departed.  Then there are curved brick garden borders to navigate and overgrown pine tree branches to dodge, both tempering my patience for the test of maneuvering around several husband-designed aqueduct projects.  

Earlier this summer we made the responsible decision to save $80.00 a month by not employing our neighbor’s eldest son for this task.  It takes me at least an hour and a half to do awkwardly what he would accomplish in less than 60 minutes, and with apparent ease – and I don’t even mess around with trimming the edges.  By the time I reach the finish line, I’m ready to walk across the street and hand him a twenty anyway, in simple awed recognition of his superior abilities in the arena of lawn care. 

Fortunately, I had my reward waiting for me inside a modest little crock pot on the counter of my blessedly air-cooled kitchen.  Just web-search any list of ingredients along with the word “recipe,” I have found,  and you will invariably come up with the inspiration for turning whatever you happen to have in your freezer and vegetable drawer into a delightful, often novel repast.  I happened to have the makings for Slow Cooker Turkey Legs with Vegetables, and had exercised the uncharacteristic foresight to stash half a dozen White Cornmeal and Chopped Corn Muffins in the freezer.  To my further amazement, I also had on hand a box of Instant Brown Rice – perfect for a day when fifty-minute side dishes aren’t an appealing proposition, or even a practical possibility.  

Finish off the meal with a scoop of frozen vanilla yogurt topped with fresh blueberries and sliced peaches, and now I’m in the mood to go “Mmmmm” again. 

The Danger of Simple Advice in a Complex World

“You think too much,” a casual acquaintance once told me.  “You don’t think enough,” seethed the self-righteous voice inside my head, begging for a public airing.  How patronizing!  And what a cliché.  Don’t worry your pretty little head, he might as well have said, tossing out a chunk of banal dialogue cut from a bad Western. 

A lot of catch phrases floating around out there are cliché and trite, and when examined, not that helpful.  So here I go, thinking too much perhaps about a few seemingly benign snippets, like an 80′s phrase which I originally liked for its reassuring cheekiness.  It’s attributed to one Robert Eliot and falls under the heading Rules for Living Life:  “Rule number one is, don’t sweat the small stuff.  Rule number two is, it’s all small stuff.” 

The heck, you say.  In my experience, life is full of monumentally huge stuff, stuff that needs to be confronted with adult courage, not sloughed off with flippancy.  Friends battling cancer; children growing up in an amoral society; parents dealing with the challenges of advanced age.  These things can be faced with grace and confidence and faith, but they hardly constitute “small stuff.”  And they call for action, not disregard. 

Then there is the simple, upbeat adage falsely attributed to Irish lore, which admonishes us to “Live well, love much, laugh often.” While encouraging on the surface, as a directive it fits the topic at hand.  At its origin in the late 1800s, such a lilting sentiment may have salved weary spirits coping with unmanageable epidemics and iffy food supplies.  But stenciled onto contemporary T-shirts, and fully embraced as a philosophy of life by some of the more shallow among us, it seems a bit less innocuous.  

What does living well mean, anyway?  Seeking material comforts?  Wringing all the pleasure out of life that you can?  Grabbing for the gusto and avoiding gritty responsibilities?  After all, we are told daily that we are so worth every imaginable indulgence. 

“Life’s a banquet, Auntie Mame says in the Broadway play, “and most poor suckers are starving to death.”  Not in the society I see.  We are becoming a nation of complacent seekers of security and pleasure, willingly exploited by ambitious Big Brother politicos.  With one-sixth of the population on food stamps and 20 per cent of able males between the ages of 24 and 50 not getting up and going to work every day, the free-lunch feast is doomed to run out of provisions sooner rather than later.  These are problems not addressable with a bumper-sticker. 

What about loving much?  Does that imply a thoughtless heaving of oneself into fawning affection toward select others, or worse yet, allowing passion to supplant unselfish concern?  Spiritual love is what is required of us – and that’s not a Hollywood-style emotive reaction to attractive, sympathetic types, but a duty to open our hearts to the less-lovable, and treat them with respect and kindness.  No celebrity taping a public service announcement from the living room of their fully-staffed multimillion-dollar penthouse can undo the sleazy messages the entertainment industry beats into young skulls 24/7, but perhaps a counter-campaign in the form of a grass-roots uprising might. 

And for heaven’s sake, do laugh as often as you can, don’t get me wrong; it’s good for the body and the mind and the spirit.  Human and animal antics provide much fodder for gaiety, so that therapeutic outlet is at our fingertips daily; we can accept with gratitude every opportunity to boost our immune systems, release tension, increase blood flow, and share joy with others.  But let’s not ever forget the sober side of life that requires our ability to muster a substantial response when necessary.  

I worry about people who make a habit of looking the other way.  The guy who consistently faces daunting topics with a shrug and a chuckle, as if he were merely a member of the audience rather than an actor; the woman who is too busy dealing with daily demands to inform herself as a voter and chooses to follow her heart and her gut instead; or the person who can’t be part of a serious discussion, but is compelled always to distract with a joke.  When people turn away from heavy issues (think political corruption, spiritual hunger, and teenage pregnancy) because they can be distressing, we lose important brain power in the struggle to make things better.  An unexamined culture becomes a cesspool, as we can see and smell all around us.  Clean-up requires arduous effort – no droll matter, to be sure. 

I remember a poster I proudly displayed on my bedroom wall when I was smack dab in the middle of floundering through my early adult years.  It was a quote from the German philosopher, Goethe:  “As soon as you trust yourself, you will know how to live.”  I thought it was pure brilliance.  Of course I had no idea how to go about learning to trust myself, nor did Herr Goethe offer any clues to this mystery. 

Seems to me that a girl has to know herself first, and knowing ourselves, how can we ever place trust in the utterly fallible natures we have discovered within us?  What does it even mean to trust one’s self, when passing up a chocolate éclair is nearly impossible and the urge to pocket the extra twenty the cashier mistakenly counted out, tempting.  Rationalizing truly is a skill perfected by the homo sapien psyche.  

Today the quote strikes me more as pure bunk than pure brilliance.  Trust yourself?  How about, trust your Creator?  Humankind without the laws of God, inscribed on hearts and prescribed through Scripture, is enslaved to selfish impulses and moral confusion.  That’s why civilized societies impose a system of laws and punishments to deter bad behavior. 

I wonder if I thought taking in Goethe’s words every night before I fell asleep would somehow bring  direction and understanding, and point me aright.  In reality, that poster did more to make me stumble  than to plant my feet on the straight and narrow path.  Thanks a lot, Johann Wolfgang. 

Then there is good old Dr. Seuss.  Who knew what a radical he really was, as we read his delightfully quirky rhythmic stanzas to little ones over the years?  “Be who you are and say what you feel, because those who mind don’t matter and those who matter don’t mind,” the rhyme-master is quoted as saying.     

Oh, did I live by that one, decade after decade of giving vent to petty impulses of thought, word and deed.  But what if, at a given moment, “who we are” is not our best self, not the person God meant for us to be?  Or, what if “what we feel” is tainted by disturbing life experiences, the effects of which we need to cleanse ourselves of, not spew out onto innocent bystanders?  And most strikingly, how do we correct our own errors in thinking if anyone who counters us “doesn’t matter”?  Growing up, for many of us, means holding our tongues, not unleashing them. 

Lighten up, I can hear that short-term visitor to my past life saying.  I am still, after all these years, ultra inquisitive and questioning and analytical.  We balance each other out, I suppose, those of us who are too much bent in my direction and those who blithely skip through a privileged existence ignoring issues of substance (can you say, “Paris Hilton”), freeing themselves up to focus on the fluff – do these pink stilettos match my Gucci bag?  Maybe that makes we extremists tolerable to the masses who fall into the “happy medium” category. 

But I tell myself that continuing to process – and over-process – everything I see and hear is palliative to the occasional  mental constipation that comes with both aging and an over abundance of information input.  Would it have been easier to be blithe in a pre-media-blitz era, when news of every tragedy,  every travesty against humanity, didn’t reach our ears and eyes within minutes of its occurrence?  I suspect citizens of bygone days simply agonized over injustices closer to home. 

I also suspect that I’ll continue to over-think things and grind issues down to their pulp as long as my mind holds out, and as a result I may be less Susie Sunshine than Thelma Thunderstorm in some people’s eyes.  But if we leave the Big Stuff to someone else to resolve, you never know just who might end up doing our thinking for us.

I like William Henry Channing’s take on things, with its emphasis on the substantial over the trivial.  Maybe I should post this one on my bedroom wall: 

To live content with small means;
To seek elegance rather than luxury,
To be worthy, not respectable, and wealthy, not rich;
To study hard, think quietly, talk gently, act frankly;
To listen to stars and birds, to babes and sages, with an open heart;
To bear all cheerfully, do all bravely, await occasions, hurry never.
In a word, to let the spiritual, unbidden and unconscious,
grow up through the commonplace.
This to be my symphony

Rainy Days and Sundays

What is it about a rainy day that makes a person feel like curling up in a corner with a quilt and a good book?  The squirrels seem to retain plenty of zip in this weather, judging from their frisky game of leap-frog tag across the front lawn.  My own ambition-level and mood, however, tend to fluctuate with weather conditions, although I’ve been able to flatten out the s-curve a bit with consistent endorphin-generating exercise.  And since the Sabbath is my weekly Official Day of Rest until the summer months turn it into my Official Day of Yard Work, I actually find relief in an occasional all-day spell of Sunday showers that gets me out of mowing and weeding – a sort of  “laziness permission slip” from Mother Nature.  

I’ve always blamed my dreary-day dips in mood on dark skies fooling my body into cranking out the sleep hormone associated with nightfall, and of course certain aches and pains can  accompany extremes in humidity.  Now Columnist Rich Maloof tells us that a 2008 study suggests only minimal effects from either good or bad weather states.  As added insult, Maloof offers the no-nonsense conclusion, “Most people are no more emotionally powerless against the weather than they are unable to put on a hat.”  He also quotes psychology professor Dr. Ani Kalayjian:  “We encourage people to take charge of their feelings.” 

Sounds reasonable.  But if storm-induced low barometric pressure reduces the amount of oxygen in the air, and dark skies trick my pineal gland into midday serotonin production, I get unnaturally tired.  When I get unnaturally tired, I get crabby.  I think my analysis is every bit as logical. 

Still, experience has taught me that, yes, alright; I can “take charge of those feelings” and “empower myself” to surmount them. So on any given gloomy day, I might plunge into something I’ll love being able to cross off my to-do list.  If I just can’t face organizing a closet or cleaning the oven or tidying the garage, I’ll do something both productive and uplifting.  For me that’s baking cookies for my neighbors or inviting a friend to dinner, because it’s the waste of time associated with feeling lethargic that really bugs me.  

One project I’ve had tucked into the bulletin-board frame of my mind, where I keep mental sticky-note reminders, is writing up some of my kitchen concoctions from April and May.  With June staring me in the face, I’d better hop to it and dispense with a half-dozen tasty dishes that fit right into a spring theme.  First, several vegetable recipe adaptations -  a Three-Pea Medley, a Brussels Sprouts With Dates and Walnuts dish, and a Mango-Glazed Carrots side, all of which sent me into spasms of delight.  But then I do love my vegetables. 

You might be more excited about Raised Currant Buns, whole wheat biscuits with some nice additions, or a Four Cheese Scalloped Potato casserole, slimmed down for everyday consumption.  For the mildly adventurous, ever try a Ground Chicken Lettuce Wrap?  Talk about a carbohydrate-watchers best friend – and if you don’t, you know I certainly will.  (Non-foodies:  you may skip to the last two paragraphs.  Mother Nature I am not, but I can grant you permission for that much.) 

You Don’t Have to Pay Dues to Be a Weight-Watcher

 basal metabolism; noun; Physiology: The minimal amount of energy necessary to maintain respiration, circulation, tissue repair, and other vital bodily functions while at rest. 

The jury is in on this one: A person’s metabolic rate begins to slow as early as age 20, with incrementally increasing decreases each successive decade. Did that make sense? On an individual-by-individual basis, many factors influence this decline – things like activity levels, conscious efforts to maintain muscle mass, certain medical conditions, and heredity. But I am aware of very few people who can simply continue “eating like a teenager,” as one friend put it, and still fend off creeping weight gain or an expanding waistline along the way to retirement. 

There are some things that can help, however, if you’ve decided to gear up for a battling of the bulge on both of its fronts, calorie intake and calorie expenditure. These are the ones I’ve tried and found true.

Set concrete goals, but make them measurable and realistic; something you can face taking on today. Sometimes this means aiming for a non-intimidating five-pound weight reduction on your way to deciding on a larger long-term loss, and it’s as much about holding yourself accountable, expecting what can reasonably be expected of a busy, responsible adult, as it is about meeting anyone else’s standard of what’s “ideal” for you. 

Keep a daily record of what you consume and what you do. To quote the old Christmas song, “Though it’s been said many times, many ways,” this is the best tool I know of for staying aware of and in control of what’s really going on with your habits. We sometimes delude ourselves about our indulgences, but that’s harder to do when the fettuccine alfredo with hot buttered garlic bread is documented in black and white, right there next to the greasy thumb print. 

And don’t forget the activity record, which can be a supreme motivator. Somehow, recording your accomplishment – “walk, 45 minutes, 3 miles” – feels very affirming, not to mention firming. It also lays a foundation for building your own personalized routine. 

Plan ahead to avoid pitfalls. I always know at the start of the day what I’ll be eating for lunch and dinner that day, and sometimes for several days in advance. You don’t have to be obsessive about it, but not planning for success (as in, “I can arrange to be in the neighborhood of a Subway shop at noon, where I’ll have a turkey on wheat bread with lots of veggies,” vs, “Oh, whaddaya’ know! It’s lunchtime and here’s a Godfather’s pizza with a pepperoni and extra-cheese special today,”) translates into setting yourself up for failure. 

These Are a Few of My Favorite Words

I am a political junkie, an information addict, and a compulsive collector of recipes. My office drawers bulge from decades of clipping and filing, so I switched to e-files to avoid overwhelming my living space. Still, I recently had to place limits on myself for fear of overwhelming the little gnome who runs around inside my hard drive trying to keep all that electronic data organized. But those obsessions have blossomed gradually over time. My true lifelong investment of passion has been in language. 

Words. I love ‘em. I am awed by their power and beauty. I even collect them. I have a second-hand William F. Buckley, Jr.’s 366 Words You’d Like to Know calendar at my bedside, and can’t get through the day without a crossword puzzle fix. It goes without saying that reading and writing top my list of favorite leisure-time activities, but I’ll say it anyway. I guess all this makes me a logophile – a term which was ironically omitted from my 2,129 page Webster’s New Twentieth Century Dictionary, Unabridged, Second-Edition, Deluxe Color, ©1979. 

Choose just the right word and you enhance the effectiveness of your message; choose the wrong one and you distract from or even annihilate it.  Perhaps that’s why I know scores of perfectly intelligent folks who are utterly intimidated by the thought of stringing words together, either for oral delivery or in essay form. But stage fright and performance anxiety aside, who can not be intrigued by the infinite variety of linguistic possibilities or the exotic appeal of certain terminologies, both esoteric and mundane. 

The fact is that some words are too delicious not to savor, like “noisome” or “draggle,” which are virtually self-defining (“draggle: to be drawn on the ground”) and have a nice way of tripping off the tongue. 

Cold Snaps and Warm Rewards

April 20, 2011

You’ve heard the expression “cold snap.” Well, in a classic Minnesota-style April weather pattern, we experience something more like a crackle – a long, succession of snaps. Picture an obsessive person in possession of a chunk of bubble wrap. 

So-o-o-o, we may cycle from a flash of T-shirt weather to 34° and snowy within just a few days. Then it’s a bump back up to 55° for a day, followed by warnings of another 2-3 inches of snow due to hit on the Wednesday before Easter. I’m sure you can sympathize with our feeling a bit disgruntled over the whole “Is it spring, or isn’t it?” game. 

But on that one glorious 70° day last week, as the little Moon Dog and I step outside into a swaddling of warm air and a shower of sunbeams, my giddiness drives me to Spoonerisms. “Ah, yes,” say I, my voice infused with delight. “The churds are burping and the shun is signing and my sood fairly moars.” 

I actually did utter that first part, surprised by my own spontaneous burst of playfulness. But that was last week. I am jerked back to the chilly present by the announcement that we have inched our way up (pun entirely intended) to number four on the list of snowiest winters on record. Forced into cranking the ol’ furnace back on, I seek out an escape to the fantasy land of pastel Easters Past via internet searches for holiday-themed recipes. 

Such ventures tend to distract for the moment. However, even color photo images of coconut-topped cakes, warm rhubarb compote, and tangerine semifreddo with salted almond brittle can’t erase the shudder-inducing image of that recently, if fleetingly, whitened front lawn that is my Midwestern reality. As all bumpy roads seem to lead to culinary resolutions, I abandon my cares to a good old-fashioned spell of kitchen therapy. There is Easter dinner to be planned and there are jelly bean-topped cupcakes to be baked; there are leftovers in the fridge that call out for some creative recycling. And how about a roasted pear take-off on a web-inspired dessert, and that marvelous pork chop marinade that I simply must pass along? 

To back up a bit, I couldn’t believe my good luck one lunchtime as I discovered that I had leftover rice, rotisserie chicken, chicken sausage, and frozen shrimp, all on-hand at the same time. Dismay soon displaced joy, though, as I scoured my resources for a basic recipe for gumbo. “Basic recipe for dietary disaster,” I was soon mumbling to myself. The approaches I came across called for up to ¾ of a cup of oil and 1-1/2 cups of flour. Yecch squared. My version is a simple soup, not an entire week’s worth of fat and white carbs in a single bowl, and it was mighty darned good, as I am prone to saying so myself. 

All-combined, I am duly motivated to share these happy discoveries, and now present you with a random selection of warm and rewarding gustatory gifts. The Leftover Queen’s Chicken, Sausage, and Shrimp Gumbo is, as implied, an original concoction; Marinated Pork Chops Extraordinaire is an adaptation of a formula found online at Planet Tess (tessknadler.blogspot.com); Roasted Pear Halves with Figs and Queso Fresco was inspired by a more sophisticated offering at Epicurious.com; and the decidedly decadent Peanut Butter-Filled Fudge Cupcakes I dug up from my 31-year-old copy of Better Homes and Gardens All-Time Favorite Cake and Cookie Recipes. Sweet. (Pun virtually required.)

A Life of Service

What’s the best thing about being a centenarian? To Viola Schweikert, who celebrates her 101^st birthday this July, it’s “Looking back and realizing how supremely blessed I have been, blessed beyond anything I could ever have hoped for.” To observers, one of the best things about Viola Schweikert is that very attitude of unqualified appreciation amidst the trials of life on earth. 

As the first of four children born into a modest household, Viola’s personal pilgrimage began in 1910 in Glencoe, Minnesota, just 46 miles west of the Twin Cities of Minneapolis and Saint Paul. Decades later, French filmmaker Louis Malle was moved to document living conditions in this small rural community in his 1985 film, God’s Country. 

“We were poor,” she says, recalling the tiny two-story home she grew up in: three bedrooms upstairs; on the lower level, a kitchen, a dining room, and a parlor that served as her grandmother’s bedroom. Heat from the wood-burning stove didn’t rise to the upper level, “So in the winter time, we children would run as fast as we could up the stairs to get under the covers.” Bed-sharing among the siblings was a practical necessity, and it had its benefits during the cold months. “Viola, you’re like a furnace,” little sister Loretta would exclaim. 

With her father rising at 4:30 a.m. to empty the parlor heater of ash and putting in long days as a painter and a paper-hanger, and her mother efficiently operating a non-mechanized household of seven, Viola’s personal work ethic was molded by her parents’ examples of uncomplaining hard work and a desire to usher their children toward a better standard of living. 

Poor or not, their simple lifestyle with a family cow providing milk must have seemed downright luxurious, compared to the experiences of their ancestors. “My father’s father was living in Germany when he heard about the Homestead Act,” which allowed anyone who had never taken up arms against the United States government to submit an application for a freehold title to up to 160 acres of undeveloped federal land west of the Mississippi. In order to complete the contract, the approved applicant then had to improve the land and file for a deed. 

Viola’s grandfather booked unpaid passage to the United States on a cargo ship, and worked at the New York Harbor docks until his transport was paid for. Steered by his brother to “some real good land” in Minnesota, he got off the train in Paynesville and hiked for four hours until he saw “nice, loamy soil” underfoot, declaring that he would settle and make his living on that spot. 

But free land was not a free ride.  Viola’s grandfather then labored for local farmers to earn cash to buy tools to erect the permanent structures required by his Homestead Act agreement. Meanwhile, the enterprising immigrant often sought shelter from harsh winter winds behind a snowbank as he developed his own claimed property. His children would later recount how they “slept in the loft of a log cabin chinked with moss,” and had to shake the snow from their covers on frigid February mornings. 

Viola retains a razor-sharp recollection of long-past events, and a sincere respect for the tribulations endured by her father’s generation. Based on a century of life experience and a unique historical perspective, she confirms with authority the often-heard observation that today’s young people have no conception of what hardship is. “When my father was growing up, sugar was a luxury item. During the Christmas season, his mother would send him to the store with a quarter, and he would buy a small bag of it so she could make kuchen, a cinnamon coffee cake – a once a year treat which the family deeply appreciated.” 

In Viola’s own childhood home, her mother stretched the food budget by making potato dumplings. “They were very heavy, so I would try to get away with serving myself only a bite or two.” But homemakers proudly defended and protected their recipes in those days, and her mother resisted adopting a neighbor’s approach to feather-light dumplings made from the Calumet Baking Powder Cookbook. 

Stomach-ladening dumplings aside, country living was healthy living, with plenty of outdoor activities, a long walk to school in the fresh air, home-grown vegetables from the garden, and plenty of chores to help the children learn how to contribute and accept responsibility. 

As the oldest, Viola rose early to gather potatoes from the root cellar and prepare them for use at the noon meal. “They weren’t like you get from the store,” she remembers. “They were crusted with soil and my hands got too dirty to scrub clean. I was self-conscious about this, so I would try to hide them once I got to school, where all the other kids had nice, clean hands.” Still, school was one of her favorite places to be, especially reading class, and Viola ended up being the only one in her family to complete twelfth grade. 

“Most confirmation-age girls got sent out to work on neighboring farms from 6 a.m. until 9 p.m., and ended up marrying the farmers’ sons and being tied to the land,” she recalls, “so I was very fortunate.” She was also fortunate to be raised in a family that attended German evangelical Lutheran church services regularly, and she remembers giving thanks before each meal.

Viola’s vivid mental photo album retains a picture of a tall, stately pine tree placed at the front of the sanctuary each Christmas, decorated with the glow of many five inch candles. It illuminated the altar area so enchantingly that it captivated her childhood attention – and left her severely disappointed when the candles were too-soon doused by safety-conscious ushers wielding wet sponges attached to long poles. 

When she was 15, the town jeweler and his wife sought out Viola as a babysitter for their daughter. “My job was to feed [my charge], Holly, bathe her, put her to bed, and read her stories until she fell asleep.” Viola would then spend the night, and get up the next morning to make breakfast for the family and clean the house – a child-tender with a heavy load of household duties. Soon her reputation for diligence – learned from striving to satisfy a hard-to-please mother – led to a succession of domestic positions. 

As an older teenager, Viola took a job at the local drug store for $10.00 per week of nine-hour work days. Her predecessor, Leo, had lost favor with the boss when he broke eight glasses in one month. Conscientious Viola was soon making a full $12.00 a week, having completed three months of employment without smashing a single piece of fountain ware. From time to time her drugstore coworkers invited Viola to go out with them at the end of their shift, but she wasn’t interested. Her character-revealing response? “What I want in life, I am not going to find in a dance hall.” 

What she did want in life was an education. After she had helped her sister pay tuition for beauty school using money she earned as church organist, Viola enrolled at Stevens Seminary – a private, liberal arts college founded by a gentleman who believed that women should be as well-educated as men. 

The rest of what she wanted in life was gradually defined for her by a persistent young pre-seminary student named George who visited his sister, Viola’s neighbor, during his “last free summer” before going off to college in Springfield, Illinois. He was interested in Viola, but she thought she was too young for him. “Get lost,” she responded plainly when he wrote to her following his summer visit. “But he didn’t hear me,” she adds all these years later.