Dearest Hubby and I attended a baseball game recently in a good-sized American city. Being the types that 1) hate paying an arm and part of a leg for parking if we can help it; 2) want to avoid the mess of post-game traffic; and 3) really do think that if you can take convientent public transportation, you should, found parking on the fringes of the city and used the light rail. It was nice, fairly clean and not expensive. Coming back, of course, half of the poeple of the city and most of the next two states packed themselves (with the encouagement of said light rail's employees) sardine fashion into, well, sardine-like cans. Most people suffered in silence as we waited for the trains to move (whch seemed slow in comparison to other public transport we've used). And anyone who knows me can guess, I was miserable. A bad back combined with claustrophobia make me wonder which circle of hell held this many people in this small a space. As DH expressed concern, andI kept telling myself that this would pass, I noticed the people lucky enough to garner seats. A few older people, parents with small children perched on their laps, and a LOT of teens and tweens busily texting their current status to all of their friends, who were probably sitting in the next car. Personally, I don't care of they text. I'm not a teacher, to worry that they are forming bad writing skills, nor am I their parent to have to pay the phone bill or be concerned that they may develop carpel tunnel of the thumbs. No, what I thought of was my daughter, and of one of the moments I was proudest of her.
Again, anyone who knows me knows I am proud of my Darling Daughter, and there have been many moments that come to mind when I think of that fact. I can be complacent that somehow we guided her through childhoold and her teen years with little screaming, crying and cursing (DD, did I ever apologize for cursing?). She was a good dancer, and just thinking of her senior solo still brings a lump to my throat. She graduated from college, then obtained a master's degree and a job (no small feat these days) that she likes (even rarer). She looked around carefully, and either by accident or design, marrried a wonderful man that we like and is kind to her aging parents. And now she's a fabulous mother, loving but firm, while still working at that job, making me proud by proving that one can be a terrific mother and still pay attention to a career. But sometimes I forget the little things, and this miserable light train trip reminded me of one of the best.
Years ago, DH, DD & I went to visit The Mouse at WDW. we stayed on site and took advantage of the World's bus transportation system (see numbers 1 & 2 in the first paragraph). DH has a habit of racing us through the crowds to be in the front of most transport lines, so we'd usually get seats on said buses. DD would sit next to us as people straggled aboard, standing in the aisles. And then, I began to notice, at some point, she'd get up and offer her seat to someone, allowing that person to sit while she stood and surfed the bus back to our lodging. Eventually, I mentioned it to her, that it was nice. She told me that she waited until someone got on who reminded her of me: a little overweight and very tired looking. I still get all choked up at this. Not only was she doing me proud by being polite (perhaps showing the world that, yes, we had raised a child who was POLITE) but also that she thought enough of me that she wanted to help me by proxy.
After DH and I & escaped the sardine can, he mentioned all of the youths sitting while older people (believe me, we weren't the only older ones on that train), and also reminisced about DD's habit of kindness. It made me feel a bit sorry for the parents of those children who weren't kind enough to think beyond themselves. Those parents weren't hurt by their children's inaction at this time, but they will never know the pride one can feel by knowing that their children are kind to strangers. I do. So my backache eased a bit. Pride is a good painkiller.
So, DD, if you ever read this, know that I am proud of you for all of the big things. But prouder still of the small ones. You will understand this some day. Your Precious Child will suddenly do something unexpected for someone else for love of you. The glow is so warm. Enjoy!
Sunday, September 5, 2010
Tuesday, July 13, 2010
Pizza ... and everlasting love
I hated pizza as a child. My first and, for many years, only exposure was the Chef Boyardi version that my mother tried several times. It tasted like bug spray on a stale saltine, not made any better by the fact that she made it on Fridays (no meat added!) so that it was just what came out of the box. Of course, we were Southerners living in central California, so she knew nothing of pizza to begin with anyway. It was a failed experiment. The rest of the family ate it, if not with gusto at least with acceptance. Picky eater that I was, I ate bread and butter.
So when I went to college, I could not understand why all of my friends so liked going and eating pizza, but they also heartily consumed spaghetti out of a can and dorm food, so I really didn't think a thing of it. My downfall came on a Saturday morning in the spring of my freshman year. I had several friends on my dorm floor, and we were visiting around and ended up in one girl's room. I'd awakened too late for breakfast and was hungry, and for once was eagerly waiting lunchtime so she offered me the contents of last night's pizza box. I declined at first (pizza: yuck!), then noted that she had a loose pill sitting on her dresser. Being the daughter of my father, whose prime directive on medicine was "Don't dose yourself," I felt she should put it back in the aspirin bottle or prescription bottle or whatever. My friend pointed out that it was neither aspirin nor prescription, but yellow sunshine, then had to clarify what that was. To cover my naive shock (this was about as far from Daddy's directive as I could imagine), I turned my attention to the limp box of leftovers.
Of course, in those days, most pizzas in middle America, or the hills of northwest Arkansas at least, we simple thin crust models. No deep dish, foldable, cheese in the crust variety. A lone triangle of browned ground beef with thin layer of cheese on a pie-like crust sat, lonely and cold. I am not sure if it was my embarrassment that I wasn't cool with being greeted with stray LSD pills on a bright Saturday morning, or my hunger, but I took a bite.
Was it the truth of the maxim that hunger is the best sauce? Or was it really that good? It was wonderful! Over the next few weeks, I had pizza several times (actually, over the next three years, I would have pizza several times a week), and quickly settled on a favorite: beef and black olives, although I ate a number of varieties. When Dearest Hubby and I began, well.. really we never dated, per se, but when we began doing such things that might include pizza, he always acquiesced to my favorite, although I learned that he would also partake of pepperoni or sausage or Canadian bacon on occasion. Over the next thirty-five years, we've eaten lots of pizza on various crusts: thin, hand-tossed, cheese-in-the-crust, even Chicago-style and french bread, but almost always beef & black olive. After one recent foray into deep-dish heaven, I though to wonder why he never really wanted anything different, so I asked. You'd think that after 35 years, there would be nothing I didn't already know, or at least, have figured out on my own. He said that before we got together, he didn't like pizza. Seems his first taste of this faux-Italian delight was a homemade Chef Boyardi from a box that his mother had produced, and he spent the rest of his childhood wondering why anyone would eat that willingly. We were obviously made for each other.
So when I went to college, I could not understand why all of my friends so liked going and eating pizza, but they also heartily consumed spaghetti out of a can and dorm food, so I really didn't think a thing of it. My downfall came on a Saturday morning in the spring of my freshman year. I had several friends on my dorm floor, and we were visiting around and ended up in one girl's room. I'd awakened too late for breakfast and was hungry, and for once was eagerly waiting lunchtime so she offered me the contents of last night's pizza box. I declined at first (pizza: yuck!), then noted that she had a loose pill sitting on her dresser. Being the daughter of my father, whose prime directive on medicine was "Don't dose yourself," I felt she should put it back in the aspirin bottle or prescription bottle or whatever. My friend pointed out that it was neither aspirin nor prescription, but yellow sunshine, then had to clarify what that was. To cover my naive shock (this was about as far from Daddy's directive as I could imagine), I turned my attention to the limp box of leftovers.
Of course, in those days, most pizzas in middle America, or the hills of northwest Arkansas at least, we simple thin crust models. No deep dish, foldable, cheese in the crust variety. A lone triangle of browned ground beef with thin layer of cheese on a pie-like crust sat, lonely and cold. I am not sure if it was my embarrassment that I wasn't cool with being greeted with stray LSD pills on a bright Saturday morning, or my hunger, but I took a bite.
Was it the truth of the maxim that hunger is the best sauce? Or was it really that good? It was wonderful! Over the next few weeks, I had pizza several times (actually, over the next three years, I would have pizza several times a week), and quickly settled on a favorite: beef and black olives, although I ate a number of varieties. When Dearest Hubby and I began, well.. really we never dated, per se, but when we began doing such things that might include pizza, he always acquiesced to my favorite, although I learned that he would also partake of pepperoni or sausage or Canadian bacon on occasion. Over the next thirty-five years, we've eaten lots of pizza on various crusts: thin, hand-tossed, cheese-in-the-crust, even Chicago-style and french bread, but almost always beef & black olive. After one recent foray into deep-dish heaven, I though to wonder why he never really wanted anything different, so I asked. You'd think that after 35 years, there would be nothing I didn't already know, or at least, have figured out on my own. He said that before we got together, he didn't like pizza. Seems his first taste of this faux-Italian delight was a homemade Chef Boyardi from a box that his mother had produced, and he spent the rest of his childhood wondering why anyone would eat that willingly. We were obviously made for each other.
Tuesday, January 26, 2010
Lightweight?
Am I a lightweight, figuratively and literarily speaking? I went to the doctor earlier last week, one I hadn't seen in several years, one who knows what I do, my interest in genealogy & history & the origin of names, one I like a lot. As I waited for him, I was reading "New Moon," the second book in the Twilight series. I had resisted reading the series because: 1) Sookie Stackhouse notwithstanding, I am not a big vampire fan; 2) I know it's mainly aimed at the young adult market; and 3) I generally resist reading anything that everyone else drools over (Bridges of Madison County pops to mind). I expected him to chew me out for not having this particular check-up for three years, but when Doc came in and saw what I was reading, he surprised me by wanting to know why I was "wasting" my time reading part of the Twilight saga. He started telling me about a book he thought would be worthy of my time.
So I found the book my doctor prescribed and checked it out. It is "Pillars of the Earth" a 900+ page tome ("tome" is fancy-speak for "ton," which the book weighs) by Ken Follett, set in medieval times, about the people surrounding the building of a church. It started with a hanging, but slowed after the beginning, as we began to laboriously learn about all of the characters. I understand this was/is a very popular book, and Doc had even told me it was an Oprah book (see #3 above). "Pillars" is populated with kindly priors and wicked priests, illegitimate children and forced marriages, spousal abuse and betrayal, impotence and rape, Moorish scholars, flying buttresses, and what passes for celebrities intertwined into the story. Very exciting, but I am really not interested. It sounds and reads like a mini-series, like the John Jakes Patriot books from the 1970s and 1980s, which I, at first, gobbled up but got tired of the way Jakes kept name-dropping. (Two characters reminiscing about seeing "little Abe" in the wilds of Kentucky and "wasn't he cute?" was the breaking point for me on that series. It just strained my credulity that they might have run across Lincoln as a child as they fled from, IIRC, Canada to Tennessee.) Plus "Pillars" is set in medieval times: poor sanitation, death, poor sanitation, torture, poor sanitation, corruption, poor ... well, you get the drift.
I could finish wading through it, but, like wading through the sewers of Paris, I really am not interested. So my question to myself: Am I a lightweight reader? Have I limited myself in my reading habits reading unworthy material? Or, since I have read so much over the years, am I just pickier about what I want to take the time to read? I've read plenty of classics and plenty of cr*p in my time, both for pleasure or class or work, but I don't wish and don't need to read to impress anyone else. I've read non-fiction but prefer fiction. I've read "To Kill a Mockingbird," "Animal Farm," "Doctor Zhivago," "Moby Dick," "The Great Gatsby," "Madeline," much of Vonnegut and Heinlein, and all of Bujold and the Harry Potter books. I have read Georgette Heyer and Sylvia Plath, and although Plath was a fine writer, I'd rather read Heyer because one doesn't contemplate suicide when reading her. So I must have already made my decision as to what I want to read, regardless of how anyone else sees me.
And then the next question is does anyone have the right to ask someone else why they are "wasting time" reading something? I personally don't care what others read. I've heard all of the stereotypical criticisms: westerns are dime novel shoot 'em ups; mysteries are formulaic; science fiction is just Buck Rogers adventure; romance is just ignorant women's fantasies. All of these statements ignore the fact that all of these genres host some very fine writing with well-developed plots and imaginative characters, while each genre also produces garbage. I've been talked into reading books by all sorts of people, and was disappointed at times, but hit enough paydirt that I keep following suggestions. The same person that nagged me into trying Charlaine Harris also suggested another series that I didn't like. But she was right about Sookie, so I will listen when she suggests something else. So no matter what it is, if you like it and, knowing me, think I will, too, go ahead and suggest it. I might or might not read it. Like "Pillars," I might take and look and decide to not read it now, or at all. But my decision doesn't make me a literary lightweight. It just makes me me.
And by the way, "New Moon" keeps my attention, flows well and I don't want to kill myself when I am reading it.
Bella, now, is another matter.
So I found the book my doctor prescribed and checked it out. It is "Pillars of the Earth" a 900+ page tome ("tome" is fancy-speak for "ton," which the book weighs) by Ken Follett, set in medieval times, about the people surrounding the building of a church. It started with a hanging, but slowed after the beginning, as we began to laboriously learn about all of the characters. I understand this was/is a very popular book, and Doc had even told me it was an Oprah book (see #3 above). "Pillars" is populated with kindly priors and wicked priests, illegitimate children and forced marriages, spousal abuse and betrayal, impotence and rape, Moorish scholars, flying buttresses, and what passes for celebrities intertwined into the story. Very exciting, but I am really not interested. It sounds and reads like a mini-series, like the John Jakes Patriot books from the 1970s and 1980s, which I, at first, gobbled up but got tired of the way Jakes kept name-dropping. (Two characters reminiscing about seeing "little Abe" in the wilds of Kentucky and "wasn't he cute?" was the breaking point for me on that series. It just strained my credulity that they might have run across Lincoln as a child as they fled from, IIRC, Canada to Tennessee.) Plus "Pillars" is set in medieval times: poor sanitation, death, poor sanitation, torture, poor sanitation, corruption, poor ... well, you get the drift.
I could finish wading through it, but, like wading through the sewers of Paris, I really am not interested. So my question to myself: Am I a lightweight reader? Have I limited myself in my reading habits reading unworthy material? Or, since I have read so much over the years, am I just pickier about what I want to take the time to read? I've read plenty of classics and plenty of cr*p in my time, both for pleasure or class or work, but I don't wish and don't need to read to impress anyone else. I've read non-fiction but prefer fiction. I've read "To Kill a Mockingbird," "Animal Farm," "Doctor Zhivago," "Moby Dick," "The Great Gatsby," "Madeline," much of Vonnegut and Heinlein, and all of Bujold and the Harry Potter books. I have read Georgette Heyer and Sylvia Plath, and although Plath was a fine writer, I'd rather read Heyer because one doesn't contemplate suicide when reading her. So I must have already made my decision as to what I want to read, regardless of how anyone else sees me.
And then the next question is does anyone have the right to ask someone else why they are "wasting time" reading something? I personally don't care what others read. I've heard all of the stereotypical criticisms: westerns are dime novel shoot 'em ups; mysteries are formulaic; science fiction is just Buck Rogers adventure; romance is just ignorant women's fantasies. All of these statements ignore the fact that all of these genres host some very fine writing with well-developed plots and imaginative characters, while each genre also produces garbage. I've been talked into reading books by all sorts of people, and was disappointed at times, but hit enough paydirt that I keep following suggestions. The same person that nagged me into trying Charlaine Harris also suggested another series that I didn't like. But she was right about Sookie, so I will listen when she suggests something else. So no matter what it is, if you like it and, knowing me, think I will, too, go ahead and suggest it. I might or might not read it. Like "Pillars," I might take and look and decide to not read it now, or at all. But my decision doesn't make me a literary lightweight. It just makes me me.
And by the way, "New Moon" keeps my attention, flows well and I don't want to kill myself when I am reading it.
Bella, now, is another matter.
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